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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
ISSN: 1369-183X (Print) 1469-9451 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjms20
Migrant cities: place, power, and voice in the era of
super diversity
Walter J. Nicholls & Justus Uitermark
To cite this article: Walter J. Nicholls & Justus Uitermark (2016): Migrant cities: place,
power, and voice in the era of super diversity, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, DOI:
10.1080/1369183X.2015.1126088
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1126088
Published online: 01 Feb 2016.
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Migrant cities: place, power, and voice in the era of super
diversity
Walter J. Nicholls
a
and Justus Uitermark
b
a
Department of Planning, Policy, and Design, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA;
b
Department of
Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Immigration scholars have long considered cities to be important
environments that mediate how immigrants are incorporated into
receiving countries. While most scholars recognise that cities have
some importance, they continue to prioritise national-level
institutions, organisations, networks, and cultural dynamics. This
paper introduces the special issue on ’Migrant Cities’. The special
issue asserts that cities are not simply backdrops where national-
level processes and mechanisms unfold. The contributing scholars
reveal how cities are distinctive environments with unique
constraints and opportunities. Following a basic introduction, the
paper examines how to apply these general assumptions about
cities to understanding the political formation of immigrants. The
paper does this by urbanising Nancy Fraser’s concept of
’counterpublic’. We suggest that cities possess certain qualities
that enable the formation of immigrant counterpublics, which in
turn become critical spaces of politicisation.
KEYWORDS
Immigration; cities;
counterpublic; political
formation
Introduction to special issue
In the past few decades, many countries have witnessed a substantial increase in immigra-
tion (Castles and Miller 2009). Migration flows have been precipitated by a variety of
causes. On the one hand, uneven economic development, ecological change, conflict,
and political instability, combined with the intensity and reach of new communication
media and transport facilities, have generated supply-driven migration flows. On the
other hand, demographic and economic developments all over the globe have given rise
to new demand-driven flows towards a variety of countries. The mobility of people is cer-
tainly not confined to the global North. Some of the world’s largest migration flows have
been in the global South. Although migration occurs across a wide range of geographical
terrains, cities are unique spaces that shape migration flows across and within countries
(Holston and Appadurai 1999; Portes 2000; Waldinger and Lee 2001; Glick Schiller and
Caglar 2009; De Graauw, Gleeson, and Bloemraad 2013; Foner et al. 2013). Some cities
generate powerful pulls on immigrants because of their economic opportunities and
social support systems. Just as important the global functions and communication
© 2016 Taylor & Francis
CONTACT Walter J. Nicholls wnicholl@uci.edu
JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1126088
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infrastructures of particularly large gateway cities allow migrant populations to maintain
connections to their sending cities, enabling the constant flow of information, resources,
and people between distant places (Sassen 1996).
The central position of some cities within global migration networks has contributed to
radically altering the composition and functions of these cities within a relatively short
period of time. Ongoing migration has stimulated population growth in these cities and
has accelerated the rates of diversity within them. This has produced environments
characterised by what Steven Vertovec has called ‘super-diversity’(2007). Such diversity
reflects patterns of radical heterogeneity concerning national origin, race and ethnicity,
sexualities, migration status, and occupations. The changes wrought forth by international
migration have therefore introduced powerful new dynamics that affect both flows of
people and urban environments.
This special issue addresses the specifically urban character of large-scale migration.
The contributors to this special issue believe that the city is a distinctive environment
that strongly affects the ways in which immigrants settle, live, and contribute to receiving
countries. Building upon contributions that view the city as a generative space instead of a
mere canvas, the special issue focuses on the specifically ‘urban’character of immigration
by examining how cities exert a distinctive pull on immigrants, how immigrants reshape
cities, and how claims and subjectivities are generated in the interplay between migrants
and other players in the urban arena, including authorities. While asserting that cities are a
major factor in shaping the trajectories and effects of immigration, the special issue also
maintains that the complex character of immigration resuscitates a central problematic
of urban sociology: Does the advanced diversity of cities accelerate fragmentation, conflict,
inequality, and anomie? Or, does diversity in dense places facilitate cultural and economic
exchange, enhancing tolerance, respect, and prosperity? Rather than suggest that one
outcome necessarily prevails over the other, the contributors of this special issue
examine how urban environments mediate immigration processes and shape immigration
experiences.
There is a large body of research on cities and on migration and our aim is to bring
different strands of the literature. To do this, we pose a series of general, conceptual,
and integrative questions to structure and focus the contributions to this special issue:
What are the impacts of migration on the demographic composition of cities and the
spatial distribution of immigrant communities within them? How do urban-based net-
works facilitate (or block) the ability of people to settle in new urban environments?
What roles do political authorities and civic organisations play in governing migrant com-
munities and negotiating differences between immigrants and national citizens? How are
discourse and sentiments of justice mobilised to enhance the rights and opportunities of
migrants within cities and countries? By addressing these questions from an interdisciplin-
ary and comparative perspective, the special issue aims at increasing our understandings
of the dynamic relationship between urban environments and human mobility.
Migrant cities: politicising immigrants and making counter publics
This introductory paper addresses some of the special issue’s central questions by exam-
ining how urban environments contribute to the constitution of immigrants as political
subjects. Migrant cities have long been places where marginalised newcomers first
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encounter established groups and therefore become a frontline in struggles for recognition
and equality. Facing restrictions and impediments, new immigrants turn to their own net-
works and organisations to pool resources, share information, and construct new identities
within receiving communities. This is by no means a smooth process of constructing
bounded and harmonious communities (Brubaker 2002;Çağlar, this volume). Depending
on the resources of specific migrant groups, degrees of restrictions and discrimination, and
density of organisational support networks, group making varies dramatically across
national immigrant groups, countries, and cities (Chaudhary and Guarnizo, forthcoming).
The aim of this paper is to explore the links between cities and immigrant political sub-
jectivities by employing and reworking Nancy Fraser’s concept of ‘counterpublics’. Fraser
(1990) conceptualised ‘counterpublics’as ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of
subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate opposi-
tional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’(1990, 68). Counterpublics
enable people to construct critical political imaginaries and identities. While Fraser’s
analysis remains important and fresh 25 years after its original publication, she provides
little discussion concerning the urban underpinnings of such counterpublics. We therefore
need to reveal the ‘urban’component of counterpublics and, following from this, how
these counterpublics make it possible for immigrants to generate political discourses, iden-
tities, and subjectivities.
Building on the work of Bloemraad, de Graauw, and Hamlin concerning the effects of
local context in shaping media representations of immigrants (2015), this paper
outlines one theoretical approach for understanding how localities serve as propitious
environments that enable marginalised immigrants to become active voices in public
debate.
Publics and counterpublics
Nancy Fraser provides a sympathetic yet forceful critique of Jürgen Habermas’s concept of
the ‘public sphere’. The concept made an important contribution to Marxist literature, she
argued, because it provided the conceptual tools to examine a sphere that exists between
the economy and state:
The idea of ‘the public sphere’in Habermas’s…designates a theater in modern societies in
which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which
citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive
interaction. This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it is a site for the production
and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state. The public sphere in
Habermas’s sense is also conceptually distinct from the official-economy; it is not an arena of
market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating
rather than for buying and selling. Thus, this concept of the public sphere permits us to keep
in view the distinctions between state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associ-
ations, distinctions that are essential to democratic theory. (1990, 57)
The public sphere is an institutional space that permits the production and exchange of
discourses. It is a relatively autonomous arena consisting of associations, newspapers,
salons, and so on. These institutions permit people to step out of their individualised
worlds and debate issues of general interest: ‘[T]he idea of a public sphere is that of a
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body of “private persons”assembled to discuss matters of “public concern”or “common
interest”’ (1990, 58).
Fraser welcomes this intervention, but she also develops an important critique. She
shows that the public sphere was made possible in the nineteenth century by excluding
multiple others (women, non-property owners, immigrants, minorities, etc.). To engage
in ‘public matters’, citizens needed to suspend private concerns and be capable of
turning their attention to the general interest. Protecting the ‘public’nature of the
public sphere therefore required the exclusion of groups unable to shed their particular-
isms. The elites partaking in the nineteenth-century public sphere (bourgeois white
male nationals) produced an institutional arena of debate for themselves, using lofty
values (rationality, public spiritedness, and so on) to legitimate the banishment of multiple
others to their private worlds. The exclusionary character of the public sphere defined the
major points of conflict in modern society. Exclusion and conflict were not accidental,
contingent, or a reflection of decline, as Habermas suggested. They were instead consti-
tuted by the exclusionary nature of the public sphere.
The exclusions and conflicts that appeared as accidental trappings from his [Habermas] per-
spective, in this view become constitutive. The result is a gestalt switch that alters the very
meaning of the public sphere. We can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of
the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also a masculinist ideological
notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule. (Fraser 1990, 62)
The exclusionary nature of the dominant public did not result in passive subjects who
quietly assumed their place on the margins of society. Echoing Foucault (1978,1982)
on the productive side of repressive powers, Fraser argues that exclusion contributed to
the production of ‘subaltern counterpublics’. These counterpublics were made up of differ-
ent marginalised groups like women, immigrants, working class, etc. Paralleling the domi-
nant public sphere, excluded groups (‘subalterns’) developed their own institutions like
associations, newspapers, cafes, and salons. This counterpublic sphere enabled margina-
lised groups to express and debate their common grievances. Drawing from observations
of the feminist movement, Fraser remarks that:
feminist women have invented new terms for describing social reality, including ‘sexism,’‘the
double shift,’‘sexual harassment,’and ‘marital, date, and acquaintance rape.’Armed with
such language, we have recast our needs and identities, thereby reducing, although not elim-
inating, the extent of our disadvantage in official public spheres. (1990, 67, emphasis added)
The counter public sphere therefore helps generate ideas and discourses that are then used
by excluded groups to analyse their subordination and exclusion and develop strategies
and tactics to right these wrongs through collective struggle.
City, immigrant groups, and counterpublics
The concept of counterpublic is analytically useful in stressing the generative aspects of
exclusion and identifying the mechanisms involved in constructing subaltern identities.
We would add that the formation of counterpublics has a distinct, and distinctly urban,
geography. We highlight three processes that influence the formation of immigrant
groups and counterpublics in cities. First, cities facilitate the institutions spawning opposi-
tional subjectivities because they allow economies of scale and scope. Second, competition
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and hostility with dominant adversaries sharpen symbolic and social boundaries and crys-
tallise identities. Third, cities offer a comparatively wide array of oppositional networks
and institutions that can flank and reinforce immigrants’counterpublics.
Institutions and immigrant group formation
A central precept of classical urban sociology is that cities are propitious environments for
marginal groups to settle and flourish (Park and Burgess 1921; Wirth 1938; Saunders
1986). Drawing on this classical literature, Fischer (1975) argues there are destructive
aspects of cities that lead to social disorganisation. But, he argues, disorganisation also
results in the reorganisation of new social groups. Large numbers in cities facilitate anon-
ymity, weaken general collective norms, and favour tolerant or at least indifferent disposi-
tions among residents. These conditions create a particularly good environment for the
emergence of new and different ‘subcultures’. Migrants bearing a stigma or engaged in
‘deviant’conduct may face greater restrictions in small towns because a smaller number
and greater homogeneity of residents permit greater social control and sanctioning
capacities by established groups. The large number and diversity of residents in big
cities breaks down social control mechanisms and provides more space for new immi-
grants to form into new groups. Fischer does not suggest that cities are spaces of total
freedom but simply that large numbers make it more difficult for established groups to
police the conduct and lives of outsiders, providing the latter more breathing room to
settle, cluster, and grow.
When cities attract larger numbers of immigrants, economies of scale develop, which
can then sustain more group-specific institutions like religious organisations, civic associ-
ations, media, socialising venues, and other organisations. Institutions provide social and
emotional support for newly emerging groups (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993; Menjívar
1997; Hamilton and Chinchilla 2001; Coutin 2003; De Graauw, Gleeson, and Bloemraad
2013; Vermeulen 2013). For example, Hamilton and Chinchilla (2001) show how a dense
concentration of supportive religious and humanitarian organisations played an instru-
mental role in assisting Central American refugees to settle in Los Angeles during the
1980s. These and similar organisations also enabled new immigrants, most of whom
were denied refugee status, to create their own organisations concerning social, cultural,
health, political, and communicative needs. The high numbers of Central American
immigrants and the growing density of interconnected organisations resulted in ‘institu-
tionally complete’worlds, facilitating the formation of parallel social, political, and cul-
tural worlds to mainstream Los Angeles society. Institutional completeness is a
fundamental condition that makes it possible for outsiders to construct cultural and pol-
itical worlds apart from dominant society. Fischer expresses this formulation in the fol-
lowing way:
The larger a subculture’s population, the greater its ‘institutional completeness’. That is, given
basic market mechanisms, arrival at certain critical levels of size enables a social subsystem to
create and support institutions which structure, envelop, protect, and foster its subculture.
These institutions (e.g., dress styles, newspapers, associations) establish sources of authority
and points of congregation and delimit social boundaries. In addition to the simple fact of the
numbers themselves, they make possible and encourage keeping social ties within the group.
(1975, 1325–26)
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Small towns may also be recipients of immigrant newcomers but strong social controls by
established groups and low numbers of immigrants may deprive the newcomers the room
and economies of scale needed to develop robust institutions and organisations of their
own.
Cities and neighbourhoods with strong institutions create strong ‘pull effects’as people
are drawn to them for support and protection. As cities attract more co-nationals, the
group grows in size, complexity, and institutional strength. This bolsters the reputation
of these cities and the neighbourhoods inside them as thriving and attractive hubs of
immigrant cultural and social life. The emerging local counterpublic then becomes a
node in a network that connects cities and traverses national boundaries. The influx of
more immigrants increases group numbers, which in turn spurs internal heterogeneity.
Expanding counterpublics are spaces of increasing heterogeneity as they spur competition
between discourses and organisations (Kloosterman, Rath, and van der Leun 1999;
McQuarrie and Marwell 2009; Vermeulen 2013). Competition encourages people to
seek out niches and develop innovative ways to survive and thrive in dense urban environ-
ments. Such a process produces a greater variety of institutions (businesses, associations,
political organisations, denominations, newspapers, etc.) to provide the immigrant group
with services and support, and a more robust discursive space to support the circulation of
different ideas.
Sharpening group identities through the fires of hostility
The increased presence of subgroups like stigmatised immigrants can and often does
trigger hostility by dominant groups. Hostility is often directed at an outside group
because it is viewed as morally ‘unclean’(Elias 1994, xxx; also, Landau and Freemantle,
forthcoming) or because it is seen as a threat to the power, privilege, and opportunities
of dominant groups (Massey 2008). Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993) argue that when
immigrant groups in cities are faced with great hostility and few exit options, there is a
stronger likelihood that in-group solidarity develops (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993,
1329).
1
Illustrating the dynamic with Nathan Glazer’s well-known study of New York Ita-
lians, they point out that, ‘These immigrants learned to think of themselves as Italian and
to band together on that basis after the native population began to treat them in the same
manner and to apply to them the same derogatory labels’(1993, 1328, emphasis in orig-
inal). Parallel institutions make an emergent identity possible but hostility spurs solidarity
and brightens group boundaries (Alba 2005). This helps solidify the common identity of
disparate people while making their principal adversaries an important and constituting
element of how they thought, talked, and felt in a stratified and conflict-ridden world.
Discriminatory public policies can further sharpen the oppositional edge of emerging
immigrant groups. The local is a generative space of exclusionary government policies,
with both national and local authorities developing measures designed to deter immi-
grants from settling in cities (Varsanyi 2008; Walker and Leitner 2011; Nicholls and Ver-
meulen 2012; Theodore and Habans, forthcoming). For example, between 2005 and 2010,
Walker and Leitner (2011, 157) report that 370 local laws in the USA were passed that
specifically addressed the issue of undocumented immigrants. Paralleling local restrictive
laws, the central government initiated national programmes (287[g], Secure Commu-
nities) that aimed to strengthen cooperation between local law enforcement and national
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immigration agencies (Theodore and Habans, forthcoming). As immigrants contend with
police checkpoints, random police stops, and housing and job discrimination, they
encounter discrimination in their life worlds, compelling many to develop micro-level
tactics of circumvention and transgression (Menjívar and Abrego 2012; Derby 2014).
Confronting small and large aggressions throughout the course of a normal day can
serve as a springboard for considering principles of social justice. For example, exclusion-
ary laws passed in Arizona were directed at the efforts of some immigrant men to find day
work on open street corners. These restrictive laws helped solidify an identity among the
immigrant day labourers and spurred some of them to mobilise against the general effort
to banish migrants to the margins of society. In this and countless other examples, iden-
tities of marginalised immigrant groups emerge from the fires of everyday hostility.
Organic intellectuals and crafting an oppositional identity
Gramsci (1971) argued many years ago that marginalised groups have implicit cultures
and discourses about their positioning in the social world. They draw upon this thick cul-
tural reservoir to frame their thoughts and talk about the injustices they encounter in their
daily lives. The ‘popular’or ‘folk’culture of marginalised groups contained, according to
him, reactionary elements, but these elements:
are juxtaposed in popular consciousness with progressive elements which as ‘that mass of
beliefs and opinions on the subject of one’s‘own’rights which are in continual circulation
amongst the popular masses, and are forever being revived under the pressure of the real con-
ditions of life and the spontaneous comparison between the ways in which the various classes
live’. (Gramsci, in Billings 1990, 8, emphasis added)
People have an implicit, if not always articulate, understanding of equal rights and such
understandings bubble up through everyday interactions with dominant groups or
social classes (what Dwight Billings called, ‘spontaneous comparison’). Their implicit
ideas of equality serve as the raw material and building blocks for constructing a more
robust oppositional identity, an identity that resonates directly with the feelings, experi-
ences, and ethics of the group.
Crafting a coherent oppositional identity from this unprocessed, mishmash of ‘folk’
culture requires, according to Gramsci, the intervention of ‘organic intellectuals’. The for-
mation of parallel institutions facilitates the emergence of diverse organic intellectuals
(Gramsci 1971). They can be teachers, artists, activists, musicians, writers, religious
leaders, radio announcers, and so on. These are everyday intellectuals (as opposed to
the ‘traditional intellectuals’who operate in the mainstream public sphere and claim to
speak on behalf of ‘the public’) rooted in the lives of the people they work with and
serve. Their specialised work in producing and managing discourse, narratives, rituals,
and symbols allows the organic intellectual to use pre-existing folk ideas about rights
and justice as building blocks for overarching discourses and mobilising frames. The
organic intellectual therefore helps produce social justice talk through the stories,
accounts, and sentiments of the people they live with. People in these groups do not
experience the ideas of social justice as an abstraction: organic intellectuals in their
midst use the language and concrete experiences of the ‘people’to highlight how the
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identities and practices cultivated within counterpublics are marginalised within the wider
society.
Situated interactions between immigrants and organic intellectuals help sift through
grievances and identify commonalities across different experiences. The construction of
overarching frames and narratives is an interactional and incremental process inscribed
in the everyday back-and-forth between organic intellectuals and regular people. Many
immigrants seeking day labour work in Los Angeles, for instance, gather at ‘worker
centres’to search for employment. The organisers running the centres are ‘organic intel-
lectuals’who use the physical assembly of workers to discuss problems. They encourage
the workers to identify commonalities and think about the broader structural forces
(racism, poor labour market protections, lack of legal status) causing these problems.
The organisers at the centres employ the tacit culture of the immigrants (manners of
speech, jokes, moralities, mannerisms, music, and song) to help them construct cognitive
frames to analyse and evaluate injustices.
As individuals frequently encounter critical ideas in different settings (a community
centre, a workers association, social media channels), the ideas over time are assumed
to be legitimate and truthful. An important example is the common use of slogans like,
‘Undocumented and Unafraid’and ‘I am Undocumented’in the US immigrant rights
movement. The slogans emerged among undocumented youth activists in Chicago and
Los Angeles (Nicholls 2013). Organic intellectuals in activist organisations helped cultivate
and give meaning to these and other statements. They engaged in intense arguments for
why it made sense to assert themselves in the public sphere in spite of the risks posed by
their legal status. Once other activists in these spaces felt comfortable employing these
slogans and associated discourses, networked organisations within and across these
cities facilitated their circulation and eventual normalisation. In the past, most undocu-
mented immigrants (activists and non-activists) viewed the public use of such terms to
be dangerous. Now, many view these slogans and their associated discourses as normal
and common sense ways to politically talk about their subordinate positioning. It is by
no means uncommon now to find shirts printed with the slogans circulating freely in
immigrant rich neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington
D.C. What were once utterances that were perceived as illegitimate, unreasonable, and
dangerous to substantial segments of the group have now become normal and banal.
They no longer produce any sense of shock among immigrants but instead have
become incorporated into the normal political imaginaries of the community.
Counterpublics do not only shape group identities but can also serve as a springboard
for engagement in the public sphere. As Fraser notes:
The point is that, in stratified societies, subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On
the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand,
they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward
wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emanci-
patory potential resides. This dialectic enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset,
although not wholly to eradicate, the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members
of dominant social groups in stratified societies. (Fraser 1990, 68)
Groupness, in this instance, is a necessary condition for politicisation and engagement in
the broader public sphere (Bloemraad 2007). We should perhaps note that ‘oppositional
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identities’are ‘emancipatory’in the sense that they empower groups to emerge but not
inherently ‘progressive’. While Fraser focuses on feminists and we mostly rely on research
on leftist immigrants propagating a ‘no border’position, the exact same mechanisms apply
to all groups, whether they are leftist, rightist, fascist, religious, or ethnic. All these groups
only emerge and persist if there are building blocks in the form of parallel institutions,
organic intellectuals, and aggrieving interactions with mainstream society. All these differ-
ent kinds of counterpublics generate and cultivate identities and discourses that can sub-
sequently enter into the mainstream public sphere.
The dilemmas of engaging in the dominant public sphere
The rules for producing a ‘subaltern’counterpublic differ from the rules that enable entry,
engagement, and success in the mainstream public sphere. The language and discourses
that make certain discourses legitimate and compelling for an emergent counterpublic
may produce the exact opposite effects in the mainstream public sphere (Snow et al.
1986). The conflicting conditions of legitimacy are especially pronounced for immigrants
whose appearances and accents can of themselves serve as stigmata within the mainstream
public sphere. The collective power (social and cultural) accumulated in counterpublics is
oftentimes not sufficient to offset the overwhelming symbolic power of more established
adversaries. These adversaries wield their symbolic power to define the terms of acceptable
and unacceptable speech in the dominant public sphere, often excluding groups that fail to
speak, act, and emote in the correct ways (Bourdieu 1994). A strong counterpublic enables
a marginalised group to enter the public sphere but the group does not enter as equals but
as subordinates facing unfavourable ‘rules’of engagement. Dominant adversaries can use
their symbolic power to dismiss these discourses as nonsensical ‘noises’of a radical and
uncivilised mob rather than the reasonable claims of a legitimate political group (Dikeç
2004). For example, participants of massive immigrant rights demonstrations in California
in 1994 proudly waved flags from different countries in the world, asserting their differ-
ences and rejecting exclusionary immigration measures. Their anti-immigrant adversaries
used this act of dis-identification (to use Jacques Rancière’s term) to argue that immigrants
were irreducibly foreign, resistant to assimilation, and intent on reconquering America
(Chavez 2008). Rather than carving open a space in the public sphere, the expression of
an identity that stood in opposition to dominant norms resulted in closure. Thus, estab-
lished members of the public sphere discourses may view and represent the emotional
and motivating discourses of subordinate immigrant groups (e.g. pride in country of
origin) as illegitimate. Their power to frame what is acceptable and unacceptable speech
can disqualify challengers from gaining entry into the public sphere. What is productive
and enabling at one stage in the politicisation process (making oppositional identities)
becomes counterproductive and disabling at another (entering battles in the public
sphere).
Facing these discursive restraints, new immigrant challengers oftentimes favour a strat-
egy of ‘identification’to ensure successful passage into the public sphere. Such a strategy
aims to produce discourses and performances that demonstrate shared values and confor-
mity with the dominant culture. Challengers are encouraged to stress a direct tie to the
society through discourses of rootedness and assimilation. They highlight goals and
aspirations in ways that resonate with dominant values. If abnormality, deviance, and
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incivility were the attributes that justified their exclusion from the public sphere, it
becomes more difficult to legitimate continued exclusion when the other demonstrates
its cultural and legal equivalence with the dominant group. The strategy of identification
facilitates entry into the public sphere but it also becomes the basis of framing a group’s
critique of the system. The critique is not directed at the core tenets of the system (borders,
illegality, the nation-state) but that the system is not fair because it is denying a highly
deserving group basic rights and recognition. Such arguments can resonate with
broader parts of the public because it rests on hegemonic ideas of right and wrong.
While the strategy of identification helps immigrant challengers to gain legitimacy and
recognition, it reinforces the idea that the ‘rights of others’(Benhabib 2004) should be
recognised only when outsiders are in some crucial ways essentially the same (culturally,
morally, economically) as the dominant group. The case of highly assimilated and college-
educated immigrant youth in the USA stands out as a primary example (Nicholls 2013).
Their ability to gain broad public support largely hinged upon a concerted effort to
demonstrate cultural and economic conformity. The flipside of this strategy is that
those unable or unwilling to demonstrate conformity face greater difficulty justifying
their claims. It is for these reasons that counterpublics can alter but do not necessarily
negate the dominant identities, discourses, and values of the mainstream public sphere.
This does not mean that resistance is futile. Instead, the proliferation of different immi-
grant groups in cities results in perpetual struggles and never ending trench warfare to
modify and change the boundaries of belonging and citizenship. These fights are messy,
dirty, compromised, and filled with impure power plays that do not fit neat binaries. In
spite of their shortcoming, a multiplicity of small street battles can push back on exclusion-
ary boundaries and provide marginalised immigrant groups with a larger space for assert-
ing their own voice in the public sphere. They can expose injustices, challenge what is
‘reasonable’, make aggressive political moves when cracks open up, and build up on
small wins in the pursuit of longer term transformations in nationally based citizenship
regimes. Examining the urban grassroots can therefore shed light on these frictions and
exchanges and help us to understand processes of integration and conflict within and
beyond cities.
This paper thus concludes by suggesting that the scholarly focus of immigrant politics
could benefit from veering away from big institutions, discourses, and outcomes and
focusing more on micro- and meso-level mechanisms. The big changes in state regimes
(emancipation, revolution, transnational citizenship), the kinds of changes that capture
the attention of social scientists, emerge oftentimes from the small struggles fought in
the urban grassroots. By starting from the grassroots, social scientists would be in a
better position to understand how countless and imperceptible shifts in the local civil
societies eventually shape the big institutions and discourses of contemporary nation-
states.
Summary of the special issue
The contributors to the special issue may not necessarily agree with this position, but their
contributions take the urban seriously and resist seeing it as a mere backdrop of broader
social, cultural, and economic process. The first set of articles interrogates how migrants
play a role in making cities but not under conditions of their own choosing. The papers
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show how immigrants respond to and reshape their destination cities. The first paper
looks to the city of Amsterdam to assess how new patterns of immigrant settlement inter-
mingle with a city that is undergoing accelerated change and gentrification. Wouter van
Gent and Sako Musterd revisit an important debate in urban theory concerning the socio-
spatial inequalities found in global cities. Advocates of the ‘global city’and ‘dual city’thesis
(Castells 1989; Sassen 1991) argued that increased incorporation into the global economy
precipitated sociospatial polarisation reflected through an hourglass occupational, wage,
and spatial structure. European scholars rebutted that this may have been the case in
the USA because of its weak welfare state and weak labour market regulations but polar-
isation tendencies remained muted in Europe. However, welfare states and labour markets
have undergone considerable neoliberalisation in Europe, Van Gent and Musterd ask
whether this would precipitate class and ethnic polarisation. Through a careful analysis
of recent data on the spatial distribution of social classes and immigrants in Amsterdam,
they find that the Amsterdam region has indeed become more diverse and undergone
important changes but polarisation trends remain rather muted. In particular, gentrifica-
tion and suburbanisation have combined to create a migrant city-region characterised
much more by a messy patchwork of residential areas more than straight polarisation.
Robert C. Kloosterman, Katja Rusinovic, and David Yeboah keep the reader in Amster-
dam with their paper, ‘(Super-)Diverse Migrants—Similar Trajectories?’Through a careful
study of recent Ghanaian immigrants, they assess the strategies of new immigrant entre-
preneurs in super-diverse European cities. Much of the classical literature on immigrant
entrepreneurship focused on a particular type of population characterised either as
older labour migrants turned entrepreneurs or migrants from former colonies. Recent
waves of immigrants have radically diversified the immigrant pool in many European
cities. This gives rise to the question whether or not these new immigrants employ
similar strategies of more ‘classic’immigrant groups. If they have departed from more
pre-existing entrepreneurial strategies, what would this tell us about the structure of
these urban economies and the role of new immigrants within them? Their case shows
that these new immigrants have human and financial resources that provide them impor-
tant advantages over more ‘classical’immigrant groups. Just as important, they show very
high rates of entrepreneurship but not necessarily in the most advanced sectors of the
economy. These findings are provocative and point to interesting new directions in the
literature on the trajectories of immigrant economic incorporation in post-industrial
cities.
Whereas the first two papers assess new developments in Migrant Cities vis-à-vis the
social, spatial and economic structures of urban areas, the second two papers of the
section turn to issues of relations, identities, and cultures. Loren Landau and Iriann Free-
mantle do not only shift the focus of the papers but also the geography: from Europe to
Africa. Their study examines how practices of belonging, tolerance, and membership
are mediated through what they call ‘usufruct ethics’in the peri-urban cities of Rongai,
Kenya and Katlehon, South Africa. This utilitarian ethic centres on benefit extraction
and support more than community membership. This results in relational exchanges
that oftentimes instrumental and pragmatic, facilitating exchanges between increasingly
diverse people. Nevertheless, while this ethic is prevalent in both cities, it also interacts
with other norms and ethics in these, creating different modalities of interactions in
these cities. By carefully documenting relational interactions between migrants and
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settled populations in the African urban periphery, Landau and Freemantle reveal how
distinctive values, norms, and ethics produce patterns of relational engagement.
‘Still “Migrants”after all these Years’suitably rounds off the first part of the special
issue by broadening the discussion and addressing more conceptual questions about the
categories used to study migrant populations in receiving cities and countries. Ayse
Çağlar challenges the reader to explore the fundamental limitations of ethno-national cat-
egories like ‘migrants’because they assume inherent spatial, temporal, and normative
differences between populations. The assumption of essential differences poses empirical
problems because we produce facts that reflect and reproduce questionable concepts. But
even more important, social scientists engage in the ideological project of reifying and
legitimating socially constructed differences. The author goes on to examine how cultural
producers in Austria have come to challenge these problems through their use of the
concept of ‘post migrant’.Çağlar welcomes these efforts but also points out several impor-
tant shortcomings. She concludes by introducing the concept of ‘migrant emplacement as
an alternative framework that could enable us to analyse migrant agencies and sociabilities
as contemporaneous to “non-migrants”’. This perspective begins not by the migrant group
but by the city. She encourages us to examining the positioning of cities within broader
economic, political, and cultural networks, and following from this, the specific practices
of people to seek out lives in these very specific contexts.
The second part of the special issue examines the institutions, organisations, and poli-
tics shaping the dynamics of migrant incorporation in cities. The papers address urban
governance issues by analysing changing contexts of reception, how immigrant organis-
ations emerge and vary according to contexts, and how urban-based immigrant organis-
ations go on to assume leading roles in broad and national struggles for immigrant rights.
The first paper, ‘Policing Immigrant Communities’, examines how partnerships
between local law enforcement and federal immigrant agencies affect the perceptions of
immigrants towards the police. Nik Theodore and Robert Habans conducted a survey
of 2004 Latinos in four urban counties in the USA. While many observers have argued
that local police enforcement of national immigration policies would likely affect the per-
ceptions and behaviour of immigrants, this is the first and only large-scale study to address
this issue directly. Theodore and Habans indeed find immigrants are much less likely to
call police and report crimes out of fear that such activities would place them or their
family members at risk of detection and deportation. These findings have very important
implications for broader policies on the costs and limitations of local enforcement policies.
Increased incorporation of local law enforcement agencies in national immigration
measures undermines the ability of local police to gain the trust of immigrants, which
limits their abilities to ensure safe neighbourhoods. While the study is based on findings
from the USA, its main lessons are likely applicable to other countries as well.
In their paper ‘Pakistani Immigrant Organizational Spaces in Toronto and New York,’
Ali Chaudhary and Luis Guarnizo examine how different contexts of reception shape
immigrant organisational dynamics in Toronto and New York. The paper takes issue
with much of the literature on the issue because of its strong focus on government insti-
tutions in shaping the contexts of reception and its use of a local/transnational dichotomy
to characterise immigrant organisations. The authors assess the context of reception (gov-
ernment policies, local attitudes, socioeconomic incorporation, and so on) and the extent
to which different contexts precipitate different organisational dynamics (localism versus
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transnationalism in particular). Based on extensive empirical work, they find that one
attribute of the context of reception (multicultural government policies) has little effect
on whether Pakistani organisations take transnational or local directions. Instead, the
affluence of the immigrant community has a stronger role in shaping the organisational
direction of these organisations. Just as important, the authors find that class combines
with geographical directionality of organisations (local versus transnational) to introduce
new and interesting tensions in these communities. The paper encourages the readers to
think comparatively and ask whether the findings here are consistent with those of other
immigrant groups in other cities and countries.
The article ‘Cities and the Politics of Integration’continues to explore the issue of
context of reception by examining how political authorities Berlin, Amsterdam,
New York, and San Francisco devised policies immigrant integration. Through this fasci-
nating comparison, Els de Graauw and Floris Vermeulen identify several broad factors
that influence the creation of receptive immigrant integration policies. In particular,
they point to three key variables that make it more likely for receptive policies: left-
leaning governments, high concentrations of immigrant voters and high participation
in decision-making processes, and a dense concentration of immigrant organisations.
These factors, they argue, should not be analysed apart from one another but in a syner-
gistic way, creating what we may think of as virtuous pathways of progressive integration
policies in cities even when national contexts remain hostile. While national contexts are
certainly important, immigrant communities can work with local allies to produce spaces
of support and tolerance within these national contexts. These urban arenas can and often
do become the geographical spaces where struggles for rights, recognition, and support
take root and grow.
Our paper (with Sander van Haperen), ‘The Networked Grassroots’, addresses the role
of cities in national immigrant rights movements directly. We examine an interesting
paradox that characterises the US immigrant rights movement. By most measures, the
movement is more national than ever. Large national organisations located mostly in
Washington D.C. have captured the lion’s share of revenue. They have strong connections
to national political elite, dominate national media, and lead the most important coalitions
driving reform debates. In spite of their overwhelming strength and power, the national
organisations have failed to achieve their primary policy goal: the passage of Comprehen-
sive Immigration Reform. On the other hand, a wide variety of non-elite activists organ-
isations (locals, radical organisations, networks) have successfully pushed for immigrant
friendly policies in local municipalities, states, courts, and the executive branch of govern-
ment (through decrees). Whereas core organisations of the movement have failed to move
the immigration reform ahead in any substantive way, peripheral actors rooted in cities
across the country have pushed the reform envelope and inspired thousands of immi-
grants to become involved in the movement. We explore this paradox by examining the
complex geographies of the immigrant rights movement. Our findings show that the
movement has both centralising and decentralising tendencies. There have been major
centralising tendencies reflected in the concentration of political and economic power
by leading Washington D.C.-based organisations. We also observe decentralised and geo-
graphically organised clusters of activists and organisations (such as DREAMers and day
labourers) that have worked with one another over extended periods of time in campaigns
with local and national-level reach. These peripheral activists have forged ties that enable
JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 13
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them to collectivise resources and deploy them in a wide variety of struggles covering the
gamut of immigration issues. While these peripheral activists tend to concentrate in
certain hubs (Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere), they also connect to one another
and coordinate collective actions through a variety of networks (social media, interperso-
nal, inter-organizational). Whereas the big and national organisations lumber slowly and
press their elite political allies in Washington D.C. to pass immigration reform, motley
networks of locally situated activists have effectively hit many targets, assembled many
different campaigns, and have successfully leveraged smaller wins to gain more advantages
and rights to undocumented immigrant communities.
Together, the papers in this issue illustrate the strategic significance of the urban for
immigrants and for researching how immigrants remake cities as well as how cities
remake immigrants.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Note
1. The more distinct a group is in terms of phenotypicial or cultural characteristics from the rest of
the population, the greater the level of prejudice associated with these traits, and the lower the
probability of exit from the situation, then the stronger the sentiments of in-group solidarity
among its members and the higher the appropriable social capital based on this solidarity.
(1329)
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