Rebooting migration theory: Interdisciplinarity,

globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies

Adrian Favell

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Adrian Favell. Rebooting migration theory: Interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in
migration studies. Brettell Caroline, Hollifield James. Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines
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 CHAPTER 9

Rebooting Migration Theory

Interdisciplinarity, Globality, and
Postdisciplinarity in Migration Studies
Adrian Favell

It is no small ambition to bring together a comprehensive overview of contem-

porary migration theory across the social sciences and humanities. Such has
been the explosion of interest in international migration in the past decade or
so that no scholar nowadays can feel adequate when confronting the avalanche
of literature that has followed. The rather heroic enterprise presented here has
the virtue of letting disciplinary perspectives speak for themselves in a conge-
nial dialogue, rather than attempting a uniied theory, the most prominent of
which have typically emerged from a base in economic theory (Massey et al.
1998; Hammar et al. 1997). It is thus highly instructive to read each chapter
as a guide to the speciic mindset of various disciplines toward the subject.
Nonspecialists will learn as much about what political scientists, anthropolo-
gists, demographers, economists, or lawyers do from reading the respective
chapters, as about political science, anthropological, demographic, economic,
or legal approaches to migration theory.
The irst edition came under ire for its lack of true interdisciplinarity and
for a pervasive U.S.-centered bias. Authors were thus asked to engage more
with the non-American literature in each discipline, while new chapters on
geography and demography ill out a broader range of subjects. To be fair,
though, offering a comprehensive overview for the American market—in
which international migration (or “immigration,” as it is mostly misleadingly
titled) is nowadays a central topic on syllabi—is certainly not quite the same
thing as it might be in Britain or continental Europe, let alone elsewhere in the
world. Immigration is such a central part of the self-narrative of the United
States that no one would today question the relevance of studying it in the
mainstream social sciences and humanities. Elsewhere in the world, migration
is no less a signiicant subject, but it has taken time for it to be established as

259
 ADRIAN FAVELL 260

a serious academic topic. A major problem in anglophone countries is that it

is often lumped together on syllabi and in bookstores with “ethnic and racial
studies.” It has taken the great effort of some scholars to delineate a research
program on migration that is quite distinct from that on race and ethnicity
(Castles and Miller 1998; King 2002).
This volume, then, will be useful further ammunition to that end—to the
emergence and institutionalization of migration studies as a full-ledged inter-
disciplinary ield. In this brief bookend to the collection, my goal is to not
only explore some other dimensions raised by the question of interdisciplinar-
ity in migration studies, but also to offer some thoughts as to what the core
theoretical building blocks of this ield might be. In attempting to synthesize
our efforts in this volume, I aim to diagnose the weak spots and miscommu-
nications in the research ield, as much as to point the way forward to the next
decade of (hopefully) increasingly multidisciplinary, multimethods research.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN MIGRATION STUDIES

On the face of it, there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sci-
ences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration stud-
ies. This should be obvious to anyone sitting down to design a comprehensive
course in international migration. In such a course, there is always a need
to somehow marry quantitative data sources and basic economic or demo-
graphic analysis of migration, with an ethnographic or oral historical sense of
the lives and experiences of migrants themselves. Sociology and political sci-
ence readings are needed to broach the structural background of immigration
and incorporation processes; and there is so much interesting work coming
out of anthropology and geography—particularly looking at transnational pro-
cesses—that these approaches clearly must not be overlooked. Migration stud-
ies need a simultaneously top-down as well as bottom-up approach, and it needs
history to temper the overwhelming topicality of the present. A course such as
this should also be comparative and global, although that part is the hardest.
Our experiences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where
I have co-taught an ambitious program with Roger Waldinger, Ivan Light, and
Rubén Hernández-León as well organized an interdisciplinary summer school
for the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), is that contrary to the con-
stant advice in the United States about the need for specialist technical train-
ing, students are well able to appreciate and assimilate readings from across
disciplines and methodologies when migration is the singular focus. A course
such as this can play a vital role in prising open the disciplinary closing of the
American mind, which is often hammered home in departments riven by fruit-
less quantitative/qualitative divides. In studying migration, multidisciplinarity
with a multimethods approach should be a basic premise even if the case study
focus of the course is exclusively immigration in the United States.
261 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

Yet interdisciplinarity, in the social sciences at least, is a struggling ideal. To

talk across disciplines in the United States is also to speak against one’s disci-
plinary career interests, which often wholly relect the business of reproducing
disciplinary canons and professional hierarchies that takes up so much of the
everyday academic enterprise. There is still quite a bit of this going on in the
chapters here, which is a pity. Reading these authors, it is clear how much all
of them have been socialized in the habitus of their own disciplines, however
open-minded their explicit intentions (Bourdieu 1984). None, for example, are
writing about disciplines other than their own. In the disciplinary mindset, the
canon in each is presented like an accumulation of sanctiied knowledge stored
in a tall farmyard silo.1 This is a very American problem. As part of their train-
ing, students are taught to prepare for disciplinary “ield exams,” which teach
them to read and retread only familiar literature. Alternative methodologies
are sidelined, they are often forced to study the United States (out of practical
accessibility), and to pose the questions in a classical mode. The only space for
interdisciplinary social studies in the United States has been in international
studies units, which often do not have their own faculty, and which are always
less prestigious positions than mainstream disciplinary professorships. Woe
betide the young graduate student who wanders too far from the disciplinary
path. It can be professional suicide in terms of scoring those job-talk, essen-
tial irst publications in the “top” recognized journals of the given discipline.
Young academics in the United States are basically taught that their dream
someday should (only) be to become chair of their respective disciplinary asso-
ciation. It is ironic and unfortunate that the willfully diverse, and distinction-
obsessed social sciences are behind the times in this sense. Interdisciplinarity
is becoming a rule of thumb for natural scientists in scientiic ields unifying
across old boundaries: for example, in the intersection of biological and physi-
cal sciences, or the pathbreaking work in complexity science in which natural
sciences are marching boldly into social scientiic territories.
In Europe, interdisciplinarity is threatened by the grim progress of bureau-
cratic research-assessment exercises, spearheaded by the British model, and
self-inlicted by a generation of compliant Stakhanovite academics recast by
policy makers as standardized organization men (and women). In these, all
academic output is reduced to scoring major journal articles, the ranking of
which is inevitably deined by disciplinary canons. To put this bluntly, if you
are assessed as a geographer, sociologist, or political scientist, publishing an
article or two in International Migration Review or the Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies (two core migration studies journals) will count for noth-
ing in the disciplinary review. On this basis, it is hard to make a career as a
multidisciplinary migration studies scholar. Interdisciplinarity across Europe
is now associated with the failure of experiments in university structures in the
1970s and 1980s.2
 ADRIAN FAVELL 262

Our idea at UCLA was to run a thoroughly interdisciplinary program with

sociology as a base. Sociology students as such were always a minority in
classes that drew in students from anthropology, geography, education, health
sciences, public policy, and political science. It works very well and is fun to
teach. Sociology, at least when it breaks clear of classical questions, has the
virtue of being a space in which interdisciplinarity is fairly automatic. The
most important areas of sociology are in effect interdisciplinary dialogues—
political sociology, economic sociology, comparative historical sociology, eth-
nography (with anthropology), demography (with economics and statistics),
conversation analysis (with linguistics), and so on. This leaves the dificulty of
deining who or what a sociologist is—as opposed, say, to economists, politi-
cal scientists, or anthropologists, who have rather clear conceptions of who
they are. But this can be a virtue as well as an identity problem.
Geography, which although rather marginal in the United States, is arguably
the most exciting discipline in the social sciences in Europe, has, at its best, a
similar quality. Susan Hardwick’s chapter here emphasizes the postpositivist,
cultural studies wing of population geography. This version of geography is
certainly inter- (if not post-) disciplinary, although her presentation does not
fully represent the full range of methodologies used by geographers today. To
be interdisciplinary does not have to entail the postpositivist stance of endors-
ing only qualitative work, rejecting explanation, or conceiving of theory as
relentless “critique” (as opposed to empirical hypothesis generator). Yet with
its central concern about lows, networks, space, place, and transactions across
the planet, geography’s advantage is that it is much less automatically wed-
ded to methodological nationalism than sociology, whose master concept of
“society” is almost impossible to extricate from the historical context of the
nation–state (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).
As the volume’s introduction makes clear, however, when read in juxta-
position, the chapters can be viewed in an eminently interdisciplinary way,
by thinking about where and how the distinct available conceptualizations or
objects of study in each discipline overlap and interrelate. There are limits to
this binary interdisciplinarity for sure, but learning about a foreign discipline
is just like learning a foreign language. One is a start, and it makes it easier
to learn more, as well as teaching you to look at the world in a different way.
There is in fact, in this sense, any amount of interdisciplinarity out there, in
the grey areas that disciplinary approaches ind themselves wandering into
through unusually imaginative or lateral thinking. For example, despite what
Hasia Diner argues, it is hard not to imagine that the best historians, for all
their sensitivity to context and the unique complexity of speciic migration
experiences, never pose themselves theoretical questions about the generaliza-
tion of their observations. In doing so, they will inevitably reach out to political
science theories of the state, sociological theories about immigrant integra-
tion processes, or anthropological insights about the interactional workings
263 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

of ethnicity. Some of the most erudite intellectual heavyweights in the social

sciences have come out of the nexus of the Social Science Historical Associa-
tion; for example, one thinks of the essential work in comparative historical
studies of Leslie Page Moch or Ewa Morawska, which has struggled to open
the U.S.-centric bias of so much historical production on immigration. There
are parallels to this in the intersection of demography, economics, and sociol-
ogy. Where would migration theory be today without the work of Douglas
Massey, Alejandro Portes, or Saskia Sassen, or the very fruitful ethnography
and theory dialogue going on in contemporary cultural approaches in anthro-
pology or geography, exempliied in the work of a writer such as Aihwa Ong?
There will be no problem with interdisciplinarity in migration studies if these
are the inspirations in the future.

GLOBALITY IN MIGRATION STUDIES

That said, certain dimensions of interdisciplinarity are curtailed by the all-

enveloping national focus of study in the United States. For sure, navel gazing
is a pastime of academics in every major and minor national tradition. It is
often at its worse in small, self-regarding nations (as I write this, I am sitting
in Denmark, a perfect example) but Americans have a particular propensity
for a lack of awareness of how so much of what they take to be “canonical” or
“universal” to their respective disciplines is nothing but the view from within
this particular nation–state, however large and powerful it is in the intellectual
landscape. “We are the world,” Americans like to think. No you are not.
In her contribution, Barbara Schmitter Heisler in fact offers a very sharp
diagnosis of methodological nationalism in (American) sociology that I need
not repeat here. I have in the past offered similar diagnoses, critiquing the
European (or Europe-focused) literature on integration and citizenship (Favell
2001a, 2005). The biggest problem is that academic studies that relect most of
all the political concerns of national debates always turn discussion of interna-
tional migration and global mobility into debates about the ethics of im-migra-
tion, which inevitably prioritizes the view from the receiving society, and the
variable transformation of foreigners into nationalized citizens.
It is particularly tiresome that leaders in the ield in the United States make
frequent calls for more cross-national comparativism in migration studies to
help advance the American debates—one thinks of Portes’s very sharp mani-
festo (1997)—but that the occasional openings and dialogues rarely go any-
where. One looks in vain for evidence of progress, for example, in the update of
the absurdly U.S.-centric Handbook of International Migration (Hirschman,
Kasinitz, and De Wind 1999)—an essential reference in other senses—when
it was redone as a conference and published as an International Migration
Review special issue a couple of years later (Portes and De Wind 2004). A set
of familiar European igures were brought in to broaden the scope, but it is
 ADRIAN FAVELL 264

painfully apparent that the discussions, which are described repeatedly by the
editors as “fruitful,” are also admitted to “once again [display] the wide dif-
ferences in perspective arising from diverse national contexts and intellectual
traditions” (843). Most transatlantic dialogue in fact has rarely got any further
than “discovering” this. American international conferences suffer from the
fact that they often do not get visits from some of the very best European
scholars, who are too busy in their local struggles and commitments to take
time out for a sabbatical year in the United States, and often do not publish
much in English. Americans weaned on the U.S. canon, meanwhile, can pop
over to Europe during the summer recess or an occasional international con-
ference, and they might try to build in a comparative agenda, but they rarely
stick around long enough to develop a plausible local knowledge. A typical
problem they run into is that after a little dialogue in a complex political Euro-
pean setting, they realize that doing comparative work is going to necessitate
thoroughly rethinking the theoretical assumptions and data relexes on which
the American canon is based. Faced with this, they often withdraw to famil-
iar territory, and debates that advance theory as if America was the standard
to which everything should be measured. One has grown tired of archetypal
American observations that compared to the more universal track record of the
United States, Germany is a more ethnic nation, or that French republicanism
masks cultural particularism (e.g., Alba 2005). What is missing is a realization
that U.S. tools and theories have to be completely rethought in the European
context. The scale of these societies, the historical nature of nation-building
and migration, and the transnational context of the European Union are all
factors that ensure European national cases are not directly comparable or
amenable to the habits of analysis that work so well in the United States. Com-
parativism is a wonderful thing, but it also has to be tempered by an awareness
of the complete asymmetry in the U.S.–Europe relationship, and the power
relations that distort it (Favell 1999). The one area where it might be argued
that there has been a fruitful cross-Atlantic comparativism is in studies of the
political sociology of citizenship, which is discussed in depth elsewhere in this
volume by Holliield and Schmitter Heisler. Here, the deep methodological
nationalism of homegrown European research was successfully challenged by
a new ield of comparative work by American or American-trained scholars.3
However, the resultant boom in citizenship studies has been highly fertile for
new comparative efforts but less helpful in its reproduction of the state- and
therefore nation–state-centered optic that talk of citizenship inevitably encour-
ages. Again, I have discussed this in much detail elsewhere (Favell 2001a).4
The explosion of political sociology work was a fruitful example of a genuine
internationalization of a research ield—a case where a far more sophisticated
comparative social science was able to cut through the parochial concerns that
dominated the debates of national scholars. For example, the terribly British
postcolonial “race relations” perspective, wholly deined by a generation of
265 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

famous cultural theory scholars in Britain (the new canon of Stuart Hall, Paul
Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Heidi Mirza, Avtar Brah et al.) looks quite provincial
when set against the recent comparative literature on citizenship and immigra-
tion (Favell 2001b; Hansen 2000). So many of these debates were deined not
by scientiic agendas but by the (understandable) activist frustrations of minor-
ity scholars in relation to dominant British policy structures. Even then, it can
hardly be claimed that it was outsider views of Britain that changed the nature
of the debate. Much more inluential has been a decade of new immigration
on the ground, that has now begun to pry open this set of distinctly British
concepts. The “race relations” paradigm simply falls lat in trying to capture
the issues involving asylum seekers or new Polish migrants.
Even in such a closely interrelated continent such as Europe, the most
basic cross-national awareness is often lacking. European scholars often hold
highly stereotypical views of near neighbors—the French see English race
relations as “racist,” the English see French republicanism as “homogeniz-
ing,” and so on—which are linked to the usefulness of stereotypes in political
debates within the country. This points to a distinctively politicized aspect of
migration studies in Europe that in fact has its weaknesses and strengths. With
the exception of George Borjas, and some of the scholars circling around the
Washington-based think tanks, such as Susan Martin or Phil Martin, Ameri-
can academic production about immigration, as on any other subject, takes
place with splendid, Olympian distance from the dirt of everyday politics.
Given just how dirty American politics is, this is perhaps a good thing for the
academics concerned. It certainly helps academic production establish a cred-
ible power of autonomy, by not playing the journalistic game (Bourdieu 1996).
At their best, American institutions are formidable institutions of independent
science, which Europeans could only dream about matching. Now, it is true
that it is getting harder to escape the pressures of the Department of State on
international studies, which are funded according to shifting U.S. foreign pol-
icy criteria, and there is always suspicion that rich U.S. universities headhunt
foreign scholars less for their outside knowledge and more as trophies to put
on the wall. But social science in the United States is clearly much cleaner and
therefore more scientiic, in the positivist sense, than in Europe.
European research could hardly be described as politically clean, in conti-
nental Europe especially, and even more so in the smaller countries or ones—
such as Spain, France, or Denmark, for example—where academics, opinion
makers, and policy makers are concentrated on top of each other in the metro-
politan centre and capital city. In these contexts, leading academics are almost
always also highly politically engaged, and their careers and appointments are
themselves often political. When you are constantly running after ministry
money or trying to catch the eye of a newspaper editor, the danger again is
navel gazing. Work gets framed exclusively in terms of the national political
debates of the day, and you certainly do not have time to waste lying to inter-
 ADRIAN FAVELL 266

national conferences in the United States. For example, being an internation-

ally recognized studies expert in Denmark does not principally mean doing
international work or being part of an international network; it means being
an international expert who observes the world outside and translates it to
users involved in furiously inward-looking debates about Danish society and
national identity. Yet the academic production on a topic such as immigration
or international migration can have a political relevance and impact in shaping
debates here of which Americans could only dream. Leading academics are
routinely invited to appear on TV as experts or write op eds in leading news-
papers. They have a status and visibility in the local society that is only ever
matched in the United States by academics who have renounced the scientiic
academic game and become despised “public intellectuals.”
One upshot of this is that there might be different criteria for evaluating
the value of scientiic production in different contexts. Pure research is dif-
ferent than policy situated research: those Danish scholars are not necessarily
mistaken in their assessment of what counts most in their research. It might
also lead to different theories. The situation means that European research is
less naively positivistic. Europeans generally have no problem seeing that the
difference between facts and values is very blurred or that political interests lie
behind the production of most scientiic knowledge. There can be found, then,
a more sophisticated relexive consciousness about the way in which power
and knowledge-interests shape academic production. Roughly speaking, the
Habermasian, Foucauldian, and Bourdieusian approaches in social science are
the three main paradigms for understanding this process. The upshot of this is
not so much that everyone becomes postmodern. This is actually a bigger prob-
lem in the United States, where the rejection of positivism has often led to a
naïve (qualitative) postmodernism that mirrors the naive (quantitative) positiv-
ism advanced by others. Rather, arguably, there is a more sophisticated aware-
ness, especially in continental Europe, that you do not just throw out good
empiricist instincts with the dogmatic positivist bathwater. In other words, that
an empirical post-postpositivism is possible (on this, see especially Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992). Even more obviously, the fact/value distinction is rou-
tinely crossed in the very large body of normative theorizing in the social sci-
ence of migration and immigration in Europe. One thinks of quite important
igures such as Tariq Modood and Rainer Bauböck, whose academic work,
ironically inluenced most of all by North American Rawlsian philosophers
such as Will Kymlicka or Ronald Dworkin, is very hard to evaluate or place in
terms of advancing disciplinary theories.
Beyond Europe, of course, there is an even bigger question about the eth-
nocentrism of much migration theory in both Europe and North America.
Decentering America in migration studies in the name of globality would be
a process that should also decenter Europe. It would be fair to say that this
volume offers very slim pickings in this respect. With the partial exception
267 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

of Caroline Brettell’s chapter, there is remarkably little relection here about

migration studies from the bottom of the heap up, as it were, from the send-
ing side—the “rest” of the world. This is very much the view from the top of
the pile. This point ought to be leading us to conceive of migration as a global
topic embedded in regional and development studies. We ought to be encour-
aging the production of far more work about migrations in all the regions of
the world, not just those in the West, looking far more at how sending country
contexts inluence and shape migration trends.5 It is perhaps surprising that the
study of international migration today has lost so much of the world systems
or global development perspective that was much more present in the earlier
work of Michael Piore (1979), Castles and Kosack (1973), or Portes and Wal-
ton (1981), for example, work that stressed relations of power and of economic
dependency between the West and the Rest.
Part of the problem, again, is epistemological. We are right to want to fore-
ground the role of power in knowledge construction. But the road to decenter-
ing the social sciences can also be a road out of social science entirely. The
call to transcend ethnocentrism has often gone hand in hand with a broader
philosophical agenda critiquing the whole modernist, developmental para-
digm that privileges the view from the West: the old school views that evaluate
development in terms of its beneits for the (Western) global economy, and/or
the performance of developing economies and political cultures in western
terms. The disciplinary mentality of the sciences can certainly be diagnosed
as part of this problem: that the notion of knowledge and the techniques for
establishing it always rely on and mask the inluence of power and dominant
ideology. This broadly Foucauldian view of science and modernity, of the
disciplining power of bureaucratic systematization and technical specializa-
tion—richly illustrated by the technical training components of postgraduate
professionalization in the United States—can be a very effective macrohistory
of the scientiic West and its evaluative relations to “backward” others. Given
the relatively uncontroversial acceptance that the developmentalist paradigm
and the science it was built on was in part a self-deluding cover for Western
self-justiication, ethnocentrism, and exploitation, the postcolonial inversion
of the Western perspective seems to make good sense. We all want and need a
truly global social science that speaks with and for the multitude, not only the
global elites, and not one embedded in discredited Western political means of
planetary control and dominance. Disciplines such as geography and anthro-
pology have gone through revolutionary change in this sense, when previous
paradigms used for mastering and dominating the colonies became discred-
ited. Departments were closed and heads rolled. We might await a similar
realization that, say, the highly Americanized and U.S.-centric disciplines of
economics and political science, with their often brittle scientiic self-presen-
tation, might go through a similar self-critique as their embedded relation to
 ADRIAN FAVELL 268

American political and economic hegemony is revealed. But this call has to be
made in the name of better science and truth itself.
Unfortunately, however, the pessimistic currents of postmodernism that raised
these doubts, and began to creep across all the social sciences and humanities
from the 1980s onward, have also tended to mean that amongst practitioners of
“critique” there has developed a thoroughgoing skepticism and deconstructive
attitude toward all the procedures and goals of the now despised “enlighten-
ment project,” not only those that were perverted in the name of Western hege-
mony. The victim of this revolution, then, has more often not been power, but
truth itself (Hollis 1994). Relativism all the way down is not an option for social
science—we really might as well give up altogether if that is the conclusion
from reading Foucault, Latour, Lyotard, Bourdieu, and company.6
The collection does not much relect these meta-theoretical concerns. Aside
from some cautious references in the chapters on geography and anthropology,
there is not much here that relects the enormous and highly creative growth of
postcolonial cultural studies in the humanities. In disciplines that begin with
novels, theater, or television as windows to the social world, but very soon
move to claiming that the whole world is a text to be deconstructed, there is
in fact an alternate social analysis of the world being made that often extends
far beyond the realm of literary studies per se. The inluence of textual and
critical discourse analysis techniques can certainly be seen in work to good
effect on the representations of migrants in newspapers, public debates and
governmental policy documents, and so on. The poststructuralist and postco-
lonial methodology that cutting-edge literary studies now embrace as a kind
of orthodoxy has indeed gone hand in hand with a huge outpouring of work
on transnationalism, hybridity, cultural resistance, and the empowerment of
subordinate and minority voices through representing the experiential dimen-
sion of migrant life. To not relect more on this kind of postdisciplinary work
in this volume is an oversight for sure (good examples are Lionnet and Shih
2005; Papastergiadis 1999).

POSTDISCIPLINARITY IN MIGRATION STUDIES

The postdisciplinary path being blazed by contemporary humanities and liter-

ary studies is, however, not the one I want to follow here. A different notion of
postdisciplinarity can I think be retrieved for research approaches to migration
other than the textual or wholly idealistic in epistemological terms (see also
Sayer 1999, 2000). On some level, I would argue, the social scientiic enter-
prise, perhaps in distinction to cultural and literary studies, relies in the end
on an underlying possibility of realism in its methods and representations of
the world. Realism is often opposed in epistemological terms to constructiv-
ism, but this is in fact an unsophisticated view. On some very basic level, all
social sciences since at least Durkheim have or at least should be constructivist
269 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

in their self-understanding (see also Hacking 2000). That is, accept the idea
that the social world is a humanly constructed (i.e., not naturally or essen-
tially given) reality, that our very methods of data gathering, categorization,
and representation themselves construct in a certain way. It accepts that social
scientists are a part of the social world they are constructing knowledge—and
techniques of knowledge gathering—about. But it is no less real for that, and
no less true when successful, especially if these techniques are embedded in
a socially shared habitus of scientiic practice (as opposed to literary, jour-
nalistic, political practice, etc.), that sustain the autonomous social power of
recognized academic work (see Bourdieu et al. 1977).7
What a constructivist empiricism might enable is a rethinking of migration
theory that helps us rebuild a more politically autonomous and scientiic form
of studying the subject, while not letting go of the incontrovertible need for a
less disciplinary and more global approach. The point here is that we do not
want to endorse procedures or methods that remove for us the very material
“fact” that migration is something that happens when a real (physical) person
moves in real (physical) space. While one can accept the point that Susan
Hardwick might make, that all geographies in the end are collective social
representations of space, which are thus socially relative and mental in nature,
it would go too far to suggest that space itself is a wholly subjective or mentally
constructed iction. People move, and the material physical distance of those
moves matter, as do the physical borders that separate different social units in
space and deine what counts as spatial movement. The postmodern cultural
turn in population geography, in rejecting the “objectivist” or “positivist” old
geography, unfortunately has tended to want to collapse all material space into
socially constructed space, thus in a sense negating geography’s most interest-
ing and valuable contribution to the social sciences.
The approach to migration studies suggested by the postdisciplinary
approach here is one that begins to question and dismantle some of the ixed
points and conceptualizations provided by our standard deinitions of interna-
tional migration in the international state system. These, clearly, are political
constructions of the modern world, exhaustively carved up as it is into distinct
nation–state units. This world should, in our migration theory, be subject to
political and historical deconstruction. Yet nearly all the chapters assume that
we know what migration is, and that we can accept the units—from which
people move to which they move—given by the political world we live in. But
these are only conventions that happen to be the case here and now. The basic
deinition they assume is the standard one. Citizens or (at least) residents of one
nation–state are migrants or have migrated, irst when they leave that nation–
state and cross an international border to set foot in another; and second, when
their move has a time dimension—decided by convention (one year in the
statistics)—after which they can be considered to have moved residency. It is
only a short step to fall into the full immigration optic by accepting the third
 ADRIAN FAVELL 270

assumption that the move creates a particular relationship with the receiving
society, deined by the new residence: that the migrant is an outside, foreign
body that has to be absorbed in some way into the receiving, given “society.”
Other movers, who are not staying and whose presence is indifferent to the
receiving society, cross borders—such as tourists, business people, interna-
tional lorry drivers—but they remain wholly indifferent and largely invisible
forms of movement from the migration/immigration perspective. The litera-
ture on transnationalism, it is true, questioned the one-way assumptions of
these migration deinitions, stressing the interplay or interrelations of the two
places, and the migrant networks between. But it did not enlarge or question
much the notion of migration itself as a form of mobility. The second genera-
tion of this literature, responding to the accusation that it was ignoring the state
by stressing only lows and networks has, with the notion of “simultaneity,”
in fact fallen back into describing the binary interaction of migrants in send-
ing and receiving contexts, and hence retains a focus on essentially the same
kind of movers as immigration scholars (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004). In
all these approaches, no one examines whether migration is in fact something
only deined and derived from the state’s need to classify and carve up spatial
mobility in a certain way, and that it could be deined in another way.
What might happen if we shut down the disciplinary canons for a moment,
and reboot our computer? The iling system in the computer has collapsed
and we are forced to redescribe our object of study out there in the real world.
Nothing appears natural any more: certainly not our deinition of what consti-
tutes a migrant or an event/action of migration in the world. We would have to
draw new lines and new conventions.
Would sending and receiving “societies” today still automatically appear
as units coterminous with the borders of actually existing, politically deined,
nation–states? Or would this historical convention now appear a redundant, or
certainly a questionable starting point for building a science of spatial move-
ment? We take it for granted, but it wholly deines our idea of who is a citizen
and a resident, and who therefore is a foreigner and a migrant, in relation to
speciic territories and space. But the world is not only one of nation–state
units. Some aspects of society are aggregated in very different units, in which
social relations, networks, transactions, and events, spanning both physical
and virtual spaces, have local, regional, or global patterns that do not cor-
respond in any way to the container that the nation–state view might wish to
impose on them. Biologists studying pollination or meteorologists studying
the patterns of hurricane formation would never think that the phenomena they
describe were in any way deined by the given nation–state borders and deini-
tions of the everyday political world. Should we continue to describe and ile
human spatial mobility in the same way?
The issue, in a sense, is a reverse of what is argued in the political science
and history chapters in this volume. The problem for a rebooted migration
271 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

theory is not to bring the state back into a scientiic ield in which the political
view was missing. In fact, the political (that is, the conventional) mode of carv-
ing up the world into nation–states is utterly pervasive and ever present in all
the existing disciplines and their debates. A similar thing might be said about
history. To be able to theorize freely, we need to remove our understanding of
migration away from the urge to account for everything in terms of time- and
place-speciic narratives; that is, the way the world looks to us conventionally
because of our history and our inherited political modes of understanding. His-
tory and political science almost always end up reproducing the conventional
nation–state point of view of spatial mobility, because it is (still) the dominant
conventional view of the world. Sociology, as we are told here by Schmitter
Heisler, is also deeply embedded in the nation–state view of the world—not
least because nearly all the statistics that it and demography uses are generated
by nation–states classifying territorially ixed populations in relation to collec-
tivities imagined as national “societies.” We might hope or expect economics,
which claims to be methodologically individualistic in its approach, to chal-
lenge the convention that the world is divided up only into macro units called
nation–states, but in fact nearly all economic theories of migration, including
the chapter here by Barry Chiswick, take the conventional deinition of inter-
national migration from nation A to nation B as their starting point for dis-
cussing economic differentials between spatial units, or the costs and beneits
of migration to societies. Geography and anthropology, it is true, have a less
automatic reliance on methodological nationalism in their modes of analyses.
But they are prey to a different problem, of reifying a culturalist view of the
world, which then often falls in line with the idea of a world divided up into
national “ethnic” cultures, languages, institutions, and so forth.
The point here is that in foregrounding the pervasiveness of the nation–state
in our conventional understanding of migration, we might in fact reverse the
relationship and show how the nation–state gets constructed and reproduced in
and through these conventional understandings. Instead of telling a story about
how foreign objects (migrants) it into or challenge the given (nation–state) nar-
rative and institutional structures by which we recognize the world, we might
instead look at how the very process by which collectivities manage movers
by naming and counting them, and thereby distinguishing them from nonmov-
ers or residents, is the fundamental way in which the territorial nation–state
society constitutes itself in the irst place. Physical movement across space is
the natural, normal given of human social life; what is abnormal, changeable,
and historically constructed is the idea that human societies need to construct
political borders and institutions that deine and constrain spatial mobility in
particular, regularized ways, such that immobility becomes the norm.
The step I am advocating here is essentially to expand and redeine migra-
tion studies as a subset of (spatial) mobility studies. This is a project that has
been advocated by several social theorists in recent times (Castells 2000; Urry
 ADRIAN FAVELL 272

2000). Unlike them, however, my concern is also with preserving the focus,
uppermost to migration studies, on real people moving in real space—not vir-
tual and nonhuman forms of mobility. The issue, in fact, is quite simple. What
is it that makes the “illegal” migrant crossing a given border different than
the “legal” immigrant, the foreigner on a holiday visa, the lorry driver, or the
shopper over for the day? The mobility of goods and services, and even some-
times capital, also involves the physical movement of persons across borders.
Minus the nation–state, we might very easily see the fruit pickers on the other
side of the sea, who pick the bananas we enjoy at breakfast, as part of our
society; they are certainly an essential part of our economy, that is, our market
for fruit. Similarly, there is a deep truth for the Mexicans in California who
complain, when accused of illegality, that they did not cross any borders; the
borders crossed them. What makes the “illegal migrant” different is that a
nation–state has decided to name the movement that way—as a way of assert-
ing its own sovereign existence.
Just taking the border at Tijuana would make this point very clear. A very
small proportion of the cross-border mobility found at this junction of the
political world—that is, the starkest political dividing line between the West
and the Rest—is actually “migration”—illegal or otherwise. As well as the
fun-loving tourists, the commuters, and the shoppers looking for cheap goods,
there is a vast number of goods-related crossings that never count, and would
never be recognized as migration. These open, mostly economic transactions,
in fact dwarf movements counted as migrations. Yet some people have rights
to physically move over the border while others do not; an even smaller num-
ber have a right to migrate. Some movements are counted as immigration,
others illegal migration, still others asylum seeking, and so on. All these dis-
tinctions are more or less arbitrary and deined wholly by conventions imposed
by the nation–states in question. As citizens we have to recognize the legality
of nation–states, but there is no reason why we have to take this power for
granted as autonomous scholars, who should be free from such political blink-
ers. These conventions, we can see, can change or vary over time and space.
The border itself only exists because it is the place where all these classiica-
tions are made; it is being made and remade every time the state (or one of its
representatives) puts into action criteria in its name that classiies a movement
as migration or not. In other words, minus the border, there would be no state,
or state governance, here. The (American) nation–state in fact constitutes itself
in the very act of recognizing, classifying, and then sanctioning or not (that
is, governing) the physical movements that are going across its self-declared
borders.
Conventional views of governance, sovereignty, and control entirely repro-
duce the taken-for-granted convention of state power. To think of this power as
continually constructed and enacted also brings into sharp focus the absurdity
of many of the discussions on incorporation or integration, especially since
273 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

academic discussions in these subields so tamely follow political ones. Spatial

movements can be highly integrated in social networks and relations—whether
familial, communal, political or economic—regardless of whether they are
organized or even fall within the receiving society’s political perception of
incorporation and integration. But again, by recognizing, classifying, and then
reshaping the social interactions that follow from movement as “incorpora-
tion” or “integration,” the receiving society itself is constituted. America is, we
know, the sum of all immigrants; that is the very story of the nation. But look
again—it might be possible to see there really is no society here other than
the controlled, hierarchical system that calls itself a nation because enough
“Americans,” who were once foreigners and immigrants, at the same time
believe it is the primary social and political entity of which they are a part. The
historical emergence of the nation–state is one by which collectivities have
found ways to cage and penetrate social and economic interactions that would
otherwise be unbounded. One of the key historical ways that the state has con-
stituted its powers over society has been to classify movement as migration,
and thereby invent a ixed immobile territorial population that can call itself a
nation.8 That, in a globally porous world, this process still works so effectively
for nations like America—which feels very little ontological insecurity at a
political level—is a remarkable fact.
The effect of understanding how the state works to create itself and society
in its own image need not be one that belittles its basic power. We simply see
this power for what it is. In a basic social theoretical sense, some collective
entity such as a state may well be necessary to the functioning of society. This
is the old Hobbesian argument about a leviathan as basic to the nondestructive
functioning of social order. But historically, and even in the modern age, there
is a range of possible social orders other than the modern nation–state society
(see Sassen 2006). Putting it this way in fact underlines just how remarkably
dominant and powerful is our taken-for-granted carving up of the world into
nation–states. The modern nation–state’s sharp ability to designate and rec-
ognize which spatial movers are foreigners is a remarkable political achieve-
ment—so effective that scholars of migration rarely question who are migrants
or not by this deinition.
What is of interest in the current global age is the extent to which this con-
ventional patterning and deining of populations, distinguishing citizens, resi-
dents, migrants and movers, is or has been changing because of the changing
relationship of the global and regional economy to nation–state sovereignty.
The subject matter of international political economy, in fact, is principally
concerned with the politics of this shifting relationship, and the governance
of the mobility on which it turns: of all forms of movement—capital, goods,
services, and persons. Among these, the global economy is of course chal-
lenging the preeminent power of nation–states themselves to deine who is
and who is not a citizen or a migrant; who is an immobile resident and who
 ADRIAN FAVELL 274

is a mover who has crossed some border. The rebooted approach to migration
theory I present here may help us recognize the empirical signiicance of work
focusing on these changes, which might otherwise look like fringe questions
in migration studies.
Two brief examples will have to sufice here. The GATS Mode 4 (General
Agreement on Trade in Services), in which service workers are able move free
of typical migrant visa restrictions, is one channel of movement that has been
much discussed by migration scholars as a potentially progressive recognition
of the manifold new forms of global mobility that escape conventional clas-
siications (Lavenex 2006). This is in effect an interesting example of how a
new form of governance, pushed by global economic cooperation, changes the
effectiveness with which states delineated some movers as migrants. A posted
service worker is no longer a temporary migrant or potential immigrant. Yet
move across borders they certainly must—services nearly always require
a physical movement—and it is quite possible that they might relocate and
work for several years in another society under these regulations, with all the
social implications this entails. The space they live in is a space carved out and
largely ungoverned within the receiving society. The all-integrating nation–
state has many such holes, like a giant Swiss cheese. Nobody sees this issue
as migration, and it might not even be clear which social unit, if any, absorbs
the externalities generated by the service mover’s life and work, other than
the multinational corporation that made the move possible in the irst place.
Enough actions of this kind and we might start seeing multinational corpo-
rate social structures, which call themselves incorporated “legal” irms in the
national world, but which often function like entire surrogate state authorities,
offering their own cultures, welfare structures, and sources of identity for their
employees, as alternatives to the nations they once lived in (Bozkurt 2006).
The European Union (EU) is a second example. Uniquely on the planet,
the building of a regionally deined internal market, based on the freedom of
movement of goods, capital, services, and persons across political borders,
creates a space that has dramatically redeined the European nation–state’s
sovereign need to deine and categorize certain movements as migrations.
Now when EU citizens move it is a politically unrecognized and invisible act.
European nation–states can no longer constitute themselves as they once might
have done by legally and politically designating French or German movers as
“foreigners.” Any EU citizen can “migrate” (move and stay) with none of the
usual means by which states recognize the movement as migration applying.
They need no visa, no passport; there is no need to commit oneself to becom-
ing a citizen one day, and in many cases they need not even show up as ofi-
cial residents. They do not think of themselves as migrants; they may or may
not show up somewhere on state statistics, and they have lives functionally
organized across a quite complicated European space that corresponds to no
national or cultural lines. For all the talk of unfettered transnationalism else-
275 REBOOTING MIGRATION THEORY

where in the world—at either the high (corporate) or low (“ethnic,” diasporic)
level—these European free movers are much less constrained and much better
endowed to engage in social forms and networks unclassiied and unobserved
by nation–states, and not in a way captured or contained by national societies.
If one was to go looking for a possible new cosmopolitan or transnational soci-
ety order in our given world of nation–states, the EU is one of the best places
to look (Favell 2007).9
These thoughts suggest that while the nation–state remains the modern
world’s great disciplining device, we ought to be able to devise through migra-
tion studies a way of seeing how and why it happens. This perhaps ought to
be the biggest challenge to a volume with rethinking migration theory as its
goal. The nation–state has created the world in its own image, and science for
centuries has also been harnessed to these goals. Migration is one of the key
anomalies of a world divided up into more or less ixed population containers,
which is why the state politically takes its challenge so seriously, and why
migration is, by most observers, so conventionally understood. Power is at
work here; it is pervasive in our social science of migration. It is perhaps dis-
appointing that social science disciplines today still seem so wedded to these
given conventions for understanding migration. Breaking with the disciplinary
nature of the social sciences, and developing a postdisciplinary view may well
help scholars think, for once, outside of the box. The theory this generates
need not be anything other than a straightforwardly empirical, historical, and
comparative enterprise, but it will have to recast the subject of migration in a
thoroughly decentered, global perspective. We need to renew the conceptual
tools with which we think of and recognize migration. The ones we have inher-
ited from scientiic disciplines are not sensitive to this need. Disciplines them-
selves think and see like a (nation) state, to borrow James C. Scott’s famous
phrase (1999). To really talk across disciplines would also mean inding a way
to escape the nation–state-dominated conceptions that conventionally make
sense of the world and the migration that takes place within it.

NOTES

1. I owe this lovely agricultural metaphor to Irene Bloemraad, University of Cali-

fornia, Berkeley. Thanks are due to her, to the editors, and to Roger Waldinger
and Russell King for comments during the development of this chapter.
2. As a member of faculty I have at Sussex and Utrecht experienced the dismantling
of two innovative interdisciplinary structures because of outside funding pres-
sures structured by research assessment imperatives, in both cases against the
will of those who worked there.
3. See the work of Rogers Brubaker, James Holliield, Gary Freeman, Yasemin Soysal,
and Christian Joppke et al. See Joppke (1998) for the best synthetic collection.
 ADRIAN FAVELL 276

4. A better example of transatlantic cooperation was the Carnegie Endowment’s

Comparative Citizenship Project, which worked because it strictly focused on
formal aspects of citizenship and naturalization rights; see Aleinikoff and Klus-
meyer (2000, 2001).
5. Again, we can thank the Castles and Miller volume (1998), which is the leading
textbook of the ield, for at least very overtly rethinking international migration in
a global sense. The work of Massey et al. (1998), although very much driven by the
Mexico-U.S. scenario, which is so close to home, can similarly be congratulated.
6. This dominant anglophone reading of French theory has typically been caused by
the overenthusiastic mis-reading of poor English-language translations. The same
scholars are read and understood very differently in France (see Cusset 2003).
7. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) speak of this as transcending the false opposition
of “social physics” and “social phenomenology.” They offer perhaps the most
successful and sophisticated paradigm for empirical social science research
based on a kind of constructivist realism.
8. Here the story becomes something more familiar to comparative historical soci-
ologists: the rise of classes and nation–states, the invention of the passport, and
the containing of otherwise mobile or ambiguously deined populations in the
late nineteenth century—a core moment in the formation of the modern nation–
state system (Mann 1993; Torpey 2000).
9. Eurostars and Eurocities (Favell 2008) takes this as its core subject. In fact,
the social closure necessary to preserve European nation–states’ sovereign reign
over society gets preserved by other informal means, as I show in this book.

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