ABSTRACT
Ever since Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan (1963) advised us to move “beyond the melting pot” in our analysis of immigrant settlement and identity, migration researchers have tended to follow what amounts to a recipe in developing a research design. Choose an interesting gateway or global city, locate an ethnic group, add a research question and mix well. The recipe is much the same, whether the researcher’s concern has been to assess the degree of integration into a new locality or to explore the cross-border relationships that migrants maintain or establish. If the research follows a transnational paradigm then there may be another site explored as wellperhaps a village in the migrant’s homeland. However, whatever the analytic framework adopted, the narrative often moves between data specific to a sampled population within a specific city or set of cities to generalizations about an entire ethnic group and its pattern of settlement within a specific nation state. Researchers describe “Turks” in Germany, “Mexicans” in the United States, “Pakistanis” in England. When processes of migration settlement are compared across nation-states, then variations in ethnic group settlement patterns are generally explained in terms of various states’ different opportunity structures including their public policies. The ethnic group research design leaves several key issues under-researched
and under-theorized. Among these are possible non-ethnic forms of settlement and transnational connection and the significance of the specific locality in shaping migrant departure and settlement. The failure to develop a theory of locality is especially ironic because one of the foundations of immigrant studies was the “Chicago School,” whose scholars focused on the “ecology” of particular urban neighborhoods, structures, and localized intergroup dynamics (Park and Miller 1921). The central concern of this chapter is to develop a conceptual framework
for the study of migration, settlement, and transborder connection that is not dependent on the ethnic group as the unit of analysis. We argue that localities of departure and settlement, if analyzed within
global hierarchies of power, provide a fruitful approach to the study of
migration. To illustrate our non-ethnic approach to migrant settlement we draw on our ethnographic research we led from 2001 to 2005 in two smallscale cities, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA and Halle/Saale, SachsenAnhalt, Germany.2 Our broader study explores multiple pathways of local and transnational incorporation including familial, non-ethnically organized businesses, friendships, charitable, and religious networks.3 In this essay we will use the example of fundamentalist Christian pathways of incorporation. Research on the study of migrant settlement in global or gateway cities has focused on bounded ethnic populations with a shared identity and mode of incorporation (Clark 2004; Ley 2003; Waldinger 2001; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996). Small-scale cities are particularly important locales to obtain insights necessary to move migration research beyond the study of ethnic groups.
