ABSTRACT
There is growing interest across Europe, North America and elsewhere in the interaction between the emergent lifestyles of migrants and settled minority populations of migrant origin, and the law and legal processes. A major reason for the burgeoning of such concerns, in public debate and in the academy,1 is the way globalization has intensified in recent years with improvements in the capacity of communications technology to ship goods, people, ideas and information cheaply around the globe. There has consequently been an upsurge in ‘reverse colonization’, as millions of villagers from the impoverished South have moved upwards and outwards to fill gaps in the labour markets of the prosperous North. In the current phase of globalization their passage abroad is a great deal speedier than those of their predecessors, and this has enabled them to keep in close contact with kinsfolk overseas. Thus many migrants, rather than orienting their lives exclusively to receiving countries, live transnationally, maintaining ongoing relations with places of origin and with international diasporas in the global ecumene, a term which the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz employed to refer to the ‘interconnectedness of the world, by way of interactions, exchanges and related developments, affecting not least the organization of culture’ (Hannerz 1996: 7).
