Migration

The term migration refers to the forced or voluntary movement of people between one place and another. Immigration has a more limited meaning. It refers to an international movement of people that leads to the permanent settlement of migrants in the country of destination. While studies of migration have focused on particular periods of time and sending and receiving locales—such as the movement of some 30 million Europeans out of the continent between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I or the turn of the twenty-first century flows from the south of the world to the north—historians agree that human mobility has been the norm throughout world history. Some scholars even challenge the actual significance of migration history as a discrete subdiscipline, echoing the famous opening sentence of pioneering U.S. immigration historian Oscar Handlin's book The Uprooted, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

Current theorizations see international migration as regulated by multifactor systems of global interconnections, which include colonialism and decolonization, wars and ethnic persecution, preferred commercial routes and trade relations, fluctuating financial and labor markets, cultural and religious translocal bonds, tourism, and so on. They replaced earlier economics explanations of migration dynamics focused on origin-destination economic factors, such as overpopulation and unemployment, encouraging population expulsion in some places and availability of jobs and unclaimed land attracting it in others. An enduring legacy of the now-discredited “push-and-pull” model is that migrants in the capitalist world system have been much more often studied as producers—workers and participants in the different national working classes—rather than consumers. If relatively overlooked by academic literature, however, it is evident that consumer culture has had a tremendous importance in migratory processes, from the formation of the decision to emigrate to the redefinition of identities involved in any migration and settlement project to the development of translocal flows of goods, capitals, ideas, and images that accompany those of mobile people.

Consumer culture and migration intersect on two major terrains: (1) the behavior and practices of migrants as consumers and (2) the representation [Page 971]and cross-cultural consumption of migrant cultures, identities, and styles via commodities and experiences, which are variously branded as “ethnic.” The two levels are actually tightly interrelated. Migrant consumption can be viewed as another form of production—a production of ethnic meanings, values, and tastes, which, in turn, can become objects of “consumption of the other” in the global market for difference. Articulating their individual and collective identities as styles or subcultures by means of their consumer choices and behaviors, migrants provide for a public self-representation of their social identities that, in an economy increasingly revolving around symbolic production, can be marketed and incorporated in everything from food to politics, fashion, film, tourism, and so forth. It is only for the sake of convenience that it may be helpful to examine (1) and (2) separately.

The influence of consumer culture on both the shaping and the commodification of migrant identities has arguably intensified in the last decades. Depending on the political and social conditions they encounter in their place of arrival, and their racial and cultural identity, migrant groups may develop into relatively separate communities, often as a result of segregation and discrimination. Processes of ethnicization—the formation of immigrant cultures—might last for generations, turning the descendents of the immigrants into socially distinct segments of the population. Anthropologists and sociologists have argued that since the late 1980s, technological innovations, along with the emergence of a global, postindustrial, and consumer-oriented economy, have radically changed qualitatively the experience of migration and ethnicization. Assimilation into host societies and nation-states has ceased to be the ineludible eventual fate of immigrant groups, as originally theorized by the Chicago school of sociology. Fast and cheap transportation over long distances and electronic media and communications have made it easier for migrants to live transnational lives, that is, maintaining psychological, political, and economic links with their real or putative place of origin. The concept of diaspora is accordingly often invoked of late in migration studies to mean large groups of globally dispersed displaced people who continue to share a sense of affiliation and belonging to a common “home.” Being de-territorialized communities bounded by culturally produced senses of common pasts, values, interests, and tastes, present-day diasporas have typically found in consumer culture a powerful means of self-production and self-representation. Deindustrialization and globalization have resulted in an economy revolving on symbolic and cultural production and in an accelerated circulation of meanings, images, and fantasies about the other. Not only have migrant identities become a common area of study in consumer culture, but they have also been brought into the consciousness of millions of consumers worldwide.

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