twelve - ‘Migrants’: a target-category for social policy? Experiences of first-generation migration

Summary

More and more people share the experience of migration, in the sense of crossing nation-state borders to start a new life in a different society. Theories of globalisation and postmodernism present this experience as a typical occurrence, almost taken for granted, in the lives of growing numbers of people. Even though migration constitutes the ‘normality’ of many societies to a greater or lesser degree, the public and, not least, the sociopolitical discourses of migration, are still predominantly shaped by the view that the large-scale movement of people somehow constitutes a problem. In the first place, the ‘problem’ of migration within this perspective is mostly considered from the point of view of the receiving society, which feels ‘confronted’ by the ‘challenge to integrate large numbers’ of ‘different’ people coming from ‘elsewhere’, ‘another place’. This, in general, constitutes a core theme of social policy discourse in most Western societies, which see themselves as the main destination of economic migrants escaping poverty, but also of refugees and exiles.

This discourse focuses on the societal integration of those who stay and do not return to ‘their place’, as is expected of them. Problems with the migrants’ legal statuses, and with their access to various social spheres such as the labour market, the educational system and the health service, are most commonly dealt with. At the same time, assumptions are made about the specific kind of ‘problems’ emerging in the individual life of migrants. From this perspective, the discourse operates with a variety of ascriptions, centred for the most part around the question of identity. Migrants are assumed to have difficulties in constructing stable, coherent identities. They are seen as either stuck in their ‘traditional culture’, which is regarded as inadequate to adapting to and making a success of life in the ‘modern society’ where they have settled, or they are perceived as ‘torn between two cultures’, with ‘unstable identities’, or as completely ‘uprooted’ and ‘lacking embeddedness’. The latter implies that they are not attached to any culture, producing the pathology of ‘identity breakdown’.

Theoretical discussions on migration have already pointed out that these views of identity formation are based on concepts of coherence and consistency that can no longer account for, or explain, the emergence of new configurations of identity shaped by hybridity, fluidity, multiculturality or even transculturality.