Migration Studies and Colonialism. Lucy Mayblin
are criticisms to be made of the extent to which world systems theory adequately accounted for, or then instrumentalized, race and gender in the world system (Grosfoguel 2011). Nevertheless, this is undeniably a corner of migration studies which has sought to incorporate an account of historical colonial power relations in seeking to make sense of the present. Equally, Latin American decolonial work on the ‘coloniality of power’ is indebted to world systems theory even as it departs from its primarily economic focus (Quijano 2000). It is here that we see emerging some decolonial analyses of migration which are alive to the importance of colonial histories, and indeed presents (Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015).
A postcolonial awareness is also visible in, if not central to, other areas of migration studies. Scholars who research the European context often, for example, note the movement of migrants from former colonies to former metropoles in the second half of the twentieth century (Geddes and Scholten 2016). These ‘postcolonial’ migrations have given rise to many studies which, though more often cited in sociologies of race and ethnicity or cultural studies (for example, Cohen and Jonsson 2011; Gilroy 2002b, 2004; Hall 1996c; Wemyss 2009), nevertheless overlap with the concerns of migration researchers (for example, race and racism as legacies of empire are strong themes in Joppke 1999). Those who research the settler colonies as ‘countries of immigration’ also often note the colonial history of those countries, albeit often too briefly and rarely with an engagement with settler colonialism as an ongoing phenomenon. Those who work on what is increasingly dubbed ‘South–South’ migration are, furthermore, offering a wellspring of non-Eurocentric analytical frameworks which, if not necessarily centring colonial histories, are certainly working against Eurocentrism and are very much alive to the connected colonial histories that link different parts of the world (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019).
There are, nevertheless, prominent volumes in the field which barely mention colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization (e.g. Brettell and Hollifield 2008; Carens 2015; Faist 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2010; Sassen 1999; Soysal 1994). Likewise, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is frequently ignored as a way of theorizing migration in key textbooks (even those professing to ‘diversify’, for example Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020). There are also many postgraduate ‘Refugee and Forced Migration’ programmes at ‘world-leading’ universities which cover neither these themes and theories nor issues of race and racism. As historical-structural approaches, such as those deriving from world systems theory, have been dismissed as overly structurally deterministic and have fallen out of favour, with them we have lost a focus on global racism and the legacies of colonialism as structuring axes of inequality and im-mobility. The focus has moved towards the more agential meso- and micro-level theories of ‘communities’, ‘networks’, ‘circulations’ and individual migrants within the context of globalization. But at the same time as acknowledging people’s power to act upon their own lives, these approaches pay too little attention, as previously noted, to structures of race and racism.
Refocusing on race and racism necessitates a renewed focus on the legacies of colonialism in contemporary power relations and particularly on the continued relevance of racial hierarchy for contemporary social, political, legal and economic life. Migration scholars tend to shy away from ‘race’ as a concept, as noted above, since it is associated with histories of racial science which we do not wish to lend legitimacy to. When studies do at least show an awareness of colonial histories, it is too often the case that colonial knowledge, racism and power are treated as something ‘in the past’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020: 312–16). Nevertheless, ‘race’ continues to hold meaning in the social world and racial ideas continue to significantly impact upon people’s lives (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Lentin 2020; Yancy 2016), as the recent renewed focus on racial capitalism has shown (Bhattacharyya 2018). In order to develop more adequate analyses of migration in the contemporary world, we need to acknowledge this and incorporate such analyses into migration studies.
A further issue is the extent to which migration studies continues to be quietly invested in ‘modernization theory’ (see Bhambra 2014). This is the idea that Europe and the white settler colonies at some point became ‘modern’ (wealthy, democratic, rational, secular, rights-based, egalitarian, capitalist, etc.), and that this process (the ‘European miracle’) was endogenous. In order for other parts of the world to become like Europe and its settler colonies (an aim assumed to be desirable), and particularly for them to eradicate poverty, modernization theory advocates that they can and should follow the path laid out by Europe and the wider Global North. This idea of modernization underpins the idea of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). It centres Europe and European history as the reference point from which a road map into the future is imagined for countries deemed ‘underdeveloped’. The concept of ‘development’ is important in migration studies and is rarely paid critical attention. There is an assumption that development is the same as poverty reduction and that migration may facilitate or hinder this desirable process, or that from the opposite perspective development can facilitate or curtail migrations. That is not to suggest that poverty reduction is a problematic aim, but that we do need to acknowledge: (a) the colonial history which facilitated wealth accumulation in ‘the West’ – development in this part of the world was not endogenous and unrelated to impoverishment and exploitation in other parts of the world (Rodney 2018 [1972]) and cannot therefore be simply mimicked elsewhere; and (b) the ongoing power relations which facilitate inequality in both mobilities and immobilities but also in concentrations of wealth and poverty globally. An interrogation of the colonial origins of the idea of development facilitates an alternative framing of the issues at stake.
A growing number of scholars argue that our analyses of migration-related phenomena are enriched by an analysis which acknowledges histories of colonialism, and related racisms. On this theme, Adeyanju and Oriola (2011: 952) observe that ‘there is no notable scholarship in the existing body of literature on African migration that deals with the influence of the colonial discourse and ideology on Africans’ desire to immigrate to the West’. This is despite the fact that these discourses, which have endured the end of formal colonialism, are for them central to understanding the motivations behind African migration to the West, and despite the fact that African migration to ‘the West’ has received a significant amount of scholarly attention. Mains et al. (2013: 131) suggest that the critical interweaving of postcolonial theory and migration studies offers ‘a unique opportunity to reflect and ground our understandings of mobility in more complicated and (hopefully) sensitive ways’. A call to complication and complexity, then, goes to the heart of the potential of the bodies of literature discussed here.
But there have also been recent suggestions that a post- or decolonial frame risks reconfirming the national territory as a site of analysis (Anderson 2019; Sharma 2020). A central danger, some argue, is that migration researchers might be cementing or confirming the migrant/native distinction by working from such perspectives when what we should be doing is denaturalizing such binaries through de-nationalizing and de-territorializing our work (see also Davies and Boehmer 2019). We contest this reading of post- and decolonial perspectives though concede that too often binaries are reinforced rather than complexities embraced. Undeniably, anti-colonial movements have historically drawn on nationalist discourses as a move to resist colonial definitions of belonging, but this has not been without significant intellectual critique (for example, see Fanon 2008 [1952]). Equally, indigenous studies have been criticized for promoting an exclusionary ‘nationalist’ agenda and the debate rages about how solidarities can be built across colonial/modern lines of racialized distinction which were the very basis of the formation of settler-colonial states (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008–9; Tuck, Guess and Sultan 2014). While we would distinguish between projects of self-determination under conditions of colonial occupation on the one hand and anti-migrant nationalism on the other, the point here is that such struggles are certainly not the totality of intellectual discussion within decolonial or related fields.
The project of questioning colonial frameworks of hierarchical distinction (Mayblin 2017; Mignolo 2011a; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a; Wynter 2003), of understanding histories as made up of movements and interconnections between societies and peoples rather than separateness (Bhambra 2014; Krivonos 2019; Nisancioglu 2019), of challenging Eurocentrism (Alatas 2006; Amin 1988; Bhabha 2005 [1994])