Migrant Shopping Patterns

The shopping patterns of national and international migrants are a central dynamic in a globalizing world. In global forms of migration shopping, questions of economy, politics, culture, identity, ethnicity, class, and business all come together. Migration shopping takes place in the interfaces between intensifying flows of people, goods, images, ideas, and capital.

Recent political and cultural transformations as well as new forms of transport and communication technologies have strengthened such global mobility. Migration shopping is also formative of novel types of transnational migrant groups and societies as aesthetic communities, that is, migrant groups with their own social ontology of consumption distinguished by taste preferences. In this entry, migration shopping is discussed in relation to “shopping,” existing studies in the field, and migrants’ consumption of specific types of commodities and services.

In many societies, shopping has become a patriotic duty in mass culture. Therefore, a number of moral imperatives involved in shopping link the shopping of individuals and groups with national sentiments and discourses. An example of this is the way in which patriotic shopping was encouraged to [Page 1157]boost national economies in the wake of the economic downturn following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Our decisions about where and what to shop for separate us from others, but at the same time, shopping exposes us to the presence and gaze of others. In modern forms of shopping, the whole economy of people, products, and money come together. Shopping has often been explored as formative of individual identities and material status, but other studies show that shopping also has to do with love, devotion, sacrificial rituals, and devotional rites. An example of this is the way in which families carry out their shopping together while simultaneously being targeted by the advertising industry.

More recent literature on migration shopping explores how modern and globalized forms of consumer capitalism have generated the growth of ethnic and “roots” celebrations. In the United States from the 1970s onward, for example, companies started to turn away from mass advertising campaigns to focus on segmented marketing approaches and migrant shopping in particular. In migration shopping, academic ideas about multiculturalism in modern societies fuse with the interests of the business sector. Thus, migrant groups were targeted as essential segments of modern consumers, who, to a large extent, construct individual and group ethnic identities through their shopping. In the United States, such migrant shopping campaigns have targeted, for example, Jews, Irish Americans, Hispanics, and, more recently, Muslims.

Migrant experiences and discourses are entangled and never clear of commodification. This point is particularly salient with respect to urban migrant shopping. Urban centers not only embody the pluralization of shopping choices in a globalized world economy, they also house large and diverse groups of migrants.

For example, London qualifies as a “global city” because it plays an important role in linking the national, as well as European, economy with global circuits of commodities, people, and ideas, and this is also the case with migrant shopping. On Edgware Road in central London, a large number of “Islamic” ethnic products and services are offered. The Islamic market, so ubiquitous on Edgware Road, signifies some wider transformations that have taken place during the past decade or so, including a changing Islamic business and entrepreneurial environment in London. Most of the shops, restaurants, cafés, money transfer agencies, kiosks, barbers, banks, and estate agencies on Edgware Road are run by Muslims. In other areas of London, it is non-Muslim migrants from around the world that evoke migrant shopping. In much the same way, Chinatowns and Little Indias around the world are centers for migrant shopping.

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