years have seen a growing number of scholars arguing for greater acknowledgement of colonial histories and their legacies for contemporary migration issues. For example, Mains et al. (2013: 132) observe that ‘despite the material links between colonialism, postcolonialism and migration, social scientists in general have been slow to address this intersection’ (see also McIlwaine 2008, cited in Mains et al. 2013). Tudor (2018) and De Genova (2018) specifically articulate this lack of attention in terms of a neglect of postcolonial racism and racialization, and observe that there is a strong sense in the field that to speak of racism is either to be racist, or (relatedly) that such observations are (or should be) the exclusive interest of scholars of colour (see also El-Tayeb 2011; Boulila 2019; Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015; Michel 2015; Walia 2014). Rivera-Salgado (1999) noted twenty years ago that race and ethnicity are ‘frequently either ignored or treated as a consequence of migration flows and considered to be a problem “here” not “there”’, but this pattern has not significantly shifted. Certainly any increased recognition of ethnicity rarely also then understands ideas of racial or ethnic difference to be rooted in long-standing practices and processes of colonialism (see Hall 1978 for more on this).
The interconnectedness of migration studies as a project of university institutions, with migration management as a project of national and international policy-making institutions, is relevant here. Because migration scholars do not only speak to each other and have esoteric intellectual discussions about the dynamics of migration, they are also invited into these national and international policy-making fora. The language of migration scholarship and that of migration governance are therefore deeply entangled and interdependent. Institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its non-refugee, migration-focused sister organization, the IOM (International Organization for Migration), are key players in this relationship and themselves emerged from colonialism. The UNHCR was founded to support European refugees exclusively following the Second World War because the colonial and settler-colonial powers did not want people of colour to have full access to human rights (Mayblin 2017). Its remit expanded as a consequence of the demands and activities of movements for decolonization. The IOM, meanwhile, was founded to settle Europeans (at a time when Europe was thought to be overpopulated) in Africa (at a time when African countries were not thought of as sovereign nations) (Hansen and Jonsson 2014).
Bridget Anderson (2019: 2) has suggested that ‘perhaps we are experiencing not an “age of migration” but an age of migration research’ (emphasis in original). Studies of migration first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Gabaccia (2014) argues that in the United States studies of migration were primarily based in social anthropology and revolved around the application of ‘assimiliationist theory’ to different social groups who were deemed ‘immigrants’ (see Fitzgerald 2014). When we tend to speak of the institutionalization of migration studies as a ‘field’, we are referring to the period after the Second World War when states and international organizations began funding research on migration and refugees. The development of migration studies thus presents an interesting example of a ‘state science’ (Gabaccia 2014). Whilst interdisciplinary, the field grew around the demands of states and the international community to track and account for the movement of people ‘globally’ (Donato and Gabaccia 2015). But, more specifically, this was concerned with the mobility of people from the Global South to the Global North in periods of decolonization and under what would later be called ‘globalization’ and the further entrenchment and expansion of neo-liberal capitalism. The provision for this type of research grew in the United States and in Europe, in the latter under the emergent funding landscape of the European Union (EU) and within a broader biopolitical interest in the cost and benefits of migration, demographics and population management (for example, see the establishment of Osnabrück’s Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) in 1991).
This history of course shapes the field today. Whilst it would be a mistake to see all migration studies as overdetermined by the need to create policy-relevant research and to produce research that maps onto the interests of states and international organizations for the capture of funds, these factors strongly shape what constitutes appropriate knowledge and determines research agendas across migration studies (see Hatton 2018 on the United Kingdom and German context). To Scholten (2018), the dangers of this ‘co-production’ of knowledge have led to migration scholars reproducing forms of methodological nationalism and reifying state concepts such as ‘integration’, ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘migrant versus citizen’ divide (also see de Genova 2013). Whilst more ‘critical’ intellectual projects have shaped the field in terms of engagement with theories of ‘transnationalism’ throughout the 1990s (see Blanc-Szanton, Glick Schiller and Basch 1992), and more post-structuralist-influenced approaches to mobility and spatiality (Urry 2007), this environment has not been conducive to a sustained engagement with postcolonial and decolonial theory or even a broader engagement with historiography (Gabaccia 2014). The often superficial engagement with history is evidenced by the long-held view in key migration study textbooks that continue to periodize ‘contemporary migration’ (i.e. after the Second World War) as ‘new’, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unique’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014).
In spite of the colonial blind spots within migration studies, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the field has completely ignored colonialism. Migration theories which draw on world systems theory (which is also an intellectual point of departure for decoloniality) are notable in taking account of colonial histories in their analyses (Richmond 1994; Satzewich 1991), and textbooks on migration studies almost always cover this theoretical field (see Brettell and Hollifeld 2008; Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014; Martiniello and Rath 2012). World systems theory (see Wallerstein 2004) makes sense of the world in terms of the incorporation of increasing numbers of states into the global capitalist economy and the consequent emergence of a worldwide division of labour which has uneven impacts on different societies. It divides the world into core, semi-periphery and periphery and argues that the core and periphery are locked into a relationship of exploitation and dependency which structurally prevents peripheral countries from developing. There are clear implications for migration studies here in that migration would then be understood as part of much broader relationships between states and societies. As wealthy ‘core’ economies became increasingly dependent upon low-paid migrant labour from the peripheries from the 1970s, international labour migration came to be seen as an important element in relations of domination between core and periphery. What is now called South–North migration therefore, from this perspective, reinforces relations of dependency.
There are criticisms to be made of the extent to which world systems theory adequately accounted for, or then instrumentalized, race and gender in the world system (Grosfoguel 2011). Nevertheless, this is undeniably a corner of migration studies which has sought to incorporate an account of historical colonial power relations in seeking to make sense of the present. Equally, Latin American decolonial work on the ‘coloniality of power’ is indebted to world systems theory even as it departs from its primarily economic focus (Quijano 2000). It is here that we see emerging some decolonial analyses of migration which are alive to the importance of colonial histories, and indeed presents (Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015).
A postcolonial awareness is also visible in, if not central to, other areas of migration studies. Scholars who research the European context often, for example, note the movement of migrants from former colonies to former metropoles in the second half of the twentieth century (Geddes and Scholten 2016). These ‘postcolonial’ migrations have given rise to many studies which, though more often cited in sociologies of race and ethnicity or cultural studies (for example, Cohen and Jonsson 2011; Gilroy 2002b, 2004; Hall 1996c; Wemyss 2009), nevertheless overlap with the concerns of migration researchers (for example, race and racism as legacies of empire are strong themes in Joppke 1999). Those who research the settler colonies as ‘countries of immigration’ also often note the colonial history of those countries, albeit often too briefly and rarely with an engagement with settler colonialism as an ongoing phenomenon. Those who work on what is increasingly dubbed ‘South–South’ migration are, furthermore, offering a wellspring of non-Eurocentric analytical frameworks which, if not necessarily centring colonial histories, are certainly
