ABSTRACT
The face of migration in Europe has changed quite dramatically after 1991. If we take the fall of the Berlin wall as an arbitrary changing point in world-order structure, we can see that, prior to this event, institutions engaged with mapping the presence of diversity in a country could rather easily circumscribe migrants in groups. With time, and thanks to favourable immigration law, these groups became sedentary recognisable immigrant minority communities in their own right in the host country (see Spotti & Kroon 2011). This understanding of diversity as group based has witnessed the emergence of a research tradition – that goes under the label of ‘migration research’ – that primarily dealt with migrants’ acculturation strategies, their children’s (often underachieving) educational trajectories, as well as with the linguistic diversity that typified their presence in the host society and on the labour market (cf. Hermans 1995; Verlot & Sierens 1997; Phalet & Swyngedouw 2002; Extra & Yağmur 2004; Zanoni & Janssens 2004). The aftermath of 1991 has testified the emergence of new patterns of migration across many European urban and non-urban conglomerates involving a far more diverse population originating from the former Eastern European block but also from Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Post-1991 migratory patterns therefore differ from the former ones for two reasons. First, migration is not supported anymore by fairly liberal labour policies, such as those that characterised northern Europe during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Second, immi - grants themselves are well aware that the country of arrival is but the beginning of yet another migration trajectory that often brings them further chances of success either elsewhere in Europe or beyond. In the same fashion, the motives and forms of migration have changed. Immigrants do not enter solely as unskilled labour
force. Rather, they enter as asylum seekers, commuting migrants, working migrants, circular migrants, transitory residents, highly skilled labour forces, and the like. The blending of ‘old’ and ‘new’ migration categories gives way to a new form of diversity for which the term ‘superdiversity’ has been coined (Vertovec 2006, 2010). This type of diversity, in essence, seeks to quantify and qualify the new conditions of emergent migration flows that are not only steadily rising, but also adding, through their uneasy-to-pin-down classifications, new facets to the concept of transnationalism. Research on the societal and sociolinguistic implications of superdiversity is well on its way addressing its complexities and implications across several institutional arenas both within onand offline environments (see Blommaert & Rampton 2011; Arnaut & Spotti 2014). Taken from an administrative viewpoint, superdiversity is a real challenge to those institutional gatekeepers who have to determine migrants’ legal positions. The intricacy in pinning down the right administrative categorisation of a migrant also calls for questioning the rationale behind admission of some and rejection of others often due to the omnipresent supremacy of the majority’s perspective within gatekeeping institutions that are in charge of handling and consequently approving or rejecting their cases (cf. Leung & Lewkowicz 2006; Spotti 2011; Duarte & Gogolin 2013; Khan forthcoming).
