(SOM4b) Sociology of Migration: Advancing theories of migration

This session advances the development of migration theory by critically assessing the fallacies inherent in the SES mobility approach to changes in racial group labels and by proposing a boundary model of how group boundaries change; new developments also rest on refining the concept of legitimacy and demonstrating its potential use in theory-building.  A case study of Haitian treatment by the Dominican Republic reveals how illegality is produced in a neo-liberal state while an analysis of migration and work histories of 57 immigrant workers in the Peel region of Toronto reveals the complex intersections between race and gender which produce intricate patterns of precarious employment along a multiplicity of dimensions. Tags: Migration and Immigration, Policy

Organizers: Lisa Kaida, McMaster University, Lori Wilkinson, University of Manitoba, Monica Boyd, University of Toronto; Chair: Secil E. Ertorer, Canisius University

Presentations

Aryan Karimi, University of British Columbia; Rima Wilkes, University of British Columbia

SES Mobility in Sociology of Assimilation: Three Logical Fallacies and an Alternative Boundary Model of Majority-Minority Relations

About 15 years ago, Dr. Herbert Gans penned a paper on the question of how to explain the historical assimilation, i.e., racial recategorization, of the European ethnics into White Americans. Pointing to the popular hypothesis on socioeconomic status (SES) mobility as a causal factor, he asked “whether, when and how assimilation causes or leads to mobility; but also, whether mobility causes or leads to assimilation” (ibid: 152). Simply, how does SES mobility translate into changing a group’s racial label? This question opens Pandora’s box since the century-old race and assimilation theories have yet to theorize the causal link between class mobility and assimilation into another ethnoracial group. In this paper, we revisit the merits of the SES mobility hypothesis. Since the 1970s, assimilation researchers have measured the changes in four aspects of a group’s SES comprising the rates of employment, education and language skills, intermarriage, and residential proximity-segregation from other groups. The purpose, initially, was to explain how, in the encounters between the two groups of White Anglo-Saxons and European ethnics, the ethnics were recategorized into Whites. Next, the goal became to make predictions about non-European immigrants’ ethnoracial recategorization versus White Americans. The core hypothesis is that the ethnics’ increasing rates of SES mobility pushed them into the White category and that SES mobility will lead to non-Europeans’ inclusion in the White American or the mainstream category. There are three logical fallacies in this SES hypothesis. First, the argument that one group experiences SES upward mobility into another racial group presumes that the first group is exclusively working-class and the latter group of middle-class status. The defective induction fallacy creates this distorted view of ethnoracial groups by overgeneralizing the characteristics of an unrepresentative sample to the entire group or nation. Second, using the SES measures to explain assimilation became popular in the 1970s-80s after the ethnics had already become White Americans. As such, the researchers hypothesized the effect of SES measures after-the-fact, but, in the absence of longitudinal data, could not test the measures by controlling for the effect of other confounding variables. This is a post-hoc fallacy, or the after-the-fact extraction and operationalization of untested measures. Third, data show that non-Europeans now nearly resemble White Americans in SES while the prospects of racial recategorization are nowhere in sight. To remedy this mismatch between SES and racial categories, some scholars have added new measures such as the impact of mixed-race children and past racial exclusions on assimilation outcomes while others modify the outcome by arguing that the boundaries of majority group or the mainstream is expanding to include the newcomers. This is a moving the goalpost fallacy which changes the hypothesis’ measures and outcomes when faced with adverse evidence. If SES mobility is not a cause of assimilation, then the question becomes: how did the ethnics, who were present in the U.S. for several decades and as late as the 1970s were predicted to linger on, suddenly became White Americans exactly at the time that the non-Europeans arrived in the U.S. in mass numbers? We offer a boundary model of how the group boundaries changed. Instead of a two-group logic, as per the assimilation hypothesis, we argue that, in the post-1965 era there were three groups, the Anglo-Saxons, the ethnics, and the non-Europeans. Given the dichotomous logic of the organization of social life, a two-group scenario cannot become a one-group arrangement, through SES mobility or other means, while a three-group encounter likely recategorizes into an us-them dichotomy on some levels. Post-1965, the Whiteness boundary expanded to merge the Anglo-Saxons and the ethnics into one group.

Nathan Ly, Cornell University

Legitimacy and Migration: Promise and Challenges

Migration research increasingly engages the concept of “legitimacy.” Although legitimacy has the promising ability to bridge levels of analysis, in the field of migration studies it is often a nebulous concept that lacks specificity in application. Researchers use legitimacy across a wide variety of contexts, hold different understandings and conceptualizations, and lack discussion across approaches. This paper seeks to address these challenges by providing an orienting account of legitimacy to facilitate and better engagement with the term. To do so, it discusses some fundamental questions underlying the field (what is legitimacy, and how are migration and legitimacy related?), underscores key themes, and synthesizes past research to map out promising directions, most prominently working towards a focus on social mechanisms. There are two principal objectives. First, is to provide an overview and orienting account of “legitimacy” in migration. By addressing core questions (i.e., what is legitimacy, and how are migration and legitimacy related?), the work clarifies the concept and identifies promising traits (e.g., ability to bridge levels of analysis) as well as challenges (e.g., lack of precision and specificity) to migration research. Second, is to synthesize the disparate approaches, conceptualizations, and applications of legitimacy in migration to date; identify common ground; and map out promising future directions. Migration research increasingly engages the concept of “legitimacy.” Classical migration theories, focused on the initiation and perpetuation of flows (Massey 1999), have been extended by considering a wide array of factors in an increasingly multidisciplinary space. One avenue in which the concept of legitimacy has gained increased salience focuses on political aspects of migration (e.g., Waldinger and Soehl 2013). The concept holds notable explanatory potential. By spanning levels of analysis, it can be a concept that bridges traditional approaches: tying together the macro structural causes of migration and state politics, the micro decision making, motives, and perspectives of migrants, and the meso analysis of groups and organizations (Bauböck 1998; Bloemraad, Chaudhary, and Gleeson 2022). At the same time, however, legitimacy presents the danger of being a nebulous and all-encompassing concept: something that researchers mobilize to capture an intuitive but vague set of sentiments, perceptions, and ideas, and that can operate anywhere and everywhere. Currently, researchers use legitimacy across a wide variety of contexts, hold different understandings and conceptualizations, and lack discussion across approaches (see e.g., Lenard and Macdonald 2021; Paquet and Larios 2018; Leerkes and Kox 2017). Theoretical synthesis, review, and development of a) past migration research (primarily from sociology and political science) making use of legitimacy as an explanatory factor; and b) the literature on legitimacy proper (mainly from political science and philosophy). Legitimacy can be broadly understood as relating to notions of “rightfulness,” “acceptability,” and/or “justifiability.” It can also be thought of as comprising three parts: beliefs, justification, and consent Beetham (1991; 1993). Major types and conceptualizations of legitimacy are also covered. We can divide the migration literature into three major approaches regarding legitimacy: 1) philosophical; 2) statist and organizational; and 3) individualist. The philosophical approach focuses on how, whether, and under what conditions states have the legitimate right and ability to control migration. The statist approach sees legitimacy as a key driver of state and organizational action, something that states are interested in maintaining and reinforcing. Finally, the individualist approach focuses on how individuals’ (often migrants and border officials) perceptions of legitimacy affect behavior, interaction, and pathways of resistance. Synthesizing this work, we can say that migration researchers largely agree (whether implicitly or explicitly) that legitimacy is: 1) a process; 2) relational; and 3) evaluative. These commonalities, in combination with some of legitimacy’s pitfalls, make a focus on social mechanisms a promising future direction. This would help narrow attention to a particular application, relationship, or area of the social structure, allowing researchers to examine exactly how legitimacy exerts its effects (Hedstrom and Swedberg 1996; Hedstrom and Ylikoski 2010). This can facilitate, for example, comparing whether similar processes operate across contexts, cases, and conditions. Influential and applicable mechanisms include diffusion, institutionalization, endorsement, and authorization. Legitimacy’s major pitfall in migration is its lack of specificity when applied to various research contexts. A focus on relevant social mechanisms allows us to build on previous research and work toward fulfilling legitimacy’s potential as an explanatory factor. This would ultimately contribute to better understanding the political dynamics underlying the migration state, migration controls, and the interplay between migration structures and individuals on the move.

Cynthia Cranford, University of Toronto; Yang-sook Kim, Florida Atlantic Univeristy

Precarious modes of incorporation: Immigrant labour in Toronto

This paper extends the longstanding modes of incorporation tradition in the sociology of migration to consider the dynamic process whereby migrant workers are incorporated into an economy characterized by the growth and spread of precarious employment. To do so it draws on several threads of critical migration scholarship, namely analyses of precarious employment, including studies of how racialization and precarious legal citizenship funnel people into precarious work; of ethnic economies and migrant social networks as mechanisms of exploitation; and of gendered transitions in homes, labour markets and workplaces through migration. The qualitative analysis is based on in-depth migration and work history interviews with immigrant workers in the Peel region of the Greater Toronto Area collected between 2016 and 2019. The Peel Migration and Employment Dataset includes immigrant workers from a variety of countries who were in Canada legally at the time of interview and who arrived through different pathways. In this paper, we focus on those who arrived as adults as primary and secondary applicant economic immigrants, sponsored spouses and refugees, resulting in a sample of 57 interviews. Our methodology traces the mechanisms that shaped immigrants entry into first and subsequent jobs in Canada, and barriers to entering other jobs; we also compare the quality of jobs in Canada and country of origin. We assess precariousness of job(s) along multiple dimensions including employment status (self-employed employer, own-account self-employed, employee), employment form (permanent/temporary, full-time/part-time), occupational status (recognized skill level), wage level and wage satisfaction, benefits, regulatory protection, and control (through a union or professional association). We also analyze dynamics like entry into a declining manufacturing sector, or a downgraded service sector, use of temporary agencies to get jobs, lay-offs, and period effects with sweeping effects on immigrant employment like 9/11. Our analysis focuses on how citizenship differentiation, racialization and gendering intersect to fuel precarious modes of incorporation. Immigrant entry pathway shapes the mode of economic incorporation in ways inflected not just by class origin and extent of racialization in broader society, as recognized in classic mode of incorporation theory, but citizenship, class and race intersect in complex ways with gendered processes. We consider labour market racialization through institutionalized devaluation of credentials from origin countries for professionals, employer discrimination, which often trigger ethnic economy mobility strategies, and employer preferences for immigrants in marginalized niches. We consider problematically racialized interactions with customers, clients or co-workers in the labour process. Racialization generates precarious modes of incorporation, yet feminization exacerbates these processes while male privilege can be a resource for men to mitigate precarious incorporation. Entry into the most precarious jobs is shaped by a household economy defined by women’s greater responsibilities for children and housework. Often, but not always, this results in women’s location in feminized paid work, that is female-dominated care or service work, which is highly associated with multiple dimensions of precariousness, while men are incorporated into masculinized work, whether manual, craft, professional or entrepreneurial. We illustrate precarious modes of incorporation as ideal typical processes, through case studies of individual migrants whose histories crystalize the contours of a given mode; and we offer analytical comparisons to showcase the mechanisms at work to heighten, or lesson, precariousness. We compare racialized, masculinized and racialized feminized versions of incorporation into professional and working-class mainstream economies, and into ethnic economies, extending mode of incorporation scholarship to include gender as an analytical category. We also uncover alternatives to precarious modes of incorporation, and the mechanisms behind them, including pan-ethnic immigrant economies of professionals, and “caring” or “public” modes encouraged by the growth of the public sector and unions’ successful organizing there. Overall, our analysis confirms recent arguments for moving beyond outcome-oriented studies of immigrant incorporation to include non-linear trajectories, such as “reverse incorporation” (Jones) and movement up and down through chutes and ladders (Goldring and Landolt 2013), but we extend this work to include a broader group of migrants who experience a wider array of precarious modes of incorporation fueled by racialization and feminization. Jones, Jennifer. 2019. "From open doors to closed gates: Intragenerational reverse incorporation in new immigrant destinations." International Migration Review 53(4): 1002-1031.

Amin Perez, Université du Québec à Montréal

Immigration, State and Neoliberalism. Practices of irregularization and denationalization in the Caribbean

The history of nation-states includes a series of attempts to deprive migrants of their regular residency status and their children of citizenship rights. In 2013, on the Caribbean Island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic (D.R.), the D.R. Constitutional Court ordered the revocation of citizenship for men, women, and children born to at least one Haitian parent between 1929 and 2007. This unprecedented retroactive repeal, far from being the result of a spontaneous decision, is part of a long history of controlling the legal status of Haitian workers on Dominican sugar cane plantations. In order to account for this making up of “illegality,” this presentation proposes to historicize the modes of control and domination of Haitian migration to the D.R. since the beginning of the twentieth century. The main objective of this presentation is to reconstruct the mechanisms and reasons that led the Dominican state to make origin unequal. Drawing on extensive research into institutional archives and interviews, this paper seeks: First, to present the readjustments of State domination to immigration. The production of illegality became “necessary” because the effects of Haitian immigration, which disrupted the temporary nature of the migration assigned to them, blurred the separation between nationals and illegitimate immigrants, disrupted the control of the workforce, and disturbed the “apolitical” framework set to them. Second, this presentation shows how the processes of deprivation of immigrant’s legal status, and the citizenship of their descendants correspond to the logic of a neoliberal state. In other words, the production and racialization of “illegality” is adjusted to an economic strategy of labor flexibility carried out by mutual agreement between the State and the oligopolies. Deprived of their identity documents, they find themselves dispossessed of all legal protection and subject to the neoliberal market’s arbitrary laws. The study of these practices of irregularization and denationalization would thus offer an original analysis of the roots of a punitive political turn that revoked and denied civil rights in order to re-establish racial hierarchies and create new, precarious social categories.