At the Cutting Edge of Migration and Refugee Studies: A Festschrift for Prof Stephen Castles

We are writing these introductory words for the Festschrift for Prof Stephen Castles at a time when governments and certain sections of the public equate immigration with threats to domestic politics, national identity and ‘social cohesion’. In contrast, emigration continues to be seen as an agent of economic development for origin countries trying to establish a diasporic community that would bring financial and network capital for their so-called homeland. Despite longstanding critical studies, there is an increasing need to understand global structural changes and reactions to them. Castles has attempted to overcome the structure and agency binary through a comprehensive analysis of both the economic and political structures and the discourses on immigration at various levels while focusing on how people, including migrants and non-migrants, respond and resist these structures and discourses.

What makes scholars inspiring and leaders in their field is their ability to make others think differently and Castles is certainly in that category. Throughout his work, he has provided cutting edge research on social issues such as ethnicity, race, class, education and international migration. While other scholars ignored migrant workers as a worthy subject of research, he provided a comparative study which underlined their significance for European countries, including Britain, Germany, France and Switzerland. His work demonstrated the different responses to migrants amongst these European countries but also how they benefited economically from migrant workers. Castles’ PhD dissertation, later published as the pioneering Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, co-authored with Godula Kosack (Castles and Kosack 1973), showed that migrant workers were situated at the lower end of the working class and how they benefited immigrant capitalist societies. At the time of publication this was an original and provocative argument as most studies were concentrating on how to change, assimilate or simply exclude migrants. Moreover, he argued that European countries did not terminate their temporary migration programmes merely because of the stagnating economic situation of the time, as many scholars have argued, but also because migrant workers themselves had started to challenge and resist their terrible working and living conditions.

Castles’ work was particularly influential in Australia where he was at the forefront of developing a critical academic literature on multiculturalism, ethnic diversity and national identities. Together with Ellie Vasta, and other colleagues including Jock Collins, Castles examined the rise of ethnic businesses in Australia as well as the experience of different ethnic groups, their culture and community formation in a changing Australian society (Castles 1991; Castles et al. 1995a, 1995b, 1992). Castles and his colleagues (1995a) have found that migrants often opted for establishing small businesses as a means of survival to offset the discrimination they experienced in the workplace and when looking for work. These studies were based on meticulous research conducted at a national and local level.

His work in the 1990s and early 2000s analysed migration in the context of wider processes of economic, political and cultural globalisation. One of his books published in this period, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (1993), co-written with his colleague Mark Miller, was later translated into a number of languages, updated and printed five times and became the classic reference book in the growing field of migration and refugee studies. In this book, Castles and Miller provided a global overview of patterns of migration, examined the effects of growing ethnic diversity on various local institutions and provided a rigorous assessment on the formation of ethnic minority groups. Another text written in this period, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging, co-written with Alastair Davidson, proposed to reconceptualise the notion of citizenship in line with the impacts of globalisation.

Migration and ethnic studies has consistently endeavoured to understand the reasons behind why people move and the impact of migration on destination countries. Earlier inquiries assumed that migration was abnormal and that migrants would bring (often assumedly) negative impacts for receiving countries. Occasionally these negative perceptions fed into a populist public discourse that shunned immigrants rather than acknowledge and celebrate their positive contributions. In his theoretical work on Social Transformation and Migration, Castles (2001, 2003, 2010, 2015) proposed a completely new lens for migration studies—he believed that migration was neither the main cause of social change nor a problem to be avoided, rather ‘an integral part of social transformation processes’. He criticised migration policies as being ‘poorly conceived, narrow and contradictory’ and as being about migration itself, which was merely ‘concerned with defining people as migrants, differentiating them into bureaucratic categories and regulating their movements and work’ without pondering the global forces behind social change (Castles 2017: 1538, 1548).

Castles is also a public intellectual. His clear and concise writing style makes his sophisticated analysis accessible not only to academics but also to policy makers. He was asked to offer expert advice to various intergovernmental agencies where he provided critical analysis free of convoluted language and jargon. From 1994 to 2001, he helped establish and coordinate the UNESCO-MOST Asia Pacific Migration Research Network, has been an advisor to the Australian and British Governments, and has worked for the ILO, the IOM and the European Union among other international bodies.

Finally, through Castles’ leadership highly credential and innovative research teams have been established. He was the director of a number of research centres including the Centre for Multicultural Studies (CMS) at the University of Wollongong, the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) and the International Migration Institute (IMI) at the University of Oxford. In all of his roles, he was a firm believer of collaborative work with researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. He considered efficiency, not the neoliberal kind, to be the basis of a harmonious and collegial working environment. He has been a great listener and has taken on board his colleagues’ views in his collective writings.

He supervised numerous doctoral researchers, working together with many of them in research projects. In the STIM project he last led, he worked with five doctoral students from different disciplinary backgrounds studying social transformation processes of different societies. This project provided his students, including one of the editors to this special issue, a space to interact and collaborate across different disciplines. In such a space students could test their ideas while analysing the data from their individual research projects and where they could ‘scale up’ their research findings in line with data from other localities—in other words, Castles provided his students with a very rich and creative PhD experience.

We are deeply honoured to publish this Festschrift in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, which Castles had contributed to since its early volumes. We invited some of the scholars with whom he has had a long working relationship and who have exchanged ideas and have been stimulated by Castles’ work and in return his own work has benefited from their exchanges. There are surely many other colleagues who have contributed to Castles’ work on migration, citizenship and multiculturalism and have benefitted from his theoretical frameworks. We wish to leave this collection as a tribute to Castles’ longstanding work and for future researchers who will undoubtedly continue to be enthused by his thinking.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.