Nation and migration
Migration:
Migrant: movement of people across adminstrative borders resulting in change of residence.
Immigrant:
Emigrant:
Expatriate: he ‘expatriate’ is frequently seen to denote an altogether different (and more valuable)
form of mobility than that of the ‘migrant’, or is seen as a privileged or valuable subtype of
migration.”
Migration crisis:
Self-determination: “an important part of group self-determination is having control over what the
“self” is.”
Securitization: “The increasingly frequent trend to reclassify something that was previously
considered to belong to another phenomenal category as an example of “insecurity”... automatically
transferring this thing to the sphere of responsibility and supervision by state” Zygmunt Bauman
(2016)
Undesirable: Overstaying a South African visa is certainly the most common reason for foreigners
being declared undesirable and banned from the country, but it is not the only one. if declared
undesirable, a foreigner shall not qualify for any visa or permit to South Africa, nor shall they be
granted admission into the country.
Nation: “community of people whose members are bound together by some sort of solidarity,
common culture and national consciousness”
State: legal and political organisation, with power to require obedience and loyalty from citizens”
Nation-state: are constituted through the construction of borders. Borders represent the sovereignty
of states. Borders are not just boundaries between territories, they shape our perceptions of the
world, and other people.
a form of organisation
• people with a common identity, shared belief system- (nation)
• Within firm borders in a country- physicals boundaries (state)
• and a government- rules, laws, (state)
Nationalism: idea that people within a nation are connected together
Citizen: people who have rights (citizens) and those who do not have rights or claim (non-citizens)
using political and legal regulations
Migration categories:
Freedom/right of association: Right to control borders based on right to association- within the right
to associate is the right to dissociate using marriage and religion as examples. •‘Similarly a group of
fellow citizen has a right to choose who to include or exclude in their political community’
, Migration industry:
Structural violence: Diverting attention from more structural issues- black people and other races
being excluded from political and economic processes
Symbolic violence: blaming migrants for problems not of their own making
Cultural violence: based on the broad social acceptance of racism based on the assumed superiority
of whites over the rest of the population.
Physical violence: was used to impose cultural and structural violence, based on extreme repression
and militarisation
Geographical differences: geographical differences in income, employment and other opportunities
Global apartheid: a system that maintains global structures in order to preserve the inequity and
violence that allow some populations and communities to maintain dominance and power over
others –from cultural and economic domination, to a monopoly over resources, privileges and
hierarchies in the movement of people and cheap labour, among others.
Apartheid- when anti-democratic institutions systematically generate economic inequality on a
global scale. Apartheid 1948: it happened during the time when decolonisation was starting after
world war II when problems of racism were highlighted.•Apartheid made laws forced the different
racial groups to live separately and develop separately, and grossly unequally too•While segregation
had always been there during colonial times, apartheid made it into a law
Historical- structural theories: migration as an exploitation mechanism rooted in the neo-Marxist
political economy as inhibiting structures to human behaviour
Focus on structural constraints- access to money,connections and information. Migration as an
exploitation mechanism, manifestaiton of capitalism, imperialism and unequal trade between
developed and underdeveloped countries. Control and exploitation of labour by states and
coporations as central to survival of the capitalist system
- Dependency theory: poor countries are drained of
their resources due to global capitalism-
- World system: incoporation of peripheral regions
in the world economy controlled by the core
capitalist nations
- Globalization theory: and ideology which
stresses the importance of market liberalisation,
privatization and deregulation for development
Critique of historical-structural theories: Focusing on the structures, they rule out human agency by
depicting migrants as victims of global capitalism + Premised on the assumption/myth of the
immobile peasant uprooted by capitalism
Functionslist theories: migration as positive, optimization mechanism, serving the interests of most
people, increasing productivity and increasing equality within between societies
- Push-pull models: demographic, environmental and
economic factors are presumed to push people out of
places of origin and pull them into destination areas