A plea for the ‘de-migranticization' of research on migration and integration¹

1. I had the opportunity to present earlier versions of this article in different keynote talks, such as at the 3. Jahrestagung Migrations- und Integrationsforschung Österreich in September 2014, the Pathways to Success: Social Mobility and Change in Migration Society Conference in November 2014 and the NCCR-on the move (National Center of Competence in Research: The Migration-Mobility-Nexus) meeting in September 2015.

ABSTRACT

Migration and integration research has been institutionalized over the last few decades. However, an increasing number of voices has been calling for more reflexivity, criticizing the nation-state- and ethnicity-centred epistemology that often informs this discipline. Consistently with this line of reasoning, I argue that migration and integration research originates in a historically institutionalized nation-state migration apparatus and is thus entangled with a particular normalization discourse. Therefore, this field of study contributes to reproducing the categories of this particular migration apparatus. This entanglement poses some serious dilemmas for this research tradition, dilemmas that ask for further consideration and possible solutions. My main proposition is to ‘de-migranticize' migration and integration research. I outline possible ways of doing so and discuss the consequences of such a strategy for the future of migration and integration studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Nation-state-centred epistemology
• migration
• integration
• mobility
• ethnicity
• social network analysis

Acknowledgements

I would kindly like to thank Wiebke Sievers, Andreas Pott, Jens Schneider and Ann Singleton, whose insightful comments at these conferences have helped me in the process of writing this article. I also would like to thank colleagues at the Sociology Department at CUNY, where I had the opportunity to spend some months as a research visitor in 2015, for their patience in becoming involved in innumerable discussions about ‘migration and ethnicity categories' with me. I am also grateful to Christin Achermann, Maurice Crul, Heike Drotbohm, Carolin Fischer, Shpresa Jashari, James Korovilas, Joanna Menet and Joëlle Moret for commenting on earlier versions of this article. My thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers of ERS, whose constructive comments helped me improve my thinking about this subject. Finally, many thanks to Daniel Moure, who turned my sometimes bizarre and convoluted German-English sentences into proper, elegant English ones. Still, the arguments presented here are entirely my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I had the opportunity to present earlier versions of this article in different keynote talks, such as at the 3. Jahrestagung Migrations- und Integrationsforschung Österreich in September 2014, the Pathways to Success: Social Mobility and Change in Migration Society Conference in November 2014 and the NCCR-on the move (National Center of Competence in Research: The Migration-Mobility-Nexus) meeting in September 2015.

2. In this article, ‘social categorization' is understood as a system of orientations and a process of grouping social objects or events that are equivalent with regard to individual actions, intentions and system of beliefs (Tajfel 1981).

3. For instance, by employing multi-sited ethnography, transnational methodologies or strategies to de-ethnicize research design.

4. An example is the concept of culture. For the distinction between the common-sense and scientific understandings of this concept, see, for instance, Baumann (1996) and Grillo (2003).

5. ‘Forced marriage' is good example of this point: the term is a political and highly normative one, and common-sense explanations, embedded in the normalization discourse, explain this form of violence via ‘tradition', ‘culture' or ‘Islam'. However, for this ‘social problem' to be subject to sociological investigation, it needs to be translated into sociologically meaningful research questions. For example, it could be sociologically meaningful to ask how we can understand the processes that culminate in conflicts between parents and their children such that the latter are faced with violence and constraints when it comes to love relationships, marriage or divorce.

6. For example, it is striking that, while religion had been of minor importance for migration scholars in Europe for a long time (in contrast to the USA), in recent years and in the context of the politicization of Islam, many migration scholars have started to work on religion, which usually means ‘Islam'. Funds are now available for studies dealing with religion, Islam and migration. This entanglement in political discourse (and the mixing up of analytical and common-sense categories) creates the danger that migration scholars may unwittingly overemphasize the religious dimension of migrants’ identities and reify widespread stereotypes about Islam, even when they want to ‘prove' the opposite (Brubaker 2013; Permoser 2014).

7. The term ‘mobility' is also used in classical migration studies, although it means something different there. Within migration studies, mobility is often juxtaposed with migration. Mobility (within the EU, of highly skilled individuals) is desired, while migration is undesired and problematic. Hence, migration and mobility are either linked to a new social reality or normatively charged (Chavel 2014). Some scholars have criticized this dichotomization (Faist 2013), but even so the signification of mobility within migration studies most often remains embedded in the normalization discourse.