Migrants and expats: the Swiss migration and mobility nexus

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed an increase in population flows towards high- income countries. At the same time, migration is becoming more complex because

motivations, conditions and forms of migration have sharply diversified. Those changes are a challenge to the frames that shaped our understanding of migration. The study of migration developed in American countries, which were willing to

let migrants from abroad settle and populate the country. In earlier library classifica- tion, migration was catalogued under the heading demography. The mid-nineteenth

century marks the establishment of the nation-states in Europe and beyond. The

national frame shaped the understanding of migration, settlement was the main out- come of those geographical moves, and assimilation turned into the leading cultural

narrative, which fit perfectly the nation-building agenda. As long as the world was structured according to nation-state principles, these became so routinely assumed and “banal” that they vanished from sight altogether. Wimmer and Glick Schiller in 2002 consider the “assumption that the nation state society is the natural social and political form of the modern world” misleading. Their critique of methodological nationalism implies considering migration from a new perspective; the globalized world provides a new frame to capture individual

and group experience. This shift in migration studies, they argue, is due to the epis- temic move of the observer and not to the appearance of new objects of

observation. This book is based on the assumption that the globalization processes of the last 25–30 years have indeed induced migration researchers to extend the objects of observation; researchers interpret present migration patterns as the result of migrants’ agency in the context of changing economic drivers, legal norms and societal factors. Migrants’ position is no longer exclusively framed in the “container space” of the nation-state, delimitated by its borders; their position and agency are also contingent on a larger relational space, whereas the new residence country is still the main arena for integration strategies.