Doing family: Responses to the constructions of ‘the migrant family’ across Europe

This paper draws on how constructions of ‘the migrant family’ in political discourse influence migrants' and their families' lives. In specific national contexts, ‘the migrant family’ is determined according to the national and European debates and expressed by their respective rules and regulations. By ‘doing family’, migrants and their families develop strategies in order to fit these requirements of living a certain family life. Fulfilling specific norms and perceptions which are not necessarily required for the majority of society is a precondition to succeed. Who is and who is not part of the family, who holds responsibility — such aspects have to be proved and repeatedly reproduced by migrants and their families. This not only affects their position in society, but also has strong implications on their lives as a couple and family, since it requires the continuous adaptation and reconstructions of their everyday reality.     

Families,Foreignness, Migration

Introducing the special issue on ‘Families, Foreignness and Migration. Now and Then’, this essay starts from the observation that in Western Europe migrating with or without one's family in the last century was increasingly shaped by state policies. As a result, migrants' identities and family experiences not only depended, and still depend, on their cultural backgrounds but also on very time-specific politics of foreignness and citizenship. The essay's main argument is that comparing and deconstructing perceptions, policies and practices of ‘family’ and migration help to overcome the limited attention given to age and kin in the study of gender and migration. From an overview of contributions to this interdisciplinary issue, it is clear that deconstructing ‘family’ in migration studies should be developed further along three axes: child migration, the multi-level analysis of family and migration, including societies of origin and migrant organizations, and the comparison of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ migrants, which contributes to uncovering the relationship between foreignness, gender and age.     

Immigration,intermarriage and the changing face of Europe in the post war period

In this article we compare the propensity to intermarry of various migrant groups and their children who settled in Germany, France, England, Belgium and the Netherlands in the post-war period, using a wide range of available statistical data. We try to explain different intermarriage patterns within the framework of Alba and Nee's assimilation theory and pay special attention to the role of religion, colour and colonial background. We therefore compare colonial with non colonial migrants and within these categories between groups with ‘European’ (Christian) and non-European (Islam, Hinduism) religions. First of all, religion appears to be an important variable. Migrants whose faith has no tradition in Western Europe intermarry at a much lower rate than those whose religious backgrounds correspond with those that are common in the country of settlement. The rate of ethnic endogamous marriages in Western Europe are highest in Hindu and Muslim communities, often regardless if they came as guest workers or colonial migrants. Whereas differences in religion diminish the propensity to intermarry, colour or ‘racial’ differences on the other hand seem to be less important. This is largely explained by the pre-migration socialisation. Furthermore, the paper argues that the attention to institutions, as rightly advocated by Richard Alba and Victor Nee, needs a more refined and layered elaboration. Institutions, often as barriers to intermarriage, do not only emanate from the receiving society, but also—be it less formalized—within migrant communities. Especially religions and family systems, but also organized nationalist feelings, can have a profound influence on how migrants think about endogamy. Finally, strong pressures to assimilate, often through institutionalized forms of discrimination and stigmatization, not only produce isolation and frustrate assimilation (with resulting low intermarriage rates), but can also stimulate assimilation by 'passing' mechanisms. These factors, together with a more comparative perspective, are not completely ignored in the new assimilation theory, but—as this study of Western European intermarriage patterns stresses—deserve to be included more systematically in historical and social scientist analyses.     

Immigration,intermarriage and the changing face of Europe in the post war period

In this article we compare the propensity to intermarry of various migrant groups and their children who settled in Germany, France, England, Belgium and the Netherlands in the post-war period, using a wide range of available statistical data. We try to explain different intermarriage patterns within the framework of Alba and Nee's assimilation theory and pay special attention to the role of religion, colour and colonial background. We therefore compare colonial with non colonial migrants and within these categories between groups with ‘European’ (Christian) and non-European (Islam, Hinduism) religions. First of all, religion appears to be an important variable. Migrants whose faith has no tradition in Western Europe intermarry at a much lower rate than those whose religious backgrounds correspond with those that are common in the country of settlement. The rate of ethnic endogamous marriages in Western Europe are highest in Hindu and Muslim communities, often regardless if they came as guest workers or colonial migrants. Whereas differences in religion diminish the propensity to intermarry, colour or ‘racial’ differences on the other hand seem to be less important. This is largely explained by the pre-migration socialisation. Furthermore, the paper argues that the attention to institutions, as rightly advocated by Richard Alba and Victor Nee, needs a more refined and layered elaboration. Institutions, often as barriers to intermarriage, do not only emanate from the receiving society, but also—be it less formalized—within migrant communities. Especially religions and family systems, but also organized nationalist feelings, can have a profound influence on how migrants think about endogamy. Finally, strong pressures to assimilate, often through institutionalized forms of discrimination and stigmatization, not only produce isolation and frustrate assimilation (with resulting low intermarriage rates), but can also stimulate assimilation by 'passing' mechanisms. These factors, together with a more comparative perspective, are not completely ignored in the new assimilation theory, but—as this study of Western European intermarriage patterns stresses—deserve to be included more systematically in historical and social scientist analyses.     

Remembering Benalla migrant camp

Abstract

The former migrant camp at Benalla (1949–1967) is one of the least publicly remembered of twenty-three similar centres which provided temporary housing for non-British arrivals in post-war Australia. One of Benalla’s keenest observers saw it as ‘a sad and tragic camp where widows and single mothers were sent’. Another claimed that, as a consequence, it had ‘peculiar difficulties’. The camp ended miserably with the forced relocation of several widows and their families who had been resident in Benalla’s ‘short-term accommodation’ ever since their arrival in Australia seventeen years before. Migrant camps, like Benalla, are difficult heritage places. They raise embarrassing questions about discrimination against the non-British, family separation, forced movement and the inadequacy of support services for the most vulnerable. Benalla has hitherto seen no grand camp reunion, plaque, memorial, public history or heritage listing which raises questions about the perceptions and experiences of the facility while it operated and broader questions about remembering and heritage-making. Benalla was a unique migrant centre and as such provides rare insight into the place of single refugee women and their children within the frames of national/state, local and migrant family heritage.     

Food and the challenge to identity for post-war refugee women in Australia

Abstract

In many societies, feeding one’s family in traditional and culturally appropriate ways is an essential part of being a mother and a wife. For migrants, food can play an important role in the maintenance of tradition, culture, and identity. This paper uses archival evidence, media coverage, memoirs, and oral histories to explore how policies associated with food in migrant hostels impacted on, and interfered with, the central role of food in the commensal circle of the family, and in the identification of migrant women as wives, mothers, and cultural gatekeepers. We identify three main factors that contributed to this negative cultural impact: the preparation of quintessentially ‘Australian’ menus that were alien to most of the population; communal dining arrangements which disrupted the basic social activity of commensality; and the fact that there was no need for women to prepare food for their families, and no opportunity to do so since having private cooking facilities was illegal. The impact of these eating/dining experiences on women and their families was obviously profound: even today, the topic of food and enforced communal dining is among the first and most vivid of memories, typically negative, reported by those who transitioned through the hostels.     

Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

This is an article about war survivors who ended up in migration in the aftermath of World War II: former Division soldiers from Poland and former Ostarbeiterinnen from the Soviet Union who settled in Belgium. It analyzes how these migrants dealt in their post-war lives with experiences of harm to their bodies undergone during the war. Often, attempts to ascribe meaning to the physical and/or psychological remnants of this harm were not made through words, but through non-verbal performances. However, such bodily memory could also, consciously or not, become socialized. In this article, I investigate the performance of bodily memory over time within two of the migrants' social entities: immigrant organizations and families, focusing in particular on their interaction.     

Buried voices: Mexican migrants’ views on the question of illegality

How do immigrant Mexican workers perceive the policies and social discourses that regulate their insertion into American society as noncitizens and illegals? Using ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, evidence is presented that unauthorized Mexican migrants do not consider themselves lawbreakers but rather moral actors responding to difficult socioeconomic conditions. Informed by a keen understanding of the social forces oppressing them, these migrants articulate a discourse of social justice that works as a powerful counterpoint to the hegemonic ideas of citizenship, belonging, and illegality. A careful analysis of migrant social reflexivity offers a much-needed corrective to the prevailing top-down perspective typically offered among contemporary scholars. By looking at the ways in which migrants make sense of immigration policies and articulate their right to have rights, this examination departs from the widespread tendency among scholars and policy makers of analyzing the migrant’s social and civic status as a matter of assimilation and immigration control.     

Family strategy of economic inequality among brothers in Korean rural society, 1690–1795

This article examines how inequality among brothers was practised as a family strategy in Korean south-eastern rural society from the end of the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century as a response to local economic changes. The Wolchon area experienced a process of downward levelling in this period. Using the household registers and land registers, the authors reconstituted 58 families with brothers who held land and 406 families who possessed nobi (‘serfs’ or ‘slaves’) for further examination. As a family strategy, most of these families attempted a strategy of unequal inheritance that resulted in maintaining high economic status for only one of the children among all the brothers. This child, in most cases, would be the eldest son, but also could be another son. The degree of inequality among brothers with regard to nobi-holding declined over time. Most families successfully maintained inequality, and through this family status, by efficiently practising the unequal inheritance strategy, while some families failed to keep the same level of inequality by the end of the eighteenth century. The degree of inequality among brothers is intimately connected to family property size. Each family sought its own strategy to suit the actual economic condition of the family. While very wealthy families attempted to give a similar inheritance to all brothers to provide an equal chance to each of them, less wealthy families reduced the survival chances of some children by the concentration of property given to only one child.     

‘Criminal families’ and the court: co-offending in Amsterdam, 1897–1902

This article focuses on a specific aspect of the history of crime: co-offending (offending with one or more accomplices) in a family setting at the end of the nineteenth century. The aims of this article are to analyze how genders interacted in a criminal setting and to show a possible bias in the court's decision to prosecute ‘criminal families’, either in relation to the people involved or to the environment in which the crime was committed. This article also questions the relevance of the concept of the civilizing mission in a court setting towards ‘criminal families’ and compares it with the reality of the court's work. The study is based on the archives of Amsterdam's Arrondissementsgerecht between 1897 and 1902. This court was in charge of trying criminal offences committed in Amsterdam and its surrounding area (a semi-urban environment within a 25-kilometre radius) according to the 1886 Dutch code of laws. Urban and semi-urban co-offending criminal rates in Amsterdam and its surrounding area are compared, as well as gender patterns and class origins in relation to the crimes committed, in order to highlight a possible prejudice towards working-class offenders. The analysis reveals a high rate of co-offending in female criminality and more gender interactions in the urban environment. However, the results also show that, despite a general anxiety towards working-class families and rising crime rates, magistrates were not more inclined to prosecute them. The family situation was taken into account before trials, and semi-urban families were not treated more leniently than urban families.     

Family Reunification Rights of (Migrant) Union Citizens: Towards a More Liberal Approach

Over the years, in the case‐law of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) determining the availability of family reunification rights for migrant Member State nationals, the pendulum has swung back and forth, from a ‘moderate approach’ in cases such as Morson and Jhanjan (1982) and Akrich (2003), towards a more ‘liberal approach’ in cases such as Carpenter (2002) and Jia (2007). Under the Court's ‘moderate approach’, family reunification rights in the context of the Community's internal market policy are only granted in situations where this is necessary for enabling a Member State national to move between Member States in the process of exercising one of the economic fundamental freedoms; in other words, where there is a sufficient link between the exercise of one of those freedoms and the need to grant family reunification rights under EC law. Conversely, under the Court's ‘liberal approach’, in order for family reunification rights to be bestowed by EC law, it suffices that the situation involves the exercise of one of the market freedoms and that the claimants have a familial link which is covered by Community law; in other words, there is no need to illustrate that there is a link between the grant of such rights and the furtherance of the Community's aim of establishing an internal market. The recent judgments of the ECJ in Eind and Metock (and its order in Sahin) appear to have decidedly moved the pendulum towards the ‘liberal approach’ side. In this article, it will be explained that the fact that the EU is aspiring to be not only a supranational organisation with a successful and smoothly functioning market but also a polity, the citizens of which enjoy a number of basic rights which form the core of a meaningful status of Union citizenship, is the major driving force behind this move. In particular, the move towards a wholehearted adoption of the ‘liberal approach’ seems to have been fuelled by a desire, on the part of the Court, to respond to a number of problems arising from its ‘moderate approach’ and which appear to be an anomaly in a citizens' Europe. These are: a) the incongruity caused between the (new) aim of the Community of creating a meaningful status of Union citizenship and the treatment of Union citizens (under the Court's ‘moderate approach’) as mere factors of production; and b) the emergence of reverse discrimination. The article will conclude with an explanation of why the adoption of the Court's liberal approach does not appear to be a proper solution to these problems.     

Hukou Status and Sentencing in the Wake of Internal Migration: The Penalty Effect of Being Rural‐to‐Urban Migrants in China

While the disparate legal treatment of immigrants in Western jurisdictions has been well documented in sociolegal scholarship, the potential legal inequality experienced by rural‐to‐urban migrants in China, who have become China's largest disadvantaged social group, has not garnered much attention. To fill the gap, this article empirically examines sentencing disparities related to the Hukou status of criminal offenders by employing quantitative data on criminal case processing in China. The results of our analysis reveal that rural‐to‐urban migrant defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison than their urban counterparts. In addition, the penalty effect of being a rural‐to‐urban migrant is further magnified in jurisdictions with a larger concentration of migrants. Our findings suggest that discrimination against rural‐to‐urban migrants has become an emerging, significant form of legal inequality in China's criminal justice system, refracting and reinforcing the deep‐seated structural inequality associated with Hukou status in China. The research and policy implications of these findings are discussed.     

Jurisdictional games and decision making: The Belgian approach in dealing with migrant smuggling

The article presents a case study focusing on the Belgian approach to deal with migrant smuggling and more broadly on the governance of migrants in transit on its territory. Drawing from the literature on jurisdiction and scales and combining it with the scholarship on bureaucrats' decision making, the article sheds light on the messy dynamics and realities of legal governance of migrants transiting through Belgium in their journey to the United Kingdom. By focusing on the multilayered nature of the issue, the distinct legal regimes and the various actors involved, the article argues that the jurisdictional separation of the realms of criminal and administrative law enables a decision to mobilize a set of law over or in combination with another. The article explores the situation at the local and national scales and, as jurisdictions overlap and competences are scattered between distinct entities and actors, specific attention is paid to “passing the buck” behaviors and discourses which have substantial consequences for the situation of migrants in transit in Belgium.     

Family in Dutch migration policy 1945–2005

This article looks at how and why the concept of ‘family’ was used in Dutch migration policy in the period between 1945 and 2005. Throughout this period differences were made between migrant women and migrant men. Whereas the migration of men was associated with labour migration, the migration of women was equated with family migration. Migrant women were constructed as wives and mothers (and not as workers). This construction of women was combined with a victimhood discourse in which women were presented as victims of repressive religion (usually Islam), domestic violence, trafficking and prostitution, and discriminatory government policy. The victimhood discourse was successfully used to acquire rights for migrant women (mostly the right to stay), but as a result all migrant women came to be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. In this article, I show how this combined family and victimhood discourse was used by governments, by (migrant) organizations and, to a lesser extent, in court cases to create differences between migrant men and women. The ‘success’ of the victimhood discourse is not only explained by the fact that it fitted (Western) ideas on femininity. It was also used to give a humanitarian face – albeit beneficial to women only – to an essentially restrictive immigration policy.     

The Anatomy of Civic Integration

Recent legislation on migration and citizenship in Europe and the EU framework on integration require migrants to meet integration requirements in order to enter, reside, reunite with their families and naturalise in the host country. Mandatory language course attendance and examination tests are viewed as means of enhancing integration, which is now framed as a ‘two way’ process or a contractual agreement between migrants and the host society. Despite the deployment of the notion of a contract, integration is, in reality, a one way process aimed at procuring conformity, discipline and migration control. Civic integration rests on an artificial homogenisation and displays the same elements of paternalism and ethnocentricity that characterised past initiatives. The civic integration paradigm is a crucial feature of a renewed, albeit old‐fashioned, nationpolitics used by political elites to provide answers to a wide range of issues and to elicit support for a controlling state in the first decade of the 21^st century.     

Reflecting on Brexit: migration myths and what comes next for EU migrants in the UK?

This article considers the potential impact of Brexit on the family and welfare entitlement of EU migrants living in the UK and of UK migrants living in other EU Member States. Whilst the vast majority of those campaigning for the UK to leave the EU (publicly at least) argued in favour of those already present in the UK at the time of the referendum having their status protected, the government has been considerably less vocal in its support for this outcome. As such, EU migrants living in the UK presently face considerable uncertainty as to their own and their families’ future legal status and entitlement to welfare rights. The article will expose some of the evidential and legal gaps in the assertions made about EU migrants’ socio economic entitlement with a view to providing a more informed, legally accurate appraisal of how the Brexit negotiations could unfold.     

Rural-to-Urban Migration and Juvenile Delinquency in Urban China: a Social Control Perspective

In the past decade, the number of rural-to-urban migrant adolescents in urban China has soared. Official criminal justice statistics point to their higher level of deviance compared to urban adolescents. This study examines whether rural migrant children are more delinquent than their urban peers in the school sample. It provides explanations for the gap by linking Hirschi’s social bond theory with the literature on migration in China. Moreover, it formally tests which elements of social bonds mediate the relationship between migrant status and delinquency. Based on a large-scale survey in Guangzhou involving 470 rural migrants and 838 urban junior high school students, our analysis shows that migrant adolescents engage in slightly more delinquent behavior and have weaker social bonds than local adolescents. Attachment to parents and school, commitment to education, and belief in law fully mediate the positive relationship between migration and delinquency. Such findings indicate that within China’s dual urban–rural structure, rural-to-urban migration can increase these adolescents’ exposure to risk factors that undermine their social bonds to conventional society and thus lead to higher levels of delinquency.     

Criminal Law and the Routine Activity of ‘Hate Crime’

If our knowledge about so called ‘hate crime’ was confined to what we read in the national newspapers or see on the television news then the impression that we would be most likely left with is that hate crime offenders are out-and-out bigots, hate-fuelled individuals who subscribe to racist, homophobic, and other bigoted views who, in exercising their extreme hatred target their victims in premeditated violent attacks. Whilst many such attacks have occurred, the data on incidents, albeit limited, suggests instead that they are commonly committed by ‘ordinary’ people in the context of their ‘everyday’ lives. Considering the everyday circumstances in which incidents occur, this paper argues that by imposing penalty enhancement for ‘hate crime’ the criminal law assumes a significant symbolic role as a cue against transgression on the part of potential offenders.     

Bodily memory: Introducing immigrant organizations and the family

This is an article about war survivors who ended up in migration in the aftermath of World War II: former Division soldiers from Poland and former Ostarbeiterinnen from the Soviet Union who settled in Belgium. It analyzes how these migrants dealt in their post-war lives with experiences of harm to their bodies undergone during the war. Often, attempts to ascribe meaning to the physical and/or psychological remnants of this harm were not made through words, but through non-verbal performances. However, such bodily memory could also, consciously or not, become socialized. In this article, I investigate the performance of bodily memory over time within two of the migrants' social entities: immigrant organizations and families, focusing in particular on their interaction.     

Responding to the Structural Violence of Migrant Domestic Work: Insights from Participatory Action Research with Migrant Caregivers in Canada

This study explores international domestic workers’ response to employer abuse and exploitation following changes to Canada’s Live-in-Caregiver Program in 2014. This research followed an interpretive policy analysis research design, using feminist, participatory, and action research methods. University-based researchers, advocates, and peer researchers collaborated to develop and implement the project’s research and advocacy goals. Thirty-one caregivers in Toronto and Calgary participated in individual and/or focus group interviews to discuss access to permanent residence, working conditions and forms of support. Many shared examples of labor exploitation and psychological hardship due to precarious work conditions and long periods of family separation. Barriers to accessing services and fear of losing status led the majority of caregivers to rely primarily on informal networks for mutual aid and support. This paper identifies how changes in Canada’s temporary foreign worker program for live-in-caregivers exacerbates the structural violence of migrant care work, where the risk for abuse, exploitation, and risk of losing status is normalized. Migrant caregivers accept the precarious work conditions with the promise of permanent residence and the chance to improve their lives for themselves and their children. Towards envisioning improvements in social service delivery, our research highlighted the need for social services to increase outreach and safety planning for migrant workers who are vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and the loss of legal immigration status. Our research also supports grassroots advocacy to call for all migrant workers to be granted permanent resident status upon arrival to ameliorate the structural violence of migrant labor.