1I am the Ora Nixon Arnold Chair in International Political Economy and Director of the Tower Center at Southern Methodist University (SMU). I have published many books and scientific articles about migration, among them Understanding Global Migration (Hollifield and Foley, 2022), Controlling Immigration (Hollifield et al., 2022), Migration Theory (Brettell and Hollifield, 2023), and International Political Economy: History, Theory and Policy (forthcoming).
What new directions are your research taking, and in what ways do they reshape your understanding of international migration?
Migration interdependence (MI) is a concept developed during the postwar period and recently mobilized in migration studies (Hollifield and Foley, 2022). MI can be defined as a mutual dependence of populations within a migration system. It is dynamic and evolves quickly when States go from the status of a society of origin to the status of transit or host society and correlates with the economic development rate. It reflects the wish and the capacity of a State to manage migrations for strategic reasons. From the countries of origin's perspective, States such as the Philippines and Nepal have used emigration as an explicit development strategy. Conversely, other countries of immigration, such as Japan, have limited their flows and have restricted entry to specific socio-professional categories: low-skilled workers, university students, high-skilled temporary workers, and trainees. Canada, through a points system, promotes immigration as a national development strategy, trying to attract high-skilled immigrants to increase its human capital stock. In other words, it is about understanding how changes in migration flows and stocks affect labor markets, demographic trends, economic growth (through remittances), and human development.
How has the field of migration studies evolved within the political and disciplinary context of your country in recent years, particularly with regard to methodologies, research objects, and theoretical frameworks? What is the place of scientific knowledge in public debates on migration?
Migration studies in the United States, once marginal, have become central within the social sciences and law (Brettell and Hollifield, 2023). The first works date back to Ravenstein (1885), to early 20th century American sociology (Thomas and Znianiecki, 1918) and to the Chicago School (Park, 1930). The concept of assimilation that they developed has moved on to new models, inductive, positivist, and “behavioral”, as the “incorporation” model developed by Portes and Rumbaut (1990). Social demographers like Massey (1998) have also contributed to the definition of the field of migration studies, focusing on population dynamics, the model, the direction of flows, and the characteristics of migrants (age, sex, profession, education, etc.). Regarding economists, they rely on conventional social science approaches (positivist and hypothetico-deductive), focusing on rationalist and utilitarianist theories of human behavior. Their research questions are formulated in terms of scarcity, cost-benefit analysis and rational choice. They focus on the reasons why some individuals migrate while others do not, paying particular attention to selectivity in order to determine what migration means for the societies of origin and host societies. The macroeconomic perspective explores what immigrants add to the economy of the host society (in terms of wealth, income, skills, etc.), what emigrants remove from the economy of their society of origin (in terms of human capital, etc.), what they send in exchange in the form of financial transfers, and what the net gains and losses are. From a macroeconomic point of view, economists consider migrants as “utility maximizers” who evaluate opportunities in terms of cost-benefit analysis and act accordingly. These two perspectives have generated debate about winners and losers in labor markets where migrants are present, on the impact of immigration on public finances, on entrepreneurship and innovation and on the social mobility of immigrants. So many questions that economists share with sociologists. These two disciplines have undoubtedly created a common language, for lack of a unique theoretical framework or a unified field of study.
The research programs of American sociologists and economists, mainly focused on the action and experience of migrants, have been exported first to Canada and Australia, then to the United Kingdom, making this field even more “Anglocentric”. Dominant paradigms of ethnic and racial relations, of acculturation, of assimilation, of ethnic entrepreneurship, integrated in a vast framework of “global systems” have been exported to Western Europe, which had an important impact on the development of migration studies in the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia and, a bit later, in France and in Southern Europe. Europe went from an emigration continent (in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century) to an immigration land after the Second World War, it is not surprising that European migration specialists turned to American and British theories to formulate their research questions and hypotheses.
A large number of the new European countries of immigration have faced the legacy of imperialism and post-colonialism, which makes the American paradigm of assimilation and acculturation inappropriate. This tension is particularly evident in countries with a long imperial history. However, in Northern Europe, concerns about social contract and viability of the welfare state tended to dominate migration studies. Little attention has been given to the impact of European migration on indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa and Australia, for example. These gaps make history and anthropology particularly important in the study of migrations, to move beyond a narrow focus on migrants' action within the dominant paradigm (Western) of economic sociology and demography, to consider broader historical, structural (institutional) and transnational forces in the population movements.
The main challenge of migration studies may be to “bring the state and politics back into” our theoretical and analytic frameworks, which have been highly centered on society. With the rise of reactionary populism, nationalism, nativism and new forms of “scientific racism”, migration policy has reached a turning point. Radical-right politics reject decades of research on the economics of migration (immigrants are being accused of stealing jobs from native workers), integration of immigrants (immigrants are accused of being responsible for crime, terrorism, insecurity and a lack of “wish to assimilate”), migration and development (refugees and asylum seekers are considered to be a burden). Symbolic politics (pressure exerted on the Trump administration to build a wall along the southern border of the United States) have taken precedence over the realities of migration: Mexico has experienced a demographic transition and the migration balance to the United States is negative since 2007.
How would you characterize the current publishing landscape in your country in the field of migration studies? What types of journals, formats, or readerships presently structure the circulation of knowledge in this domain?
With the web, social media and the rise of artificial intelligence, publication in all study fields has become more fluid and the maintenance of high standards in terms of scientific research is more important than ever. Migration studies are embedded in this publishing revolution, but it seems that the major presses and journals have largely managed these changes well, without compromising the editorial standards, and while making many publications free to access.
How do you engage, in your research, with emerging modes of publishing and “journal-making” (open access, artificial intelligence, etc.)?
This revolution has permitted the improvement of the scientific discourse while democratizing access to the recent research findings. However, the question is whether the recent research findings are effectively and quickly translated into policy innovations, which is often not the case. With the politicization of immigration, policymakers from both the right and the left choose to ignore the best scientific research in this field, and to choose what is the most opportune from an electoral point of view.
