By: Iain Walker, Senior Research Officer
Spectators watching the festivities
The birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, or Mawlid an-Nabi, falls—for Sunni Muslims—on the twelfth day of the Islamic month of Rabi’ al-Awwal. The event is celebrated widely in the Islamic world by a variety of events, religious and secular, and in East Africa the biggest of these celebrations is the Maulid organised by the Riyadha Mosque in Lamu, Kenya.
By: Ben Gidley, Senior Researcher
“Communities together not apart”, “Eric Pickles puts Big Lunch at the heart of effort to unite communities”, “Eric Pickles signals end to multiculturalism and says Tories will stand up for majority”, “Immigrants will be expected to speak English and champion British culture”, “Assimilation 1 Racial Justice 0”: it seems odd that such widely divergent headlines last week announced the same news item.
After months of waiting, and hints dropped in the blogosphere, the Department for Communities and Local Government has finally unveiled a new strategy for integration and cohesion, in the form of a paper entitled Creating the Conditions for Integration. The strategy suggests some significant continuities with past policy but also some major ruptures, and offers some cause for optimism as well as some cause for concern.
It centres on five key planks, and in this post I will go through each of these in turn, as well as the philosophical propositions which frame them, and give my personal response, as a researcher working in the field of integration and cohesion.
By: Marisa Macari, COMPAS DPhil Student
Migration from Mexico to the US is the largest and most continuous migration in the history of the world. A large proportion of the undocumented Mexican population in the US entered the country through the 1,952 mile southwest border between Mexico and the US.
Jason De León, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and creator of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), remarks that despite the social, political and economic importance of migration across the US-MX border, there is surprisingly little scientific research exploring this process. I spoke with De León to learn more about the UMP and how it could inform us about the experience and phenomenon of border crossing.
By: Biao Xiang
Imagine: two pieces of pine are coming from Poland by air, fifteen oak trees travel from China by boat, by air, and finally by truck, eleven maples arrive from Argentina (three of them claim to be apples from Chile)… They cannot be more different from each other, except for the fact that they have all left their forests of origin and have yet to settle in the new land.
What about seeing all these disparate timbers as one forest, with its own rules, patterns, structures, ecosystem, and life cycle?
Sounds crazy? Many people are doing just that. Among them are bureaucrats, migration researchers, journalists, international organization officers. The UK government declared that it was “Making migration work for Britain. The assumption here is that the Pakistani student, the Iranian asylum seeker, the Canadian accountant, the Chinese chef … are all inherently related to each other, that they can be managed through standardized policies, and will somehow be made to act together collectively in ways dictated by the state.
By: Carlos Vargas Silva, Senior Researcher and Quantitative Data Analyst, Migration Observatory
A government is deemed ‘successful’ if national GDP growth is strong. A country is said to be on the right track if it is growing faster than other countries. GDP growth has become a gauge of what is good and bad, for success and failure. The fact that migration has either positive or negative impacts on receiving and sending countries’ GDP growth may lead to conclusions that migration is good or bad. In a new volume titled “Migration and Economic Growth” (co-edited with Mathias Czaika, coming out December 2012, Edward Elgar Publishing) I explore the different channels that relate migration and economic growth.
By: Rob McNeil, Senior Media Specialist, Migration Observatory
Unlike most of the clever folks swanning around the corridors of COMPAS, I am not an academic, so the mind-bending vocabulary wielded by those with a PhD can mean I exit conversations feeling a little like I have been smacked around the head with a cricket bat.
But, while the language is something that one does get used to, as an ex-journalist I do wonder sometimes whether I’ll ever get used to the lack of easy answers about migration. The problem, it seems, is related to one of those cricket bat-swinging academic words – epistemology – the nature of truth.
By: Ida Persson, Events and PR Officer
This is a question I’ve spent most of my life being both surprised by being asked, usually after having revealed part of my background to someone, and equally surprised by the slightly suspicious reaction to my reply.
I answer in a slightly garbled fashion… “Well, growing up it was wherever we were living, so really wherever my parents were. But I guess now I could just say Sweden, but not really, I don’t live there. I have some family there. I live in Oxford, but I wouldn’t call that home as such. Eventually I guess home will be wherever I settle, however you define ‘settle’ and if one ever really does. So, not really anywhere. At the moment. But I’d like, were I to die now, to be buried in Sweden. You know?”
Often they don’t know.
By: Ole Jensen, Research Officer
Early January, and I am in the process of finalising the fieldwork that I have been carrying out in two neighbourhoods in Southwark during much of 2011. The final interviews have been set up, and we are in the process of organising neighbourhood forums in Bermondsey and Camberwell in order to discuss our findings with research participants and local stakeholders.
Bermondsey tube station. Photo taken by A. Brady
The fieldwork is part of an EU-funded research project called Concordia Discors. Partner organisations in Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Britain are carrying out similar projects at neighbourhood level in Nuremberg, Budapest, Turin and Barcelona, exploring how local residents experience integration and inter-group relations.
By: Franck Düvell, Senior Researcher
I have recently been invited to three major events, the European Migration Network’s (EMN) annual conference on 25 October in Warsaw, the EU Council’s Strategic Committee for Immigration, Frontiers and Asylum (SCIFA) on 8 November in Brussels and the EU Fundamental Rights Agency’s annual conference on 21-22 November again in Warsaw. In addition, I also addressed a seminar by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) and others on 24 October in Madrid. All four events concentrated on irregular migration, though from rather different perspectives.
By: Mette Berg, Departmental Lecturer, Anthropology of Migration
Questions of migrant adaptation and engagement with their homelands are becoming increasingly important to migrants, their homelands, and the countries where they move. Yet our understanding of how migrants’ pasts impact on their adaptation where they resettle and how they relate from there to their homelands remains inadequate. In the West, migrants are all too often seen as ‘immigrants’ only, but every immigrant is also an emigrant, and brings experiences and memories embedded in particular historical contexts with them when they migrate and resettle.
