Localized neoliberalism, multiculturalism and global religion: exploring the agency of migrants and city boosters

Abstract

This paper examines the discourse on citizenship and cultural values in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, a city that has received many immigrants. The author examines how multiculturalism was endorsed by political and economic city leaders in their initial efforts to reinvent their city within an agenda of neoliberal restructuring, but rejected generally by the very migrants deemed to embody cultural difference. The migrants in the case study – from a wide array of countries – countered the push towards cultural politics with public non-ethnic identification with a global religion, Christianity, Buddhism or Islam. I suggest that in certain localities the universalistic claims of global religions have facilitated the local and transnational incorporation of migrants in ways that reject aspects of both multiculturalism and neoliberalism.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• multiculturalism
• global religions
• migration
• transnationalism
• Christianity
• Buddhism
• Islam

Notes

1. This research was conducted with support from the McArthur Foundation Human Security Programme, a Saul O. Sidore award and a James H. Hayes and Claire Short Hayes professorship from the Center for Humanities of the University of New Hampshire. My thanks go to Bert Feintuch and Peter Wade for their support and encouragement and Thad Guldbrandsen for his work as a co-researcher. Thanks also to the many migrants and refugees who contributed to this paper and because of commitment of confidentiality are represented only by pseudonyms. A draft of this paper was delivered at a conference of the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) of the University of Manchester.

2. I use the word ‘migrant’ to include both immigrants and refugees, despite the fact that they have different entitlements and refugees in the United States have a faster and less costly track to citizenship. In Manchester, many people who arrived with permanent resident or student visas came from war-torn countries. People with various entry statuses are often members of the same networks, organizations or families, share workplaces and place of worship and are served by many of the same organizations.

3. One ‘minority’ organization, which was initiated by professionals including some of immigrant background, did succeed in obtaining various kinds of public funding to provide health education and linkages to services. Persons from various immigrant and refugee backgrounds were hired to do ‘community outreach’. Income was earned through providing cultural competency classes for officials and businesses.

4. An elderly French-Canadian nun tried to provide much needed food, clothing and furniture for newly arrived refugees. Masses also have been developed in Portuguese and Polish. More recently an internal evaluation by the Archdiocese recognized this problem and ‘in the face of financial setbacks, the diocese put multicultural issues in the forefront when making decisions about how to restructure diocesan services and parish mergers and closings’ (Diocese of Manchester, n.d., p. 1).