Article

On the West–East methodological bias in measuring international migration

Taylor & Francis
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
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Abstract

This article examines the complex relations between two social processes-standardisation and quantification in measuring migration. We explore how international migrant populations in the European territories of the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have been defined, counted and presented in European population statistics. Our analysis led us to conclude that the category of international migrant, defined as a person born abroad according to the present-time borders, has low contextual validity in postsocialist European contexts. Perceived as universally applicable, however, the category is persistently used in enumerating migration in postsocialist Europe. We argue that the unchallenged transferability of the category of international migrant across contexts is based on the West-East methodological bias-a preconception embedded in the standardisation and quantification of migration. The West-East methodological bias plays a dual role. It fuels the initial perception of the category, forged in Western geopolitical contexts, as standardised and applicable across different settings. Then, in combination with the perceived power of the quantified representation of reality, the West-East methodological bias contributes to the further objectification of the standardised category. ARTICLE HISTORY

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... Studies focusing on attitudes towards immigrants in Central and Eastern Europe have begun to increase gradually in recent years (See Bell et al., 2022;Bessudnov, 2016;Gorodzeisky, 2021;Lancaster, 2022;Leykin & Gorodzeisky, 2023). These studies often show that there are considerably higher levels of exclusionary attitudes towards immigrants in this region despite immigrant populations often being quite low (Bell et al., 2021(Bell et al., , 2022Bello, 2017;Gorodzeisky & Leykin, 2022). 1 Additionally, these studies often find that theoretical concepts and frameworks developed in the 'West' do not necessarily easily translate to other contexts. Leykin and Gorodzeisky (2023), for example, found that right-leaning conservative individuals were not necessarily more anti-immigrant than more centre or left-leaning individuals in a post-socialist context. ...
... In the Central and Eastern European context, we also need to discuss who the immigrants and ethnic minorities are in different countries within the region, as this factor may influence perceptions of whether they deserve social benefits and inclusion in the welfare system. It is worth highlighting that at the time the data was collected for this analysis (2016-2017) immigrant populations in most CEE countries were considerably smaller than in Western European (Gorodzeisky & Leykin, 2022). 4 In certain CEE countries, a significant portion of the immigrant population consists of co-ethnics or immigrants from neighbouring countries. ...
... 9. This highlights arguments challenging the universalism of concepts developed in the 'West' (Gorodzeisky & Leykin, 2022;Leykin & Gorodzeisky, 2023). 10. ...
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This article focuses on the role of past standards stories and how they are deployed strategically in ways that shape the process of standards creation. It draws upon an ethnographic study over multiple years of standards meetings, discussions, and online activity. Building on existing work that examines how standards are shaped by stories, this study follows the development of Augmented Reality Markup Language and maps how the story of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) became the key story that actors utilized and debated to push for participation, agreement, and material development of the standard. The authors present several different ways the recurring HTML story was effective at various points in the process as a diagnostic tool, promissory future, empirical evidence, and confidence building measure. Understanding these strategic deployments serves as an empirical example of how recurring stories of the past can shape standards development. These mappings illustrate how standards can be built on past standards sociologically as well as technologically and also broadens our theoretical tools for understanding the importance of stories in the sociology of standards.
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Using the Baltic states as an empirical example of a wider social problem of categorization and naming, this article explores the statistical categories of ‘international migrant/foreign-born’ population used in three major cross-national data sources (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurostat and The World Bank Indicators (WBI)). We argue that these seemingly politically neutral categories ignore historical processes of state formation and migration, and privilege the current ethnonational definition of the state. We demonstrate how, in regions with recent geopolitical changes, the international migrant category’s spatial and temporal constraints produce distorted population parameters, by marking those who have never crossed sovereign states’ borders as international migrants. In certain social contexts, applying the international migrant category to those who have never crossed international borders shapes and legitimizes restrictive citizenship policies and new forms of social exclusion. We further argue that, when uncritically adopting this category, transnational institutions assert territorial imaginaries embedded in ethnonational political discourses and legitimize exclusionary citizenship policies.
Article
Europe faces the challenge of enormous recent asylum seeker inflows, and the allocation of these immigrants across European countries remains severely skewed, with some countries having a much larger per capita share of asylum applicants than others. Consequently, there is a debate at the EU level on how to allocate asylum seekers in order to tackle this imbalance. The present study focuses on preferences of European citizens towards the supranational policy issue of achieving a more equalized distribution of asylum seekers. Several theoretical arguments point towards asylum seeker intake, general immigrants’ legal status, prior immigration stocks, and economic circumstances as explanatory mechanisms at the macro level. We test these propositions using Eurobarometer data from 2015. The results show that a high level of asylum seeker intake and larger immigrant stocks in 2010 are associated with a greater willingness to redistribute asylum seekers. Apart from this, integration policies also play a role: the more inclusive a country’s political stance towards Third-Country Nationals, the higher the public support for a better allocation of asylum seekers. These results also emerge when excluding the top five asylum seeking destinations. At the individual level, views of the EU as a competent political actor and general immigration attitudes are substantially related to the support for redistribution efforts. These individual-level patterns occur both in countries with many and in countries with few asylum seekers, indicating that respondents largely take a broad European view on this topic, rather than a national one.
Article
The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence.
Article
‘Expatriate’ is an unstable and contested term, as emphatically embraced by some, as rejected by others. The category ‘migrant’, on the other hand, can have all the veneer of a self-evident and technical category. Yet, their tense relationship suggests the usefulness of an examination of their co-production and combined effects. This article explores the everyday socio-cultural production of the category ‘migrant’ in its tense relationship with the category ‘expatriate’. More specifically, it draws on 8 months of ethnographic research in Nairobi and The Hague to examine how participants deploy the category ‘migrant’ in the context of conversations about ‘expatriates’ or ‘expatriate’ lives. The article argues that the category ‘migrant’ emerges as polysemic and malleable as it is constructed with and against the ‘expatriate’; both categories are joined by a constitutive but not straightforward relationship that is deeply politicised and specifically works to reproduce racialised power relations. The polysemy of these overlapping terms is thus reflective of and operative in racialised power relations in ways that demand more analytical attention. As such, the categories’ relationship reflects the ‘polyvalent mobility’ of race as it works through ostensibly neutral migration categories and ‘takes on the form of other things’.
Article
This article inquires into the historical conditions of the global category of “international migration” by analysing quantification processes in the International Labour Organization in the 1920s. Based on a history of knowledge perspective, it analyses how and why the categories of immigration and emigration were reduced to the single category of “international migration”. The paper interprets this epistemological change with a shift from an imperial to an international point of view that occurred in the 1920s. This argument is based on an analysis of negotiations between international administrators and functionaries of the British Empire that arose, when international categorisation and quantification of people on the move began. Drawing on sources from the British National Archives and the International Labour Organization, this article highlights the historical importance of debates about the categories of “nation” and “race”, in the making of what was stabilized only later in the 20th century as the category of “international migration”.
Article
Socio-cultural and ethnic origin can be a powerful predictor of social attitudes and behaviours but, unlike the situation in the classical countries of immigration such as Australia, Canada and the USA, there is no standard measure in Europe for measuring ethnic background. The paper reports a new measure and classification, developed for the ESS and trialled in the ESS wave 7 (2014/2015). It describes the underlying theoretical concepts, structure and classification criteria and reports a range of substantive findings. The paper shows that the new measure of ethnic origins has both criterion and predictive validity: it predicts whether respondents identify themselves as belonging to an ethnic minority and whether they feel that theirs is a group which is discriminated against. It also predicts strength of national identity and attitudes towards immigration. A particular strength of the new measure is that it identifies both indigenous and (sub)national minorities as well those with a migration background. The paper shows that in some countries subnational minorities are quite distinctive, for example in their feelings of being discriminated against and in their low levels of national attachment.
Article
The present paper contributes to the literature on the formation of attitudes and public views toward out-group populations by focusing on the relations between actual versus perceived and misperceived size of immigrant population (as indicators of competitive threat) and attitudes toward immigration. The analysis is conducted in the context of 17 European societies. The data for the analysis were obtained from the 2014 European Social Survey (ESS). The main findings lead to the conclusion that misperceptions of the size of immigrant population play a more important role than factual reality in shaping public views and attitudes toward immigration. Although perceived size is not totally detached from actual size, the discrepancy between actual and perceived size is found to be a more powerful predictor of opposition to immigration than actual size. The more inflated is the misperception the more pronounced is opposition to immigration. The impact of misperceptions, when measured as a discrepancy or a ratio, on anti-immigrant attitudes is more pronounced in countries with, proportionally, a large foreign-born population. The meaning of the findings and the relevance of misperceptions and cognitive maps in shaping public views are discussed.
Chapter
The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.
Book
The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.
Book
In School of Europeanness, Dace Dzenovska argues that Europe's political landscape is shaped by a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. Nowhere, Dzenovska writes, is this tension more glaring than in the former Soviet Republics. Using Latvia as a representative case, School of Europeanness is a historical ethnography of the tolerance work undertaken in that country as part of postsocialist democratization efforts. Dzenovska contends that the collapse of socialism and the resurgence of Latvian nationalism gave this Europe-wide logic new life, simultaneously reproducing and challenging it. Her work makes explicit what is only implied in the 1977 Kraftwerk song, "Europe Endless": hierarchies prevail in European public and political life even as tolerance is touted by politicians and pundits as one of Europe's chief virtues.
Book
'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
Article
The biggest concentrations of displaced people lie far from the spotlight.
Chapter
The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance.
Article
Alain Desrosieres understood statistics as simultaneous representations of the world and interventions in it This article examines two mechanisms that mediate how numbers do both. The first, reverse engineering, describes how working backwards from a desired number shapes organizational routines. The second, emotional attachment, describes the processes by which numbers generate a variety of emotions that sometimes stimulate collective identities. Focusing on educational rankings but including examples of other types of numbers, it argues for the importance of disclosing the effects of specific causal mechanisms in the analysis of particular performance measures.
Article
This study examines how numbers in transnational governance constitute actors, objects, and relationships, including relationships of power. We review the existing literatures on numbers for insights relevant to their role in transnational governance, including the ontology of numbers, the history of numbers and their role in governance. On this basis, we set out the main distinctive ways that numbers are implicated in transnational governance. We conclude that studies of transnational governance would benefit from paying more attention to the much overlooked performative role of numbers in governance processes. Numbers have properties that differ from words, and shifts from one to the other in governance, for instance in the displacement of laws or norms with risk models or rankings based on numbers, have particular effects, including political effects on states, firms, individuals, and other actors and institutions.
Article
Indicators are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world. There are indicators of rule of law, indicators of violence against women, and indicators of economic development, among many others. Indicators are widely used at the national level and are increasingly important in global governance. There are increasing demands for “evidence-based” funding for nongovernmental organizations and for the results of civil society organizations to be quantifiable and measurable. The reliance on simplified numerical representations of complex phenomena began in strategies of national governance and economic analysis and has recently migrated to the regulation of nongovernmental organizations and human rights. The turn to indicators in the field of global governance introduces a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and between governments and civil society. The deployment of statistical measures tends to replace political debate with technical expertise. The growing reliance on indicators provides an example of the dissemination of the corporate form of thinking and governance into broader social spheres.
Article
In this article we examine how Europeans perceive the consequences of immigration. We draw upon group threat, conflict and boundary-making theories to differentiate between probable reasons of anti-immigrant sentiment. We hypothesize that perceived threats vary over time and across countries since their nature may shift according to changing economic and other conditions. Using data from three rounds and 24 countries of the European Social Survey, perceived threat is explained by socio-economic characteristics, political orientation and structural conditions. We then focus on more specific threats in economic and cultural terms and how they vary in their effects on negative attitudes toward immigration. Our findings support variable economic and cultural foundations of anti-immigrant sentiment exerting different influence associated with changing economic conditions. Implications of these findings for future policy and research are discussed in the light of the current economic crisis.