Biographies, politics, and culture: Analyzing migration politics from the bottom up

Migration is not only one of the most salient and contested issues of our times, but cross-border human mobility also marks a dynamic and complex field of policy making. One of the most striking and peculiar features of this policy field is that those most affected by laws and regulations – “migrants” – have the least influence over them. This special issue starts from this very gap. It seeks to explore the possibilities and challenges of biographical perspectives for understanding and analyzing the meanings, mechanisms, and effects of political regulation on the lives of countless individuals across the globe, and especially of migrants of all origins living in Europe.

The idea for this special issue emerged from two distinct sources. Firstly, the Midterm Conference of ESA’s Research Network “Sociology of Migration” (ESA RN35) that took place at the University of Strasbourg in January 2019. Secondly, the Franco-German research project Migreval: A Biographical Policy Evaluation of Policies Concerning Migrants at the University of Strasbourg (https://migreval.hypotheses.org/). The conference focused on the interplay of politics and biographies in migration contexts. It thereby seized on a decisive shift that has marked international migration scholarship over the past years and decades. Migration scholars have increasingly moved from construing their research in individualising terms (focusing on migrants and their behaviour) to more structural and political readings of migration (Erel, 2007; Findlay & Li, 1997; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2011). This tendency has gained momentum in the light of the current politicisation of migration (Buonfino, 2004; Hammar, 2007; van der Brug, 2015). More and more, scholars have become interested in the role of migration politics and policies for how mobile individuals envision, organise, and live their lives in the face of highly polarized and often hostile public discourses, as well as increasingly restrictive legal frameworks (see, for example, Bélanger & Candiz, 2020; de Jong & de Valk, 2020; Toma & Villares-Varela, 2019). This shift goes hand in hand with a recognition of how deeply migrant subjectivities, cultural dynamics, and the political regulation of borders and mobilities have become entangled over the past seventy years (Halfacree & Boyle, 1993; Horvath, Amelina, & Peters, 2017), especially in the European context where dynamics surrounding EU migration frameworks have added complexity to this overall development (Amelina, Horvath, & Meeus, 2016; Wihtol de Wenden, 2016).

Empirical studies that employ a biographical perspective are, however, still rare in international migration studies and our theoretical understanding of interplays between politics and biographies in their cultural contexts accordingly limited. Against this background, this special issue follows the idea of “biographical policy evaluation” (Apitzsch, Kontos, & Inowlocki, 2008). Rather than analyzing the effects of policies top-down, by focusing on institutions and the way they function, this approach studies individuals who are affected by policies and explores the way in which said policies come to affect life courses. Biographical analysis allows for an exploration of migration and integration processes by focusing on how they are formed, experienced, and interpreted by involved migrant subjects themselves (Apitzsch & Siouti, 2015; Bertaux, 2016; Delcroix, 2013; Pape, Takeda, & Guhlich, 2015; Rosenthal, 2004). They thus enable a deeper understanding of how political, social, cultural, and other contextual processes become relevant for migrant lives in often unexpected ways, but also how migrants react to policies or resist them, sometimes even contributing to transforming them. After all, politics and policies cannot be reduced to the “formal activities of legislation (…) or to the operations of bureaucratic political institutions” but are always “embedded in a wider sphere of politics as a social practice” (Blokker, Eranti, & Vieten, 2020, p. 1). Through biographical policy evaluation we analyze policies and their sometimes paradoxical effects that force migrants to find solutions for shaping their life practice (Apitzsch, 2004).

Such a biographical perspective broadens our analytical scope in highly relevant ways. Among other things, it enables us to grasp how policies that are most often developed and implemented separately from one another – in fields such as housing, health, education, and labour – can interact in shaping individuals’ lives, and how this interplay is mediated by cultural formations, political discourses, imaginations of (non-)belonging, and various forms of everyday boundary making. It also allows us to understand the entanglement and sometimes paradoxical effects that policies develop, especially when different levels of policy making are involved (European, national, regional, and local scales). Biographical approaches further underline the need to understand how individuals – when confronted with challenging political circumstances – react by adapting and developing their (more or less strategic) agency. Or rather, we need to understand how such individuals develop strategies to make the best of prevailing cultural and political frameworks, aiming to engage with, make use of or transform them, as has been most prominently highlighted in the literature on the “autonomy of migration” (Casas-Cortes, Cobarrubias, & Pickles, 2015; Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013). A biographical outlook also allows innovative longitudinal analysis, not only by following individual biographical trajectories over time, but also by comparing individual experiences across historical periods and, especially, by exploring intergenerational dynamics through the experiences of different family members (Bertaux & Delcroix, 2000).

By focusing on the experiences of migrants who have arrived and settled in various European countries in different historical periods and political contexts, this special issue also advances our understanding of how individuals relate to and engage with the more mundane and everyday aspects of political regulation in forming their life stories over longer periods of time. It thereby adds an important perspective to ongoing debates that so far have mostly focused on highly salient, but short-term, political developments such as how refugee populations react to immediate experiences of being governed and controlled in narrowly circumscribed contexts such as European border-zones (see, for example, De Genova, 2017; Scheel, 2019).

The five articles compiled in this special issue represent a variety of thematic focuses, empirical strategies, and conceptual perspectives linked to the nexuses between politics, culture, and biographies in migration contexts. All are based on the empirical use of biographical interviews in migration research. In their combination, they make three important contributions.

First, they provide insights into different concrete instances of biographical policy evaluations from migrants’ points of view, in various political as well as cultural contexts, and in different national settings. They cover divergent policy fields: entry and settlement regulations and integration policies, including policy fields not directly related to migration; legal aspects of marriage migration (Al Rebholz & Apitzsch); policies that hinder or favour the employment of migrant mothers with tertiary education (Romens); policies towards families with “incomplete rights”, in which the different family members have different accesses to rights (Delcroix & Inowlocki); rights concerning modalities of arrival and of the integration of refugees over time (Wilhelm & Bartel); and discriminatory policies in the employment sector (Pape, Schwarz, & El Hamdani). More precisely, they show the entangled impact of different policies that deeply affect how migrants can live their lives: access to language courses and to the job market for non-EU-spouses moving to a EU country; the impact of short-term residency permits on women’s employment; legal constraints to family reunification; difficulties in the recognition of diplomas; legislation limiting access of migrants to childcare; intra-European mobility for non-European migrants; access to housing or a shelter and further basic needs for migrant families lacking secure residency rights. The contributions illustrate intersectional and gender-related dynamics (Al Rebholz & Apitzsch; Romens) as well as cases of resistance against specific policies, be it on the municipal and associative level (Delcroix & Inowlocki) or concerning the collective struggles of migrant workers themselves (Pape, Schwarz, & El Hamdani). They furthermore underline the impact of individual actors involved in implementing policies, such as social workers, on migrants’ lives (Wilhelm & Bartel). Thus, the collected contributions do not only show the biographical impacts of policies on migrants’ trajectories, they also highlight specific strengths, weaknesses and failures of policies as they are knitted together. On this basis, they allow us to derive some first suggestions on how to cover existing biographical gaps in migration policies in Europe.

Second, the contributions engage in different ways with the analysis of the post-colonial European context that political regulations are embedded in. The perspectives of Western nation states have long dominated the analysis of policies that concern immigrants and refugees in Europe. A biographical approach allows for a shift in focus to the perspectives of those who are labeled and talked about in ongoing political and public debates about migration, and thus helps to counter Eurocentric tendencies in migration research and beyond. The articles in this issue work in this direction by assessing European policies on various levels and in their respective cultural contexts in a comparative perspective. Romens compares policies in two regions of two different European countries (Veneto in Italy and Alsace in France), while Delcroix and Inowlocki compare policies in two municipalities in two countries (Strasbourg in France and Frankfurt am Main in Germany), thereby articulating the national, regional, and municipal scales. Al Rebholz and Apitzsch explore, from a transnational perspective, biographical resources of marriage migrants from Turkey and Morocco, who have followed their spouse to Germany, linking the country of origin with the country of settlement in complex and unforeseen ways. The transnational perspective developed by Pape, Schwarz and El Hamdani concerns policies and political systems themselves. They show how not only policies in the French context, but also politics in Morocco, and at times even a collusion between both states, have restrained political engagement on the part of Moroccan migrant workers living in France. Wilhelm and Bartel engage in yet another type of comparison, comparing policies concerning refugees at two different points in time in France. They also connect policies of entry and of integration on the national level to the European and international levels, for example to UNHCR and Dublin regulations. Contributions to this special issue further highlight the importance of adopting a post-colonial and decolonial lens, even more so when the migrants affected by policies in the European context come from former colonised countries. Post-colonial and decolonial theories stress the importance of seeing colonialism as a central moment in the development of Eurocentric knowledge production and contest the unequal orders established by European Empires (Bhambra, 2014). Some of the articles aim to unveil the impact of postcolonial legacies on individuals’ biographical trajectories and thus to make the impact of postcolonial experiences in a European migratory context visible.

Finally, the present articles provide examples of different approaches towards doing biographical research on the politics of migration in their cultural embedding. While all contributions build on qualitative research strategies, they give insights into the manifold ways of collecting biographical material and linking it to political and cultural contexts: through parallel interviews in migrant families, which is to say through interviews collected with different members of the same family group (Al Rebholz & Apitzsch); through contrasting migrants’ in-depth biographical narratives with semi-structured interviews with professionals (Romens & Toffanin; Delcroix & Inowlocki); through comprehensively comparing biographical narratives of migration experiences in different eras (the 1970s and the 2010s) and systematically contextualising these narratives with discursive and legal information (Wilhelm & Bartel); or by contrasting biographical interviews with ethnographic observations and focusing on interviewees’ experience at a late stage in their lives (Pape, Schwarz, & El Hamdani). Overall, the articles thus point at multiple novel directions for biographical approaches in migration research. This includes ways of contrasting and bringing together different types of material (thus connecting individual life experiences with broader assessments of migration-related policies) or employing biographical approaches to advance historical perspectives on migration. In this sense, the articles in this collection also highlight the added value of interdisciplinary bridge-building between sociology, history, and political science.

Anıl Al Rebholz and Ursula Apitzsch explore transnational marriages of highly educated women of Turkish and Moroccan descent in Germany who marry a partner from the country of origin of their parents or grandparents. While existing research on marriage migration has focused on women who migrate to a EU-country following their marriage to an EU-resident, few works have explored the experiences of men who migrate to Europe for marriage. Through their biographical analysis, Al Rebholz and Apitzsch identify several key factors that facilitate or hinder men’s arrival and settling in Germany such as possibilities of learning the German language, opportunities (or obstacles) for accessing the job market, but also resources these men can rely on in their new living context (networks of friends and kinship, or, perhaps counter-intuitively, economic resources from their home country). The specificity of Al Rebholz and Apitzsch’s approach lies in the parallel biographical interviews with both spouses, which help to demonstrate the importance of a re-negotiation of gender-orders in a transnational family setting, in which men often experience a destabilisation of their male identity.

Anne-Iris Romens also analyzes an often neglected aspect of the gender-migration nexus, the impact of motherhood on the professional trajectories of migrant mothers with tertiary education in Veneto (Italy) and Alsace (France). Recent scholarship has explored the professional downgrading of highly educated migrant women, however mainly by connecting it to the high demand for a low-paid feminised workforce in the field of care in the Global North. The specific impact of motherhood on the professional trajectories of migrant women remains understudied. Drawing upon the analysis of four detailed biographical case-studies and taking the example of specific policies, Romens adopts an intersectional regime approach to explore the interaction between regimes of migration, care, and gender. She thus highlights inequalities based on gender, migratory status, class, racialisation, and mothering status that result from this interaction. At the same time, she identifies resources that her interviewees gained through motherhood for their access to employment and shows how they developed strategies to overcome barriers to employment.

Catherine Delcroix and Lena Inowlocki also examine family dynamics in a migratory context, but from the perspective of accessing rights when one or more family members have an irregular or undocumented legal status, focusing on two municipal settings: Strasbourg (France) and Frankfurt am Main (Germany). They address particular situations in which family members have different sets of rights (in terms of residency permits, the right or the obligation to attend school, access to health care, to housing, to the employment sector, etc), an experience families often encounter through migration. While the municipality of Strasbourg has developed a policy at the city-level that takes family members with the most extensive rights (often minors) as the benchmark to gradually ‘complete’ the rights of the other family members, families with incomplete rights in Frankfurt am Main mainly have to rely on grassroots associations for support. Delcroix and Inowlocki concentrate on two counter-intuitive in-depth case-studies of migrant fathers who are single parents, who respectively settled in Strasbourg and Frankfurt am Main, to show how these migrants and their children gradually accessed vital rights through institutional and grassroots support.

Isabelle Wilhelm and Anja Bartel adopt a radically historical comparative approach. They contrast biographical experiences of refugees who arrived in France in the 2010s with refugees from Southeast Asia who came to France in the 1970s. While the arrival of refugees to Europe in the mid 2010s has been presented in political and media discourses as an exceptional state of emergency and crisis, resulting in increased restrictions on arrival and asylum policies, refugees fleeing communist regimes in Southeast Asia back in the 1970s received a warm welcome in France. By contrasting two in-depth case-studies of refugees, one who had fled from Syria to France in the 2010s, and the other who had arrived from Laos to France in the 1970s, Wilhelm and Bartel analyze how the different policies set in place at both points in time, against the background of the collective representations of refugees, affected the life course and perspectives of their interviewees. Apart from profound differences, they also identify striking similarities in the biographical experience of refugees, thereby providing counter-intuitive findings with important implications for refugee and asylum studies.

Elise Pape, Christoph Schwarz and Mustapha El Hamdani finally take up the perspective of collective resistance of migrants against specific policies. They analyze a struggle of Maghrebi-born workers against their former employer, the French national railroad company (SNCF). For decades, they had been denied the same wages, promotions, retirement pay, and further benefits as their French colleagues. The migrant workers finally won at the Paris Court of Appeal in 2018, thus setting a major precedent in the struggle against institutional discrimination. Pape, Schwarz and El Hamdani analyze the biographical experiences of these workers that led to non-engagement or to different forms of engagement in the struggle. They highlight the importance of investigating migrants’ perspectives at a later stage of their careers. They furthermore argue for the importance of a transnational and postcolonial lens, showing how Moroccan migrant workers were on the one hand subject to French labour and immigration policies, but also to diaspora politics by the Moroccan regime (which aimed at surveillance and control of ‘their workers’), and to political orders before and after colonisation.

In summary, we can say that transnational migration becomes discernible in the structures of migrant biographies, which are produced and repeatedly reconstructed by migrant subjects through biographical work. Transnational spaces thus are constituted by multiple networks of national, legal, political, and cultural transitions to which individuals orient themselves biographically and in which they are simultaneously enmeshed as collectives of experience. The examples of transnational migration presented in this special issue show that in their possibilities for action and mobility, migrants encounter and have to deal with citizenship policy, language policy, labour market regulations, education and training systems, and cultural politics. These policies interface at different local, regional, national, and transnational levels. Policy-driven migration regimes change and overlap each other in often paradoxical ways. The acting individuals and groups are nevertheless challenged to plan their life courses as coherent diachronic “projects”, transversal to the overlapping and sometimes contradictory systems of control emanating both from the European Union and nation-states. As a reconstructive research methodology, biographical policy evaluation can help to analyze and understand the workings and consequences of policies in these different contexts. In this way it is possible to show both the achievements in overcoming biographical trajectories of more or less externally controlled action and the respective individual, social, and cultural costs of such coping strategies.