Towards a Comparative Theory of Locality in Migration Studies: Migrant Incorporation and City Scale

Abstract

Building on the scholarship that theorises the restructuring of cities within neoliberal globalisation, this article calls for a comparative scalar approach to migrant settlement and transnational connection. Deploying a concept of city scale, the article posits a relationship between the differing outcomes of the restructuring of post-industrial cities and varying pathways of migrant incorporation. Committed to the use of nation-states and ethnic groups as primary units of analysis, migration scholars have lacked a comparative theory of locality; scholars of urban restructuring have not engaged in migration studies. Yet migrant pathways are both shaped by and contribute to the differential repositioning of cities. Migrants are viewed as urban scale-makers with roles that vary in relationship to the different positioning of cities within global fields of power.

Keywords:

• Urban Rescaling
• Migrant Incorporation
• Methodological Nationalism
• Transnationalism
• Neoliberal Restructuring

Acknowledgements

This paper was co-authored in the true sense of the word. Funding was provided by grants from the MacArthur Foundation Human Security Program, the Center for the Humanities, UNH, the Charles and Claire Hayes Chair, UNH, the Willy Brandt Guest Professorship and IMER of Malmö University and by institutional support from the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Thanks to Maja Povrzanovic Frykman for generous editorial and intellectual support in preparing an earlier version of this article as a working paper, to anonymous JEMS reviewers for their useful critique and to Darien Rozentals for helping to prepare this paper for publication.

Notes

1. There has been considerable debate about the utility of the concept of scale among geographers. While the concept is often used metaphorically and without sufficient definition (Samers 2006), we argue that the literature on rescaling processes is useful and the concept should be retained. For a critique, see Marston et al. (2005). For a defence, see Hoefle (2006). We argue for a concept of scale that builds on the existing debate but includes dimensions of situated power.

2. Occasionally, research on specific forms of incorporation in a city designated both ‘gateway’ and ‘global’ has been compared to a city of smaller scale, and differences in pathways of incorporation are noted, such as in the studies of Itzigsohn and Saucedo (2002) in New York and Providence. However, even in these instances, the researchers did not build from their observations of differences in pathways of incorporation in the two localities to a theory of locality and migration.

3. Global competition between cities is certainly not new (Abu-Lughod 1999). However neoliberalism imposes new pressures on localities and local authorities.

4. http://www.dallascityhall.com/info/about.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nina Glick Schiller

Nina Glick Schiller is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures at the University of Manchester, UK, and Research Associate at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany

Ayse Çağlar

Ayse Çağlar is Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University, Budapest