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, regardless or because of the gyrations of world economic activity, the restrictionist stance of countless national, as well as regional and local governments, the hospitality of citizens, or the energy, determination, and wishes of migrants themselves. As we pointed out in the Introduction, there were an unprecedented 244 million migrants in the world in 2015, including 19.5 million refugees, which amounts to approximately 50 million more than in 2005. Yet, even if this is a gross under-estimation of migration and immigration, the percentage of the world’s population that lives outside their country of origin probably does not exceed 3.5 per cent. In other words, the majority of the world is not involved in international migration. They suffer from what Carling (2002) calls an ‘involuntary immobility’. This seems to contradict the value of the so-called ‘new mobilities’ paradigm of the mid-2000s that has evolved into an extremely wide-ranging discussion of mobilities across the social sciences and perhaps a preference for the term ‘mobility’ over ‘migration’. The language of mobility is hardly without merit. For one, it seems to capture much of the relationship between spatially and temporally dynamic, non-linear, and sometimes circular patterns of
international migration, internal migration, and the ambivalences of settlement (e.g. Skeldon 2015). Second, it 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 environmental stress or disasters, poverty or war, but international migration should not be conflated uncritically with all forms of mobility. The bulk of governments and publics continue to create obstacles for asylum-seekers, refugees, and low-skilled/low income migrants especially, 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.
