Managing Diversity: Practices of Citizenship

CHAPTER 1

NATIONAL IDENTITY AND GLOBAL MIGRATION: LISTENING TO THE PARIAHS

Alastair Davidson

Returning to Dublin in 2004 after fifty years away, I expected that when I walked past Bewley’s Oriental Café the smell of coffee would evoke an almost Proustian recollection in me. As a child I lived for a time just near the Bagot Street Bridge. My Irish mother had brought her two sons home. Spud Murphy, who taught us the Irish at school, used to greet me with "A hogan dhu an gael? (Do you speak Gaelic?) and then, since he knew I came from Fiji, would add, half in jest, You eejit, Fiji, don’t they even teach you the Gaelic down there? As a child brought up on the myths and legends of Cúchulainn, Róisín Dubh, John Mitchel, and the evil Black and Tans, I resolved to avoid such mortification by learning Irish quickly. Snippets of the poems still come to me: Do eirig me a madhan… (I get up in the morning …").

This struggle to assimilate, to belong, was soon thwarted. It was not that identifying by speaking the Irish was a partial, nostalgic, and romantic choice of a way to belong but that, like millions of others before us, my brother, my mother, and I soon left again across the water in search of a better life. Since then we have lived in many countries, new versions of the wanderers in Greek, Jewish, and other ancient literatures. My late brother became culturally an Englishman, I moved on to Australia, and my mother wandered the world, to come to rest at ninety-eight years of age in the hills outside Melbourne.

In 1952 we were still among the millions of forced migrants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who left the old country for new peripheries. Like the myriad Irish men and women who had preceded us, when we left it was time for lament, above all for my mother, who still has a Paul Henry on her wall and who reminds us that John Mitchel, the leader of Young Ireland who was transported to Tasmania in 1849, was our ancestor. Now his face stares out from the mantelpiece of my home in the Morvan, deep in la France profonde. The millions who migrated in earlier centuries and from other far distant places also lamented. When I left Fiji they sang "Isa Lei (Isa, you are my only treasure). When I left New Zealand they sang Po kare kare ana (E hine e, Hoki Mai ra, My girl, return to me). In the nineteenth century, when they left for the Australian colonies, they sang about leaving old England forever." The voyage that they and we made after leaving was long: five weeks from Dún Laoghaire even in 1952. All that was home was being left for destinations that must sometimes have seemed like the gates of hell. I was reminded of this when I visited William Smith O’Brien’s cottage at Port Arthur in Tasmania and gazed at the pictures on the walls and the names of the men who had stayed there or been transported for political crimes, including Canadians who had joined in the rising of 1837.

Long after they arrived in their new homes these migrants kept their languages and their customs, and they were torn between Home and home. This was a theme of Australian literature well into the twentieth century. It has also been captured beautifully in Alistair McLeod’s haunting stories of Scots in the freezing fishing villages of Canada’s east coast. The stories of migrants are myriad. Some decided to make the best of it, others to go Home, perhaps never to find it again, for Home has a way of disappearing into memory as customs and places change with time. I have seen a woman’s letters that gradually changed from Gaelic into English over twenty years as her own Australian world changed. Her feelings are re-evoked in a recent collection by Denise Burns, who is trying to unite her two affinities, Australia and Ireland: I realize I am working on it when I have dreams of North Queensland green frogs playing the bodhran (Havenhand and McGregor 2003, 61).

In 1952, when my mother, my brother, and I left Ireland, we lamented as our forebears had for centuries. We knew that we had lost worlds in space and time. Those worlds would remain as no more than memories and deceits. Yet by 1982 the same was not true for migrants. After the 1980s their experience has been radically changed by globalization, the process of creating a truly global market in capital, goods, and labour through the use of new digital technologies. Before it became obvious in the 1990s that the nation state had more capacity to survive than many had expected, the thrust of the process was summed up in the titles of two best-sellers by Kenichi Ohmae: The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinking Economy and The End of the Nation-State and the Rise of Regional Economies. Despite the survival of nation states in a new form, globalized digital technologies have created a world as truly new as it became when Columbus first sighted the Americas. Globalization has completely changed the sense of time and space that tore us from our past and our roots in earlier times. No longer is the primary point of reference for our economics and social development, for capital and goods, the nation state. The destinies of the latter are decided by the flows of global capital and goods, and woe betide a state that ignores those imperatives. Labour follows those flows and is regulated by their requirements, being invited in or expelled as required by political actors, including the power brokers of nation states (see, for example, Human Rights Watch 2002). The best writers who used to argue that the nation state played a primary role in the global world of migration, such as Christian Joppke, cannot gainsay what everyday practice reveals today: global migration as a driver towards universalization (see Joppke 1999 and 2005). This reality is summed up in the words of Australia’s leading scholar of such movement (Hugo 2002, 79):

It is important to realize that in the early postwar era almost all Australians operated within labour markets bounded by a state so that they could see the capital city of the state as the centre of gravity of that labour market. Increasingly, those labour markets were extended to encompass the nation with the centre being in Sydney and, to a lesser extent, Melbourne. However, in the globalizing world of the last decade the boundaries of labour markets have extended further so that many look to global cities such as London and New York as the centre of gravity of their labour market.

My four children are now in Australia, but a couple of years ago two were working in New Zealand, another was in East Timor, and another was checking out prospects in New York, and plans are again being made to work overseas. They are good evidence for Professor Hugo’s assertion.

Scholars of globalization—of the lightning-fast movement of labour around the world and the emergence everywhere of multiethnic and multicultural societies as a result—have rightly noted that never before in recorded history has there been so much migration. It is important to indicate the dimensions of that migration. First, let us admit that most human beings still stay at home. They grow up there and they feel that they belong. They are Irish or Australian or Canadian. Even if, as individuals, they migrate, it is in the expectation that they will either return home or simply change allegiance to a new home. They will either assimilate or create a new syncretic culture.

Statistics give us only half the picture of what is happening. They are ever changing and gain meaning only as a long series. They also depend for their usefulness on definitions, on answers to questions on departure cards such as, are you departing permanently or long term (meaning, in the Australian case, for longer than twelve months)? They require interpretation to help us to understand our problem. For example, most of the people who made the one billion overseas trips recorded in 2001 by travel agencies would fall into the group of those who belong. If these trips were made on the basis of one to each person, that would mean that one fifth of the world’s population went overseas, but probably most are multiple trips made by much smaller numbers of businesspeople. Australia had a population of 20 million in 2001. Three and a half millions made overseas trips that year. Clearly most came home, or the country would be even more sparsely populated than it is. This is much less true, however, of the 150 million or more people who migrate every year inside huge territorial states such as China and Indonesia, or the further 100 million who leave legally for permanent destinations overseas every year, or the 22 million refugees and similar individuals who have no place to go. These figures still leave out an incalculable number of illegal migrants (see UNRISD, and Castles and Miller 1993).

In the nineteenth century people were transported from Europe and then from South Asia, Vietnam, or China to serve as labourers in vast diasporas. Nothing has really changed in that regard. Human beings are still forced to migrate by globalizing pressures, although today we separate definitionally, and with little justification, economic migrants from refugees and other categories (see Laferrière 1996). As Sami Nair (1997, 73) notes,

We have entered a period of a huge displacement of population. I use the word displacement deliberately, for when the populations of entire regions leave this is not because they want to leave, but because they are obliged to by the situation. In fact, what is called globalization, the extending of the economy to the globe, goes together with uprooting of entire peoples, abandoned by the flight of productive structures, left to the blind forces of the world market. Even rich countries undergo these changes fully.

Nair also notes that now the migration is from peripheries to centres, if those terms have any more meaning; that the flow is much more rapid; and that the sort of labour to which migrants are put is quite different. Once destined to be agricultural labourers or factory fodder, today most go to take service jobs or highly skilled employment, both of which have been created by the global digital revolution (see Sassen 1998). Recently, even more unusual developments can be observed around the world, and particularly in Australia and Canada. We might wonder whether these developments are working in reverse for the Republic of Ireland, which was once characterized by net emigration but is now host to thousands of immigrants. It is striking that in the past ten years or so one million Australians have left to find work overseas, an increase of 146 percent between 1992 and 2002, turning Australia from a destination for migrants to a transit station with as many emigrants as immigrants. You may wonder how many still call Australia home. While they are still on their second way station they probably do, and then they think of it, as Italians and Chinese of an earlier generation did, as the place they want to be buried in. The jury, however, is still out for the real wanderers who have lived in three or more countries. One third of those who have left say that they are not sure whether they will return to Australia and 20 percent of males say that they will not (Hugo 2002, 79, 88). Unwittingly supporting the notion of the transit station is a Victorian survey that showed that more than 80 percent of such emigrants intended to return to Australia, and one-quarter said that they would do so within two years (Williams 2003).

These migrating masses, including the Australians, certainly head to El Norte or l’Amérique, as their forebears did, to get a job in the global markets as opportunities are destroyed at home. However, they also increasingly expect to move on to new places of employment or return to base much more rapidly and frequently than they did (see Ong 1999, and Hewison and Young 2006). Families live in different states and commute by plane, as, for example, Hong Kong’s astronauts shuttle each weekend to and from Australia and the United States. They are polyglot and multiethnic, and frequently hold two or more passports. Their children change from idiom to idiom depending which branch of the family they are visiting. A semi-English, the lingua franca of a new global workforce, is now spoken, David Crystal (1996) tells us, by one-fifth of the world’s population. The overall result is the ethnoscape described by Appadurai (1990, 297) and exemplified by O’Connell Street in Dublin. This makes global migration qualitatively different in character from earlier migrations. People who live in this way belong in many places and in one at the same time. They may experience striking generational clashes, as exemplified in Clara Law’s film about the Chinese diaspora, Floating Life (1996), but their world is small when compared to the world separated by vast distances in space and time that I grew up in. The notion of a global neighbourhood is no mere metaphor for