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C h a p t e r 9 Rethinking Migration, Ancient to Future Rising tides in the movement of information, commodities, and people characterize the contemporary world, and anthropologists of the present have been vigorous in charting these proliferating forms of transnational circulation.1 Taking a global view, Arjun Appadurai discerns ‘‘a general rupture in the tenor of intersocietal relations’’ marking ‘‘the extended present’’ and attributes this to first, the impact of electronic media and second, the pace and ubiquity of contemporary migration. Of the latter, he writes, ‘‘Few persons in the world today do not have a friend, relative, or coworker who is not on the road to somewhere else or coming back home.’’2 In the year 2000, some 130 million human beings lived outside their nation of birth.3 In social anthropology, the dominant concept for investigating this massive intercourse of people has been immigration—the selfdirected movement of individuals from one nation-state to another.4 We have learned much from the harvest of immigration studies and have by no means exhausted the productivity of this approach. Yet in making sense of the contemporary world, we find that there is a conceptual narrowness to immigration as a master framework, a narrowness that may be summarized under four headings: 1. Treating human migration primarily in terms of contemporary legal categories 2. Paying insufficient attention to national citizen-making processes as experienced both by immigrants and by others 3. Failing to treat immigration as ideology as well as experience 4. Subscribing to a presentist orientation that foregrounds movers versus other groups 134 Chapter 9 Immigration as Legal Category Contemporary global immigration cannot be studied apart from the enormous legal apparatuses that define and channel it. In the United States, since 1965, these have included an evolving and increasingly intricate complex of ceilings and quotas; visa categories; and immigrant, refugee, and asylum statuses, including that of illegal or undocumented alien.5 Intersecting with this and with the legal structures and processing procedures of other nations is a complex array of paragovernmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), human rights monitoring groups, pro- and antiimmigration lobbies, dual citizenship arrangements, and government programs for extraterritorial diasporees.6 Research that exemplifies careful attention to this legal domain includes Michel Laguerre on the strategies by which Haitians obtain U.S. immigrant visas; Johanna Lessinger on the ties of expatriate non-resident Indian (NRI) investors to their homeland; Jacqueline Hagan on the utilization of Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) legalization provisions by undocumented Guatemalan Mayan migrants; Alex Stepick on U.S. refugee and immigrant statuses in relation to Haitian and Cuban ‘‘boat people’’; and Jon Holtzman on Nuer refugees in Africa and North America.7 Researchers who do not master the legal technicalities that apply to the immigrant and refugee populations they study are not doing their job. But the rub arises when legal categories are used to narrowly define the parameters of study, and the wider social fields within which immigrants and others operate are rendered hazy or invisible (which does not mar the careful work of Laguerre, Lessinger, Hagan, Stepick, and Holtzman). In addition, the legally framed immigration standpoint tends to obscure historical continuities between past migrations within nation-states or colonial dominions and contemporary migrations that cross national borders.8 Immigrant and Other Citizens Several scholars have considered how cultural concepts relating to race, language, and culture influence official and popular ideas of what a nation is and how its citizenry should behave, speak, worship, dress, or even ‘‘look.’’9 From this perspective, citizenship in contemporary nation-states has an ethnocultural aspect, making it something more than merely a legal status. In past decades, U.S. society awarded what Renato Rosaldo terms Rethinking Migration 135 ‘‘first-class’’ citizenship10 to the offspring of ‘‘white’’ European immigrants —persons who spoke ‘‘American’’ English (and, in public, no other language); were Christian or, latterly, ‘‘Judaeo-Christian’’; were educated in U.S. schools in which the triumphalist mythos of American continental settlement and frontier expansion was inculcated; and who had largely forgotten or never learned the languages of their European background and their cultural ‘‘roots.’’11 Whether in terms of ‘‘Anglo-conformity’’12 or ‘‘assimilation,’’ assessing the attainment of such cultural citizenship has dominated U.S. immigration studies. Even as there is debate over whether today’s non-European immigrants will or will not similarly ‘‘assimilate’’13 and speculation about how cultural conceptions of U.S. citizenship are being stretched—for example...

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