ABSTRACT
International migration has been a fundamental feature of nation-states since their emergence in the sixteenth century, and it is likely to continue to shape the economic, political, and social life of societies across the world in the twenty-first century, regardless or because of the gyrations of world economic activity, the restrictionist stance of countless governments, the hospitality of citizens, or the energy, determination, and wishes of migrants themselves. Yet the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ in the social sciences may risk exaggerating the ease with which people move and the extent that they do. As I pointed out in the Introduction, it has been estimated that approximately 3% of the world’s population lives outside their country of origin. Even if this is a gross under-estimation of migration and immigration, the majority of the world is not involved in international migration. They suffer from what Carling (2002) calls an ‘involuntary immobility’. At the same time, it would be irresponsible to deny the vast and unprecedented numbers of migrants in the world: estimated to be somewhere around 193 million, including some 14 million refugees. And while the new mobilities paradigm is pregnant with a fresh social imagination and a rich corpus of ethnographic studies that reflect the voices of migrants as ‘actors’ rather than simply as victims of poverty or war, international migration should not be absorbed uncritically within this paradigm. The bulk of governments and publics continue to create obstacles for especially low-skilled/low-income
migrants, and international migration is hardly a whimsical project taken lightly by most individuals. Indeed, mobility runs into the problem of territory. International migration is therefore segmented or stratified, with some having the capacity to be more legally mobile than others.
