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The Dreams of Middle Class: Consumption, Life-course and Migration Between Bangladesh and Portugal
Abstract
In the past 20 years, Bangladeshi migration to Southern European countries has gained an increasing importance. Portugal is no exception, and today more than 4,500 Bangladeshis live in the country. One of the more interesting facets of this population, though, is their educational and economic profile. They come from what has been roughly summed up as the ‘new’ Bangladeshi ‘middle classes’. Their families are both rural and urban, have properties, and own businesses. Other members of their domestic units work in NGOs, and private and state owned companies. Simultaneously, they have considerable educational backgrounds, with college and university degrees, and most are fluent in English. But what was their motivation to come to Europe in the first place? And what does this tell us about the young Bangladeshi middle class? For these young Bangladeshi adults, it is through geographic mobility that one can earn enough economic capital to access the ‘modern’ and to progress in the life-course. By remaining in Bangladesh, their access to middle class status and adulthood is not guaranteed and thus migrating to Europe is seen as a possible avenue for achieving such dreams and expectations. The main argument in this paper is that migration—as a resource and a discoursive formation—is itself constitutive of this ‘middle class’.
... The middle-class now constitutes 1 almost one-fourth (22%) of the total population and is estimated to reach 30% by 2030 (Mujeri 2021). Dhaka-centred industrial and economic growth has spawned a rapidly growing middle-class in the city that is transnationally mobile and has access to a cosmopolitan lifestyle (Mapril 2014, Sabur 2014. Many middle-class families are now 'affluent' , own a second home abroad and may even send their children abroad for higher education (Hussein 2018b, Karim 2022, Sabur 2014. ...
... Many middle-class families are now 'affluent' , own a second home abroad and may even send their children abroad for higher education (Hussein 2018b, Karim 2022, Sabur 2014. Transnational mobility has become constitutive of Bangladeshi middle-classness, and is important for increasing one's social capital and networks, as well as for securing upward social and economic mobility and claiming a modern identity (Mapril 2014). This has significantly shaped the aspirations of middle-class youths as many of them now see migrating to a western country as a pathway to live a good life (Mapril 2014). ...
... Transnational mobility has become constitutive of Bangladeshi middle-classness, and is important for increasing one's social capital and networks, as well as for securing upward social and economic mobility and claiming a modern identity (Mapril 2014). This has significantly shaped the aspirations of middle-class youths as many of them now see migrating to a western country as a pathway to live a good life (Mapril 2014). ...
Middle-class youngsters in Dhaka, the quickly developing capital of Bangladesh, are facing contradictory demands. On the one hand they live in a patriarchal society marked by gender inequality expressed in gender segregation, sexual purity, sexual harassment of women and a focus on the male breadwinner. On the other hand, profiting from economic developments and schooling, they have the financial and intellectual resources to explore new spaces and to buy the appliances that can connect them with the views and images of the whole world, including those on gender and sexuality. In this thesis, adolescent sexuality of middle-class girls and boys is explored from their own perspective, and it is studied how these young people navigate in this situation of conflicting demands at home, at school, in Love Lane and on the Internet. The research sheds light on how their concerns diverge from the usual focus on ‘dangers’ in scholarly depictions of sexual and reproductive health issues. It challenges the traditional binary view that conceives of adolescents as either passively reproducing or deliberately transgressing dominant norms. Instead, their negotiations of sexuality and gender are intricately tied to their aspirations for modernity and cosmopolitanism, as well as their desire to attain a respectful middle-class standing within their families, peer groups, and society at large. For practitioners and policymakers in the field of sexual and reproductive rights within the country, adopting an emic perspective can prove valuable in understanding the complexities of adolescent everyday experiences and concerns of sexuality, gender and belonging.
... I refer to the high-skilled as those having completed a tertiary education, including professionals such as tech professionals, managers, accountants, engineers, social workers and teachers, based on the OECD and World Bank definitions (Docquier and Marfouk 2006). The interviewees come from middle-class families and much of the literature discusses their migration as a means to preserve their status against the odds of the political and economic challenges faced in the home country (Limpangong 2013;Mapril 2014;Torresan 2012). This is a particularly widely studied case for migration of the highly qualified, who alsoas the evidence showsopt for accumulating more capital, including an education in the host country, in order to prevent deskilling and to cope with the different challenges posed by career advancement (Al Ariss 2010;Zikic, Bonache and Cerdin 2010). ...
... The 'escape from' motive in this context is also supported by the intention of the highly skilled to preserve their social status through migration, especially after various challenges in home country. Several studies discussed the migration of the highly qualified individuals as a way for them to maintain their middle-class status instead of fighting against the politically and economically driven issues that might have threatened their status in the home country (Limpangong 2013;Mapril 2014;Torresan 2012). Moreover, as Azevedo, Atamanov and Rajabov (2014: 11) point out, 'the growing middle class… is the most unstable group and the people who comprise it have non-negligible chances of moving to the vulnerable or poor groups'. ...
... Indeed, it becomes a secondary motive for migration purposes, where it is also utilised instrumentally as an easier way to arrive in Poland, as well as to access the labour market while outsmarting some institutional mechanismsthus earning becomes more important than learning. This all represents a life strategy to maintain their social class through migration, as is the case for the middle classes (Limpangong 2013;Mapril 2014;Torresan 2012;Waters 2005). ...
... The Bangladeshi migrant husbands were working as nonprofessional immigrants abroad, and their wives remained in rural Bangladesh, either living alone with their children or with their husband's extended families. I focus on these migrant families because remittances play a key role in shaping class mobility in Bangladesh, particularly in the 63 percent of the population who live in rural areas (Mapril 2014;World Bank 2020d). In most of these families, women manage the remittances and run their families in the absence of their migrant husbands, leading to other gender transformations. ...
... I define the middle class in the Weberian sense as a "status group" (Mapril 2014). In contemporary Bangladesh, the middle class can be identified through both material resources and cultural practices. ...
... These families in rural Bengal follow religious practices that deviate from orthodox Islam and are less gender-segregated in private and public spaces (Azim and hasan 2015;Read and Bartkowski 2000;Sadiqi and Ennaji 2006;Sarker 2008;Srinivas 1977). Religious rules such as veiling do not apply or only loosely apply to the women of poor and low-caste Muslim families, and women's mobility outside the home is expected (hussain 2010;Mapril 2014;Rozario 2006). however, Bengali Muslims who were close to the British empire were educated, while also following orthodox Quranic Islam and considered as higher caste in the Muslim community (Sarker 2008). ...
In Bangladesh, due to economic growth and greater access to education, more girls and women are veiling, even as they are also more likely to be in school or employed. Some scholars identify this trend of women appearing both “more modern” and “more religious” as paradoxical. On the basis of 114 in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi migrant workers ( n = 57) in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore, and South Korea and their wives ( n = 57) in rural Bangladesh, I claim that Muslim women in middle-class Bengali families who veil are cultivating symbolic boundaries guided by an accountability structure of middle-class religiosity and gender conservatism. The increasing tendency of middle-class Muslim women to appear both “more modern” and “more religious” can be explained by examining the role that veiling plays in signaling class status through conspicuous consumption, moral superiority, and respectable femininity, differentiating them from lower class women. I conclude that “doing gender” through veiling must be understood as also “doing middle-class difference” in Bengali Muslim families in rural Bangladesh.
... Wie in diesen Studien betont wird, hängen Entscheidungen für Mobilität, Rückkehr oder weitere Mobilitäten mit spezifischen Ereignissen im Lebensverlauf der mobilen Menschen selbst und der Menschen, mit denen sie verbunden sind, zusammen (Adrian Bailey 2009;Kõu, Mulder und Ajay Bailey 2017). Mobilität wird außerdem in Verbindung mit dem Imaginieren und Erschaffen von Zukünften analysiert (Vigh 2009b;Cole 2010;Mapril 2014;Valentin 2014;Boccagni 2017). Die Arbeiten in diesem Forschungsbereich beschäftigen sich unter anderem mit dem Einfluss zeitlicher Begrenztheit auf das Leben mobiler Menschen und deren Umgang mit dem Bewusstsein davon, dass die eigene Mobilität nur ein vorübergehender Zustand ist (Adrian Bailey et al. 2002;Griffiths 2013;Collins und Shubin 2015). ...
... Viele Menschen werden mobil, um einen positiven Einfluss auf ihre Zukunft auszuüben (Vigh 2009b;Cole 2010;Mapril 2014;Valentin 2014). Mobilität wird in diesem Sinne selbst zu einem Mittel der Zukunftsgestaltung: "as means of imagining or creating futures, about hopes and aspiration" (Griffiths, Rogers und Anderson 2013: 28). ...
... Die internationale Mobilität gehört im zunehmenden Maße zu dominanten Vorstellungen des Lebensverlaufs dazu: "Aspirations and imaginaries of transnational mobility (…) increasingly shape ideas of transition to adulthood for both mobile and immobile youth that cut across regional and class divides" (Robertson, Harris und Baldassar 2017: 204;vgl. Baas 2010;Skrbiš, Woodward und Bean 2013;Mapril 2014;Kirk, Bal und Janssen 2017;Kandel und Massey 2002). ...
... With the diversification of Bangladeshi migration, this diasporic public sphere (Appadurai 1996) has expanded to include other locations, actors and dynamics that have so far been left out of the picture. For instance, Bangladeshi migration to Southern Europe—Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece—began in the late 1980s and has grown steadily, as labour migration and family reunification, in the past decades (Knights 1996, Zeitlyn 2006, Mapril 2011, 2014). These new destinations were not transit locations for the more affluent and desirable destinations. ...
... The majority of these Bangladeshis come from intermediate social groups, those that in Bangladesh are commonly classified as the 'new' and 'affluent middle classes', urbanized and with high levels of educational capital (Mapril 2011Mapril , 2014; for a comparative analysis with Spain and Italy see Zeitlyn 2006 and Knights 1996, respectively). For these social strata, bidesh in general and Continental Europe in particular is associated with 'modern' ways of life, access to educational capital and adulthood (Mapril 2014) and a way of escaping an uncertain future (Bal 2012). ...
... The majority of these Bangladeshis come from intermediate social groups, those that in Bangladesh are commonly classified as the 'new' and 'affluent middle classes', urbanized and with high levels of educational capital (Mapril 2011Mapril , 2014; for a comparative analysis with Spain and Italy see Zeitlyn 2006 and Knights 1996, respectively). For these social strata, bidesh in general and Continental Europe in particular is associated with 'modern' ways of life, access to educational capital and adulthood (Mapril 2014) and a way of escaping an uncertain future (Bal 2012). 13 To access bidesh, my interlocutors followed several routes. ...
The literature on what could be called a Bangladeshi transnational public sphere has grown significantly in the last few years and has focused mainly on translocal political activities and ways of belonging for British Bangladeshis and Bangladeshi immigrants in the UK. However, this public sphere includes other locations and actors that have so far been left out of the picture. Based on a situational analysis of the celebrations of Sahid Dibosh (Language Day) in a square in Lisbon in 2011, this article explores the political dimensions of the transnational social fields that exist between Portugal and Bangladesh. The main arguments are firstly that this Bangladeshi transnational public space connects Bangladeshis in the UK, Bangladesh and other locations, such as Portugal, through symbols, long distance nationalism and politics of memory. Secondly, the paper argues that these are interpreted according to the contexts where Bangladeshis live and thus assume new meanings.
... Job opportunities refer to the availability of employment aligned with skills and qualifications, often influencing migration decisions as individuals seek education in regions with better post-graduation prospects (Smith, 2009;Becker, 1993). Alam and Mamun (2022) demonstrated that urban centers with higher employment rates in Bangladesh attract students, while Mapril (2013) highlighted that Bangladeshi students migrate to Europe seeking stable and lucrative careers. This underscores the critical role of employment availability in shaping student migration patterns. ...
... International students often migrate to countries where all these facilities are offered for free or at low cost (Omar and Hasan, 2024). Mapril (2013) also emphasized that cost considerations are critical for students of middle-class families in migration planning. The cost of living affects the ability of students to afford education; hence it plays a crucial role in students' decision to join a university or higher education institution. ...
... This difference may also explain this group's distinctive boundary-making strategies. The achievers bear similarities to the group of middle-class migrants which has been described by authors such as Scott (2006) and Mapril (2014). However, rather than locating their lifecourse goals within the cultural context of their country of origin, as is often implied in the literature on migration as a middle-class strategy (Hussain, 2018;Kawashima, 2018), the achievers in our study considered life goals that embodied a mix of cultural middle-class ideals characteristic of both German society and their origin societies as relevant for their status evaluations. ...
... This is particularly so when these prestige markers are part of culturally sanctioned life-course goals, such as buying a car, building a house or marrying and having children. We find that this group of migrants bears resemblance with research undertaken on the social standing of middle-class migrants in many parts of the western hemisphere (Garapich, 2012;Hussain, 2018;Kawashima, 2018;Mapril, 2014;Scott, 2006), which is, however, still predominantly qualitative in nature and difficult to investigate through quantitative methods because of the multiple ways in which migrants negotiate their social status trajectories in different cultural, social and economic contexts and spaces across nations. ...
How does spatial mobility influence social mobility and vice versa? Often, the ‘objective’ structural positions on the one hand, and the ‘subjective’ definition of social positions on the other hand, are not considered together. Yet this is necessary in order to gauge the consequences of mobility trajectories reaching across borders. This framing editorial asks how we can study the interplay of perceptions of one’s own social position and one’s objective social position to better understand how spatial mobility influences social mobility and vice versa. In short, this means an exploration of the nexus of spatial mobility and social mobility. Exploring that nexus requires attention to objective social positions, subjective social positioning strategies, transnational approaches to the study of social positions and self-positioning, and social boundary theory. Overall, the complexity of the nexus between social and spatial mobilities calls for a multifaceted research approach that covers various levels of analysis. Some of the contributions feature a mixed-methods approach that allows drawing a multifaceted picture of the interrelation between the perceptions of social positions and their structural features.
... This difference may also explain this group's distinctive boundary-making strategies. The achievers bear similarities to the group of middle-class migrants which has been described by authors such as Scott (2006) and Mapril (2014). However, rather than locating their lifecourse goals within the cultural context of their country of origin, as is often implied in the literature on migration as a middle-class strategy (Hussain, 2018;Kawashima, 2018), the achievers in our study considered life goals that embodied a mix of cultural middle-class ideals characteristic of both German society and their origin societies as relevant for their status evaluations. ...
... This is particularly so when these prestige markers are part of culturally sanctioned life-course goals, such as buying a car, building a house or marrying and having children. We find that this group of migrants bears resemblance with research undertaken on the social standing of middle-class migrants in many parts of the western hemisphere (Garapich, 2012;Hussain, 2018;Kawashima, 2018;Mapril, 2014;Scott, 2006), which is, however, still predominantly qualitative in nature and difficult to investigate through quantitative methods because of the multiple ways in which migrants negotiate their social status trajectories in different cultural, social and economic contexts and spaces across nations. ...
This article examines the nexus of spatial and social mobility by focusing on how migrants in Germany use cultural, economic and moral boundaries to position themselves socially in transnational social spaces. It is based on a mixed-methods approach, drawing on qualitative interviews and panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey. By focusing on how people from different origins and classes use different sets of symbolic boundaries to give meaning to their social mobility trajectories, we link subjective positioning strategies with structural features of people’s mobility experience. We find that people use a class-specific boundary pattern, which has strong transnational features, because migrants tend to mix symbolic and material markers of status hierarchies relevant to both their origin and destination countries. We identify three different types of boundary patterns, which exemplify different ways in which objective structure and subjectively experienced inequalities influence migrants’ social positioning strategies in transnational spaces. These different types also exemplify how migrants’ habitus influences their social positioning strategies, depending on their mobility and social trajectory in transnational spaces.
... As in the case of Spain and Italy, the majority are from middle social strata, what in Bangladesh has come to be classified as the new and affluent "middle class", consisting of urbanites with a high level of education. For these social strata, coming to Europe entails a vast range of expectations and aspirations in relation to social mobility, consumption and life-course (Mapril, 2007(Mapril, , 2014b. ...
... In the 1990s, with Southern European countries repositioning themselves in the face of global migration (King et al., 2000), probashis settled in countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Malta and Greece, taking jobs in various sectors of the economy (from construction and agricultural work to varied commercial activities) and reuniting their families. Thus, in the last four decades, migrations to continental Europe related to intermediate social strata in Bangladesh (Mapril, 2014b) have gained momentum. ...
In 1996, Appadurai argued that imagination is an essential element in the creation of cross-border political forms.Electronic media, for example, establishes links across national boundaries, linking those who move and those who stay.In his argument, these diasporic public spheres were examples of post-national political worlds and revealed the erosion of the nation-state in the face of globalisation and modernity. In this paper, I draw inspiration on this concept of diasporicpublic sphere but to show how these imaginaries are intimately tied to forms of group making and emplacement in several contexts. This argument is based on an ethnographic research about the creation of a transnational federation ofBangladeshi associations – the All European Bangladeshi Association (AEBA) – in the past decade, its main objectivesand activities. Through the analysis of an AEBA event that took place in Lisbon, I want to show the productive dialecticbetween diasporic imaginaries, group formation and emplacement processes between Portugal and Bangladesh.
... Van Schendel (2009) saw the complexities of this middle stratum through their role in the reproduction of a Bengali cultural pride, their involvement in politics and economics, and their investment in education. Janeja (2010) identified the role of food and café culture and Mapril (2013) studied international labor migration as constitutive of the new middleclass in Bangladesh. In this paper, I explore the changing structure of urban middle-class Bangladeshi women's household patterns, which have an impact on their negotiations with respectable femininity within the family and on the construction of a new affluent middle-class. ...
... However, I also argue that in this alternative form of negotiated respectability, older accountability structures remain unchanged, as women are still expected to carry out household chores, though they have found ways to navigate through these expectations and give their careers as much importance as their families; I identify this as an alternative form of respectable femininity. 42 To conclude, I have expanded the construction of the new affluent middle class in urban Bangladesh from propertied, highly-educated, English-speaking, internationally-mobile people engaged in the neoliberal market through business, civil society and multinational-company jobs (Mapril 2013) to include dual-income families where professional "new women," through their practices of alternative forms of respectable femininity, are contributing to their family's class status. "New women" have always been conceptualized as change agents. ...
Using qualitative data, this article explains how affluent urban and new middle-class women in Bangladesh reconstruct the notion of respectable femininity within the family. The normative conception of middle-class women’s respectability is measured against women prioritizing family above work by performing their domestic, care, and socializing roles and by maintaining moral propriety. Using Bourdieu’s theory of capitals and Lamont’s formulation of boundary work, I demonstrate that by reinstating class dominance, concealing unrespectable practices, evading their domestic work by co-opting others to do it, and maintaining a public display of socializing duties for the family, women can negotiate the boundaries of respectable femininity in Bangladesh. In so doing, women legitimize alternative forms of respectability in the family, which vary according to their age, profession and household setting. The paper shifts the focus of respectability research in South Asia from a binary construction of respectable and unrespectable practices to how women make and remake their respectable status and class privilege in neoliberal Bangladesh, and reflects on the implications for gender and class relations.
... As a result, practitioners aiming to encourage impetus purchases should present consumers with comprehensive information about the offerings when developing advertising/marketing and promotion campaigns. Secondly, normative influences have also been found to have a significant impact on ICBs, especially in terms of immigrants" attitudes toward brands [89]; attitudes towards alternative consumption [90]; cultural omnivores [12]; education consumption [91]; and house purchase and medical insurance [86]. ...
This article explores the concept of “immigrant consumption behavior (ICB)” in the context of its holistic surroundings. The study investigated the current dynamics and scientometrics of the research field regarding immigrant consumption behaviors. Using an integrative approach employing bibliometric and content analysis, it scrutinized a collection of 224 studies from the Web of Science and Scopus databases to detect the field evolution, disciplinary distribution thematic map, and emerging trends in the ICB literature, as well as to forecast research directions. The results showed that ICB is a multi- and inter-disciplinary research area that experienced three phases of growth between 1989 and 2023: initiation (1989–2006), development (2007–2012), and consolidation (2013–now). The thematic analysis revealed five current trends, i.e., (1) the immigrant consumption behavior domain, (2) the demographic sub-groups of immigrants and related consuming products, (3) country-, region-, and cultural-focused studies, (4) the effects of culture and the acculturation process, and (5) the impact of urbanization. Each theme contains a number of sub-themes. Based on the current thematic evolution and keyword burst analysis, this paper suggests a number of critical research directions, comprising (1) observatory studies including remittances, China, ethnic minorities, lifestyle, inequality, urbanization, and food consumption; (2) context-based studies focused on socioeconomic, cultural, legal, and environmental factors; (3) studies based on compensatory and compromissory consumption behavior; (4) studies focused on sustainable and green consumption behaviors; and (5) studies regarding the behavior of specific demographic co-ethnic communities. The results have great implications for developing interventions and programs that can support immigrant populations in making appropriate consumption patterns and adapting to new cultural environments. The paper pushes forward the ICB investigation from individual empirical studies to synthesis-based research, which (1) provides an ample overview of the ICB literature, (2) identifies research priorities, emerging trends, and gaps, (3) proposes new research avenues for investigation, and (4) outlines expected contributions. The research contributes to a variety of disciplines through the provision of new knowledge, since ICB studies are multidisciplinary in nature. It also has numerous implications for policymakers and practitioners.
... Unlike the second generation of Bangladeshi immigrants in the United Kingdom, those who immigrated to the United States in the 1960s were professionals and skilled migrants (Mapril, 2014). Large numbers of young Bengali students immigrated to the United States for higher education. ...
Owing to substantial remittances, overseas employment has emerged as a cornerstone of economic growth in Bangladesh and other developing nations, proving to be the most secure, expedient, and enduring pathway to economic liberation. The eradication of extreme poverty and the generation of employment opportunities stand as pivotal objectives of international employment. Eradication of extreme poverty and creation of employment opportunities are the main objectives of employment abroad. The main objective of this chapter is to address the government's efforts around the overall migration process in Bangladesh and provide possible outcomes in anticipation of an integrated and holistic approach to create a congenial environment for the safe migration of workers and expatriates. This includes human resource development and planning, and strengthening the migration process and welfare services to ensure economic development and creation of secure jobs abroad. A qualitative approach with a content analysis method is used for the study. Data and information from secondary sources are used to analyse and explore the multidimensional issues on overseas employment in Bangladesh.
... Social construction of Bangladeshi migrant masculinity in Italy (Della Puppa, 2019) and the life-course of Bangladeshi migrants in Portugal (Mapril, 2014) have been studied to understand the circumstances of Bangladeshi diasporas in Southern European countries. Some scholars (Kibria, 2008;Pande, 2017;Rao & Hossain, 2012;Ye, 2014) have considered the process of identity formation explicitly among Bangladeshi male labour migrants. ...
Although there is growing scholarship on marginalized migrants
and racialized masculinities, studies on how migrant masculinities
influence gender norms in the origin countries remain limited.
This article explores the formation of multiple masculinities
among low-paid Bangladeshi labour migrants to the Middle-East
and South-East Asia. I pay particular attention to how migration
influences men’s attitudes towards gender norms in their home
country. This ethnography reveals that Bangladeshi migrant men
advocate for female ‘modesty’ and religious schooling for women
in their native communities. Struggling to achieve hegemonic
masculine power abroad, men uphold rigid masculinities back
home often by relying on a patriarchal interpretation of Islam.
Regardless of the diverse ways in which Islam is practiced in the
host countries, migrant men returning from both the Middle East
and South-East Asia exhibit similarly conservative views on
gender norms. This article highlights the need for further research that examines how formation of multiple masculinities among migrant men may impact gender relations in their native
communities.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
For the last several decades, low-elevation islands have been highlighted as being at the forefront of facing the impact of creeping environmental changes, notably from human-caused climate change. The islands’ low elevation, including in the Indian Ocean, has led to considering migration due to coastal erosion, sea-level rise, acidifying oceans, salinity intrusion, and changes in monsoon patterns and hence rainfall. Maldives is experiencing such creeping environmental changes which are often stated as being key factors affecting Maldivian society, livelihoods, and futures. Evidence from Maldivians, however, is that they perceive future sea-level rise to be a serious challenge at the national level, but rarely accept it as a local difficulty requiring action. Migration from their islands to other countries might be a potential option, especially when combined with other reasons for relocating, but they generally prefer to stay and adjust to all ongoing changes. Within this context, this paper reports field research from August 2013 in the capital Malé and nearby residential islands, using qualitative interviews with fifteen local experts. The results suggest that, besides a set of actually experienced changes, creeping environmental changes are perceived as being one of the important factors affecting Maldivian society and livelihoods. The results and interpretation, including in the context of major changes from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, identify some dissonance in understandings of possible impacts and resultant actions, in terms of recognising what might happen to the country yet not fully considering the action-related implications.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
This study examines the impact of international remittances on children’s education in families that receive remittances in Pakistan. Remittances sent from overseas migrants play many roles. At the household level, workers’ remittances are an important source of income for recipient households and are used for a wide range of purposes, including daily consumption and the education of migrants’ children and/or siblings. South Asia is the largest remittance-receiving region, accounting for 25.1% of the world’s remittances in 2019. This flow of money from overseas has a significant positive impact on recipient households. Using data on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, taken from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) Survey 2014–15, this chapter investigates whether receiving remittances influences the middle and secondary school enrollment of children. The findings indicate a positive impact of international remittances on the school enrollment of male children but a non-significant impact on female children. They also show that the probability of enrollment declines if the household receives internal remittances. The study reveals various influences of internal and international remittances on school enrollment and confirms a considerable disparity in middle and secondary school enrollment among male and female children.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
Migration patterns in South Asia are defined by temporary migration of low-wage labourers within and across national borders. The conditions in which migrants move, live and work expose them to multiple health risks that cause chronic ailments, mental health problems, and increase their susceptibility to airborne and waterborne diseases. Despite this, public policies and mainstream discourses in the region overlook migrants’ health needs or tend to pathologize them as carriers of infectious diseases. In this chapter, we take stock of the regional evidence on migrants’ health, presenting an overview of their health and the underlying social and structural determinants. In reviewing this evidence, we identify the high-risk and disempowering conditions in which they work, the transient nature of their lives and livelihoods, and the intersecting inequalities they face based on distinct aspects of their social location. Together, these conditions, identities and social locations produce distinct yet inter-related and interlocking oppressive states of insecurity, disempowerment, dispossession, exclusion and disposability, locking migrants in a continuing cycle of poverty and ill-health.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
This chapter presents a political-economic analysis of migration from Bangladesh. Based on a review of available literature, it discusses the role of the state in migration out of Bangladesh to various destinations. It locates the origin of this migration in its history of population movement during the colonial era and recognizes the role of the late-colonial state in managing migration. It presents a brief overview of contemporary migration in Bangladesh classifying them in terms of composition of the flows, their stated goals and observed consequence both in the destination and origin countries. Finally, it explores the role of the state in Bangladesh by discussing particular laws and policy instruments with their effectiveness and challenges to make those more efficient in achieving the expected policy outcomes. It concludes with a brief overview of the response of Bangladesh government and also by reiterating the need for more research exploring the role of the state in migration origin and its potential benefits.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
This paper seeks to understand the complicated nature of the relation of ‘nation’ to ‘civilization’ and vice versa and most importantly the implications that these relations have for the evolution of official migration regimes in India since Independence. While civilization continues to be one of the abiding elements of Indian State’s world-view in general and foreign policy in particular, the country is still grappling as it were with the reality of the nation(-state) and its twin imperatives of territorial enclosure and restriction on free movement of people across borders. The paper concentrates on how Indian State’s self-understanding as a ‘civilizational nation’ in the immediate aftermath of Independence gives way to the present stage when the nation is understood as a self-contained civilization itself. It proposes to view the evolution with reference to a few stages and focuses mainly on how the evolving nature of our State ideology might help explain the variation in State’s responses to cross-border migration over the decades.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
The topic “Migration” is considered as a bedrock of South Asian Civilization. It has the largest Diaspora among the World, with India as a lead. Majority of these workers migrate for either low or semi–skilled jobs. This reader is an attempt to cover some of the important themes including Phenomenon of non- traditional migration in South Asia, Temporary labour migration and caste system, Feminization in the South Asian Migration, Climate and environmental change induced migration that concerns the Migration in South Asia. This reader has also pointed out the impact of migration governance for safe, legal and orderly migration for the future migration in South Asia.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
Traditional migration drivers are being supplanted in certain situations by non-traditional drivers in South Asian (SA) countries. Traditional factors such as economic, climatic, and political concerns appear to be driving a particular group of people to leave. In recent years, however, some fresh factors have emerged in South Asia that have led to the emergence of a new type of migration, namely wealthy South Asians leaving their countries to settle elsewhere in order to secure their accumulated wealth in ways they do not want to disclose. This results in a reverse remittance flow. This study aims to contribute to the discourse on this new category of migrants, which is distinct from traditional migration flows that include economic and forced migration.
... Finally, a final type of migration from Bangladesh is primarily towards Southern European countries. Originating in the wake of the first Gulf War, and increasing significantly in the last few decades to countries such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, this migration includes young, middleclass, urbanized and educated (Knights, 1996;Zeitlyn, 2006;Mapril, 2007;Mapril, 2014;Morad & Puppa, 2019). In recent years, this migration flow came to world news media as a few hundreds of Bangladeshis migrated to European countries through clandestine processes. ...
In migration studies, male migrants and their stay-behind families, including women and children have been an area of sustained academic investigation in the Global South. The unaccompanied children of female migrants remain, however, an area of peripheral interest in the existing literature. Millions of South Asian female migrants work in two major destination regions: the GCC countries and Southeast Asia. They are often married with children and their traditional role as mothers is transferred to and executed by other members of the extended family, giving rise to an exciting area of migration research in the global South in general and in South Asia in particular. This paper attempts to address this relatively under-studied field of South-South migration by investigating the stay-behind families of female migrants in Bangladesh with a focus on their unaccompanied children.
... Unlike the typical migration movement, going from country 'A' to country 'B', NTCNs' migration involves three stages: home country > country of opportunity > destination country (Ahrens, 2013;Ahrens et al., 2016;Della Puppa & King, 2018;Castro-Martín and Cortina, 2015;Mapril, 2014;Lourenco 2013). Therefore, it becomes apparent that the initial migration was intended to be transitory and was limited to facilitating migrants' subsequent migration to their destination (Paul, 2011). ...
This paper explores the individual and group motivations that have encouraged the onward migration of Italian-Pakistanis and Italian-Bangladeshis to the North of England after obtaining Italian citizenship because the reasons for moving again to the current destination are under-researched. It appears that there has been a design-driven form of intentionality in their complex migrations attributable to the influence of European and Italian policies. Gender and ethnic differences among these groups are identified, as well as the level of their integration in the new host country. A qualitative research approach is adopted utilizing six focus group discussions with 48 participants, and the data collected were subjected to thematic analysis. The findings revealed that aspects of education and qualifications, religion, social identity, and culture along with welfare, security, and employment were the motivations for the participants’ onward migration.
... Furthermore, the discussion about class and mobility also relates to studies that address how migration policies are influenced by the educational and professional profile of prospective migrants (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015). How migration is perceived, as a means to realize some goals by groups belonging to a certain class of the society is another theme addressed within the overarching topic of the relationship between class and migration (Mapril, 2014). ...
Discussions about female labor migrants from the Horn of Africa are often
loaded with accounts describing them as a homogenized group of destitute
people on the move. Such trends of homogenization often hide the diverse social
classes within these groups and the differential access co-nationals have across
such social classes. Moreover, such discourses conceal the differences in
migrants’ migration trajectories and related variances in their overall
integration processes. This paper accentuates the heterogeneity of the social
classes of Ethiopian female migrants and argues that the term Ethiopian female
migrant is a parasol that often obscures the diverse and highly stratified migrant
group. By going beyond this dominant trend of homogenization, this study
addresses how differential access to economic resources, different social
characteristics of migrants, and migrants’ settlement patterns impact migrants’
networks and their status within the larger Ethiopian female migrant group.
... See, for instance,Vertovec and Cohen (1999);Vertovec (2010). See the work done on Bangladeshis in Europe and the diaspora byKnight (1996);Mapril (2014); andClaire, Chatterji, and Jalais (2015). 2 Writers in this vein includeHall (1990);Appadurai (1996);Hannerz (1996);; andBygnes and Erdal (2017). 3 For details of UK Bangladeshis, seeGardner (1995). ...
... Veja-se o caso das populações oriundas do Bangladesh. Uma parte significativa da população do Bangladesh que está hoje em Portugal é oriunda de uma classe média com capitais educacionais e económicos no país de origem (Mapril 2014b). As suas trajectórias migratórias, que nem sempre terminam em Portugal,9 implicaram a sua fixação numa zona central, mas economicamente diminuída da cidade de Lisboa. ...
Resumo
A história do Islão e dos muçulmanos no Portugal contemporâneo está indelevelmente marcada pelas dinâmicas coloniais, mas também por processos pós-coloniais. As próprias configurações institucionais do “Islão público” na sociedade portuguesa revelam esta importância e, simultaneamente, criaram as condições para uma hierarquização de determinadas vozes e projectos entre os muçulmanos.
Partindo de três pesquisas sustentadas em trabalho de campo etnográfico sobre a Associação Islâmica e Cultural da Margem Sul, que representa a congregação afecta a uma mesquita de inspiração sufi no concelho de Almada, a Noor Fatima, um projecto caritativo encabeçado por uma mulher muçulmana de origem indo-moçambicana, e o Centro Islâmico do Bangladesh ( CIB ), envolvido no projecto da construção da nova praça da Mouraria, o objectivo deste artigo é demonstrar, por um lado, que esta hierarquia se sustenta em discursos dominantes sobre o Islão, que sublinham uma clivagem entre “muçulmanos portugueses” e “outros muçulmanos”, e, por outro lado, que existem margens que contestam esses discursos, revelando interessantes (des)articulações entre mobilidades, dinâmicas coloniais e pós-imperiais, políticas de reconhecimento e a produção de alteridades.
... Despite the crucial role and importance of Southern Europe for Bangladeshis, and a growing body of literature on Bangladeshi migrants in countries such as Portugal (Mapril 2010;2014a;2014b;, Spain (Zeitlyn, 2006;Martín-Saiz 2017), Italy (Della Puppa 2014; King and Della Puppa 2020;Knights 1996;Knights and King 1998;Mantovan 2007;Morad and Della Puppa 2019;Priori 2010;2012a;2012b;Quattrocchi et al. 2003), or Greece (Fouskas 2012;Kassimeris and Samouris 2012), there is still no comparative approach looking at the impact of the different national and city contexts on our interlocutors' experiences, nor at the connections (economic, political, religious, ritual, among others) which they have created between different European countries in the past decades. ...
This special issue stems from a panel we organised at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in 2018, under the title ‘Banglascapes in Southern Europe: comparative perspectives’. Not all the panel participants from that conference feature in this special issue, and not all the authors included here were present at the conference. Nevertheless, the panel represents a first important moment in which we began to collect case-studies and insights on a relatively new aspect of the so-called Bengali, or Bangladeshi, ‘diaspora’.
... Furthermore, the discussion about class and mobility also relates to studies that address how migration policies are influenced by the educational and professional profile of prospective migrants (Kofman and Raghuram, 2015). How migration is perceived, as a means to realize some goals by groups belonging to a certain class of the society is another theme addressed within the overarching topic of the relationship between class and migration (Mapril, 2014). ...
The relationship between migration and health is complex, and its impact varies
considerably among individuals, across migrant groups, and from country to
country. Although African immigration to the United States (U.S.) and South
Africa has increased rapidly over the past two decades, little is known about the
health experiences of this growing population even though conditions
surrounding the migration process have been found to increase vulnerability to
ill health. The aim of this study is to examine and compare the perceptions of
African refugees and immigrants to South Africa and the U.S. on informational
support and its impact on health status. Data was collected from purposively
selected 62 African immigrants to the United States and 66 African immigrants
to South Africa using the PROMIS Global Health v1.2 and the PROMIS Item Bank
v2.0 (informational support) instruments which assess an individual’s general
physical, mental and social health.
... In this connection, Palit and Chaurey (2011) document the successful market-based approach in fostering off-grid electrical power undertaken by the private sector and microfinance institutions. In summary, the migration-induced reduction in tangible deprivations of living standards may lend support to the 'increasing aspiration in rural Bangladesh to progress and access more comfortable lifestyles' (Mapril 2014). We find no evidence of migration being associated with education or health-related indicators when additional characteristics are included. ...
The discourse on migration and poverty has largely shown that international labour migration reduces monetary poverty for the migrant-sending households. With the international consensus that poverty is multidimensional and goes beyond income alone, many studies evaluate the nexus between migration and non-monetary aspects of life, such as education and health. These show mixed evidence. Far fewer studies assess whether suffering from simultaneous deprivations in multiple indicators of well-being is affected by migration-which would be a full multidimensional poverty analysis at the household level. To assess the value-added of the latter, we empirically compare three approaches to measure poverty and the effect of migration on the three. These are (1) a solely monetary approach, (2) a dashboard approach that considers several non-monetary well-being deprivations, and (3) a counting approach that evaluates whether the multiple deprivations manifest themselves jointly. Using household panel data for rural Bangladesh, we assess how the association between international labour migration and poverty among the stay-behind household members changes in light of the three approaches. The endogen-ous nature of migration in this connection is explicitly addressed by applying a Hausman-Taylor estimation procedure. We corroborate that migration is related to a lower likelihood of being monetary poor, but we do not find that it is associated with an increased likelihood of exiting multidimensional poverty altogether. However, we do find that it is associated with a lower likelihood of facing simultaneous deprivations in terms of sanitation, electricity, and asset-ownership among those who live in multidimensional poverty.
... Studies (Batnizky et al., 2008;Kelly, 2012;McGregor, 2008;Mapril, 2014;Pratt, 1999;Rutten and Verstappen, 2014) have shown that while labour migration may help migrants and their families to maintain existing social status or to achieve upward economic mobility in their home countries, ironically it is often accompanied by downward class mobility in the country of destination. Considering that migration is generally understood as people's movement to search for better opportunities, the phenomenon of contradictory social mobilities in migration raises questions: how do migrants anticipating a better life perceive and experience such downward social mobility? ...
This article explores the ways in which Nepali migrants perceive, experience and rework their downward class mobilities within the processes of labour migration to South Korea (hereafter Korea). It focuses on the temporal dimension of the migration process in relation to the Korean labour migration regime in terms of three aspects: the temporariness of sojourn, temporal disjunctures and adaptations in workplaces, and temporal resynchronisation in transnational spaces. First, the article argues that the temporariness of their sojourn under the Employment Permit System (EPS) is perceived by migrants as a ‘liminal time’ or a ‘time-out’ from the life course, serving to make the precariousness of life and work bearable. Second, illustrating the subjective experiences of Nepali migrants as underclass workers in unfamiliar workplaces, the article argues that they experience their working-class positions through temporal disjunctures between time in Nepal and Korea, and heteronomous time as discipline under the EPS. Lastly, it is shown that their downward class identities are reworked by dividing working time and social time, with a further temporal resynchronisation between migrants and their homeland. The conceptual and empirical insights offered by this study aim to contribute to the discussions of temporalities of migration and class analysis of people on the move.
... Unlike its parallel in India, the 'new' middle class of Bangladesh receives little attention in significant political, social, cultural, and economic research on the country. Yet, there is a booming middle-class community in Bangladesh who are engaged in neoliberal market through employment and consumerism, economically affluent, invested in English education, and who exercise transnational mobility (Van Schendel 2009;Sabur 2010;Janeja 2010;Mapril 2013). Gender roles within this class are also changing as more women enter public arenas through education and paid employment, affecting women's status and opportunities as well as the domestic division of labour. ...
This chapter highlights the emergence of the discourse on ‘new girlhood’ among Muslim families from lower, middle, and upper classes in Assam’s Nagaon district. I focus on change and continuity of ideals around normative femininity in the girls’ and parents’ narratives around aspirations. Muslim parents in my study enact as a merger of economic and cultural ideologies by fusing together career and marital aspirations into a single concept of ‘appropriate aspirations’. Muslim girls on the other hand exhibit a range of attitudes in negotiating appropriate aspirations, often narrating their experiences using a storyline of the ‘aspirational victimhood’ that voices their agency and their victimhood at the same time. I argue such reflexive capacities of the Muslim girls enable them to assume ‘new girlhood’ in Assam.
... In this regard, while the geographical mobility of middle classes is not new (Savage, 1988), international mobility, also favoured by processes of European integration (Favell & Recchi, 2011;Verwiebe, 2008), has become an increasingly 'normal' middleclass activity (Mapril, 2014;Weiss, 2005; Weiss & Mensah 2011) as more job opportunities have become available in transnational arenas and global cities. Hence mobility and cosmopolitanism (Weenink, 2008) are increasingly significant markers in middle-class processes of social distinction (Dubucs, Pfirsch, Recchi, & Schmoll, 2017;Scott, 2006). ...
A growing body of scholarship has shown how, in order to reproduce themselves, households increasingly ‘stretch’ in space, accessing resources drawn from multiple local contexts. The paper explores how young Italian middle-class families in London undertake transnational mobility projects. The data show, on the one hand, that intra-EU migration is a viable solution to overcome a middle-class reproduction crisis, and on the other hand, how a middle-class position is pursued and achieved inter-generationally through social reproductive practices which imply the transnational negotiation and validation of different forms of capital.
In recent years, awareness of the socio-economic costs of immigrants’ marginalisation and exclusion has led Swiss policymakers to promote integration. However, the biographical interviews with migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (MRAs) who arrived in Switzerland between 2014 and 2019 tell a different story. MRAs consider themselves not well integrated, while the labour market outcomes of certain migrant groups are diverging. Particularly migrant women run the risk of being left behind. This chapter sheds light on these aspects. It also argues that policymaking can only be effective if it considers all structural and agential factors in their interdependence. The chapter illuminates a discrepancy between, on one hand, structural changes that do not always shape aspirations of Swiss policy actors for successful and promising policy implementation and, on the other, the realities of the migrants’ lives. Their experiences of deskilling and a consequent feeling of not being welcome lead to the development of negative epiphanic views on the inability to access gainful employment. The illuminated synergistic relationship between structural and agential factors are very instructive for policymaking: leaving agential considerations outside the scope of structural reforms can expose migrants to further risks and vulnerabilities, and exacerbate inequalities within host societies.
The chapter focuses on micro perspectives expressed in individual trajectories of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (MRAs) in the Czech Republic. Drawing on 14 in-depth biographic interviews with MRAs, this chapter analyses biographies of labour market integration. Particular attention is given to critical moments or those critical life junctures we name turning points that generate epiphanic, life-changing experiences. This approach is inspired by Denzin’s conceptualisation of epiphanies. The chapter is structured as follows. We first provide background information on barriers to labour market integration at macro-, meso-, and micro- levels. Next, the chapter introduces the methodological approach and elaborates on the process of recruitment and interviewing. We then discuss the various contexts in which turning points and epiphanic experiences were described by the interviewed migrants. More specifically, we explore the critical junctures that led our participants to the decision of migrating. Next, we focus on epiphanies related to positioning in terms of social status and professional aspirations and, finally, we look at the transformative impacts of social interactions structured by discrimination.
Migrants’ agency is a promising analytical tool and approach in migration and refugee studies as it shifts the focus of analysis (and attention) from the weaknesses or ‘faults’ of the migration experience to the opportunities and capacities it can generate for migrants and the community where they settle. Still, political, institutional, cultural, and economic contexts do keep exerting influence on migrants’ capacities to operate agency. This is particularly the case for migrants seeking humanitarian protection as they experience not only personal challenges and vulnerabilities, but also constraining legal and administrative barriers, preventing them, for example, to have their capacities duly recognised and valued. This chapter discusses how migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers’ agency helps them cope with adverse circumstances such as those promoted by obstructive policies and narratives in the United Kingdom. Eleven biographical interviews explore the life paths of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. The UK context presents a very challenging environment for their integration as legislation so far has been mainly based on increasing border control and decreasing entitlements, with scant attention to strategies of integration and inclusion. This chapter discusses how the political-institutional context influences the unfolding of such agency and how, in turn, agency provokes responses and adaptations from those contexts.
Immigrants and refugees have contributed significant growth in the Canadian economy over the last three decades. Despite clear advantages of a smooth transition into the labour force, many newcomers experience multiple barriers impeding their pathways to sustainable livelihoods. Further, significant increases in refugee resettlement and asylum claims in Canada since 2015 resulted in a growing number of refugee newcomers entering the labour market, often facing additional challenges of precarious legal status while seeking employment. To interrogate the settlement landscape, this chapter examines newcomers’ employment-related needs, experiences, and aspirations through a case study of migrants and refugees in Greater Toronto. Using narrative-biographic interviews, the chapter presents an ethnographic approach to examine how individual migrants navigate labour market policies and settlement dynamics during their initial years. A biographical approach allowed us to focus on the interplay of migrant agency, precarity, and adaption to both long-standing labour market dynamics as well as new barriers and enablers brought on by the shifting sands of Canada’s pandemic affected economy. The chapter highlights how emotions, decisions, and actions are inter-related and coalesce with broader structural conditions within a network of actors – individuals, networks, and institutions – to shape the labour market experiences of recently arrived immigrants and refugees.
In Finland, integration is discussed in terms of labour market success. Finding work tends to occur in the ‘secondary’ labour market as migrants have difficulty accessing the more secure jobs of the ‘primary’ labour market. This chapter draws on 11 qualitative biographical narratives of migrants and refugees, looking for turning points and epiphanies about their job-seeking experiences. We classify these as agentic acts of resilience, reworking, and resistance, borrowing from Cindi Katz’s framework. Interviewees exhibited resilience in revising downward their expectations of what sort of job they would accept and how their career would develop. ‘Reworking’ was also often attempted, usually at a later stage and with limited success, through reskilling, or repackaging of existing skills to appear more desirable to employers. Resistance was rare and limited to exit from the Finnish labour market, rather than voice within it. We found that despite significant investment in their own human capital, macro structures such as segmented labour markets and unequal power relations limited the scope for their individual acts of resilience and reworking. Thus, while agency is useful for understanding migrant actions, overemphasising it obscures the role of labour market structures and employer recruitment practices – important bottlenecks to migrants moving from the secondary to primary labour market.
Migrants and asylum seekers have faced important hurdles in integrating in the Italian labour market. The segmented and ethnicised nature of this coupled with their often-uncertain residence status significantly contribute to such difficulties. Building on previous studies that looked at the role of policies and structural factors in migrants’ labour market integration, this chapter adopts a biographical perspective to investigate how pre-migration experiences as well as turning points after arriving in Italy have shaped migrants’ and asylum seekers’ labour market integration trajectories. Using biographical narratives, we look at specific events and actors (people or organisations) that marked turning points and provoked epiphanies – whether negative or positive – for the migrant. Our findings highlight the fragmentation of the Italian labour market and the many hurdles that migrants experience. They also highlight how pre-departure experiences and networks at destination contribute to building migrants’ resilience and help them turn their migration experience into a positive one.
This chapter summarizes the interaction between integration and agency by comparing migrants’ encounters with labour markets through which their agency challenges existing discourses. The chapter investigates the complex relationship between policy discourse, gender, and class in the production of migrant agency across different countries. The gendered experiences of low labour in Denmark centre around the crucial moments of retraining for migrant women, through which they reconsider their adjustment to the labour market as ‘devoid integration’. The EU discourses of integration are further disrupted by humanitarian migrants in Scotland and Switzerland, whose encounters with the non-recognition of qualifications and inadequate social welfare contradict the ‘migrant-welcoming’ national facades. The Canadian grand discourse of ‘smooth transition’ is opposed by the analysis of aspirations that clash with outcomes such as the labour market entrance. In this connection, we can see the Italian ‘borderline’ space of the informal market, within which many legal economic migrants navigate a complex web of existing laws and informal opportunities. The comparison is amplified by a visually ‘successful’ portrait of entrepreneurial integration, which is nevertheless perceived by skilled migrants in Finland as a less desirable option. The quality of migrants’ agency thus becomes contested if they seek to progress in the labour market. An essential element in this contestation is the transnational migrants’ disagreement with official discourses of ethnic solidarity and national citizenship in the Czech Republic. The comparative analysis of these lived experiences leads toward a new understanding of ‘agency’ and ‘resilience’ in labour market integration.
This chapter presents the analytical framework of this volume, arguing that an interpretive-biographical methodology for analysing labour market integration can highlight the many ways in which migrants exercise agency both materially in shaping their lives but also cognitively and emotionally in making sense of what is happening to them, taking decisions and following specific courses of action. The chapter introduces the notion of turning points and epiphanies as a new approach to labour market integration that goes beyond ticking boxes of who has a job. It also looks into the employment trajectories of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. After elaborating on the interpretive biographical methodology and its tools, this chapter briefly outlines the contents of this volume.
This chapter explores the role of gender in migrants’ efforts at integrating into the labour market in Denmark. Numerous academic works argue that the experience of integration (and migration) is qualitatively different for men and women. They conclude that gender plays a critical role in the pre-migration stage, in how men and women transition across state boundaries and, most significantly, in determining the way integration bureaucracies are experienced in host societies. Such studies demonstrate that the experience of integration is gendered and often to the detriment of women. But can the experience of women also be generalisable and reveal the foundational nature and logics of a host country’s integration regime? To answer this question, the chapter empirically focuses on the biographical accounts of female migrants in Denmark and their experiences of labour market integration (LMI). Since most holders of family reunification visas in Denmark are women, their experiences confirm the extant literature’s claim that migration is a gendered process. In addition, we argue that the nature of their experiences of LMI in Denmark also reflects the foundational character of the Danish integration regime. The biographical accounts of our female narrators are analysed through the scope of turning points – as path-altering events – in their integration narratives and associated epiphanies, that is, revelations or apprehensions triggered by turning points.
Based on a longitudinal ethnography with Bangladeshis in Lisbon and in London, this article unravels the ways my interlocutors perceive their onward migration projects to the UK. Their decision to migrate once again was intimately connected with the education of their children. This would not only make them fluent in English language, a global language of power and prestige according to many but would give them access to better opportunities in the labour market. Simultaneously, these new mobilities had a tremendous emotional/affective price and were seen by the parents as a sacrifice and a new beginning. This article argues that these new beginnings are not about the accumulation of diverse forms of capital per se but rather the creation of larger horizon of expectations based on the redistribution logic of relatedness, kinship and domestic units; in sum, onward migration was a future‐making strategy in contexts of economic uncertainty.
Taking inspiration from renewed scholarly interest in the role of time in migration, we compare the temporalities of work and social life among male Bangladeshi-origin migrants in northeast Italy and London. We draw conceptually on time geography and rhythmanalysis, and empirically on interviews with 40 Bangladeshi migrant men, to demonstrate the stark contrasts in migrants’ daily lives in the two settings and the impacts of moving from northeast Italy to London. More broadly, this article contributes to debates on the temporalities and rhythms of migrants’ everyday lives via comparative analysis. While in both settings capitalism inexorably shaped class dynamics through its command over flexible labor, there were also marked differences in the routinization of migrants’ work and social and family life. In northeast Italy’s small industrial towns, stable shift-based working rhythms created regular free time for family and associative life. In London, where participants’ employment was limited to low-skill jobs with unsocial hours, family and social life was disrupted, with consequential effects on social integration. The findings presented here highlight the under-appreciated role of onward migration in global migration dynamics and underscore the importance of time, in particular the way in which the diverse temporalities of migrants’ daily lives are shaped by the mode of regulation of the labor market and the spatial setting where migrants’ working and social lives unfold.
Este texto reflexiona sobre la construcción de un objeto de estudio en entornos mediados por la migración, donde las procedencias o la etnicidad suelen adquirir una importancia significativa. A partir del caso etnográfico de Migrapiés, un grupo de defensa de derechos de la población migrante, la propuesta que se hace aquí pasa por desplazar el estudio de grupos por el de procesos de colectividad. Esta forma de construir el objeto de estudio puede servir para descentrar el origen como punto de partida de la investigación, evitando reificar la procedencia como elemento principal del análisis.
This chapter places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood among affluent middle-class women of Dhaka, Bangladesh. I study women’s hybrid sartorial practices to investigate how new women merge the boundaries of respectable middle-class Bengali cultural attire of sari and salwar kameez with working-class Islamic religious attire of hijab and upper-class and Western women’s sexualised attires, a hybrid aesthetic practice which I call smart dressing. New women’s practices of smart dressing distinguish them as a symbolic group challenging the boundaries of tradition and modernity, local and global, and provide an image of womanhood that is contrary to the poor, uneducated, traditional, bound by religion, sexually constrained, and victimised ‘third-world woman’.
This chapter explores the relation between mobility and the politics of memory. Focusing on the debates among Bangladeshis in Lisbon, Portugal about the role played by a political party and its main leaders during the Bangladeshi liberation war in 1971, the aim is to reveal how the struggles for a hegemonic narrative of the past are fought out in a transnational context. These heated debates in Lisbon began in 2003, but reached a recent climax influenced by the International Crimes Tribunal in 2009 and the Shabhag protests in Bangladesh. ‘A Past That Hurts’ concludes that due to mobility, in this case migration, the convergence of past and present in everyday and political life is enhanced.
This article surveys contemporary theories of international migration in order to illuminate their leading propositions, assumptions, and hypotheses. It hopes to pave the way for a systematic empirical evaluation of their guiding tenets. The authors divide the theories conceptually into those advanced to explain the initiation of international migration and those put forth to account for the persistence of migration across space and time. Because they are specified at such different levels of analysis, the theories are not inherently logically inconsistent. The task of selecting between theories and propositions thus becomes an empirical exercise, one that must occur before a truly integrated theoretical framework can be fully realized. -Authors
My analysis of the restructuring of the labor market in Mumbai's private sector has pointed to a significant contradiction in the position of the "new middle class" in liberalizing India. On the one hand, the actual labor market experiences of the "new" upwardly mobile urban middle classes provide important parallels to processes of economic restructuring that have characterized industrial labor. Processes of retrenchment, increased job insecurity and a structural shift to subcontracted work represent striking points of convergence between the industrial working class and middle class experiences. Such points of convergence disrupt the idealized images of affluent consumers that are characteristic of public representations of the new Indian middle class. On the other the hand, individual strategies and responses of white collar workers demonstrate the effectiveness of these images as individual dissatisfaction has not led to political opposition to India's economic reform policies. Individuals whom I interviewed consistently pointed to the importance of new choices available to consumers as a sign of the benefits of reform. The contradictions that arise out of these empirical patterns point to the political question of how the failure to achieve the idealized image of the Indian middle class dream will shape the political behavior of the liberalizing middle class. Analyses of the national rise of the BJP and of the Shiv Sena's local historical activities in Maharashtra have already demonstrated the ways in which middle class frustrations have played an important factor in the rise of the Hindutva movement. 28 An understanding of the role of the middle class requires analyses which go beyond self-evident assertions of consumerism, explore the underlying structural effects, and begin to interrupt the discursive invention of the "new" Indian middle class in the context of India's new economic policies of liberalization.
In the wake of Partition—the break-up of British India in 1947—millions of people moved across the new borders between Pakistan and India. Although much has been written about these ‘Partition refugees,’ a comprehensive picture remains elusive. This paper advocates a rethinking of the study of cross-border migration in South Asia. It argues especially for looking at categories of cross-border migrants that have so far been ignored, and for employing a more comparative approach. In the first section, we look at conventions that have shaped the literature on Partition refugees. The second section explores some patterns of post-Partition migration to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the third uses oral evidence from cross-border migrants to present a number of case studies. The concluding section underlines that these cases demonstrate the need for re-examining historiographical conventions regarding Partition migration; it also makes a plea for linking South Asia's partition to broader debates about partition as a political ‘solution’ to ethnic strife.
The partition of India is customarily described in surgical metaphors, as an operation, an amputation, a vivisection or a dismemberment. By extension, the new borders created in 1947 are often thought of as incision scars.
Since 1991, when the policy of economic liberalisation began in earnest, the size and prosperity of India's middle class have grown considerably. Yet sound sociological and ethnographic information about its social structure and cultural values is still sparse, and as André Béteille comments: ‘Everything or nearly everything that is written about the Indian middle class is written by middle-class Indians…[who] tend to oscillate between self-recrimination and self-congratulation’. The former is exemplified by Pavan Varma's The Great Indian Middle Class (1998), which excoriates this class for its selfish materialism and the ‘retreat from idealism’ that was manifest in the smaller, ‘traditional middle class’ of the earlier, post-independence period. A good example of the opposite tendency is Gurcharan Das's India Unbound (2002), which celebrates ‘the rise of a confident new middle class’Das's diagnosis of what has changed is actually very similar to Varma's, but he insists that the new middle class is no ‘greedier’ than the old one, and the ‘chief difference is that there is less hypocrisy and more self-confidence’
The ‘new’ South Asians: the political economy of migration between Bangladesh and Portugal
- Mapril
- Meyer