Berlin Honors: assignment – reading reflection, week 2

Reading – Chapter 2: The Migratory Process and the Formation of Ethnic Minorities

  1. Much more often migration and settlement is a long-drawn-out process, which will be played out for the rest of the migrant’s life, and affect subsequent generations too.” (p 21) This point struck me, particularly as an American because we are all generations from immigrants. My great great grandparents come from Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. I once worked with a woman who had a faint Irish accent so I had asked her where she moved here from. She said she’d been here for about twenty years and her accent was fading and I told her that I was of Irish ancestry. I remember this incident because she had laughed at me and said that Americans were so obsessed with where they “come from.” “You’re American!” she had said. “You don’t ‘come from’ anywhere! People in Europe don’t go on about these things.” In hindsight, I don’t entirely agree with her on that there are certain sections of the American population who proudly announce their heritage – Italian Americans, for one. (Irish Americans, for another!) But does she have a point? Are we just “American” and how many generations do you need to be “just American”?  This is a vastly different experience for people who migrated from Western countries versus anywhere else in the world – especially anyone with skin that’s just a shade darker. One of my favorite movies is “The Namesake”, about a couple who migrated to the US from India and had children in America. I think this movie did a beautiful job of showing the state of liminality that migrant children live in, a perpetual state of “not quite American” (or not accepted as such) but not fully living in the culture of their parents’ homeland. I think this is a really important point that often gets glossed over.
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  3. Such ‘general theories’ emphasize tendencies of people to move from densely to sparsely populated areas, or from low to high income areas, or link migrations to fluctuations in the business cycle.” (p 22) Overall, I wasn’t a fan of the neo-classical economic perspective but this first point doesn’t seem correct to me – does anyone have any thoughts on the point that people move from densely to sparsely populated areas? I don’t know much about economics but to me, “densely populated areas” would mean cities, more job opportunities, and higher wages? Or am I thinking of this through a very Western lens?
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  5. Neo-classical theory assumes that individuals maximize utility: individuals ‘search’ for the country of residence that maximize their well-being…” (p 23) Not a huge point, but I circled this several times and wrote, “Isn’t that obvious?”
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  7. Borjas claims that ‘this approach leads to a clear – and empirically testable – categorization of the types of immigrant flows that arise in a world where individuals search for the ‘best’ country (Borjas, 1989: 461)” (p 23) This seemed to me to that it would only apply to a small minority of migrants? Refugees primarily seek to live somewhere that’s just NOT where they are currently, I don’t know that they have the privilege of seeking the “best” country. I feel like “choosing the best country” is a choice available only to certain types of people. Even migrants who are not eligible for refugee status but feel they need to flee their current circumstances (be it economic, environmental, or otherwise) don’t always have that liberty. They just need to be “somewhere else.”
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  9. Borjas, for instance, suggests that the US government should ‘deregulate the immigration market’ by selling visas to the highest bidder (Borjas, 1990:225-8). (p 24) This point simply horrifies me, I’m of the belief that freedom of movement should be a right and not a privilege. Regardless, Planet Money did a podcast on a tiny island in the Caribbean (St Kitts-Nevis) started selling houseshares with citizenship and passports. For awhile, it worked fairly well so several other islands started doing the same (Antigua, Dominica). Last I had read, it fell apart in St Kitts as they had several empty buildings and houses all over the island because people were purchasing homes to get the passports but weren’t living there. And then criminals started purchasing passports to get into countries they wouldn’t have been able to get into otherwise. (Canada and the US wound up issuing an advisory and required anyone entering from St Kitts to use a visa, no longer allowing entry with just St Kitts passports.) So aside from the ethical implications of selling visas, this would open up a whole other host of issues (and obvious ones, I think?)
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  11. Today many authors emphasize the role of information and ‘cultural capital’ (knowledge of other countries, capabilities for organizing travel, finding work, and adapting to a new environment) in starting and sustaining migratory movements.” (p 27) This quote made me think of how much the internet and technology is changing how people move around the globe and how people get information and gain the “cultural capital.” You can talk to people all over the world in a way that you never could before, befriend people online, view everyday photos of daily life in other countries (such as Instagram, etc.) In this way, it might give a false sense of “cultural capital”, also.
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  13. On page 29 the authors wrote a list of questions to ask in regard to the migratory process. On some level, it seems odd to me that we need to study and ask this. It’s my understanding that humans used to be nomadic and wandering is in our nature. I think the questions we should be asking are why are we so attached to borders and national identity and controlling the movement of huge populations?

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