| dc.description.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. | |
