Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice 9780773588820

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mobilities, knowledge, and social justice

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Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice Edited by suzan ilcan

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-7735-4129-0 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4175-7 (paper) 978-0-7735-8882-0 (ePDF) 978-0-7735-8883-7 (ePUB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the University of Windsor. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication   Mobilities, knowledge, and social justice / edited by Suzan Ilcan. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4129-0 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4175-7 (pbk.).– ISBN 978-0-7735-8882-0 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8883-7 (ePUB)   1. Social mobility. 2. Social justice. 3. Access to knowledge movement. I. Ilcan, Suzan, 1960–, editor of compilation HT612.M62 2013   305.5'13

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Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

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Contents

Introduction: Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice  3 Suzan Ilcan part one  

fr ames of belonging

1 Contending Frames of ‘Security’ and ‘Citizenship’: Lebanese Dual Nationals during the 2006 Lebanon War  25 Daiva Stasiulis 2 Knowledge, Gender, and Changing Mobility Regimes: Women Migrants in Europe  59 Eleonore Kofman and Parvati Raghuram 3 Mundane Cosmopolitanism, Mobility, and Social Justice: A NeoDurkheimian Approach  76 Ronjon Paul Datta 4 Integrating High-Tech Immigrants and Temporary Workers in Canada’s New Economy: Structural Limitations to Mobilities  103 Lloyd Wong and Karl Froschauer part t wo  

governance and e x pertise

5 Mobility Regimes: The Short Life and Times of North America’s Security and Prosperity Partnership  131 Janine Brodie 6 Mobile Citizens, Risky Subjects: Security Knowledge at the Border 152 Kim Rygiel

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7 Paradoxes of Humanitarian Aid: Mobile Populations, Biopolitical Knowledge, and Acts of Social Justice in Osire Refugee Camp  177 Suzan Ilcan 8 Payday Loans: Assembling the Immobile Subject of Fringe Credit  207 Rob Aitken 9 Geographical Indications, Mobility, and Identity  227 Daniel Gorman part three  

c ounter - movement s

10 Justice for Migrants: Mobilizing a Rights-Based Understanding of Migration 255 Tanya Basok and Nicola Piper 11 Critical Mass, Global Mobilities, and the Haudenosaunee: Struggles for Cultural Autonomy  277 William D. Coleman and Theresa McCarthy 12 International Copyright Law, Access to Knowledge, and Social Justice 300 Myra Tawfik 13 ICTs as a Catalyst for Social Justice? A Capabilities Perspective  320 Daniel J. Paré and Sandra Smeltzer 14 Mobilizing for Development: Promises, Perils, and Policy Implications of M4D 340 Leslie Regan Shade 15 Symbolic Knowledge Mobilities and Biopolitical Governmentalities of Resistance of Solomon Islands’ Pipol Fastaem  361 Anita Lacey 16 Mobility, Human Rights Activism, and International Intervention in Darfur 377 Amanda Grzyb Afterword 397 Suzan Ilcan References 407 Acknowledgments 489 Contributors 491 Index 493

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mobilities, knowledge, and social justice

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Introduction Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice

suzan ilcan

The scale and scope of the mobility of people, ideas, objects, information, and capital have reached levels unprecedented in human history. Such forms of mobility manifest themselves in continuing advances in transportation and communication capacities, in the growing use of digital, risk-profiling, and biometric technologies, in the movements of indigenous, migrant, and women’s groups, and in the expansion of global capitalism into more and more parts of the world. Indeed, mobility issues are at centre stage in debates and controversies ranging from modes of belonging to border security measures, from gender, race, and class matters to governance and international trade, and from immigration policies to human, citizenship, and migrant rights. Over the past several decades, we have witnessed new and familiar forms of mobility in the forms of movement of people (human mobility), social networks and relations (social mobility), trade and capital (economic mobility), and information and images (symbolic mobility). Alongside the escalating popularity of global mobility, millions of people are seeking mobility for work and pleasure, while others are fleeing war, famine, and persecution and becoming displaced refugees, immigrants, and migrants. An increasing penetration of information and images into the collective consciousness of people across the world is emerging through print, visual, and online media. The fall of various regimes and the emergence of new political forces are contributing to the rise of new classes and perspectives on mobility in new states, such as those of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. An escalating intensification of migration and border controls is inhibiting the travel of particular

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groups while simultaneously fostering dynamic enactments that challenge border and citizenship practices. With these new and familiar forms of mobility, new types of knowledge flowing from specialized training and professional university education – technical, legal, and scientific forms of “credentials-based” or “expert” knowledge and other types of knowledge (embodied, indigenous, popular, subjugated) – are emerging, exchanging, and entering into circulation. Actors participating in and seeking these passages of exchange and distribution deploy different types of knowledge to negotiate their status and identities. Those in a good situation to benefit from credentials-based or expert knowledge do rather well, such as development strategy experts in powerful organizations. The extent and form of this type of knowledge often permit its users to legitimize and authorize their interventions for producing classifications of difference between, for example, people and places. However, those who are marginal to this knowledge, such as colonized populations, displaced peoples, and “risky” citizens, can face increasingly new injustices that correspond with the concentration and dispersion of power in multiple sites and through institutional practices across the world. Yet the sharing of information and ideas, and the coming together of people in certain cultural and political sites, hold considerable potential for democratizing knowledge and thus for challenging the concentration of power and formulating policies and practices that address these injustices. Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice is a valuable and timely collection that aims to produce novel research analyses by examining emergent and familiar forms of mobility that depend on or generate specific types of knowledge – what I call the “mobility-knowledge nexus.” This kind of nexus concerns the interrelations between forms of mobility and types of knowledge, interrelations that have been rarely studied and never analysed in the context of social justice and its related issues, controversies, and demands. As such, it encompasses the manifold ways in which people can harness certain types of knowledge to frame their belonging to a place, nation, and space as well as to make political decisions and justify and legitimate new and common arrangements of mobilities at local, regional, national, or international scales. It also comprises various forms of mobility and immobility that rely on or incite specific types of knowledge and that diverse groups can employ from different political vantage points. The mobility-knowledge nexus has crucial implications for social justice, that is, for a more equitable distribution of economic and social resources, inclusive political participation, and acceptance

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of diverse cultural expressions arising from various groups in societies across the globe. In this regard, this edited collection has two overriding objectives. The first is to understand the nature and the scope of the social and political processes underlying the mobility-knowledge nexus. The second is to examine the challenges to and opportunities for realizing social justice emerging from new and familiar relationships between mobility and knowledge. As we see below, the chapters in this volume, as a group, address these objectives from critical perspectives and shared often from theoretical and methodological orientations. The collection concentrates on the key concepts of mobilities, knowledge, and social justice and the constellation of core ideas (belonging, governance and expertise, and counter-movements) that the chapters explore. It acknowledges the meanings associated with its key concepts. The concept of mobility remains fundamental in the social and human sciences (e.g., Conradson and Latham 2005; Gibson 2007; Hyndman 2004; Sheller and Urry 2006; Squire 2011; Urry 2007, 2010). In broad terms, mobility refers to changes in the position or disposition of people, goods, and images in relation to belonging, place, space, and identity. It includes the large-scale movement of people, capital, and information and the local processes of the daily travel of goods and objects through space. Issues of mobility, including too little, too much, and the “wrong kind,” are essential to many peoples’ lives, organizations, and governments (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006:1). Several not-for-profit, nongovernmental, private, and government organizations are seeking to distinguish, scrutinize, or transform mobilities, such as when governing organizations prevent people from passing through enclosure and entrapment (see also Shamir 2005; Turner 2007). These activities situate these organizations and these people within particular constellations of mobility and politics. One can explore such constellations in fields ranging from border control sites and deportation campaigns, through the expulsion of non-citizens and the migration of dual citizens, to the irregular movements of people. For example, Vicki Squire views the politics of mobility through an analytical frame of ‘irregularity,’ a condition that is produced both through the movements and activities of national, transnational, or international agencies and through the movements and activities of migrants and citizens (2011:8). She introduces the notion of ‘mobilizing politics’ in the dual sense of politicizing mobility through examining how the movement of people (such as ‘irregular’ migrants) is constituted as both an object and subject of politics and of rendering politics

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mobile through exploring how the irregular movements and activities of people entail a shift in what it means to be political (2011:5). In these and other constellations of mobility and politics, increasingly at issue are the ways in which work, security, policing, and other practices shape the irregular movements of people and how mobility transforms and shapes conditions of social and political action at local, national, regional, and international levels (e.g., Appadurai 2006; Coutin 2011; Luke 2003). In such contexts, specific forms and practices of mobility can constrain the movements of some groups (Ahmed 1999; Grueso and Arroyo 2005), accelerate the movements of other groups and things within and across national borders (e.g., De Genova and Peutz eds. 2010; O’Connor 2009; Sassen 2006), produce memories of displacement by diasporic peoples (e.g., Clifford 1997; Ilcan 2002; Shamir 2005), and embody spaces for the policing of certain actors, objects, and processes which can in turn foster forms of social and political insecurity (Huysmans 1995; Isin 2008a; Muller 2009; Walters 2006) as well as inequalities, injustices, and social justice movements. Forms of mobility can also enable an understanding of, for example, those “immobile infrastructures” that arrange the irregular flow of people, goods, and information that organizes the borders or ‘gates’ that limit and direct movement or anticipated movement (Sheller and Urry 2006:212), and that involve diverse actors, institutions, policies, practices, ideas, and spaces (see, for example, Amoore 2006; Mountz 2011). There are many sites of increasing concern in this regard, such as the endless sites of emergencies that, as Agier notes, materialize as hundreds of African refugee camps form and as the massive displacement of populations emerges and signals war, famine, or violence. As these forms of mobility and immobility continue, he suggests that refugee camps are gated sites to keep vulnerable refugees alive and to “park and guard all kinds of undesirable populations” (2011:3). He recalls the diversification of camp forms, the widening of frontier zones, the increased control of ‘wandering populations,’ and thereby the reification of “a clean, healthy and visible world” on the one hand and “the world’s residual ‘remnants’, dark, diseased and invisible” on the other (2011:4). Thus, here and elsewhere, new and familiar forms of mobility and immobility can foster understandings of diverse worlds, such as those forms that highlight ideas of: belonging and citizenship (e.g., ­Castles and ­Davidson 2000; De Genova and Peutz, eds., 2010), governance and expertise (e.g., Diken and Laustsen 2002; Escobar 2001; Sparke 2004), and counter-­ movements flowing from social p ­articipation and rights activities

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(C. Gould 2004; Schaffer and Smith 2004) and demands for social justice (e.g., Coutin 2003; Harvey 2001, 2007). Yet to examine the mobility-knowledge nexus requires, for example, investigating how particular forms of mobility (and immobility) depend on specific types of knowledge, which in turn might emphasize technical and legal knowledge over more traditional types of knowledge belonging to communities. For example, the privileging of legal and scientific knowledge underscores the corpus of agreements that forms part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its denationalization of public policy (see Sassen 2006). Scholars working from various social, historical, and political vantage points have long disputed the concept of knowledge. Knowledge refers to a social or collective operation of generalization and the development of normative understandings, habits, fields, and practices. It emerges when this collective operation engages in relating and exchanging data and information, which necessarily change in that process. The contributions in this book do not so much deal with what knowledge means as explain types of knowledge and thus articulate the diverse ways in which individuals and groups can come to view and understand the worlds in which they live.1 Such understandings involve a disparate array of apparatuses, discourses of power, practices, procedures, spaces of action, and techniques for producing and engaging in specific types of knowledge (see, for example, Bishops and Phillips 2006; Coombe 2003). The plural noun “knowledges” alerts us to how specific types of knowledge, such as scientific or legal, implicate themselves in the hierarchies of value that can legitimate ways of knowing as “expert” (Carr 2010) and can embody a form of cultural imperialism deriving from ideas about the “professional,” the “expert,” and “expertise” (Kothari 2005:427). These types of knowledge can also shape particular forms of mobility and serve as a catalyst for social transformations, such as the industrial and scientific revolutions. Scholars interested in the mobility-knowledge nexus might benefit from asking questions about the various ways in which legal, policy, and security experts, as well as everyday people, mobilize knowledge to enable or control mobility. For example, certain types of knowledge intrinsic in diverse state and immigration policies link to actors and agencies who can shape the movements of labourers, such as female workers from the global South who provide care in the global North, and to the type of employment they obtain in particular markets and countries (see, for example, Kofman and Raghuram 2006; Razavi 2007). On a broader

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scale, there are specific types of knowledge inherent in border-security and surveillance systems, and asylum and immigration policies, that connect to expansive social and intelligence networks and serve powerful actors and agencies who seek to control the flow of travellers, refugees, terrorist suspects, or citizens within and across nation-states (see Dillon 2004; Muller 2011; Salter 2003, 2008; Wang 2004; Wood and Graham 2006). In these processes, official documents, such as passports, and biometric information can have “high truth-claim” (B. Anderson 1998) regarding individuals’ identity and can sustain a governing system of power asymmetries afflicting mobile populations (see Bigo 2000; Nyers 2011:187; Squire ed. 2011). The European Union (EU) provides a good example in this regard. While it has placed the right to mobility at the core of its constitution (the freedom of movement of citizens, tourists, business people), it has used expert forms of security and surveillance knowledge to prevent certain mobile populations from entering into its borders, such as illegal immigrants, migrants, or refugees (Cresswell 2006:233–4). These and other similar types of security and surveillance knowledge employed to control mobile populations may influence some migrants to shift the points of access across jagged borderlines, which can lead them, as Papastergiadis (2010:349) suggests, to adopt dangerous sea or land journeys that proceed towards their intended destination via the less regulated ‘third’ territories. In this regard, Cresswell’s point about the importance of keeping “notions of fixity, stasis and immobility in mind” is crucial. Even though “there is a temptation to think of a mobile world as something that replaces a world of fixities,” he claims that “we need to constantly consider the politics of obduracy, fixity and friction” (2010:29). These and other relations connecting to the mobility-­knowledge nexus highlight fundamental issues of social justice. A wide range of scholars, trade union and civil society advocates, policy personnel, and others have discussed and contested the concept of social justice. They have applied it to interrogate the effects of cultural, economic, social, and technological processes on human lives and human conditions and to shape legislation, public policy, and the behaviour of a wide range of groups and populations (e.g., Fraser 1995; D.  Miller 1999; A. Smith, Stenning, and Willis, eds. 2008). In broad terms, social justice refers to the demand for fairness and equity by various groups in societies across the globe. This description encourages an examination of the social justice demands that emerge from the mobility-knowledge nexus. Diverse legal and other authorities circulating knowledge on who belongs to particular territories and nation-states

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and on what ­constitutes appropriate rights and for whom are creating new obstacles to full-fledged human and citizenship rights. Some forms of mobility, such as social and symbolic, have created opportunities for ordinary people to contest monopolies of expert knowledge, such as policy authorities that fail to address large-scale social inequality or that engage in gender discrimination and racial profiling. These kinds of contestations continue to emerge in collectives such as indigenous, migrant, and women’s movements, citizenship and environmental coalitions, anti-poverty and human rights groups, and other “mobilized groupings” (Cloke, M ­ ilbourne, and ­Widdowfield 2003; Urry 2000a). In varying intensities, such social justice movements have formed counter-­ movements. Although such counter-movements often have different goals (see Harvey 1973, 2001), they frequently call for greater acknowledgment of “counter” knowledge for mounting collective action (e.g., Brah 2002; Kenyon, Lyons, and Rafferty 2002), group rights and recognition claims (Fraser 2005; Fraser and Honneth 2005; Young 1990), and increasing social, environmental, and political change. The political spaces in which these actions occur often involve a complex terrain that is shaped by ideas of belonging, practices of citizenship, the social and cultural positioning of diverse groups, and the aims and strategies of actors (see Isin ed. 2008; Staeheli 2008). In this book, the approach to social justice takes into consideration not only the challenges to and opportunities for the resolution of injustice in periods of enhanced mobility, but also how diverse social and political groups demand social justice and how the mobility-knowledge nexus influences this demand. Mobilities across the globe have disrupted and transformed social and political relations as well as the ways that researchers have understood and studied them. The mobility of peoples, governing practices, and forms of political activism have prompted a “mobility turn” (Buscher and Urry 2009; Cresswell 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007) in the humanities and social sciences. This gestalt shift has led to a focus on new relations of power, visions of social justice, and unintended and surfacing properties that avoid established disciplinary boundaries, conceptual models, and governing paradigms. It enables an understanding of material worlds that is sensitive to processes of instability, to unexpected time-space movements that challenge notions of equilibrium (Urry 2007; Urry and Elliot 2010), to practices of belonging and displacement that distinguish a diverse range of diasporic, migrant, and citizenship relations and conflicts (Maurer 2012; Sheller 2004, 2007), and to issues of power, inequality, rights, and social justice (see, e.g., Cresswell 2006; Harvey 2007).

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In responding to these critical challenges, this interdisciplinary collection (which includes anthropology, communications, gender, geography, history, law, migration, politics, and sociology) brings together an innovative cluster of research under three core ideas or parts. Each of the core ideas facilitates a consideration of what is at stake in the mobility-­ knowledge nexus. Part I, “Frames of Belonging,” examines human mobility in the context of ideas of belonging and the prioritization and regulation of specific types of knowledge that generate new forms of social inclusion and exclusion as well as ambivalences. Part II, “Governance and Expertise,” looks at how sites of mobility and knowledge inform the character and governance of forms of mobilities, which in turn raise questions and issues concerning social justice. Part III, “Countermovements,” considers how various types of knowledge, including subordinate and emergent types, provide the basis for counter-movements that challenge the divisions and inequalities associated with contemporary forms of mobilities while offering new approaches to understanding social justice. The three parts remain comparatively close to issues relating to the mobility turn in social sciences and humanities research. In this regard, the volume makes a strong and extensive interdisciplinary contribution to the diverse fields that emerge out of or link to the mobility turn. In it, we find issues ranging from matters of travel, migration, citizenship, and border control, through issues of development and market politics, through the political and socio-economic issues that arise from the emergence and proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), to a broad range of concerns about knowledge, such as intellectual property rights and international trade agreements, and the accompanying issues of struggles and resistance. The three parts highlight specific events, policies, discourses, practices, sites, and transformations that, in varying degrees, relate to the mobility-­ knowledge nexus and its implications for social justice. As such, the collection shows how both policy, legal, and security experts and community members are redefining mobility (see, for example, chapters 1, 5, 6, 7, and 14 in this volume). It also reveals how certain individuals and social groups can enable and shape aspects of mobility in three sets of conditions: I when frames of belonging influence human mobility (see, for example, chapters 1, 2, and 3) and social mobility (chapter 4 and others in other parts) in gendered, racialized, classed, or institutional fields that privilege certain types of knowledge

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II when notions of governance and expertise shape mobile ideas, goods, and information (chapters 5, 6, 8, and 9) as well as control mobile groups while these groups respond through demands for social and political change and social justice (see, for example, chapters 6, 7, and 8 and others in other parts) III when counter-movements emerge through the actions of marginalized or mobile groups (see chapters 11, 15, and 16), the use of communication technologies (chapters 13 and 14), and rightsbased approaches (see, for example, chapters 10 and 12) These new and familiar understandings of mobility draw on specific empirical sites and case studies that investigate emergent and familiar forms of the mobility-knowledge nexus. In this work, the authors offer diverse critical insights and analyses variously in anthropology, communications, geography, history, legal studies, political science, and sociology literatures. They situate their research in a range of national, regional, and international fields, including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Latin America, Lebanon, Namibia, Solomon Islands, Sudan, and the United States. At the same time, the authors here share theoretical and methodological orientations, including critical political and sociological views deriving from the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Michel Foucault, and Saskia Sassen, and tend to focus on questions surrounding social justice and accompanying literatures, including the work of such political philosophers as Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Jürgen Habermas, and Amartya Sen. The chapters of Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice, while explicating their authors’ interests and specialization, elucidate the mobility-­ knowledge nexus and its social justice implications from historical, comparative, and contemporary vantage points. In this edited collection, the analysis spotlights how diverse forms of mobility, such as economic, human, social, and symbolic, depend on and engender explicit and, at times, new types of knowledge. What is revealing is how some forms of mobility generate specific types of knowledge, how in turn knowledge shapes patterns of mobility, and how this mobility-knowledge nexus creates new challenges to and opportunities for the realization of social justice. These and other related issues are examined under the book’s three core ideas. This analytical focus provides an instructive occasion and imperative momentum for critical reconsiderations of mobility as a key term in the social sciences and humanities by delineating new ways of

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understanding how mobility informs and shapes lives as well as social, cultural, and political relations within, across, and beyond states. pa rt i : f r a m e s o f b e l o n g i n g

Social and political ideas of belonging often provide ways of viewing the identities of particular groups, such as dual nationals and irregular migrants, and of simultaneously producing categories of peoples who do and do not belong (Isin, ed. 2002, 2008; McNevin 2011; Nyers 2011). These ideas habitually articulate the racialized, orientalized, gendered, classed, and sexualized lives of groups of people in and as they move through communities and territories across the globe. In fact, human mobility is increasingly framed by ideas of belonging and by the formation and regulation of specific types of knowledge that engender new forms of social inclusion and exclusion as well as ambivalences. Daiva Stasiulis, in chapter 1, on Lebanese dual nationals during the 2006 war, investigates contending frames of security and citizenship obligations of states from the vantage point of mobile subjects, namely dual nationals who negotiate their lives on the basis of their dual citizenship in wartorn Lebanon and “secure and peaceful” Australia and Canada during the military hostility between Israel and Hezbollah in summer 2006, in which many countries sought safe exit for their holidaying and resident nationals. Through an analytical focus on belonging and security knowledge, Stasiulis stresses the complex and detailed narratives of dual citizens caught up in an unexpected war who respond under direct threat of war. The experiences of Lebanese Canadians and Lebanese Australians reveal the heterogeneity of the concept of dual citizen. Their sense of belonging in and to Lebanon and of defiance against seemingly limited external military aggression hindered their efforts to join the assisted departure by the government of their other citizenship. Their knowledge of micro-geographies, of which areas were safe and of when and where to sojourn as violence escalated, helped them stay safe during the 34 days of violence. While citizenship in “safe” Western countries places them in the privileged side of the global citizenship divide, their history as racialized, orientalized peoples in these settler societies positions them on the other side – feared and widely regarded as risks to national security. According to Stasiulis, birth in Australia or Canada increased their attachment to those landscapes and cultures, but was no guarantee of a sense of belonging or acceptance.

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In chapter 2, Eleonore Kofman and Parvati Raghuram examine how gender shapes particular kinds of mobility regimes in Europe that constitute who belongs and who does not and immobilizes some women immigrants more than others. They focus on gender differences: men are inexplicably present in the less regulated sectors and in more fluid mobility, and disproportionate numbers of women are in the more regulated and spatially restricted sectors. The authors show how the national – global interface interacts with a dominant European regime of mobility, knowledge transfer, and citizenship. They highlight the specific kinds of knowledge that a knowledge economy recognizes and show how gender acts to stratify opportunities there for migrant women. Knowledge itself mobilizes different spatial imaginaries, and gender offers one vector of stratification, often alongside others such as race and nationality, to influence migrant women’s experiences. In conceptualizing the effects of changing mobility regimes, Kofman and Raghuram illuminate the gender-neutral representation of knowledge and gendered valuation of skills. The filter of knowledge, gender, and mobility shapes not only the selection of migrants into Europe but also their labour market outcomes. The authors remind us that the social justice implications of current closures and openings may result in a partial return to the gendered patterns of the 1990s but with greater gender equality occurring in Europe. Ronjon Paul Datta’s essay in chapter 3 examines Durkheim’s views of cosmopolitanism, infrastructure, collective knowledge, and the forms of solidarity and belonging that have emerged from social life in global cities. For Datta, cosmopolitan social life is a form of solidarity, belonging, and normative regulation, which he refers to as “mundane cosmopolitanism.” The concept underscores the commonalities found in global cities and the conditions that integrate, regulate, and facilitate people’s mobilities and their everyday navigational know-how – how they reach work, school, leisure activities, and home. These forms of mundane coordination involve a routinized mobility and small-scale, logistical calculations for daily social life and moving oneself, others, and things around. The author suggests that contemporary articulations of a new social morphology in global cities, combining with a global division of labour, reflect a new form of solidarity that can provide real social effectiveness to projects aiming for a new kind of social justice. In chapter 4, Lloyd Wong and Karl Froschauer look at the mobility of high-technology and temporary workers in Canada. Many of these migrants are from Asia, particularly from India and China, and their

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transnational mobility is geographical-economic (avenues and circulation of capital) and social (movement up the job/occupation ladder) and as such is subject to both facilitation and constraint. Through a focus on the high-tech sector, Wong and Froschauer demonstrate the political and economic challenges that shape these migrants’ belonging to certain kinds of employment based on gender and ethnicity, influence their access to mobility and specific types of knowledge, and raise critical implications for social justice. pa rt i i : g o v e r n a n c e a n d e x p e rt i s e

Transforming political and cultural economies as well as the relations between territories often introduces distinct governing practices and new types of expert knowledge, new kinds of subjects, and new forms of inequalities in mobility, identity, and citizenship relations that threaten social justice. Contemporary debates regarding governing regimes, technologies, and organizations provide valuable insights into the political and social dynamics underscoring the mobility-knowledge nexus. Part II analyses the relations that connect forms of mobility to types of knowledge expertise and how these relations shape practices, borders, policies, populations, citizens, and identities and, in the process, raise questions of social justice. These chapters draw our attention to multiple scales of governance. They also reveal that certain forms of mobilities and expert types of knowledge influence economic, security, border, and humanitarian spaces, foster immobilities, link notions of risk to certain citizens, and generate new cultural identities. In chapter 5, Janine Brodie looks at North America’s Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) in the light of the Canadian experience and the author’s view of mobility as being a product of dominant discourses, technologies, governing practices, and, above all, inequalities in social and political power. Her analysis argues that the SPP represented an “experimental mobility regime” to regularize the continent as a discrete economic and security space within a progressively more fluid global economy and to advance its spatial imaginaries and processes of regularization, which resulted in a fragmented and partial post-national governing order. Its strategic actors engaged in reflexive practices to better position themselves in relation to the new geographies of regulation that the SPP helped inscribe on North American space. For Brodie, this mobility regime was complex and emphasized that mobility and immobility are in the thrall of expert forms of knowledge about the risks

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Introduction 15

and benefits of the movement of people and things, the categorization of lawful and unlawful movement, and the deployment of surveillance and regulatory practices. It involved three distinct dimensions – a spatial imaginary, regularization, and reflexivity, which, among other things, would enable the SPP to de-border and then re-border North America without changing formal territorial boundaries. Through these kinds of border movements, the SPP had ambitions similar to the European Union project that was influenced by expert forms of knowledge and began almost a half-century before. Although the SPP was short-lived, Brodie alerts us to the results of its security agenda, such as the intensification of securitization expertise, which regularizes an increasingly refined set of conditions for movement and entry of people into the United States rather than North America per se. Chapter 6, by Kim Rygiel, on security knowledge at the border, examines the growing prevalence of expert knowledge at international borders in terms of two examples of techno-scientific knowledge: risk management and biopolitical knowledge. Highly industrialized countries, such as Canada, the United States, and Britain, she tells us, invest in intelligence-­driven border control programs that depend on risk profiling, data aggregation, and biometric technologies. These technologies privilege mathematical forms of knowledge as a basis for verifying identity and authorizing mobility. Using risk-profiling technologies, for example, risk management potentially sidesteps the promise of equal mobility rights of all citizens, since citizenship is no longer their guarantor. Increasingly, mobility comes to depend on one’s ability to prove oneself a trustworthy and thus low-risk citizen. In the analysis of expert knowledge at the border and the mobility of Canadian citizens, Rygiel introduces the term “mobile citizen” – the dual or transnational citizen who may be on the move for reasons of work, travel, or family, for whom mobility renders citizenship precarious. She highlights cases of Canadian citizens, particularly those of Middle Eastern nationality and/or Muslim religious or cultural background, who have become precarious because of the authorities’ use of risk management and biopolitical knowledge at the border. Far from being simply a technical means of administering mobility, their uses have their own logics of governing that can generate new forms of unequal citizenship and mobility rights that are antithetical to social justice. In chapter 7, Suzan Ilcan’s examination of humanitarian aid looks at political objectives and governmental programs to control mobile populations, such as refugees. She suggests that humanitarian aid operates

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as an assemblage of governing practices that targets populations and produces hierarchical classifications for optimizing the life of mobile populations, a form of power and knowledge she terms “biopolitical knowledge mobilities.” She presents a genealogy of humanitarian aid that emphasizes expert solutions to the abiding ‘problems’ of mobile populations and analyses an international biopolitical space in rural Namibia. The Osire Refugee Camp had been a detention centre under South African apartheid, and in 1992 the government of Namibia repurposed it to house refugees from neighbouring Angola during the civil war there. Through an analysis of archival, policy, media, and aid documents, Ilcan argues that the camp has survived the conflict as a mobile field for shaping the ties between care and authority and for circulating and transforming the life of populations through biopolitical knowledge mobilities. Yet this space, she informs us, also fosters “acts of social justice” that challenge humanitarian interventions – demands by refugees, and those who support their struggles and initiatives, for rights, recognition, and new modes of relations to bring about change within, across, and beyond camp spaces. Chapter 8, by Rob Aitken, investigates payday lending – an expensive and formalized source of short-term credit. Unlike the kinds of practices in liberalized financial markets, this is not so much a technology of the self as a “regime of immobility.” Emerging on a large scale only since 1990, it has expanded rapidly across and beyond the Anglo-American world. Aitken views the practice, increasingly an integral part of global circuits of capital, as enmeshing financially distressed populations in high-cost credit. He focuses on its construction, its formalization or legitimatization in Canada in recent legislative and regulatory changes, the heavy burdens it imposes on people least able to afford it, and its emergence as a governing process that immobilizes people. He shows how it closes off access to reasonable sources of mainstream credit. A decentralized but concerted network of financial specialists, auditors, consultants, statisticians, lawyers, and academics, all claiming particular forms of knowledge expertise, formalizes the resulting immobilities. For Aitken, their regime is the effect of a specific assemblage of expertise and practice that has been the subject of debate and contestation from various social justice groups, including consumer rights advocates and antipoverty activists, who seek new channels of mobility for fringe credit clients. The assemblage of fringe credit is not only a local or discrete process but simultaneously both political and politically urgent, raising critical issues of social justice.

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Daniel Gorman’s chapter 9 assesses the historical development and current use of geographical indications (GIs) – a broad array of intellectual property rights that identify a product with a particular geographical location – e.g., Champagne. They are the result of trade practices or government regulations, rather than of individual creative work. They are legal and cultural forms of knowledge designed to be globally mobile, but are resistant to change or adaptation by those outside the cultural group that creates them. Experts study GIs in relation to other forms of global intellectual property or as a component of the international trade regime, but, as Gorman stresses, communities around the world use them to preserve both cultural identity and economic autonomy. Notable in this context are governing agreements, such as the Lisbon Agreement (1958), the EU Council’s Regulation on the Protection of Geographical Indications and Designations of Origin for Agricultural Products and Foodstuffs (1992), and the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS agreement (1995). Gorman demonstrates that GIs have operated as a process of symbolic and economic mobility, and he examines the intersection of these two forms of mobility through a focus on the development of genericization. Additionally, he assesses how the use of GIs fosters social justice by encouraging a sense of social citizenship that enables cultural groups to uphold a sense of their identity in the face of the forces of global commodity capitalism. He reveals how GIs have developed as a uniquely mobile fusion of economic and social imperatives that draw on expert forms of knowledge and are enmeshed in various governing dimensions and political economies. pa rt i i i : c o u n t e r - m o v e m e n t s

The notion of counter-movements often highlights forms of activism at local, national, transnational, or international scales and emphasizes diverse ways of assessing the participation of groups, mobile populations, and grassroots organizations in movement campaigns. Like other forms of mobilization, counter-movements can form part of the building of emerging citizenship spaces and forms (see Nyers and Rygiel, eds., 2012) and of an imagined sense of collective identity (see, for example, A. Smith, Stenning, and Willis, eds. 2008). Contemporary debates on counter-movements and emergent forms of knowledge offer crucial insights into social, economic, and political relations that draw attention to questions of the mobility-knowledge nexus and matters of social

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justice. The chapters in part III focus on social participation and the mobilization of practices, flows, and rights in specific fields that stress the mobility-knowledge nexus and its implications for social justice. The analyses highlight several key issues of mobility, including international migration, global mobilities, international copyright law, technologically mediated information, mobile telephony, and citizenship and human rights activism. These issues link to specific types of knowledge (such as traditional, counter-hegemonic, and symbolic), to knowledge networks, and to the mobilization of social justice. In chapter 10, Tanya Basok and Nicola Piper articulate an understanding of migration, grounding it in rights. They examine migrants’ rights activism and their ties to the mobilization of knowledge and demands for social justice in national and transnational settings. They draw attention to how such activists question and transcend conventional understandings of citizenship and human rights. They focus on human mobility, mainly of people migrating across international borders in the search for work, and the ways in which this form of mobility helps generate and mobilize counter-hegemonic knowledge. The authors draw attention to three critical examples – mobilization of knowledge to change the Canadian temporary migration program and mobilization of transnational knowledge in the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) and the parallel gathering of People’s Global Action, which took place in 2009 in Athens, and in the transnational networks of organizations pushing for the rights of foreign domestic workers vis-à-vis a new International Labour Organization (ILO) convention. Basok and Piper reveal the importance of cleavages and ideological disagreements within the political environment that social movements aim to target and how national and global networks of migrant rights activists generate and mobilize counter-hegemonic knowledge for social justice. William Coleman and Theresa McCarthy’s chapter 11 focuses on the Haudenosaunee people who migrated from what is now upstate New York to the Grand River area in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Like other indigenous peoples in the Americas under attack by colonizing powers, they have faced long struggles to preserve the authority of their Confederacy government, their languages, ceremonies, and distinctive ways of knowing and being, and their cultural autonomy. The authors examine why, in the face of the globalization of modernity in new and intensive ways over the past twenty years, the Haudenosaunee have been able to resist assimilation more effectively. In assessing ideas that form part of contemporary globalization processes, they reveal how the new

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mobilities of people and information relating to indigenous community experiences across the world create new opportunities to revitalize dimensions of their language and culture. The authors demonstrate the Haudenosaunees’ recommitment to their culture, their languages, and their traditional knowledge (cognitive justice) and, with it, social justice. The analysis stresses their taking advantage of, and contributing to, the critical mass of indigenous activism that engages in alternative, non-neoliberal globalizations. Their participation therein has made them more aware of other indigenous peoples’ struggles and of their own similarities and differences vis-à-vis the strategies of other communities. As a consequence, they increasingly view themselves as working in partnership with indigenous peoples around the world who are asserting the right to their own knowledge, seeking to recover knowledge lost to colonialism, and demanding cognitive and social justice. In chapter 12, Myra Tawfik’s essay on international copyright law examines the modern construction of copyright as involving the mobilization and commodification of knowledge, the international trade agenda, and rights that holders can abuse at the expense of public access to knowledge. In the light of the historical record, where copyright law sought to advance learning and diffuse knowledge, Tawfik reveals the complexities of international copyright law in terms of primary legal materials, such as statutes and treaties, and archival and policy documents, showing how it encourages “copyright maximalism,” or rightsholders’ tendency to control global dissemination of their works. This trend has strengthened copyright rights without regard to the public interest in affordable access to knowledge, as in the aggressive U.S. and EU pursuit of bilateral trade treaties (e.g., the Australia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement and the U.S.–Chile Free Trade Agreement), where stringent copyright rights sidestep certain development issues. The author demonstrates that copyright maximalism continues to face challenges from multi-layered counter-hegemonic movements that believe in global access to knowledge and organize and form alliances and networks in order to resist the maximalist view. In chapter 13, Daniel Paré and Sandra Smeltzer explore information and communication technologies (ICTs), or “mobile machines” as Sheller and Urry (2006: 212) label them, in the context of narratives about the mobility-knowledge nexus and its implications for social justice. Rather than framing ICTs and their related infrastructures as artefacts that can foster progressive transformations and counter-movements to foment social justice, the authors challenge the techno-centrist view of ICTs as

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a means for achieving social justice. They move beyond an institutional understanding of social justice (which takes certain legal, regulatory, or technological arrangements as indicating the achievement of social justice) towards the notion that people’s lives shape social justice. Specifically, they examine the complex, dynamic relationship between ICTs, knowledge, and social justice. They ask how ICTs might most effectively enable people to lead lives they value and have reason to value. Drawing on the ideas of Sen and Alexander, they shift their focus away from technology per se towards the factors that affect people’s ability to harness ICTs’ benefits to enhance their well-being. Their insightful analysis presents social justice as being about how to design “society’s economic and political institutions in such a way that adequate material and social resources are available to everyone in order to possess and exercise a set of basic capabilities that go to make up a decent life” (Alexander 2008:2). To that end, they investigate how technologically mediated flows of information and knowledge influence social justice. Leslie Regan Shade, in chapter 14, considers the discourses on mobiles for development (M4D) and the kinds of social justice activities that they have engendered. She concentrates on the techno-optimistic and often techno-determinist claims of how mobiles reach people at the “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP) and of the inherent flexibility in organizing mobiles for social justice – that is, the design and deployment of mobile phones and their applications for social change in communities and their use to advocate politically at national and global levels. Shade questions the dominant discourses surrounding M4D, such as that of BOP, and asks whether social change is occurring. Through examination of select case studies and projects, she analyses how the mobile affects women, raises political awareness among individuals, and serves human rights. She demonstrates that the “mobility turn” flowing from mobile telephony, which allows new styles of communication on the move, can facilitate social justice and new forms of knowledge, while alerting diverse groups, such as women working in development and social justice activists, about mobile divides. Anita Lacey examines, in chapter 15, how Pipol Fastaem, a local NGO, uses information technology to implement development in Solomon Islands and explores the emergence of biopolitical governmentalities to resist these programs. Her analysis demonstrates that Pipol Fastaem implements knowledge mobilities via satellite communications hubs or mobile phones on some of the nation’s vast network of islands. Its users engage with these technologies according to their life circumstances and

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Introduction 21

own ideas of change and social justice and can challenge the advanced liberal programs of knowledge mobilization of international donors. The resulting challenges forge immediate and virtual spaces of resistance that focus on social justice. The case study highlights not only how technologies interact, but also how they engage with individuals and communities to affect biopolitical governmentalities, or the ways that direct intrusion into notions of life and its conduct controls people’s lives. For Lacey, this engagement demonstrates “symbolic knowledge mobilities” – the role of fluid interactions by and between Pipol Fastaem as an organization, its members, its users, its funders, and its technologies. These mobilities build on the idea that “being mobile” involves travel and on people’s interaction with each other. People exchange, produce, consume, and act on such mobilities, which in turn shape their lives. The author reveals that Solomon Islanders who participate in the open communication spaces that Pipol Fastaem affords can establish their own knowledge mobility needs and outcomes, engage in the social justice potential of diverse practices, and actively shape their spaces of participation. Chapter 16, by Amanda Grzyb, examines the relationship between crimes against humanity, human mobility, and social justice in Darfur, Sudan, and the symbolic mobility of information, ideas, and images about Darfur. These intersections, the author argues, influence the international community’s understanding of the Darfur crisis and shape actions by international agencies, the United Nations Security Council, the International Criminal Court, and individual governments. Grzyb looks first at how the anti-genocide movement uses new communication technologies and popular media to mobilize Western shame and garner celebrity support. She demonstrates that the world’s failure to prevent genocide relates directly to the translation of information, images, and ideas across national, geographical, and ideological boundaries, or “symbolic mobility.” Advocates employ images of suffering and statesponsored violence to mobilize the public to support a unified and decisive international response. The author maintains that symbolic forms of mobility – which can flow both from traditional government, corporate, bureaucratic, and credentials-based sources and from less traditional counter-movements or individual activists – is critical for social and economic equity, citizenship rights, and freedom of expression, or, more broadly, social justice. Grzyb demonstrates the ways in which activists have helped the West to visualize atrocities and have forced mobility in Darfur using interactive topographies and animations of displacement

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and destruction. She raises crucial questions about the structural barriers that prevent activists, governments, and members of the international community from translating expert knowledge about crimes against humanity into understanding, and understanding into tangible, meaningful action to protect civilians at the mercy of their own governments. In this collection, we see that the concepts of mobility, knowledge, and social justice are increasingly essential to understanding the complexities of a world of practices, spatializations, enactments, and contestations to established forms of ordering that underscore the book’s core ideas. The contributors examine the mobility-knowledge nexus, particularly how the use of certain types of knowledge serve as a basis for framing belonging to a place, nation, and space (see chapters 1–4, part I) and for making political decisions, justifications, and legitimations about the movements between and across imagined and securitized territories (see chapters 5, 6, and 9). The writers also illuminate the mobility–knowledge nexus in terms of ways in which certain mobile groupings rely on and incite specific types of knowledge in different ways and from different political vantage points (see in particular chapters 6–9 in part II). This analysis demonstrates critical implications for social justice and for understanding the significance of counter-movements (see chapters 10–16, part III). As we see in the chapters that follow and in the Afterword, the collection advances knowledge on new and familiar mobilities, relations of power, visions of social justice, and emergent properties that challenge and elude established conceptual models. It also offers critical implications for advanced research – across several interdisciplinary fields, in diverse academic and policy terrains, and around the globe – on the fundamental relations and complex intersections between mobility and knowledge and how they generate issues about and demands for social justice.

note

1 A vast number of studies view the concept of knowledge in this regard. See, for example: Agrawal 2005; Bigo 2006; Merry 2006; Stehr 2005; Tsing 2005; Valverde 2003; Walby et al. 2009.

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Frames of Belonging

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1 Contending Frames of ‘Security’ and ‘Citizenship’ Lebanese Dual Nationals during the 2006 Lebanon War

d a i va s ta s i u l i s

introduction

Conventional discourses in security studies construct refugees and migrants from countries experiencing military violence and political upheaval as threats to state sovereignty. Indeed, they frequently place these people on a par with vile, border-crossing hazards such as new diseases, environmental degradation, international terrorism, illicit drugs, and laundered money (Lewis et al. 2008:1–2). Increasingly, another mobile subject – the dual citizen with origins in countries disrupted by war – has joined this shadowy group and is provoking mistrust and aversion among uni-citizens who suspect divided loyalties and unfair advantage. This security framing mobilizes security knowledge and language to create a politics of fear that ignores the individuals’ real plight while elevating the risks to affluent, border-fortified states (Huysmans 2006; see also chapter 6, this volume). This chapter examines contending frames of security and citizenship benefits and obligations of states from the perspectives of imperilled (dual) nationals of a war-torn country (Lebanon) and a “secure and peaceful” country (Australia, Canada). It explores the social justice implications of holding multiple citizenship and highlights the tendentious relationship of social justice to citizenship, conventionally a relationship between nation-states and their citizens that is s­ imultaneously inclusive (e.g., for citizen-members) and highly exclusionary (e.g., towards non-citizens). The chapter also demonstrates how certain types of knowledge (e.g., localized knowledge about micro-geographies) can

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help mobile subjects to realize their citizenship benefit of state protection or to compensate for its shortfall in the context of war. The immediate context for this chapter is Lebanon’s 34 days of military hostility (12 July–14 August) between Israel and Hezbollah in summer 2006, which saw dozens of countries scrambling to find safe exit for their holidaying and resident nationals. The larger context is the “global war on terror,” which has demonized and decreased the sense of personal security for Arabs and Muslims on a world scale and which forms but one phase in the long history of orientalist Othering vis-à-vis these diverse collectivities (Said 1978). Accounts of national security or indeed the more people-friendly “human security” framework often neglect ontological security (Giddens 1991:36–8) – ordinary people’s avoidance of chaos and overwhelming anxiety and their striving for order, continuity, and meaning. Military actions create actual or perceived threats to their lives and thus make ontological security a prominent concern for dual citizens caught up in an unexpected war and who need to make decisions about how to respond when their lives are in danger. Dual citizens rank security and safety high among the benefits of holding Canadian or Australian nationality, citing constant threats of war and political violence, and general instability, as the leading drawbacks of holding Lebanese nationality. Dual citizens’ narrated life experiences, mobility decisions, and ties to their two countries, however, reveal a more complex and hybrid mapping across space of a sense of personal, familial, and collective ontological security, which blurs “good, safe citizenship” and “bad, dangerous citizenship.” Their knowledge and often visceral and deeply emotional sense of what constitutes a safe space or place are multiply determined and deeply embedded in networks of border-crossing social relations and histories that are simultaneously personal and public. They also resonate with conceptions of citizenship that are relational, communal, and based on networks in civil society (rather than exclusively state-centred) and that have more resonance in the Middle East than Western, liberal individualist notions (Joseph 1997). Moreover, for these dual citizens, ontological security is often micro-geographical, i.e., relating to spaces that are smaller, more local, and more familiar than the modern nation-state. The constant reminder of their alterity, even among Australian- and Canadian-born Lebanese, and their vilification as potential terrorists, have compromised their sense of belonging and security in Australia and Canada. Many dual citizens said that they felt safer, happier, and more

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at peace in Lebanon, a country that has implicitly accepted “a seemingly endless vacillation between war and peace” (Beydoun 2006:25), than in their “safe and peaceful” other country. This was by no means universally the case. Some young people, visiting Lebanon for the first time only to experience war, fervently declared how much they loved Canada or Australia’s safety, with some of them vowing never to return to Lebanon. None the less national security policies in these countries have fostered and contributed to the ontological insecurity of such citizens. Securitization has intertwined with racialization to render the dual citizen who is also Arab, especially if Muslim, as always already suspect, prone to divided loyalties, a security risk, and a potential terrorist.1 These processes, working through state policies and media discourses and imagery and through the paranoia of ordinary people, have undoubtedly created anxiety among Lebanese dual citizens, who feel that everywhere, except perhaps in their country or village of birth, they are permanent foreigners. Suad Joseph (1997:86) has coined the term “connectivity” to describe a type of selfhood that permeates the citizenship that prevails in Lebanon and that contrasts sharply with the “autonomous, … contract-making, individuated, separative” form of selfhood of Western classical liberal theory (see Figure 1.1). Citizenship in Lebanon, she argues, is based on familial and communal relations, where both family and community are porous and relational forms of association, that shift with changing needs and circumstances. In the narratives of dual citizens, close family and community attachments, which many see as part of their Lebaneseness, figured prominently in their explanation of where they felt most secure, safe, and “at home.” Indeed, familial relations helped shape such decisions as whether or not to remain in Lebanon during the 2006 war. While high anxiety for the safety of their traumatized children provoked many to accept evacuation assistance afforded by their “good” passport, others declined this assistance on grounds of solidarity with and anxiety about their uni-citizen relatives, perhaps worrying about the guilt they would feel if they deserted them.2 Thus, while many dual citizens – whether they thought highly or poorly of Canadian or Australian evacuation assistance – expressed their strong sense of entitlement thereto, others hated the injustice and arbitrariness of a “piece of paper” decreeing that only some family members could claim state assistance to reach safety. As Joseph (1997:84) suggests, the fluidity of communities and identities in Lebanon lends itself to flexible, shifting, and even seemingly contradictory positionalities among the Lebanese, which “bring with

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Figure 1.1  Passport photo services in Beirut

them different sets of entitlements as well as liabilities.” Such f­luidity and hybridity multiply when one possesses two or more citizenships. As one community worker in Ottawa declared, “It’s famous in Lebanon to have more than one citizenship. That’s why there are three million in Lebanon and 15 to 20 million Lebanese around the world” (interview, Ottawa, 11 May 2007). citizenship and sovereignty

In this section, I provide some theoretical explication of key concepts such as citizenship, sovereignty, security, and insecurity that inform and frame my analysis. In regard to the larger issue of what difference multiple citizenship makes, I look at what types of security knowledge and understandings of the rights (and wrongs) and character of their respective citizenships influenced Lebanese-Australian and Lebanese-Canadian dual citizens during and following summer 2006. I also examine how they value their two nationalities and feel that their dual citizenship has

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affected their sense of security, social justice, and belonging in relation to their two nation-states. To address these issues, I sought out and interviewed dual citizens holding Lebanese and either Australian or Canadian citizenships, living either in Lebanon, Australia or Canada, who were in Lebanon during the 34-day war in summer 2006.3 I focus on how their sense of ontological security, identity, belonging (or non-belonging) maps across the territories of their two countries. While most scholarship on multiple citizenship, and citizenship more broadly, examines these phenomena from the vantage point of the state or through the prism of legal debates (Spiro 2008), the current project seeks an understanding of the lived realities and localized subjectivities of those who hold dual citizenship (see also Preston, Siemiatycki, and Kobayashi 2007). While wars create statelessness and territorially displace persons who lose legal ties to their nation-state (Arendt 1979/1951:299), they also multiply the types and incidence of legal and other ties that mobile subjects have to states, territories, and communities. Like other facets of globalization that compel migration (see Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007), wars have helped create the transnational subject who may also be the dual or multiple citizen – someone who theoretically enjoys several sets of rights and is therefore subject to manifold responsibilities and liabilities. Wars – such as the conflict in summer 2006 in Lebanon – may also illuminate the significance of dual citizenship for people from homelands troubled by civil strife and long histories of military aggression and occupation by foreign powers. According to Thomas Faist (2007:3), when “citizens combine memberships in and of several states … we are dealing neither with exclusive citizenship in tightly bounded political communities nor with denationalized citizenship, but rather with a sort of multi-nationalized citizenship.” But what sort of multinational citizenship results from dual or multiple citizenship?4 Geopolitically, nation-states exist in varying degrees of friendship, conflict, dependence, and inequality with each other. In addition, mobile subjects may negotiate access to partial entitlements to rights and privileges in two or more states, resulting in “hybrid citizenship,” which represents various combinations of full (legal and substantive) and partial citizenship (Stasiulis 2004:301). How do we conceive of the variable and interactive identifications of subjects with plural state memberships (Knop 2001:113), when the states are so uneven in their capacity for sovereignty and thus so diverse in their legal and substantive citizenship? As Sejersen (2008:527) suggests, the literature on

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t­ransnationalism has yet to investigate the relationship between transnational patterns of living and official state memberships. In exploring how dual citizenship shapes life decisions (including whether to flee military hostilities), I adopt Audrey Macklin’s (2007:346) conceptualization of citizenship as a “substance with heft,” referring to such dimensions as “the unconditional right to enter and reside, the franchise, diplomatic protection factor, civil, social, economic and cultural rights, entitlements, duties, identity claims and practices [which, however] should not and often cannot be weighted independently of one another.” Heft differs markedly among states, creating a “citizenship gap” between the global North and the global South, such that “even marginal membership in the economy of a stable and wealthy state can seem preferable to whatever citizenship a destitute, conflict-ridden state offers” (346; see also Brysk and Shafir 2004; Stasiulis and Bakan 2005). Even as the state’s safety net is in decline across nation-states, manifesting the global neoliberal consensus among political and economic elites, there is notable disparity in the quality and extensiveness of social citizenship between wealthy, more stable states and poorer, more conflict-­ ridden states. One category of citizenship right that wealthier states offer is diplomatic protection – “the extension on an extra-­territorial plane of the right to protection by one’s state, or indeed to be acknowledged by one’s state as a political subject deserving of special, national protection” (Stasiulis and Ross 2009:96). In war-torn countries of the South, with chronic violence from state and non-state actors, civil disorder, external occupation, and political, economic, and social instability, nation-states are notably unreliable in protecting their nationals, both those living and working at home and those abroad. Within such “failed states,” citizenship is “purely formal,” delivering virtually none of the rights and protections of membership in a functioning polity, including basic public services and domestic security (Macklin 2007:348). The U.S. think tank Fund for Peace’s (2008) common indicators of a failed state include a central government with little practical control over much of its territory, non-provision of public services, widespread corruption and criminality, refugees and involuntary movement of populations, and sharp economic decline. Its 2008 index of failed states ranked Lebanon 18th worst of 177 countries, with “high alert” status, with the 2006 war having catapulted it 10 places higher than in 2007. In 2008, Canada and Australia, by contrast, sat comfortably in the “sustaining” category, ranking at numbers 167 and 168, respectively (Fund for Peace 2008).

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During war, citizenship can become a key dividing practice within families, especially if held in a wealthy and stable liberal democracy that offers a haven and sense of safety from a country of origin enduring war. Possessing a second, “safe” citizenship can create distinction within a family, as became clear in the narratives of dual nationals caught in Lebanon during summer 2006. A reporter for the Arab programming of SBS, the Australian government’s multicultural broadcasting system, spoke about “the enormous amount of guilt of people who were boarding on those ships as they left Lebanon, leaving their relatives behind … knowing that the only thing that separates them from death is citizenship” (interview, Sydney, 8 April 2007). The robustness of citizenship – the capacity and willingness of a state to protect its citizens from harm and want – depends on the quality of the state’s sovereignty. The reasons for the Lebanese government’s inability to govern and protect its citizens (e.g., from the threat of external and internal military violence) are complex and would require considerably more detailed examination of its history than space permits here. As the Fund for Peace (2008) observes, Lebanon is far from a unified nationstate – and exists instead as “essentially a loose coalition of separate [confessional and sectarian-based] communities,” with each group having its separate political parties, courts, residential areas, schools, media, and workplaces. According to a recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), “sectarian pluralism” is a dominant civic narrative in Lebanon (2009). Hezbollah is notable for its operation independent of the (mostly) pro-Western central government and armed forces and for its control of most of the south. The country’s sovereignty is so ineffectual because it “has long been used as a base or location for surrogate forces – Syrian, Israeli, Palestinian, Iranian, U.S., and others” (Elden 2009:85). Elden maintains that the 2006 conflict was an opportunistic war by Israel, which used U.S. rhetoric about Hezbollah and its classification of the group as a terrorist organization to respond to a non-state group by attacking the state that “harbours” it, effectively acting in the same manner as the United States has done in Afghanistan. The attacks on Lebanon have, however, further weakened the government by destroying its infrastructure, targeting its leaders, and deepening alienation among its people. Aiwha Ong (1999:215) introduced the concept of “graduated sovereignty” to explore how zones of sovereignty differing by relations such as ethnicity, religion, and class proliferate within national territories. Citizens in various zones are subject to different kinds of surveillance

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and disciplinary power and in practice enjoy differing sets of civil, political, and social rights, levels of state protection, and biopolitical investments in fostering life, growth, and care (see chapters 6, 7, and 15). Such models have particular resonance in Middle East countries such as Lebanon, where confessional affiliation determines political power, rights, and resources (Davis 1997:138; Joseph 1997). Suad Joseph contrasts the Western construction of the modern nation and deliberative liberal model of citizenship, in which national subjects divest themselves of particularistic status based on sub-national communities, with the Lebanese conception: “In Lebanon, with eighteen different formally recognized religious sects governing personal status or family law, there can be no universal national subject. The deferral of family law to religious courts, the absence of civil alternatives, the patriarchal male control of sectarian institutions, the representation of citizens on the basis of religious sects, the distribution of state services and resources on the basis of religious sects and other practices … have particularized the national subject” (1997:85). As Joseph (1997:84) indicates, with the central government non-­ operational during war, the Lebanese have had “to maintain extensive networks with members of different militias, many of which constructed themselves in religious sectarian terms.” In this system of graduated sovereignty, Hezbollah, a Shi’ite Muslim group with a militant wing, enjoys effective sovereignty in the south and in Dahiya, a southern surburb of Beirut. It has sought to ensure its political survival after Israeli withdrawal by nurturing extensive support among the Shi’ites, by dint of its decades-long resistance and rapidly expanding networks of social services (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002:53). Following the 2006 war, Hezbollah distributed about $300 million in aid and reconstruction, funds allegedly originating from Iran (Elden 2009:94). As Elden argues, its service provision, its status as a political party with seats in parliament,5 and its reputation among the local population as the only domestic force able to stand up to Israel defy any facile depiction of it as a terrorist organization (93).6 Indeed, while the Western Islamophobic imaginary melts it into a single enemy – “global Islamism” – that embraces al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and Tehran (99), its actions suggest that liberation from Israeli occupation is a greater imperative for Hezbollah than Islamicizing society (Saad-Ghorayeb 2002:38). It became apparent in interviews with people, especially those from the south and Dahiya, that the grid of citizenship identifications and benefits in Lebanon indeed followed a graduated notion of sovereignty.

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In many instances, the central government was simply not present, and local parties and militias exercised local sovereignty. One dual citizen remarked, “Sometimes there are problems with the government, but the government isn’t responsible for me … It is difficult for the government as well, they can’t control everything” (interview, Lala, Bekaa Valley, 5 Aug. 2008). n at i o n a l a n d o n t o l o g i c a l s e c u r i t y

State citizenship policies in many Western states (and indeed Eastern, e.g., India) are undergoing securitization, insofar as national security, particularly vis-à-vis the “global war on terror,” has over-determined recent reforms to state policies. The securitization of policies such as those governing the border affects the relative heft of citizenship, eroding civil liberties and humanitarianism in immigration and refugee policies, shifting resources from social citizenship to policing functions, and so on. Security knowledge and policies require the production of insecurity (Huysmans 2006:7). As Nyers (2009:3) maintains, “There is a double-movement to security as it simultaneously produces and contains insecurity. Acts of security seek to provide protection from danger, freedom from doubt, and relief of anxiety. At the same time, however, such acts encourage fear, foster apprehension, and feed off of nervousness in the population.” The production of insecurity identifies and iterates a threat or threats. A politics of fear that generates public support for the state’s novel and intensifying security policies can rely on a “culture of paranoia … built into a nation’s anxieties around its racial and ethnic dimensions but deriving from a range of wider social, economic and political factors” (Poynting et al. 2004:213). Threats can be external, embodied in such “newsworthy familiar foreign figures” as Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, or attributable to “dangerous internal foreigners,” as represented by the veiled Muslim woman or the construction of the Arab or Muslim Other (Dhamoon and Abu-Laban 2009:163). As Poynting et al. (2004) suggest about construction of the Arab Other in Australia, this latest “folk devil” supplants the Asian menace. This complex entity draws together diverse groups, through various ideological elements and tropes, linking criminality, terrorism, and barbaric acts (such as ritual slaughter of animals) “into a homogeneous Other which is then naturalized through iteration and association” (50; see also Mason 2004). As a plethora of academic and community-based studies have

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­ ocumented, a “post-9/11” security agenda flowing from Western antid terrorism legislation has led to, intensified, and expanded discrimination from both governments and civil society and vilification of Muslims and Arabs (Bahdi 2003; Canadian Arab Federation and Canadian Council on American–Islamic Relations 2005; Jamal and Naber, eds. 2008; Mason 2004; Poynting 2004; Poynting et al. 2004). . In our interviews, it appeared that women who wore the hijab (headscarf) or other forms of clothing associated with Islam were particular targets of discriminatory practices (in employment and service provision), racial epithets, harassment, and assault in public spaces in Australia and Canada (see Poynting et al. 2004:158). State policies purporting to promote security can thus have the precise opposite effects, jeopardizing the safety and security of groups of Othered citizens. The securitization of citizenship – that state-directed, national form that seeks to protect the body politic from the menacing foreigner – can discursively, and even legally, transform the citizen into the foreigner (Macklin 2007:42),7 thus introducing an extremely unsettling dynamic for some citizens. State policies that profess to deliver national security can create and intensify insecurity, fear, and anxiety for citizens through racial profiling and anti-terrorist practices and the conflation of these Othered groups in the mass media and public discourse with terrorists. These policies and discourses can either mitigate or undermine the feeling among people from the Middle East that their citizenship delivers on its promises of social justice, fairness, and equality among all citizens regardless of origins. In this sense, national security policies compel people to respond strongly to the emotional dimensions of their citizenship and to evaluate whether they associate their membership in a state with comfort and a sense of peace or ontological security or alternatively with fear and anxiety. How do Lebanese Australians and Lebanese Canadians respond affectively to the cognitive dissonance of holding membership in states that simultaneously protect and undermine their sense of belonging? Do they gain a sense of existential security through avoidance of risk, secured by their legal footing as full-fledged members in more than one state? Or does dual membership create trauma when it renders them suspect and assumed to be prone to divided and dangerous loyalties (Bahdi 2003; Stasiulis and Ross 2009)? How do Lebanese dual citizens who flee violence in their homelands and seek protection from their “safe” state reconcile the latter’s treating Arabs and Muslims as security risks?8 And finally, how do they compare their two citizenships, and how does dual

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nationality affect their sense of security and sense of belonging in relation to the two nation-states? The rest of this chapter examines the ways in which dual citizens, who were in mortal danger (or perceived that they might be at risk) during the summer 2006 war, deployed their legal and affective dimensions of citizenship. Its three sections look at their experience of evacuation, at the micro-geographies of their (in)security within Lebanon, and at their feelings about their two citizenships. For many of them, their understanding of security drew on local forms of knowledge (e.g., in Lebanon, about which areas were safe from the bombing) or lack thereof (by virtue of being a non-resident). Their ontological security, however, was enfeebled by Western traditions of racialized Othering of Middle Eastern peoples and their “safe” governments’ unsettling use of specific discourses of security and citizenship. t h e s u m m e r 2006 wa r a n d e va c u at i o n

The 34-day war in Lebanon in July and August 2006, in which the principal parties were Hezbollah paramilitary forces and the Israeli military, provides a litmus test of the significance of dual citizenship, as various parties within numerous states understood and acted on it. It also illuminates the role of “security,” in its manifold senses (including people’s perceptions of their own safety or insecurity), in the affective politics of citizenship and fear (Ahmed 2004). This conflict was one in a series of Arab–Israeli wars, beginning in 1948, and the fourth Israeli invasion of Lebanon (after previous ones in 1978, 1982 and 1996). Lebanon had also suffered through a 15-year civil war from 1975 to 1990. Israel had occupied south Lebanon (about one-tenth of the country) for 22 years until 2000. In July 2006, a few days after Israel launched an onslaught against Hamas in Gaza (which it presented as a response to the abduction of an Israeli soldier), it started a similar offensive in Lebanon, in a clear effort to destroy Hezbollah after the latter kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in their homeland (Achcar and Warschawski 2007). The conflict killed, according to different estimates, between 1,100 and 2,000 people, mostly Lebanese civilians (44 Israeli civilians also died), injured over 4,000 more, and displaced approximately one million Lebanese, or about one-quarter of its territorial population. Israeli air strikes severely damaged civil infrastructure worth between U.S.$3.6 billion and $5 billion (Achcar and Warschawski 2007; Fund for Peace

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Figure 1.2  United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon clearing cluster bombs in southern Lebanon

2008; Harel and Issacharoff 2008; Hourani 2006; Sultan 2008:3). As the mass media and organizations such as Human Rights Watch documented, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killed several dual nationals in Lebanon when the fighting began, including Canadian, Brazilian, German, Kuwaiti, and U.S. citizens. Eleven members9 of one Canadian family resident in Montreal died in one bomb blast in the border town of Aytaroun; one Canadian-born, Israeli-resident pilot serving in the Israeli Air Force was felled reportedly by “friendly fire”; and one Israeli Australian who had volunteered to fight in the IDF also died. After the ceasefire, some parts of the south remained uninhabitable due to unexploded Israeli cluster bomblets, a large volume of which rained down in the final days of the war (see Figure 1.2). The war also produced anxiety among the populace about its effects in provoking new waves of sectarian violence. As Hourani writes, “As the war progressed, numerous Lebanese feared that the unresolved conflicts and crises that had plagued the country for decades might lead to a new civil war circumscribed by the international conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Alarm at the prospect of a new wave of sectarian

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violence appears to have been one of the factors that convinced many Lebanese to leave the country” (2006:20). From the dual nationals who stayed during the war, we heard many stories of how individuals and communities in areas not targeted by the bombing would take in displaced people from the south and how the external aggression papered over differences between north and south, Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shi’ia, and so on (see UNDP 2009:47). As Cathy Sultan (2008:3) observes, “The July 2006 war saw a rare moment of national unity for all Lebanese in the face of Israeli aggression against the people in South Lebanon.” Thus, when we asked a novelist with Australian citizenship how he spent the 34 days of war, he replied: I was here [in his home in Seraal, north Lebanon]. I was involved with people who were helping around this area, and the schools were filled of people who came from the South … I tried to stay away, but I got very close to what was happening and seeing what happened to the people who came over. In a way I was secretly happy. Q: Why? Because for the first time, I saw the south and the north together in one place, and that gave me goose bumps … Every time I remember this, it comes back to me seeing how the people came together, as they’ve known each other for centuries, although there were so many differences and so many bad and wrong expectations, meetings like this and helping out the people from the south, made them feel proud of what they were doing. This was great. (Interview, Seraal, north Lebanon, Aug. 2008) This sense of solidarity across sectarian lines was also apparent in the diaspora – during the anti-war protests on the streets of Montreal and Sydney. Despite the distancing of some Christian Lebanese from perceived support for Hezbollah, thousands of Sunni, Shi’ia, Christian, and other Lebanese-origin protesters and other supporters marched to protest the war and the U.S., Canadian, and Australian governments’ support for Israel. For many of the dual nationals caught up in this war – particularly those facing sustained military hostilities for the first time – the experience was terrifying and chaotic. Their first impulse was to find immediate escape. Several said that their governments were acting too slowly to protect their citizens, so they sought their own way out by tapping into

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whatever familial and other social networks to which they had access in order to seek cars, gasoline, food, water, and information on how to navigate roads under bombardment. One 20-year-old woman, born in Canada and vacationing in Beirut, related her family’s passage from a besieged quarter of Beirut to the Baalbek (in the Bekaa Valley), which was also bombed; her father’s trip back to a bank in Beirut to collect passports and their harried drive to Syria, where they took shelter in a school; and their flight to Germany and eventual return to Ottawa. Her “refugee” status was unusual: “We lived in a school as Canadian refugees in Syria from Lebanon. It was interesting when you are Canadian to be a refugee from Lebanon” (interview, Ottawa, 16 June 2007). Especially among non-residents, including youths who had rarely or never before visited Lebanon, the violence of the 2006 war was “unpredictable” and therefore terrifying and something to escape as quickly as possible. Several dual nationals, however, had feared the possible outbreak of sectarian violence more than the geographically more contained, predictable, and thus avoidable Israeli bombing. However, such perceptions were more common among people visiting or residing in areas away from the Israeli offensive in the south and in southern Beirut where Israel’s bombing campaign against Hezbollah had flattened entire villages (Achcar and Warschawski 2007:54, Sultan 2008). See Figure 1.3. The rapid devastation of Lebanese infrastructure from the onset of this intense war brought to international attention the unprecedented numbers of foreign nationals seeking immediate escape. As news reports explained, the “summer of return” or “the promising summer,” as the local media dubbed it, saw record numbers of tourists, with many people of Lebanese descent visiting Beirut in all of its restored glory, following the 1975–90 civil war.10 Many were expatriates or descendants of emigrants on a pilgrimage home; some sought to acquaint their children with the extended family and to attend weddings, to purchase property, or to take a beach or mountain holiday (Hourani 2006:29). Israel’s swift and massive aerial attacks of predominantly Shi’ite areas severely damaged civilian infrastructure, including Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport, roads, and bridges. Israel’s air and naval blockade further hampered civilians’ ability to flee, although (as we saw above) many foreign nationals boarded buses, drove around crater-sized potholes, or hired taxis at exorbitant fees to cross the border to Syria. Hourani (2006:26) states that the numbers – hundreds of thousands – of foreign nationals in Lebanon at the time were so staggering that few

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Figure 1.3  Dahiya, a Shi’ite suburb of Beirut that the IDF targeted

embassies could assist departure at such a scale. For most foreign governments, this was their largest evacuation by sea of non-combatants. According to Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, Canada evacuated 13,052 nationals (only the United States evacuated more of its nationals) (Canada, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development 2006:2). Indeed, this became a major aspect of the media and political discourse in Canada, emphasizing the high incidence of dual citizenship among the Lebanese, the costs of evacuation assistance, and the first sustained questioning about whether the government could afford to sustain its policy of dual citizenship (CBC News Staff 2006). Australia’s “Operation Ramp” assisted the departure of 5,300 Australians and 1,250 other foreign nationals (Hourani 2006:43). Ambassador Lyndall Sachs noted civilians’ unawareness of embassies’ complex communications and logistical preparations for the operation and their competition for scarce resources such as ships (interview, Beirut, Aug. 2008).11 Few embassies had contingency plans, although a few (such as the United States) had more resources and could call on their militaries

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to assist. Altogether, some forty-five countries evacuated their nationals or asked other nations to help (Hourani 2006:40–1). The relative action or inaction of the various embassies also made it starkly evident that holding citizenship in a wealthy, well-resourced state in the global North was an asset, while citizenship in a poor nation in the global South provided no such benefit. Thus the governments of countries with large numbers of migrants in Lebanon, such as Sri Lanka with 80,000, the Philippines with more than 34,000, and Bangladesh with 10,000, warned these people that they had neither the transportation nor financial resources to assist in their departure. While prior to 12 July, only about 11,000 Canadians had registered with the embassy in Beirut, this number doubled by 17 July, when the embassy began to contact nationals to inform them of the evacuation plan, and reached almost 40,000 at the worst of the crisis. Many thousands, lacking communications, having no viable route to points of departure by sea (Beirut and the southern city of Tyre), or impatient with their government’s seemingly sluggish evacuation, found their own way out, usually to Syria. For the roughly one-third of Canadian dual citizens who were in the south, convoys of private vehicles or hiring taxis offered the only exit.12 micro-geographies of security

Canadian and Australian operations to assist departures used substantial resources and repatriated large numbers of nationals. Many dual citizens, however, decided to remain in Lebanon, though making contingency plans in case the violence deepened or more immediately affected them. They made their decision and any contingency preparations in response to the violence, applying local knowledge of the micro-­geographies of conflict in Lebanon. All parties to military violence – foreign forces, local military, and insurgents – study and develop specific understandings of the spatialization (e.g., rural–urban, specific administrative borders and ethnic regions, flat versus mountainous terrain, and so on) in patterns of violent events. Civilians rely not on sophisticated technology or systematic study, but on their own memories and familial experience of violence, as well as ongoing communication with residents, to identify where violence clusters in space (and also time) and also where best to avoid it.13 For those people who chose to stay in Lebanon, many relied on and applied their knowledge about more or less secure or safe zones in order to maximize the safety of themselves and their loved ones. They

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sought safer suburbs in Beirut and/or rented housing in mountainous and northern areas, which for the most part escaped the bombing. Several factors affected the decision about whether to leave or stay, including: site of primary residence (Lebanon versus Australia/Canada), fear for children’s safety, age, prior experience of war, and location of principal residence in Lebanon. Prior experience of war did not affect the decision-making process in a predictable or consistent way. For some people, the earlier exposure – particularly living through and being uprooted by the 15-year civil war – had been so traumatic that they did not wish to face war again. As one 53-year-old Lebanese Canadian living close to Beirut stated: “My two boys, they wanted to go. Because my youngest son was watching what is happening on the news; bombings, killing, bridges falling down, he saw the [Qana] massacre where a big number of children were killed in one hit, he used to ask me all the time: ‘Dad, when is our turn? We’re going to be next.’ The thing is in 1987, my wife and I migrated to Canada because of the civil war in Lebanon, so when the war erupted in Lebanon in 2006, we did not want to go through the same thing again … It is not easy to migrate again, and to restart our lives all over again” (interview, Lebanon, 12 Aug. 2008). One 30-year-old Lebanese-Australian female resident of Beirut, an employee at the Lebanese American University, went to work almost every day during the war. She based her decision to remain in Lebanon on her understanding of likely targets for Israeli bombing – Shi’ite areas under the local control of Hezbollah, rather than Christian neighbourhoods. Had she registered with the Australian embassy? “Yes, they did call us for evacuation. But the thing is we all knew, even those that left to Canada and to Australia, wherever, we all knew it was a targeted area. We knew the war was not going to expand to the Christian area, we knew it was focused there [referring to Dahiya], so we did not see the point of evacuating. It was obvious to the media, it was obvious to everybody, the bombings were just targeting a specific area” (interview, Beirut, 9 Aug. 2008). For this woman, as for many dual citizens, particularly those living in Beirut, it was the less predictable sectarian violence (“when the Lebanese people were shooting each other on the street in Beirut”) that provoked thoughts of exodus. Guilt about possessing a privileged citizenship and leaving behind vulnerable uni-citizen relatives was a common explanation for staying, but those who fled also expressed it. A 17-year-old, Canadian-born female Montrealer who left Lebanon with government assistance expressed her sense of kinship with her cousins and guilt at leaving them behind. “We

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were like, oh, there’s no Canadian [help], it’s all right, we’ll stay here, and we’re safe. If we die, well our cousins also [die]. I found it a bit unjust and selfish on our part. Like we’re Canadians, so we could be saved. I found that like it was hurting me. Just because they’re not Canadians” (interview, Montreal, 12 Jan. 2009). A middle-aged man, resident in Australia for 20 years, who fled by car from Aytaroun in the south for evacuation by boat from Beirut, spoke about his and his wife’s distress at leaving their Lebanese family members behind. His response underlines the lack of perceived social justice in a policy that decrees that in such “humanitarian crises,” foreign governments seek only to protect their own citizens and that only those with foreign passports could leave: I spoke to one of the Australian officials who were there; they were trying to help us. Because I left the people there on the street in pyjamas, you know my brother and his kids, the women, my aunty and my uncle; a disabled uncle who has been to Australia before. So I said to this woman, look, just let them come to Australia, and then they can come back when the war is over. She said we can’t do that, and I really got emotional then, because we can go because we have a little document says that we got an Australian citizen[ship], and they can’t go, they don’t have anybody. That really puts you in that kind of emotion where, what kind of human rights do we have? I meant at that time I was thinking that in this country here [Australia], they have more animal rights than human that we have there [Lebanon]. (Interview, Sydney, Oct. 2007) Whether they escaped Lebanon with government help or on their own, Lebanese dual nationals sought security for themselves, their families, and their co-nationals through a connective form of selfhood that “sees itself embedded in others and fosters relationality as a central charter of selfhood” (Joseph 1997:86). Families were not always physically in the same area. Some children were in villages visiting their cousins and grandparents, while their parents were in Beirut. We heard many stories about parents’ anguish regarding their children’s safety, long, sleepless nights, and frantic efforts to mobilize relatives and neighbours to convey these youngsters to safety. One Sydney resident, who was in Beirut while her children were in south Lebanon, fantasized about hearing the voices of her children, “crying, telling me, ‘Why mummy? Why have you left us here? We are so scared!’” Her brother decided to take a taxi to fetch

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her boys, whom relatives had moved to another town, and after a fivehour trip ( normally a one-hour hop) sent a text message (SMS) to his sister. “On the road to the mountain, they met up with my uncle, aunties, and other cousins, who were also fleeing the south, they all joined together for the trip. One hour prior to their arrival, my brother called and said, ‘We will be there in one hour, we are all going to have breakfast together’” (interview, Sydney, Oct. 2007). Communication, and the ability to reach people who could help, through border-spanning and even transnational familial and communal networks, could prove crucial for escape. Many family members in Australia and Canada registered their loved ones who were in Lebanon and whose access to the internet was more problematic. The Australian ambassador commented on the logistical nightmare for her staff, as various family members would register the same people, sometimes using different spellings. Arabic-language reporters from the Australian multicultural radio/television station SBS served as a valuable means of communication between the Australian government, and family members in Australia, and relatives stuck in areas of Lebanon where communication and movement were fraught (interview, Sydney, 8 May 2007). The information flowing through such networks that bridged Lebanon and Lebanese diasporas helped press slow-to-respond states to organize to evacuate their nationals and to inform government officials about the locations of nationals seeking their assistance. Rendering the escape of Lebanese civilians, regardless of citizenship, particularly treacherous, Israeli retaliation blurred the distinction between Hezbollah combatants and Lebanese civilians and between legitimate military objectives and protected civilian objects (Sherry 2007:10). Very soon after hostilities started, and following aerial pamphleting of southern villages instructing civilians to evacuate the area on 11 August, the Israeli minister of justice stated, “Anyone left in South Lebanon was assumed to be a terrorist related to Hezbollah. [One such town,] Bint Jbeil is not a civilian settlement. It is a military zone. It must be dealt with as a military zone … Civilians are not supposed to be present in Bint Jbeil” (21).14 Several people who survived the bombardment witnessed the massive destruction and death of their relatives and neighbours in towns close to the Israeli border such as Bint Jbeil and Aytaroun. One 50-year old, Sydney-based businessman who was in Bint Jbeil for his daughter’s wedding, harboured 45 people in his house during the onslaught. He describes his family’s journey to safety in the midst of the chaos and

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carnage of the unremitting bombing: “It was on the houses, on the street, close to us, on top of us. Just like a volcano … just like fire … And not just by guns, by airplanes. Just smashing everything, all the houses, 90 per cent of the village was wiped out.” On the eighth day of the bombardment, he and his family jumped into their car and drove to Marike, unwittingly leading an unofficial convoy. From there, he “went to the mountains” and asked a taxi driver to take the family to Damascus. I was driving like you wouldn’t believe. Even the car was sliding sideways from the amount of debris on the road. And very, very lucky, some of the cars got hit. We didn’t stop to help them. Cars behind us got hit ... Young people come out from nowhere, and they just says, ‘This way’ [gestures] … It took us four to five hours for what is only usually 10 minutes’ drive … So we just went through the bush, into some people’s backyards, to make our own way. Because the roads [got] hit … And we made it, but some of us didn’t make it. By the way, I had people that said to me, ‘We’re following you.’ I said to them, ‘I’m following you! I don’t know the way. I don’t live here.’ I got lost. And it’s so … mess. So many bombs have been exploded in the area. All orchard trees and rivers … And eventually these people told me to go this way. And the river was shallow. And there’s a lot of people trapped in the river. I saw one guy, an Australian; he was on holiday with his family. I couldn’t help him. We were so scared, so frightened. I just yelled, ‘Hellooo’ [waves] and keep going. (Interview, Sydney, 4 May 2007) This narrative is indicative of several strategies dual citizens whom the war most directly affected used, harnessing their economic and social capital to seek safety for themselves and their families in treacherous conditions. Their sense of entitlement to their “safe” citizenship fuelled anger, frustration, and disappointment, which they directed against their (Australian/Canadian) government, a theme that I elaborate on below. In the absence of practical consular assistance and communicating only intermittently with their embassies, they relied on the local knowledge of residents (e.g., the young people in the narrative above) to navigate to safety. Regardless of international concerns over the mounting human impact of “collateral damage,” the massive destruction to vital infrastructure, and the potential for the conflict to escalate beyond Lebanon and Israel,15 several powerful Western nations (Germany and the United Kingdom)

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and middle powers such as Canada and Australia joined the U.S. administration of George W. Bush in expressing unwavering support for Israel and its right to defend itself against terrorist Hezbollah forces. The Canadian and Australian stances merely echoed U.S. foreign policy, rejecting an immediate ceasefire in the hopes that Israel would destroy Hezbollah. Their constant refrain that Hezbollah was a “terrorist” organization justified Israel’s indiscriminate bombings in south Lebanon and also linked it with the “global war on terror.”16 Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, asserted the country’s support for Israel’s right to self-defence: “Hezbollah’s objective is violence … Hezbollah believes that through violence it can bring about the destruction of Israel … And inevitably the result of the violence will be the deaths primarily of innocent people” (CTV News Staff 2006). Harper endorsed Israeli’s military incursion as “a measured response” and said that the key to resolving the conflict was the return of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers. While Australian Prime Minister John Howard was “appalled at the loss of life on both sides,” his country, like Canada, held Hezbollah entirely responsible and failed to call for an immediate ceasefire. The Greek Melkite Catholic bishop in Australia, one of several leaders of Australian organizations who aided in the evacuation, observed, “We only heard both the prime minister and the foreign affairs minister confirm, time and again, Israel’s right to defend itself. Not once did they show any support to Lebanon or its suffering people, let alone the right of Lebanon to defend itself” (interview, Sydney, 17 Oct. 2007). The U.S., Canadian, and Australian positions translated into an uneven moral economy of civilian deaths, which regarded Lebanese deaths as unfortunate but inevitable, and Israeli fatalities as reprehensible and tragic (Gregory 2006). Canada’s “sincere condolences” for the deaths of “eight family members from Montreal, the el-Akhras family,” which MacKay called “the height of the harm of innocents,” stopped short of any condemnation of Israel or its military for its disproportionate force and indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighbourhoods, which had produced these deaths (Canada, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, 2006:5). The contrast between the extraordinary efforts to evacuate citizens and the foreign policy responses created striking cognitive dissonance, ambivalence, and anger for some dual nationals. Those whose origins and family were in vulnerable areas commonly articulated such responses. The Sydney resident who escaped Bint Jbeil proclaimed: “I give it [Canberra] five out of ten, not good enough! At least, you know, Australia

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should pressure Israel, to say ‘Okay, we’ve got foreigners, we’ve got our people here … our citizens.’ The Israeli were shooting on everything, they don’t care. And they started shooting civilians, that’s [inaudible] … But what I’m saying is if they have a battle, we have nothing to do with it. We are Australian! We should have been taken care of. The Australian government didn’t do much, at first. And after that, they said, ‘Okay, we’re going to send a boat to Tyre.’ And Tyre is being shelled constantly. How can we go to Tyre? Constant shelling on Tyre” (interview, Sydney, 4 May 2007).17 Ahmed El-Akhras, the Montrealer who lost eleven family members while visiting his ancestral home in Aytaroun, expressed the sense of betrayal this family felt regarding Ottawa’s seeming inaction and disregard to their plight and that of other Canadians seeking evacuation from the areas where the danger and loss of life among civilians were most acute. Barely surviving the blast, he was unconscious for several days with severe injuries. Ottawa’s apparent unwillingness to protect its citizens or to condemn Israel made him “so upset, and hurt, because the Canadian government did not condemn this awful crime of killing Canadian civilians. It is a war crime” (intervew, Aytaroun, 14 Aug. 2008). El Akhras’s 21-year-old, Canadian-born son clearly distinguished his feelings about this particular government and towards his fellow Canadians: “Of course, I feel angry, but I feel angry about everything, because I lost a lot of people who I care about. But it was not the fault of the Canadian people. It is the fault of a group of Canadian people who are in the Conservative party, and I feel more angry with this government, but not with the Canadian people, because I know the Canadian people have a good nature, and they proved it. I felt their support, a lot of Canadian people supported me” (interview, Aytaroun, 14 Aug. 2008). Many dual citizens felt that the foreign policies of the Canadian and Australian governments were out of step with “their people.” These policies (e.g., failing to call for an immediate ceasefire, condemn Israel, or negotiate a safe corridor of escape for their nationals) endangered not only their uni-citizen relatives, but also their own entitlement to consular protection and thus undermined their citizenship rights as Canadians and Australians. c a rt o g r a p h y o f o n t o l o g i c a l s e c u r i t y a n d a f f e c t i v e citizenship

The concept of affective citizenship presented itself rather emphatically in my interviews with dual citizens in Lebanon during the 2006 war. So

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many respondents spoke in affective terms about their two citizenships, but particularly the Lebanese. It was not only what they said about the benefits and drawbacks of their two citizenships, but their often highly emotional statements. My use of the term derives from Engin Isin’s (2004) writing on the “neurotic citizen,” wherein government projects often work less through calculating rationalities than through responding to, fanning, and managing people’s fears, anxieties, and insecurities. I suggested in 2004 that “anxiety, fear, distress, and even more ominously an obsession with death … are thankfully not the only affects experienced by subjects and calibrating their conduct. Love, joy, gratitude, anger, envy, disgust, altruism, hope, courage, et cetera, and other non-neurotic affects and emotions also mediate subjects’ sense of the world, their place within it … and their political and social engagement” (Stasiulis 2004:301). In exploring citizenship’s affective dimensions, I am taking up the challenge of researchers such as Ho (2008), who observes that the study of citizenship and transnational migration neglects emotions (see also Fortier 2010). Unlike Isin’s (2004) and Fortier’s (2010) governmentality approaches to affective citizenship, which use the affective dispositions of citizens such as fear and anxiety to support particular policies, my inquiry examines how dual citizens govern themselves in relation to the affect deriving from their respective citizenships. The mobility of emotions attached to place, ethnoscapes, and geographic imaginaries is axiomatic for transnational migrants and multiple citizens who retain and cultivate ties in more than one nation-state. What is of interest here is not only how various emotions can attach themselves to formal membership in nation-states, but also how examining the affective dimensions of citizenship can add nuance to a hierarchical understanding of the relative ‘heft’ of different citizenships. When I asked about the benefits and drawbacks of each of their two citizenships, and about which one they valued the most, LebaneseCanadian and Lebanese-Australian responses varied by birthplace, age, gender, length of time spent in Lebanon and Canada/Australia, and family attachments. None the less certain patterns emerged quite forcefully to distinguish the place of each in their emotions, lives, hearts, souls, and identities. The responses are suggestive of how the ontological security of dual citizens maps out transnationally and the relationship of these subjects’ sense of security to their memberships in more than one state. Among the several imaginaries of national citizenship are “liberal procedural” and “communitarian” citizenship (Betts 2002). At the two extremes, the procedural model presumes at least cool attachment, a

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contractual exchange of state services for citizens’ duties, while the communitarian assumes emotional commitment to collective goods and willingness to sacrifice short-term personal interests for broader communal goals (58). Liberal forms of citizenship assume instrumental orientations on the part of the citizen, particularly if naturalization has been the route to its acquisition. Indeed, our interviews confirmed that affective attachments were overall more intense vis-à-vis Lebanon, connecting individuals to sets of human beings (particularly family), quality of life, and objects (e.g., weather, mountains, orchards) that they marked as “Lebanese” or “Arab” or associated with particular villages or regions of Lebanon. Conversely, for some dual nationals, particularly those who had spent most of their lives in Lebanon, Canadian or Australian citizenship was almost purely instrumental and focused on formal state membership. They defined benefits in terms of access to public services (particularly education and health care), the value and ease of travel possible with a highly respected passport, and the “insurance policy” that such a passport provided in terms of safe passage from the violence and unbearable risks of living in a politically unstable country. “Safe,” “safety,” “secure,” “security,” “peace,” and “stability” were constants in responses to our question about benefits of Canadian or Australian citizenship. Interviewees also frequently mentioned the value of a Canadian or Australian passport for people who might otherwise encounter difficulties, delays, and harassment at borders – the typical experience of many Arabs and Muslims since 11 September 2001. However, our interviews with dual nationals who fled the summer 2006 war suggested a more complex mapping of affective citizenship. The emotions attaching to state memberships varied considerably with place of birth, length and patterns of residence, age, gender, familial status, and experience of past wars (especially the Lebanese civil war). Notwithstanding this diversity, my analyses intimate certain patterns in the bi-national mapping of affective citizenship. First, political membership occurs in states that are a study in the contrasting heft of their two respective citizenships. Attachments to Canada and Australia tended towards the traditional state-centred definition of citizenship. One Lebanese Australian commented: “We are respected here [in Australia] as human beings. Here your rights are protected. As long as we respect this country, this country will respect us. [There are no drawbacks] other than that we get called wogs now and then” (interview, 40-year-old female, Sydney, Oct. 2007).

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Many dual nationals who left Lebanon during the war expressed passionate attachment to their Australian or Canadian citizenship because it protected them and gave them social security and liberal democratic freedoms – all valuable public goods absent in Lebanon. In the context of summer 2006, I expected that dual citizens would especially value security and safety, the absence of war. Second, the contrast between their two countries’ benefits was starkest for young people, especially those who had grown up in Australia and/ or Canada and for whom July 2006 was their first experience of war. Respondents related harrowing stories about the costs to their children’s health during the war. One child refused to go the bathroom while her family was fleeing the hostilities and went to hospital in Sydney with a bladder infection. Another experienced internal bleeding while his family was dodging missiles escaping from Bint Jbeil and could not receive medical help until reaching Australia. Some children and youths suffered mental breakdowns, and parents sent them to psychiatrists on return to Australia. As they came to associate Lebanon and its citizenship with the trauma of war, their other, safe citizenship took on increased worth. A 25-year-old Canadian-born man with dual citizenship who visited Lebanon for the first time during the summer of 2006 and held Lebanese citizenship only in order to register the family land in his name responded about the benefits of Canadian citizenship: “Wow, what a question! So many benefits, we can just live in a peaceful and best country in the world. No wars, no violence, just great. I don’t know, it’s like almost a utopia. I hated war. I hated everything about it” (interview, Ottawa, 12 May 2007). Another young woman from Ottawa almost shouted: “FREEDOM. You can do whatever you want here. You can work. You can walk. You can vote. You can do anything in Canada. If you want, you can. Many things. Just peace. No planes flying above your head. Think about the social system of helping each other. Think about privacy in your home, ha ha ha! Nobody coming to see you all the time. Woman! To say your opinion! Oh wow! I can go on. Everything. My gosh” (interview, Ottawa, 15 May 2007). Third, by contrast, their attachments to Lebanon, or specific localities there, even when they were speaking about Lebanese nationality, tended to bypass the state. Lebanese citizens have experience of a country that vacillates, sometimes unpredictably, between war and peace. During war-time especially, but even in the absence of military hostilities, their governments are frequently unstable and ‘non-operational,’ a lack of functional sovereignty that many Lebanese understand and, for the most

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part, accept (UNDP 2009). The non-state-centred, connective, and relational character of Lebanese citizenship was clear in the interview with a 34-year-old Lebanese-Canadian woman, who had been vacationing in Tripoli during summer 2006. She described the benefits of holding Lebanese citizenship in terms of her “feeling connected to my Lebanese family, roots and religion” (interview, Ottawa, 12 June 2007). Terms of intense emotional attachment (“unconditional love”) and a sense of essentialist and embodied identity (“blood”) peppered the answers of most respondents about their Lebanese citizenship. “I don’t even know what it is about being a citizen of Lebanon. It really offers you nothing, but at the same time you feel like you have everything” (interview, 31-year-old Australian-Lebanese female, Al-Koura, 23 Aug. 2008). In response to a question about the benefits of Lebanese citizenship, Lebanese Australians and Canadians would consistently emphasize strong family ties, familial love, and sociability as defining Lebanese and Arab culture and as differentiating it from Australian and Canadian culture. A Lebanese-Australian man observed: And by the way, the Lebanese culture is better than the Australian culture in one way. We are very tied to one another. We love each other. We protect each other. The Australians don’t care. This is very bad. Australians see their families once at Christmas time. We see each other all the time. We have more love to give. You know, as a culture, this is better than Australian culture. I’m not insulting, but you know the Arab people, they have something, very attached to each other. Family unit. And that part of it, I like it. You can be friend for life, very attached to each other, all the time. This is the Arab culture. (Interview, Sydney, 4 April 2008) Even as the majority of our respondents would not think of revoking their Lebanese citizenship, one-quarter declared that it provided no benefits whatsoever. Being Lebanese, it seemed, had nothing to do with citizenship, government, or “a piece of paper,” but rather was bred in the bone. A 45-year-old man declared, “My Lebanese citizenship is my identity, absolutely without a doubt … [but] that piece of paper does not benefit me in Australia, even in Lebanon. The Lebanese government does not provide any social benefits to its citizens. My love of Lebanon is coming from the memories of my childhood … If I was caught in a war, will the Lebanese try to get me back to Lebanon, and try to find a safe passage for me? The answer is no” (interview, Sydney, 29 May 2007). A

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44-year-old dual-national female professor residing in Beirut expressed her fears about the weakness of social security in Lebanon: “For me, I keep saying this country [Lebanon] does not have a real social security for old age. Even here in the university, the moment I stop working, I don’t really have any benefits. That is a very scary thought, because when I am older, I will be weaker, that is when I actually need help” (interview, Beirut, 19 Aug. 2008). Deep love/affinity/sense of belonging for Lebanon often went hand in hand with abiding gratitude for the second citizenship and its practical citizenship entitlements: “I have a romance for Lebanon because Lebanon is my country, I love it, it’s in my blood, but when it comes to practicality, Australia provides everything we need to live peacefully and in dignity” (interview, female teacher, 34, resident of Sydney for 15 years, Sydney, 14 June 2007). “To have an Australian citizenship, you automatically have all the benefits. In Australia, there are many open opportunities and there are no drawbacks. In general, the Lebanese government does not provide any social welfare. To live in dignity you have to have money … Having Lebanese citizenship does not give me security, but I love Lebanon because I was born in Lebanon and grew up in Lebanon. It is what I call the unconditional love” (interview, 31-year-old woman, Sydney, 28 May 2007). Such distinctions reflect the relative heft of citizenships in North and South and in peaceful and war-torn countries, as well as a contrasting instrumental versus affective attachment to a liberal versus communal form of citizenship. An alternative “security” frame, however, belies a neat dichotomy between a “peaceful, safe” citizenship (Australia, Canada) and a “dangerous, war-torn,” and failed citizenship (Lebanon). While the violence and destruction of war compelled many dual citizens to flee Lebanon for their safe country, as mobile subjects many often sought or encountered a form of inner peace and ontological security in Lebanon that they found to be lacking in Australia or Canada. Indeed, this was one of the most arresting observations about how these dual citizens thought about the relationship between their sense of security and their two contrasting citizenships. Several spoke with pain about racialized otherness in Australia and Canada, even among the native-born. A 31-year-old, Australian-born woman, who now resided in Beirut with a successful therapeutic massage business, talked about growing up in Melbourne: “I always felt different because first of all my hair on my arms, maybe, they were a little bit dark, they were strange for them. And there were blonde kids

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in my class and some Asian students, and I was always the different one in my class, because maybe my love for Lebanon, even if I hadn’t been there yet. Just being teased, I was called ‘monkey’ or ‘ape’ because of the hair on my arms. There are people like me somewhere in the world, so I decided to try that, and I came here [by myself, at the age of nine to live with my aunt], and I thought that this is it” (interview, Al-Koura, north Lebanon, 16 Aug. 2008). When this woman’s father lost his business in Melbourne during an economic downturn in 1998, the family returned to Lebanon, where he had sent money to complete construction of buildings there. In a reversal of the assumed hierarchy of strong and weak citizenships, Lebanon provided an “insurance policy” for when things had gone badly in the country of “robust” citizenship. For this woman, now living alone and distancing herself from a painful family situation in Australia (where a beloved brother had become a drug addict), the summer 2006 war was not traumatic, but rather a time of increasing sociability and heightened freedom from routine. “Actually, to be honest, it was only scary when you hear other people making a big deal out of everything, like ‘Don’t leave the house.’ … I remember it was the best time of my life, 2006, the war time that summer, it was the best summer I ever had, because the war made everyone free. They were jobless, they can’t travel, can’t commute, they can’t go anywhere unless they have a job nearby. So we were all free. This was a time when friends got together. It was a time when you learned new card games. It was a time when you went to the beach” (interview, Al-Koura, north Lebanon, 16 Aug. 2008). For this young woman, as for several other dual citizens who had mixed experiences in both contexts – of trauma and of joy – and moved accordingly and often from one to the other, the significance of dual citizenship lay in “security, for me to know that I come from two beautiful worlds, I can go to each one anytime I want.” One of the most astonishing and poignant reflections of this more complex notion of security occurred during our most painful interview, in Aytaroun, with Ahmad El-Akhras and his son. As we saw above, Mr El-Akhras, a resident of Montreal for 30 years, had sustained critical injuries in a bomb blast in the middle of town, which also killed eleven members of his family. His 21-year old son, in Montreal at the time of the explosion, was now staying with his father, restoring their family home in their ancestral village of Aytaroun. He took us on a tour of the house, pointing out the damage from Israeli bombs. He spoke with emotion about how this event had ruined his life and how he couldn’t

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believe that the little ones – his young nieces and nephews – were gone. He patted his chest and said he could still feel them lying there. Without provocation, he remarked: “Life in Canada is so stressful, we are always rushing to be on time, working nine to five. I don’t feel any stress here. Can you explain why people live here ’til the age of ninety and a hundred years old, and they don’t go to doctors? In Lebanon, I feel I am relieved from stress” (interview, 8 Aug. 2008). conclusion

War, such as the summer 2006 conflict in Lebanon, both demonstrates and tests the benefits of holding a hefty citizenship in a state such as Canada or Australia. Such countries engaged in unprecedented efforts to secure their citizens’ safety by assisting passage, revealing clearly how citizenship in a secure, wealthy state could provide “a passport to life” inaccessible to uni-national relatives in Lebanon. While many dual citizens clung to a sense of entitlement to the rights and privileges of belonging to a “secure” nation-state, they also observed the injustice and lack of humanitarianism in these states’ responses towards their noncitizen family members implicit in the family-cleaving practices of the state-assisted departure movements. Only a fraction of those eligible for such assistance were able or willing to leave Lebanon through the evacuation efforts of their “safe” countries. Some, particularly those residing in parts of Beirut or in the north, felt relatively safe. They drew on their knowledge of a war between Israel and Hezbollah – a more predictable mapping of military violence than sectarian conflict. Dual citizens in the heavily bombed south expressed their frustration over Canberra or Ottawa’s unwillingness to negotiate safe avenues (such as temporary ceasefires) to let them escape. As they fled, the unremitting destruction of their ancestral and familial villages forced them to circumvent destroyed bridges and roads, depend on the navigational instructions of locals, and find their way through chaos and a ruined landscape to the Syrian border. Several vented their anger at the one-sided foreign policy that helped cause and then played down deaths among their co-nationals (Butler 2006). They depended on their own security knowledge or that gained through their particular familial and wider social networks, many of which spanned geographically to the Australian and Canadian diasporas, to make decisions about how to secure their own safety. Their engagement in a particular mobilityknowledge nexus produced their sense of belonging in and to Lebanon.

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Dual citizens cited diverse reasons for remaining in Lebanon during the war. For some, primary residence, extended families, jobs, children’s schools, home villages, family land and orchards, and social networks were all in Lebanon, and leaving was unthinkable, despite their other, valuable citizenship. For some dual citizens visiting Lebanon, the guilt of leaving family members compelled them to remain. An unquestioned sense of belonging in and to Lebanon, and defiance against temporary external military aggression, stalled plans to join the assisted departure. Again, local knowledge of which areas were safe, and when and where to sojourn (e.g., through suburb-hopping) as violence escalated or bombing targeted different villages and Beirut neighborhoods, was critical for these people and their families during the 34 days of violence. The narratives of dual citizens that emerged from our questions revealed that these individuals’ sense of their ontological security develops from and yet departs from state-centred notions of national security (Stasiulis and Ross 2009). While citizenship in “safe” Western countries places them in the privileged side of the global divide, their history there as racialized, often-vilified, orientalized peoples makes them feared and widely regarded as risks to national security. Being born in Canada or Australia certainly increased attachment to those landscapes and culture, but was no guarantee of a sense of belonging or acceptance as fully legitimate citizens. Throughout the short 2006 war and state-assisted departure, Canadian politicians such as blogger Conservative MP Garth Turner pejoratively termed them “citizens of convenience” (G. Turner 2006). In April 2009, amendments to the Canadian Citizenship Act introduced a socalled two-generation rule that makes it more difficult for foreign-born and adopted citizens to pass on their citizenship to their offspring. This effort to contain the proliferation of dual citizens was part of the political fall-out of dual citizens’ claiming their right to protection (Canada, Citizenship and Immigration 2009). As Nyers (2010:59) perceptively suggests, through such reforms to citizenship legislation, states such as Canada reveal their unease about dual citizenship, unable to reconcile their keenness for their citizens to immerse themselves in global business and other networks and their desire for them to feel deep attachment only to one nation-state. Thus, while many Lebanese dual citizens sought to avoid the violence of their homeland or ancestral land, their affective responses to such violence were by no means the only or central source of their ontological (in)security or abiding sense of belonging. In this context, as they chose

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when and how to move about between their two countries, another, more hybrid notion of citizenship emerged, centring less on the state and more on affect and networks and binding them to their family and neighbours, fields, orchards, and houses, even those jeopardized by war and cluster bombs.

notes

1 Miss USA 2010, Rima Fakih, born in the southern Lebanese town of Srifa, who holds dual citizenship in Lebanon and the United States, has come under fire by right-wing bloggers, who have dubbed her as a “terrorist in a bikini” (Province, 2010). I would like to thank Yasmeen Abu-Laban for bringing this newsworthy item to my attention. 2 Among our respondents there were 79 dual-citizens in Lebanon when war broke out in mid-July 2006, and Canberra evacuated 17 to ­Australia; Ottawa evacuated 22 to Canada; 24 found their own way out of Lebanon, primarily across the Syrian border; and 16 chose to remain. 3 My research assistants and I conducted and taped 79 interviews in Australia, Canada, and Lebanon between April 2007 and December 2008 with dual citizens of Lebanese origin, who had been in Lebanon when the summer 2006 war started. A few of these interviewees held citizenships in Lebanon and a country or countries other than Canada and Australia (e.g., Brazil, the United States). We interviewed 10 leaders of community organizations in Canada and Australia. We recruited respondents through personal contacts of the researchers and research assistants, community associations, university groups, and word of mouth in Australia (primarily the Sydney area), Canada (primarily Ottawa and Montreal), and Lebanon (several cities and towns in all major regions). These interviews, which lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours, took place in Arabic, English, and French or a combination of these languages, and interviewers translated those not in English. The respondents ranged in age from 17 to the mid70s and were of both genders. We sought representation from faiths or religious affiliations with at least the three largest sects: (Muslim) Shi’a and Sunni and (Christian) Maronites. While the majority of respondents were born in Lebanon, some, especially younger ones, were born either in Australia or in Canada. Many of them had lived at least part of their lives in Lebanon during the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), which helped explain their responses to the sudden new conflict there.

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4 People may hold more than two citizenships. I am following the convention in scholarship and many nations’ laws (e.g., Canada’s), which use and treat multiple or plural and dual citizenship as synonymous. 5 The allocation of seats in the Lebanese parliament is confessional. The Taif Agreement of 1989, which ended the civil war, reapportioned seats that had previously favoured the Christian minority. There was to be equal Christian and Muslim representation in the 128-seat, unicameral parliament, with 64 seats for Christians, 27 for Sunni Muslims, 27 for Shi’a Muslims, 8 for Druze, and 2 for Alawites. The 2005 elections gave Hezbollah 14 seats. While its strength varies, a wave of violence in May 2008 prompted lawmakers to compromise with the militant group. In August 2008, parliament approved a national unity cabinet, giving Hezbollah and its allies veto power with 11 of 30 seats. 6 In their fact-finding mission to southern Lebanon immediately following the 2006 war, Canadian Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj and NDP MP Peggy Nash noted how Hezbollah has integrated into Lebanese society and government and suggested that Canada reconsider its 2002 labelling of it as a banned terrorist group. Jason Kenney, parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, retorted that “Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that is comparable to the Nazi party of the 1930s” (CBC News Viewpoint 2006). Australia joins other countries such as the United Kingdom in listing as terrorist only Hezbollah’s External Security Organization, “a discrete organisation under the umbrella of Hizballah but with a separate leadership and direct links to Iran” (Australian Government 2009). 7 Dhamoon and Abu-Laban (2009) document historical precedents whereby Canada’s racialized national security policies have constructed “dangerous internal foreigners,” such as Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, the Front de libération du Québec in the October crisis of 1970, and the Kanehsatake/Oka crisis of 1990. 8 For the generations of Canadian- or Australian-born Lebanese, the question is somewhat different. None the less cognitive dissonance may stem from their membership in a state that provides security from the violence of their country of origins and yet defines Arabs and Muslims as security risks and engages in racial profiling. 9 Eight members of the El-Akhras family who died held Canadian and Lebanese citizenship. The power of citizenship to define who is grievable (Butler 2006) meant that most media reports spoke of seven or eight members, rather than eleven. 10 Such optimism dovetailed with the Israeli army’s departure from most of Lebanon after 22 years of occupation and the Syrian army’s withdrawal

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in April 2005 after the Cedar Revolution, which the assassination of Rafik Hariri (Lebanon’s prime minister 1992–98 and 2000–4) had provoked. According to Guita Hourani, director of the Lebanese Emigration Research Center, “Between 1 January and 12 July 2006, 739,109 tourists entered Lebanon; 279,396 of them arrived after 1 June” (2006:29). On 1 August 2006, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay testified to the interrelated challenges facing Ottawa’s evacuation operation: “The rapid deterioration into a rolling and continuous war zone; the Israeli sea blockade, which created a 12-hour window to move ships in and out of Beirut harbour; basic road, bridge, and airport infrastructure damage, which included the Beirut international airport and for all intents and purposes prevented air evacuation without helicopters, of which we had none in the region; the deterioration of communications networks in Lebanon, as many phone lines and radio towers were taken out in the early days; serious capacity shortages in Lebanon’s port infrastructure – in other words, only so many boats could dock and we were sharing limited space with numerous other countries; high international demand for the limited commercial maritime capabilities available for immediate use in the Mediterranean Sea led to a bidding competition with many other countries; the distance between Canada and Lebanon itself being half a world away; and the relatively small size of our embassy in Beirut, which had a complement of 32 staff – nine Canadian-based and 23 locally engaged – which eventually grew to 48, in contrast with the largest resident Canadian community, an estimated 50,000 people, one of the largest of any western country in Lebanon” (Canada, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, 2006:2). MacKay estimated that one-third of the 50,000 or so Canadians in Lebanon in July 2006 were in the heavily targeted south. “The intensity right now of the bombing is such that to send people there, even to send buses or armoured cars, we don’t have that equipment on the ground” (quoted in O’Neill 2006). See O’Loughlin, Witmer, and Linke (2010) for a fascinating spatial analysis by a team of political geographers of the “hotspot” clusters of violent conflict in the Afghanistan–Pakistan wars during the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency and the first year of Barack Obama’s. According to the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Research Institute in Washington, DC (Sherry 2007:21), “It is an egregious violation of international humanitarian law if Lebanese civilians in their home villages and towns were presumptively viewed as legitimate military objectives.”

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15 While many European governments criticized Hezbollah’s provocation of Israel, they also labelled Israel’s response disproportionate. Some, such as France’s, castigated Israel’s offensive into Lebanon on 14 July, arguing that it would “plunge Lebanon back into the worst years of the war with the flight of thousands of Lebanese who ... were in the process of rebuilding their country” (Washington Post 2006). Jean Fabre, a spokesperson for the UNDP, claimed that “the damage was such that the last 15 years of work on reconstruction and rehabilitation, following the previous problems that Lebanon experienced, are now annihilated … Fifteen years of work have been wiped out in a month” (Fattouh and Kolb 2006:101). 16 On 1 August 2006, Canadian Public Safety Minister Peter Goldring, a member of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, rejected opposition MPs’ suggestion that Ottawa take a “balanced approach” to the Lebanon war: “I would ask why we should have a balanced decision on terrorism. We have acknowledged that we are in a war on terrorism. I think we have a responsibility to face that headon” (Canada, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development 2006:41). 17 The hostilities put the ancient Phoenician city Tyre at tremendous risk, prompting UNESCO’s director-general to issue a “Heritage Alert” for the site (Matsuura 2006).

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2 Knowledge, Gender, and Changing Mobility Regimes Women Migrants in Europe

e l e o n o r e k o f m a n a n d pa rvat i r a g h u r a m

introduction

Over the last decade the concept of skills has been increasingly mobilized to select migrants. As a result, the paradigm of mobility has become one of the leading tropes for understanding the present (Urry 2007). However, opportunities for mobility are not evenly distributed; a mobility gap exists with many people prevented from travelling through enclosure and entrapment (Shamir 2005). Taking these arguments further, Bryan Turner (2007) suggests that it might be more useful to think of an immobility regime. In parallel, there have been discussions of the paradigmatic status of knowledge within mobility regimes (Tannock 2009). Knowledge defines the economy and hence visions of society. It is a driver of growth, so that society privileges the mobility of knowledge workers with appropriate skills, specialities, accreditation, and experience. However, only certain kinds of knowledge fit within the domain of mobility. This differentiation immobilizes and devalues some groups because of the nature of their knowledge. Such an inequitable outcome deserves serious consideration if we value social justice. One axis of differentiation is gender (Walby et al. 2009). Men and women do not inhabit the same mobility regimes as custom and control over their gendered personae limits women’s mobility. In this chapter, we explore how gender affects mobility regimes and immobilizes some women more than others. It first outlines five types of knowledge in the knowledge economy. It then looks at gender and mobility in E ­ urope and

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their impact on knowledge, where the national/global interface interacts with a European regime of mobility, knowledge transfer, and citizenship. It next examines how Europe stratifies migrants: how knowledge itself mobilizes different spatial imaginaries and takes on spatial dimensions in these forms of governance (see also chapters 5, 7, and 9). It looks finally at the resulting gendered outcomes of the shifting mobility regimes and considers the social justice implications of unequal outcomes in the mobility-knowledge nexus. The three sections above highlight different kinds of knowledge, which types Europe’s knowledge economy recognizes, and how gender stratifies opportunities in Europe for migrant women. types of knowledge in the knowledge economy

Mobility has become one of the tropes that define a modern subject. Thus, according to Buscher and Urry (2009:99) “Attention to the fluid, fleeting, yet powerful performativity of a multitude of everyday (im)mobilities transforms conceptions of sociological inquiry, explanation and critique.” The quest to understand modernity therefore involves, indeed requires, sensitivity to how mobility shapes the world. This constitutive gesture of mobility, while important, is for other commentators not the whole story. Zygmunt Bauman (2000) grounds his vision of liquid modernity in globalization’s effect of increasing mobility for some people while immobilizing others (see chapters 8 and 11). Hence Shamir (2005) suggests that mobility is only half of the contemporary condition. The other half involves the immobilization of large parts of the world through “a pervasive ‘paradigm of suspicion’ that conflates the perceived threats of crime, immigration, and terrorism, thus constituting a conceptual blueprint for the organization of global risk-management strategies” and that “actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders” (197). Shamir suggests that immobility is therefore as significant in shaping modern subjects as mobility. Moreover, he relates the two – producing a mobile world requires technologies of curtailment and entrapment, ranging from walls and fences to complex surveillance technologies. For Bryan Turner (2007), we inhabit a paradigm of immobility featuring sequestration, storage, and seclusion. Turner elaborates a series of modalities that secure these, adapting Agamben’s (1998) theorizations of enclavement. Moreover, he posits an inexorable turn to suspicion and exclusion.

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The fundamental contradictoriness of the immobility paradigm lies in the constitutive nature of mobility in defining the modern. Whether through the ability to travel (cosmopolitan pleasures) or through the need to move for developing an economy, the modern subject requires mobility (see chapters 3, 5, 9, 14, and 15). To make a claim to be modern is to place oneself in the trope of globalization and its spatialities – the global. Moreover, these mobilities are not simply corporeal; they involve goods, capital, and, most important, knowledge. Mobility is a strategization of power that reinforces certain versions of knowledge. N. Cook (2007) offers an illustration in her exploration of how Northern women working for international aid agencies do development work in Gilgit in northern Pakistan. They use their mobility, in the form of international travel, to narrate their developmental knowledges in comparison to the women in Gilgit, whom they posit as underdeveloped and lacking in knowledge due to constraints on their spatial mobility. Hence mobility scripts certain kinds of knowledge as valuable. It is those knowledges that circulate, have come from outside, are borne by certain individuals, and have a wide reach, that count in the contemporary world. Local knowledge, which is context specific, beyond the networks of international power, loses value. Cook shows that the power of mobility is as important to “development workers” as to the people they are said to be developing. The comportment, behaviour, and qualities of the migrant knowledge worker reflect the “operative rationales that animate aspirations aimed at shaping the conduct of others” (Osborne and Rose 1999:738), have an ideational value, and operate to validate and value certain kinds of mobility. They also validate the knowledges of the mobile subject. Mobility, knowledge, and the body thus have firm connections. This is particularly evident in the discourse about the knowledge society. “The ideological work that knowledge economy discourse performs is based on its claim that knowledge should be seen primarily as a factor of production, along with land, labour and capital; its promotion of the need for networking, teamwork and partnership; its insistence that social and economic advancement be based on talent, education and skill; and most of all, its presumption that knowledge, education and learning are inherently and unquestionably goods in and of themselves” (Tannock 2009:257). The productive capacity of knowledge, however, goes hand in hand with its mobilizability, which has its own spatial reach.

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States woo knowledge subjects as investments in rational knowledges, in evaluative judgments, and in informed engagement, which they see as productive both of the state and of the modern subject. As “modernity has given science the status of the only truly public knowledge” (Pelizzoni 2003:331), scientists are the ultimate modern subjects. Thus modern states may well encourage some forms of mobility as mobility comes to be seen as part of modern subjecthood. With underpinnings in notions of Enlightenment, the forms of mobility become an exercise in rational discrimination by bounded, autonomous selves, moving freely and rationally within the world. These forms of knowledge also find value in migration, and international migrations are increasingly shaped by the prioritization and regulation of knowledge within specific migration regimes (see chapters 1, 4, and 5). However, the qualities of the knowledge that travel also vary. Discussions of different kinds of skills and their propensity and ability to be transferred, transmitted, and translated with corporeal mobility owe much to Michael Polanyi’s (1958, 1966) distinction between the codified and the tacit. He explored the personal and emotional dimension of knowledge creation, distinguishing between “codified knowledge” (rule-based knowledge that people can write down and store) and “tacit knowledge” (which they acquire on the job and retain as know-how and experience). Since then, the classifications of types of knowledge have become more complex and differentiate between those indivisible from the individual, and in principle transferable, and those that are social (Williams 2006). We look here at five types of knowledge – embrained, embodied, encultured, embedded, and encoded. Embrained knowledge is dependent on conceptual skills and cognitive abilities, which allow recognition of and reflection on underlying patterns. Such knowledge appears creative and imaginative but also captive to existing systems of production, so that it is economically productive. Thus it is often assumed that these conceptual skills derive from scientific formulations. Such types of knowledge have become more valuable and prominent because of their generic nature and hence mobility. They underpin the productivity of knowledge society and also provide it with its competitive edge. Both actual economic growth and relative growth are seen to be spearheaded by this form of knowledge. Embodied knowledge results from the experience of physical presence, practical thinking, material objects, sensory information, and learning in doing. The “material turn” in social theory has led to revalidation of such corporeal knowledges. The embodied nature of many kinds of work and

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the tacit knowledges that accompany even the more embrained forms of work have received recognition, spurring new methodological insights and methods (Buscher and Urry 2009). However, embodied knowledge has been traditionally associated with women’s knowledge and its contribution to production and social well-being is often discounted. Furthermore, they necessarily posit work that some people do, especially certain groups of migrants, as embodied, as we see below. In encultured knowledge, meanings are shared due to some form of common culture. Socialization and acculturation, and hence language, shared experiences, and sociality are key elements of this form of knowledge. This form of knowledge is often related to soft skills, with shared understandings, responses, and ways of behaving. It is often tacit, although it may be counted up and classified through gross categories such as nation or religion. Knowledge that is embedded in contextual factors and is not objectively pre-given forms another category of knowledge. Here knowledge is shared, even though it is generated in different language systems, cultures, and groups, because it is integral to institutional and political contexts. Finally, encoded knowledge takes the form of signs and symbols in traditional forms such as books, manuals, codes of practice, and websites. This is the kind of knowledge we associate with traditional professions relating to law, medicine, and education, although these have created other forms of knowledge. For Williams, these forms of knowledge are relatively less mobile (2006). However, as many postcolonial theorists have argued, the transfer of encoded knowledge has been central to the development of spatialized power (Cooper 2005). For instance, the mobility of doctors has enabled formation of shared codes across a profession, which then shapes further mobility (Raghuram 2009) for some members. Although it is useful to separate these forms of knowledge in order to understand what each contains and seeks, empirically they often appear in combination. It is their configurations that are interesting ­(Williams 2006). Their diverse and intricate configurations are differently valued and depend on the context in which their bearers live and work. And the configurations’ directionality – i.e., between spheres of life and social networks (Ettlinger 2003) – and patterning reveal the status of the knowledge and its bearers. Thus knowledge that draws on and moves out of the household, as much embodied knowledge does, may receive little value. Although observers often devalue embodied

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­ nowledge when it combines with encultured and embedded knowledge, k it may help the bearer climb within an occupation. For example, Filipino domestic workers and carers often earn higher wages because of their shared religion and English language. One particular example of this configuration has emerged in recent thinking about the complexities of embrained knowledge within knowledge societies. Meyer and Brown (1999) suggest knowledge communities are socio-cognitive communities, not just social or institutional ones. This inherently embeds the knowledge of scientists, their focus of interest is not only in brains but also in codes and cultures. They argue that scientists enact this socio-cognition in particular ways at particular locations and that these forms of enactment are inherent to the production of their knowledge. As a result, many questions have arisen about the many sites, relations, and practices that foster knowledge (Amin and Cohendet 2004). Attention has also focused on the role of networks of knowledge, especially those that cluster around global cities (Henry and Pinch 2000), their production through local configurations and “buzz,” and the role of such sites for fostering the learning process as knowledge transfers between places that buzz (Faulconbridge 2007). The emphasis here has been on the macro-geographies of learning in the context of competitiveness and collaboration, especially on places that serve as nodes of learning and place-based relations and their role in fostering growth. Such local nodes help create and diffuse global knowledge, thus blurring distinctions between local and global knowledge. Moreover, the relations between these nodes in a global economy may shape economic growth. Even embrained knowledge may be very specialized and emerge in local environments that are not easy to duplicate or replicate (Meyer and Brown 1999). Yet this is not the form of embrained knowledge that the knowledge society recognizes, as we see below. Moreover, certain kinds of embodied and embedded skills may gain value in combination with brains. Thus, according to Grugulis and Vincent (2009), when women had technical skills, their soft skills gained recognition too. The prefixes ‘em’ and ‘en’ signal the processes through which knowledge earns status, recognition, and value because they represent the noun(s) that follow(s). Thus embrained knowledge is about brains, often almost exclusively. Similarly, in encoded knowledge, the coding is the primary process through which it gains value. These differentiations are representational practices that emphasize certain elements of knowledge while removing others. The prefixes ground these forms of knowledge –

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relate their ontological status to – their practices. Privileged signatures give them status. For instance, embrained knowledges are a product of certain forms of art practices that form part of the creative cultural industries. They exist within power relations about what matters and what does not. Certain elements of knowledge may gain recognition as codified, but others codes may be implicit and not marked up as such. These are not definitional problems alone – along with marking come issues of value, including remuneration. Within a particular configuration, embrained knowledges are probably the most valuable. The addition of encultured and embedded knowledge enables their possessors to transcend their bodily status. Thus it enables a migrant to approximate as closely as possible the non-migrant because it enables them to get recognition that comes much more easily to non-migrant. Of course, the migrant may not be able to access the relevant experience and hence knowledge. And soft skills – a broad term that includes embedded and encultured knowledge – derive from jobs and employers, are locally relevant, and are political rather than universal and generic (Grugulis and Vincent 2009:599). Prospective employers often equate them with gendered and racialized attributes – for example, seeking aggressive men and empathetic women. Because most of the literature has merely categorized these forms of knowledge, there has been little discussion of their underlying power relations. Each type of knowledge forms part of a constellation of power relations that shape and respond to other factors. Yet recognizing and challenging these power relations are often central to demands for social and other forms of justice, which much of the literature purports to seek. Without highlighting the processes through which different kinds of knowledge are sifted and valued, such literatures can remain analytical without revealing the politics of belonging, who is included and excluded, and how these processes of inclusion/exclusion occur. In this chapter, we aim to correct this by exploring two factors – gender and migration – which influence how the power of knowledge gets stratified but also transformed. g e n d e r , m i g r at i o n , a n d e u r o p e ’ s k n o w l e d g e e c o n o m y

Gender and mobility both offer important axes along which this power of knowledge is manifested (Kofman 2007). Women tend to experience far more gender segregation at work than do men. The comparative European project From Welfare to Knowfare (European Commission

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2007:23) found evidence that “labour markets are becoming more diversified in terms of skills, pay, and job autonomy and security. These employment changes increase the risk of the social exclusion of those with a weak labour market position at either a global or local level. Women’s greater responsibility for the care of children and dependents makes it more difficult for many of them to obtain secure, skilled and well-paid jobs throughout their working life.” The report concluded that women’s jobs, especially those with atypical contracts and part-time work, involve less complexity and autonomy. The gendered stratification of knowledge has become an urgent problem in a knowledge economy. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD 2008) proposed a generic definition of knowledge economy: “one that encourages its organisations and people to acquire, create, disseminate and use codified and tacit knowledge more effectively for greater economic and social development.” The European Union (EU) saw globalization and a new knowledge-driven economy presenting it with a major challenge (Lisbon European Council 2000). Digital technologies were transforming the old industrial society into an information society. The Lisbon Agenda (2000) aimed to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010.” It called “social and institutional modernisation” inevitable and presented the knowledge economy as technical management (neoliberal governance), not a political choice. Each member state was to be at the “cutting edge” of a knowledge-based and innovative economy and society. A recent definition captures the dominant role of the revolution in information and communication technology (ICT) working with the market – i.e., “the knowledge economy is what you get when firms bring together powerful computers and well-educated minds to create wealth” (Brinkley 2006:3). This understanding embeds knowledge in the relationship with machines and codes rather than in human beings. The United Kingdom believes that the knowledge economy requires economically valuable skills and more jobs in financial services, high technology and the ICT sector, media, and the broader cultural economy (Walby 2002). Although analysts often conceptualize the knowledge economy through the global lens – the spatial field within which human mobilities operate – the regional dimension is increasingly resolving tensions between the global and the national. Moreover, this is not new. Certain codes of knowledge and their mobilities have been influential within particular cultural spaces and formations – for example, between former

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colonial and metropolitan spaces or within the EU, where recognition of credentials applies. In Europe, the EU is displacing the global scale as a container of migration and social interaction.1 The European mobility regime plans to manage social difference and seeks a borderless space within which bearers of skills and knowledge can circulate freely (see chapter 5). However, this internal space within the Union, which is relatively weakly stratified, is posited against an external world that is increasingly stratified. The few people who may cross the barriers to Europe can do so because of their prized scientific knowledge and financial expertise as the drivers of the now-battered global economy. For the regulated professions, there has been largely a return to the situation of the 1990s – at best minimal hospitality or guest-worker status. These trends are most evident in the United Kingdom, which had previously worked towards global competition for skilled people. As a result, regional formations such as empire or Europe always help shape mobility regimes. Moreover, the governance of such regimes moves dynamically between different spatialities. The conceptualization of the knowledge economy and its relationship to mobilities exemplify the idea of gendered knowledge as Schwenken and Eberhardt (2008) show when they analyse theories of economic migration. “Collective gender knowledge” refers to a society’s knowledge about the differences between the sexes, the reasoning about its self-evidence and evidence, and the dominant normative concepts about the correct relations and divisions of labour. In this instance, it refers to the acknowledgment of gender differences in types of knowledge, differences in locating and acquiring them, and explanations of these differences vis-à-vis the functioning of the global economy. The gendered conception of the knowledge economy affects immigration policies. Recent changes to management of migration in European states closely correspond to the exemplary candidate for the knowledge economy – an individual working in the financial sector or an ITC expert, or combination of both, who can earn high salaries and is young and promising, with many years of work to offer. Migrants in the feminized regulated sectors – welfare professionals and those in social reproduction – tend to earn less, are less mobile, and are subject to confirmation of good conduct by the sponsor. This distinction differentiates bearers of different forms of human capital and skills and hardens the boundaries between people with and without useful skills. In countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom, the highly and the ordinarily skilled take different routes. Other

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countries, such as the Netherlands, seek primarily “knowledge migrants equated largely with scientific and technological skills.” For the highly skilled routes of entry, salary levels help decide or actually determine eligibility, and this is now the case for the EU Blue Card (EU Council Directive 2009/50/EC), which came into effect on 25 May 2009.2 And because of the gender pay gap in most countries of origin and destination, this is likely to affect gender balance for highly skilled migrants. Such unequal outcomes should be of concern for social justice. s t r at i f i c at i o n o f e u r o p e a n m i g r a n t s

The stratifications we saw above are often more intense for migrant women. Women circulate globally through the world of services ­(Agustin 2003), most notably in less skilled, embodied work, such as care for children and the elderly, hospitality services, cleaning, and sex work. There is a clear concentration of women, but especially migrant women, in the personal and social services in nearly all OECD countries, particularly in southern Europe, because of their over-representation in domestic labour and hotels and restaurants. Many have experienced substantial deskilling or have taken a long time to use their credentials (MorenoFontes Chammartin 2006; Rubin et al. 2008). Yet a significant minority of female migrants with skills have been able to mobilize their cultural and social capital to obtain skilled work. Until recently, data have not been sufficiently disaggregated to demonstrate their significance. The OECD has begun to address this deficiency in relation to skilled migrants and labour markets (SOPEMI 2007) and the gender brain drain (Dumont, Martin, and Spielvogel 2007). The data suggest the growing feminization of migration, including for the highly skilled (possessing a tertiary degree), where the genders are almost equal (see Table 2.1). The share of highly skilled women immigrants in OECD countries is only three percentage points below that of men. Moreover, many such women also enter a country as spouses of principal applicants, as is the case in Canada (see chapter 4). In Europe, there are relatively high rates of female skilled migrants among the foreign-born (Hungary, Ireland, United Kingdom). At the other extreme, due to high levels of deskilling migrant women in most of southern Europe, there are markedly lower proportions of migrant women in skilled occupations there. Since the late 1990s, reduced investment by states such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom in training doctors, nurses, and

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Table 2.1  Percentage of women in highly skilled occupations by origin, ages 15–64, in selected European countries, 2004 Country  Austria France Germany Greece Hungary Ireland Italy Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom

Native-born

Foreign-born

Foreign-born, non-oecd

38.2 37.7 46.0 36.6 40.8 40.0 43.9 36.2 45.4 44.1 36.2

25.3 30.5 30.5 13.5 42.7 47.9 29.2 21.6 38.3 38.0 43.7

18.6 31.1 –  6.8 40.8 – 20.4 12.3 25.7 29.2 39.8

– not significant Source: Table I.15 (SOPEMI 2006).

t­ eachers has led to significant shortages in education, health, and social work, which local professionals cannot meet, forcing these and other states to recruit labour abroad. Women’s employment in these sectors has therefore helped alter the gender balance in skilled migration. For example, over 90 per cent of migrants in nursing are women, and in many countries nursing is the largest health profession. However, these occupations are in feminized reproductive sectors, which remain nationally bounded, regulated by corporatist bodies, and deploy primarily encoded rather than embrained skills. And within these sectors, for example, as in nursing, discriminatory practices and national and racial stereotyping may relegate migrants to the more embodied types of labour (Wolkowitz 2006), at lower grades and receiving less pay. Women migrants are also increasingly present in formerly male domains, such as doctors, but the gender balance has evened out in recent years. In some countries, such as the United Kingdom, use of migrant labour has fallen sharply as the number of domestically trained health staff has increased during financial cuts in public health. These trends are also country specific. For example, the life sciences and health professions (which include nursing, midwifery, doctors, dentists, veterinarians, and biologists) is still one of the top five groups of occupations for migrant women in Belgium, Denmark, and Ireland. These countries employ between 7.4 per cent and 8.6 per cent of migrant women in this sector (Rubin et al. 2008: 72).

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Women also form a small but significant minority among migrant professionals in information and communication technology (ICT) – a category expanding rapidly until recently (Raghuram 2004, 2008) – entering any of the major countries of immigration in any year (see also chapter 4). In 2005, women made up one-quarter to one-third of the computing professionals entering Australia through the major streams of skilled migrants or as family migrants (DIMIA 2006: 82, Tables 1 and 2). In Canada, between 1998 and 2000, women were about one-fifth of all computer programmers and systems analysts entering as principal applicants within the skilled stream, but only about 10 per cent of computer engineers (Citizenship and Immigration Canada [CIC] 2003:Tables 3 and 4). Intra-European migration has increased of late, while the growth of female migration among third-country nationals has favoured some sectors. Rubin et al. (2008) explore what knowledge migrant women bring to Europe, how this varies with place of origin, how far European institutions accredit and recognize them, and how well they convert this assessment into employment. Rubin et al. (2008) show us that migrant women spread across a range of skills, educational qualifications, and sectors. However, over half of native-born women and nearly two-thirds of migrant women concentrate “in the lowest skilled segments, which typically entail low status, low pay, and limited rights and scope for mobility within the labour market. Some of these sectors, like the sales and services elementary occupations, and personal and protective services, are typically sectors which demand ‘unskilled, rudimentary, menial, repetitive, interchangeable, and substitutable or expendable labour’” (71). Additional years of experience do not much affect earnings, which remain relatively flat, and there are high instability and turnover. The limited scope for developing human capital and the few opportunities for career advancement restrict opportunities (71). The experiences of intra-European and of third-country migrants often differ. Overall, the EU-born have higher labour-force participation and employment rates and lower unemployment rates (Rubin et al. 2008:95–6). These differences are smaller for women with less education, who are on a par with native-born women with little education, except for more unemployment. . Germany exemplifies some findings of Rubin et al. (2008), where in 2008 roughly 1 million women from central and eastern Europe were living. Overall, about 8 per cent of female migrants in Germany had

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a university degree, but the proportion for central and eastern Europeans was often much higher – so there were considerably more than 80,000 of them. About 12 per cent of all women in Germany with a university degree are scientists and engineers. Consequentially, almost 10,000 of the highly skilled migrant women with university degrees are natural scientists or engineers, probably more, because central and eastern European educational institutions do not segregate these subjects as Germany does, and most Communist states emphasized the sciences (Macrakis and Hoffmann 1999). However, after migration, Germany did not acknowledge or validate all of these women’s skills, and only some women entered equivalent occupational sectors. Overall, only 6,668 women with foreign nationalities were working in engineering and science with social insurance in 2005. These examples suggest the distribution of skills and education across the EU, which is keen to be a competitive knowledge society. They show us the uneven experiences of accreditation and validation of knowledge and the resultant differences in people’s participation in the knowledge economy. They provide a map of the differences but do not show some of the processes of differentiation, an issue we turn to next.

(dis)counting

knowledges

The three sections above highlighted different kinds of knowledge, which types Europe’s knowledge economy recognizes, and how gender stratifies opportunities in Europe for migrant women. We indicated that gender stratifies people’s incorporation into a knowledge society. In this section, we explore the ways in which power relations influence how different kinds of knowledge absorb new personnel. We focus on care work, a growing field for migrant women in Europe over the last decade. Capitalist exploitation has always extracted bodily labour, but in a globalizing world the fields of exploitation have been expanding and incorporating migrants in new ways (Wolkowitz 2006). One example is care work, where migrant women play an ever-greater role. Three Ds – dirty, dangerous, and difficult – typify much of the work of migrants, especially women, so many of whom care for other people (Doyle and Timonen 2009). But in this marking one can also see the ways in which migrants’ care work has been accompanied by a paring down of care to physical labour – its emotional content, both in its content and in its ascription, has been minimized (Duffy 2005), especially when migrant bodies become somatically marked and racialized as “brown,”

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­ coloured,” or “black” or othered in some visible way. The definitions of “ their work strip away their affective capabilities and ignore their brains, which make decisions on appropriate care. Defining care as only sensory bodywork also ignores (or devalues) the body’s multiplicity, which always involves emotional, social, and biological labour. Here, certain kinds of labour are consonant with particular types of knowledge, and the two are rarely unpacked. Underlying these definitions, this care inherits the configurations of recognition that affected previous performers. Typically, migrants (mostly women) have moved into a world of care that women usually dominated. However, women’s rising workforce participation has resulted in substantial labour shortages in unpaid informal care that women had often provided, intensifying demand for paid care-givers. Besides, at least in the West, many states have rolled back public provision of care services, so that the gaps in care have most acutely affected women, as they have faced a care gap both within and beyond the household. Migrant female labour increasingly meets this demand. The provision of care in its myriad forms underlies much female migration, so that many women migrate to provide care in a range of contexts and sites. They find employment as domestic workers and as care professionals, such as senior carers, nurses, and social workers, and facilitate the care of children, adults, disabled people, and the elderly within households, in residential homes, and in hospitals. However, society has tended to view the requisite knowledge as embodied rather than as needing brains. The transfer of women’s skills and knowledge from the domestic sphere – e.g., domestic work, cleaning, and care – to a public sphere has gone hand in hand with the status such skills usually denote. Society sees it as an extension of women’s innate ability to care for family members (Cameron and Boddy 2005) and hence pays it poorly. This reality influences knowledge recognition across many highly feminized sectors of the labour market, resulting in minimal recognition of the need for formal skills and training or its importance in the constellation of global knowledge. Moreover, the ascription of the value of knowledge depends not only on people who have the knowledge – it is also situational. Migrants’ work, caring for people who are most dependent, including the bodywork of touching and cleaning dirty or frail bodies, means that they too bear the negative ascriptions of their work (Dyer, McDowell, and Batnitzky 2008). Working in “out of place” sites, such as hospitals and care settings, intensifies this positioning. Many people regard both black bodies and older bodies with disgust and see them as distant from the desirable

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body. This is due to phenotypical variation as in race or to the effects of change and impairment, as in the ageing body. Thus both bodies, singly and in association, are seen as out of place, never ordinary, and always questionable and classifiable in some way. This set of characteristics seems to come together to dominate a particular way of thinking about both black and old bodies. A particular assemblage appears to dominate both types of bodies. It also defines the knowledge they demand, so that, for example, society may define looking after old people as not only involving knowledge about lifting and cleaning but as not requiring any intelligence, emotional or otherwise. However, these configurations also stigmatize providers of that labour and their knowledge. Types of knowledge, though stratified, are also capable of transformation. They may shift from one type to another. For example, certain elements of embrained knowledge may become increasingly codified and become less valuable over time. Similarly, the embodied knowledge that underpins care is increasingly becoming codified. Britain’s social care sector has put considerable effort into training and formalizing qualifications in response to severe shortages of labour and recourse to migrants (Cangiano et al. 2009). Knowledge and skills are not only dynamic over time but also spatially variable. The knowledge that some places inculcate is more valuable than that from others. Some of this variability may transfer across space, and some of it may not. According to Raghuram, Bornat, and Henry (2010), even though doctors in India shared the same codified practices as British doctors, their credentials did not count in the United Kingdom. Similarly Bauder (2003) suggests certain forms of knowledge regularly remain unaccredited because of their source. Canadian accreditation and experience seem to garner authority often unavailable to knowledge from other countries. However, this situation may be changing as migrants recognize the power of such knowledge. They may acquire new skills and accreditation to advance their opportunities. Other contexts may discount the encoded knowledge – i.e., educational qualification – and job seekers may hide it so as not to appear too threatening to the employer. What is clear is that who possesses the knowledge, their pre-histories, their locations, and whom it benefits all operate to stratify knowledge. Gender and race act as further prisms to operationalize and magnify those differentiations. However, on occasion the power differentials may shift, especially in migration. Thus women with a particular form of embrained power, such as migrant women in the ICT sector, may find

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that those qualities do not travel. Their bodies become the surface for enacting forms of control. For example, some Western countries may watch and police them as black bodies because of their race (Fanon 1967). The characteristics of the migrant body – its comportment (suspicious behaviour), clothing (veil, type of beard) – all come to be the primary markers of how to deal with them. Their brains become even more secondary in today’s highly securitized environment. For other migrants, these transformations may be more straightforward, when they transfer within a company, and within institutional processes and authorities, so that their knowledge travels with them, especially when they are played out through the white male body. conclusion

Knowledge, skills, and education are not equally distributed across the world. They vary in content, valuation, accreditation, and transferability. They also come together in different combinations to influence who moves and how. In this chapter, we have explored some of these issues through the example of gendered migrations in Europe. Gender offers one vector of stratification, often alongside others such as race and nationality, to influence migrant women’s experiences. In analysing the effects of changing mobility regimes, we have to take into account the gender-neutral representation of knowledge and gendered valuation of skills. The filter of knowledge, gender, and mobility affects not only selection of migrants into Europe but also labour-market outcomes. Across Europe, men are disproportionately present in the less regulated sectors and have more fluid mobility; women, in the more regulated and spatially restricted sectors. The effect of current closures and openings may result in a partial return to the gendered patterns of the 1990s for the interface between the national and the global, but with greater gender equality at the European scale. The categorization of knowledge helps us to fathom the roles of different kinds of knowledge shaping a knowledge society. As Tannock (2009) argues, we need to be wary of thinking of knowledge in unilinear or depoliticized ways. He writes that we call forth the language “of high skills (good) and low skills (bad), and we talk of knowledge and knowledge economies as goods in and of themselves, inherently and unquestionably. We need to remember that even in the vocational and economic context alone, all knowledge is ideologically charged, and what we learn can point us in what are often diametrically opposing directions” (269).

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These definitions of knowledge and their configurations have a complex contextual setting, in which power relations need addressing. This is crucial at a time when mobility is a foundational trope for defining modernity, and knowledge acts to select women who can migrate and how the new society incorporates them. As we argue in this chapter, the differential valuations of different types of knowledge affect the global distribution of economic and social resources and thus the realization of social justice. Two contrasting scenarios of the mobility-knowledge nexus and social justice (see Introduction) are thus discernible. Embodied knowledges, though in demand, accrue few rights of mobility, forcing many individuals to live with undocumented, or at best temporary, status for long periods. Embrained knowledges, more valuable and closely relating to global circulation, more easily cross borders and acquire economic and social rights. Moreover, as these different kinds of knowledge come together in different ways, they pose ever more complex challenges for ethical treatment of migrants. Placing migrants’ knowledge at the heart of this debate demands that we recognize the complexity of how embodied issues, such as race and gender, come together with elements of selective evaluation of knowledge to produce diverse forms of stratification that are locally contingent. These provide the basis for inclusion/ exclusion and raise social justice questions not only about what society is doing but also about what it needs to do to move towards justice. Hence the intersection of migration, gender, and knowledge merits further analysis, and the terms of the discussion require interrogating in an effort to make way for the diverse groups of women who make up today’s mobile subjects.

notes

1 The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is another example of regional cooperation where mobility has intensified as a result of mutual recognition, resulting particularly in Canadian emigration to the United States. 2 Member states had to pass this proposal within 2 years (i.e., by 2011) for it to go into effect. Although it represents a harmonized admission route for highly skilled individuals, states do not have to replace their own schemes, may set their own admission numbers, and may vary the minimum salary level for a work permit, which is currently set at 1.5 times the average annual salary.

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3 Mundane Cosmopolitanism, Mobility, and Social Justice A Neo-Durkheimian Approach

r o n j o n pa u l d at ta

i n t r o d u c t i o n : m o b i l i t y , c o s m o p o l i ta n i s m , a n d belonging

Two leading figures in urban social theory, with whom I concur, argue that “the close juxtaposition of peoples and cultures from around the world in cities has to be placed at the heart of any politics of identity, belonging and affiliation” (Amin and Thrift 2005:14–15). Arjun Appadurai ties this kind of phenomenon to urban “ethnoscapes” involving the circulation of tourists, immigrants, refugees, and guest workers (Short and Kim 1999:75). This chapter develops a neo-Durkheimian theoretical approach to socially just cosmopolitanism by focusing on the conditions and consequences of movement in global cities, taking seriously the observations above. In this regard, Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande indicate that the mobilities turn to examining “what sets and keeps people, goods and symbols in motion and how actual and potential movements structure social life,” developed by John Urry, shows promise for making better social scientific sense of cosmopolitan life. While Durkheim might seem to many an unlikely resource for contributing to contemporary mobilities studies, his attention to cosmopolitanism, migration, infrastructure, knowledge, social justice, and how belonging is transformed from below in the conditions of everyday life, suggests that a return to his work is timely and warranted. I contend in particular that a neo-Durkheimian approach

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to the mobilities dimensions of cosmopolitan life noted by global cities scholars provides a basis for developing viable, sociologically informed proposals for constituting more socially just cosmopolitan conditions. The provisional formulations below develop as follows. First, I challenge the neglect of movement in contemporary cosmopolitan theory through a consideration of research on global cities. Next, this is leveraged to show resonances with key thematics in Durkheim’s work. I then develop a basic analytical framework for redressing idealist impasses in contemporary cosmopolitan theory in no small measure theoretically responsible for the neglect of the mobilities dimensions of cosmopolitanism. A neo-Durkheimian alternative is articulated in which mobilities, knowledge, and social justice are theorized as constitutive elements of cosmopolitan belonging. Finally, a framework for realist social justice policy principles pertinent to cosmopolitan mobility is explicated. My hope is to contribute conceptual means for linking empirical studies of mobilities, globalization, and global cities to contemporary cosmopolitan theory in a sociological way pertinent to realist social justice advocacy. The method I use relies on critical theoretical readings and the retheorizing of existing material to extend promising lines of investigation, while confronting and aiming to resolve contradictory, implausible, regressive, and reductionist accounts of cosmopolitanism (Pearce 2001; Plouin 2010). u n d e r s ta n d i n g c o s m o p o l i ta n i s m a n d g l o b a l c i t i e s

Contextualizing the Problematic Pervasive population migrations to global cities (Hales and Pena 2012; UNESCO 2011) are reconstituting much of social life and producing new forms of knowledge, belonging, and struggles for social justice. The extent of this mobility is part and parcel of global sociality, transforming societies from within and from below. These changes are inspiring an extensive literature on globalization and cosmopolitanism (Inglis 2012). Yet the study of life in global cities appears not to have affected normative cosmopolitan theory very much (Inglis 2012; Saito 2011; see also Harvey 2009). In this regard, normative cosmopolitan theory “seems to construct an image of the world as it ought to be that has little connection with the world as it is” (Fine 2003:466). The intensification of a global division of labour, in which massive increases in mobility play a significant role, suggests that new forms of

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social bonds and global forms of common knowledge (see Hardt and Negri 2009) are emerging. However, even while discussions of migration, global cities, and cosmopolitanism allude to phenomena resonant with the Durkheimian themes of solidarity and belonging, “the connection between transnational migrant experiences of global cultural diversity and institutionalized forms of cosmopolitan solidarity ... remains largely unelaborated” (Cheah 2006:492). Here, one may invoke Durkheim’s sense of a fundamental change in the social bond, typical of modern societies found at the beginning of The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim 1984). He noticed a new “cosmopolitanism” (xxvi), focusing on the moral valorization of humanity and “linked to the total world system” (xxviii). Durkheim was well aware that the division of labour was not only internal to a society but had trans- and inter-societal elements too (see also Inglis 2012; Robertson and Inglis 2008:14; Bryan S. Turner 2006). The increase in the numbers and kinds of social interaction generates new existential, experiential, and normative/practical bases of social life. So, rather than globalization destroying belonging and common knowledge, Durkheim’s work suggests that new kinds of solidarity are the result of such changes. Indeed, for him, an advanced division of labour transformed communal existence from below. We can find evidence of this phenomenon today in new patterns and habits of routine mobility and their conditions, causes, and consequences. Durkheim’s approach suggests that cosmopolitan belonging depends on pervasive quotidian know-how about mobilities. Such know-how depends in no small measure on a material infrastructure (“social morphology”) that actualizes immanent moral principles, emergent from below, that can ground viable and desirable social justice policy agendas. Taking this approach means asking such questions as, “What kind of social cooperation is needed for citizens to move about unencumbered, to have access to public transportation, to drive or walk in peace?” (Cladis 2005:388). In this light, I contend that normative cosmopolitanism theory can include consideration of emergent normative principles arising from globalization affecting mobilities in global cities. Mobility, Global Cities, and Knowledge Contemporary analyses of global cities highlight the extent to which mobility and the circulation of different people, practices, things, and ideas are evidence of significant changes to social life. This circumstance has affected the social bases of power globally. Global cities expert

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Saskia Sassen argues that “what has become clear over the past few decades with the rise of global cities is that our geopolitical future is not going to be determined by the G2 combo of the United States and China. It will be determined in good part through 20 or so strategic worldwide urban networks” (in Hales and Pena 2012:8). Yet “cities have too often been seen as the medium when they are in fact the message: cities are not simply passive players in a global game played out among and between national and international actors, nor are cities simply another set of actors to be added in. Instead, they are sites that help forge the international” (Amin and Thrift 2005:17). Such circumstances and analyses suggest that contemporary cosmopolitan theory would benefit from a consideration of global cities and their mobilities dimensions. The mobilities paradigm attends to “movements of images and information on local, national, and global media … The study of mobility also involves those immobile infrastructures that organise the intermittent flow of people, information, and images, as well as the borders or ‘gates’ that limit, channel, and regulate movement or anticipated movement” (Sheller and Urry 2006:212). Urry also stresses that mobility and the infrastructures that facilitate it involve a knowledge dimension. Drawing on work by Vincent Kauffman, Urry understands “motility” to mean how “an individual appropriates what is possible in the domain of mobility and puts this potential to use for his or her activities” ­(Kaufmann in Urry 2007:38). The capacity for appropriation refers to a form of mobilities know-how. Earlier geographical approaches such as “time-geography” (see Thrift 1977) and conventional views of “wayfinding” serve as reference points in recent urban studies on this kind of knowledge. They consider how “people come to learn the local urban transport system, or where to buy the best fresh fruit in urban markets … not through formal training but through gradually developing a sense of how things work and change” (McFarlane 2011:3; see also Shove 2002). The television program The Amazing Race highlights much of what is at stake in obtaining and using mobilities know-how – motility – in specific infrastructural conditions. It is thus sociologically pertinent to view cosmopolitan life in terms of mobilities in global cities. This requires thinking about how people figure out how to reach work, school, leisure activities, and home. These forms of mundane coordination involve a routinized mobility and figuring out how to make small-scale, logistical calculations necessary to daily social life and acquiring a know-how about moving oneself, others, and things around (Shove 2002). Doing so requires gaining familiarity with

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the infrastructures and vehicles of mobility in a local motility context (e.g., I can walk to the store to pick up a few things for dinner; I’ll have to drive to the airport to pick up a relative). The phenomena would be familiar to those who have moved house or travel regularly for business. To move house is to have to start learning about navigating around the new neighbourhood and where the banks, grocery stores, drug stores, restaurants, and so on are. By way of illustration, in Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, journalist and social commentator Doug Saunders (2010) documents the stories of many people new to cities around the world and the challenges they face. One such story involves Adinah and Hillal Heqosah, an Afghani couple who moved to Toronto via Tajikistan and Pakistan, fleeing from “warring Taliban factions” (312). They learned how to manage with snow boots and find a market – “Iqbal’s” – which had “heavy sacks of rice and grain on the floor and the racks of raw spices” (311) that remind them of home. There they meet other Afghanis and exchange know-how about navigating the immigration system. Sharing knowledge is one reason immigrants from the Asian subcontinent stay in this Toronto neighbourhood, Thorncliffe Park. As one interviewee put it, “I prefer to have immigrants around me – if there are problems, they can help” (314). However, studies of global cities have neglected such social facts. Most analyses of social action in global cities have focused on managerial, artistic, economic, and political elites and their business culture and the “sophisticated consumption patterns of this high-income bracket” (Cheah 2006:492). Responding to criticisms of global elites, some observers have linked elite cosmopolitan mobility to the undermining of belonging and loyalties to people and place (see Calhoun 2003; ­Kurasawa 2004). Elite persons possess knowledge, money, power, and social capital, which provide them with substantial capacities for being mobile (Caletrio 2012; Urry and Elliot 2010:65ff) and hence, too, motility advantages. In this light, to be mobile is to have the choice not to have to belong anywhere, being free of localized duties and obligations, manifesting a particular elite globalistic form of liberalism. Elite cosmopolitanism has generated a populist backlash, dating back to U.S. President Richard Nixon’s Republicans (Perlstein 2008). Rightleaning critics claim that cosmopolitan elites are mobile and have become unsympathetic to the plight of people bound to place and circumstance (see Delanty 2009:12–13; Featherstone 2002:1; Fine and Boon 2007). Right-populist criticism of cosmopolitanism retains ­vestiges of its e­ arlier

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“negative connotations (from times when Jews, communists, and cosmopolitans were cast as traitors to national solidarities and at best vilified and at worst sent to concentration camps)” (Harvey 2009:78). Yet populist opposition to elite cosmopolitanism highlights certain paradoxical elements of the current situation. On the one hand, global media networks are the commonplace of what Beck calls “banal cosmopolitanization” (Beck 2004:134; Szerszynski and Urry 2006), including exposure to global media events and the availability of ethnically diverse cuisine. On the other hand, anti-cosmopolitanism appears to spawn a “reflexive” (Zizek 1999:336–7) neo-nationalism in reaction to media representations of urbane, cosmopolitan, domineering elites, precisely as those networks show them, generating nostalgia for a unitary communal culture that never actually existed except perhaps as phantasm (see Hand and Sandywell 2002; A. Marx 1998:18). The proliferation of differences flowing from global migrations concentrating in global cities certainly affects social cohesion and belonging, especially vis-à-vis the sense of moral duties and obligations to other people and conventional understandings of ethnicity. Normative cosmopolitan theorists (e.g., Appiah, Delanty, Habermas) have responded to such postulated changes to belonging by reconceptualizing the institutional and axiological bases for a new kind of cosmopolitan community. This normative theoretical project, however, is complicated by the circumstance that to live in large, global cities is to dwell in a world of strangers with whom one may not identify or whom one might not be able to identify at all (see also Ossewaarde 2007; Saito 2011). For ­Durkheim too, strangers in the city, in contrast to small-town life, are not the exception, but the rule: “Everyone is a stranger” (1984:244). The mundane difficulty of figuring out the identity of “others” thus challenges conventional conceptions of belonging, since generalizing the problem of “otherness” to most, in turn becoming the basis of a “commonality” without a conventional basis for making identifications. Such quotidian experiences are a consequence of globalization – “a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power” (Held et al. 2001:55). But the empirical referent of globalization relates closely to its urban context, where we find the greatest and most intense concentration of networks and connectivity – i.e., “global cities” or “world cities” (Amin and Thrift 2005;

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Short and Kim 1999). Global cities are “strategic sites” of development for capitalist enterprise, government, the third sector, and cultural production, institutions which “do” globalization (Amin and Thrift 2005; ­Sassen 2000; Short and Kim 1999; Urry 2000a). Sassen defines global cities in terms of their concentration of command capacities in relation to the global economy, finances and specialized services. Also key are production and innovation and the size of their markets for goods and services (Sassen 1991). Analysts argue that “globalization represents a transfer of power from national states to a network of global cities. The world today is more about cities than countries and a place like Seoul has more in common with Singapore and Hong Kong that it does with smaller Korean cities” (Hales and Pena 2012:4). Seventy-eight per cent of the population in the developed world lives in cities (UNESCO 2011); the developing world is increasingly urbanizing too. By mid-century, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban centres, and most people “now spend their time in cities” (Amin and Thrift 2005:14, 16; UNESCO 2011). Emerging global c­ ities seek to capitalize on communications, technology, and “the mobility of people and capital” (Hales and Pena 2012:5; see also chapters 13, 14, and 15). Globalization has thus manifested itself as a social phenomenon deeply dependent on cities as dense hubs of many overlapping networks (Featherstone 2002:2). Moreover, the networks between global cities decentre the nation-state by transcending societies from nodal points within (Harvey 2009:87). Thus examining urban life in these centres provides a basis for the “concrete analysis of global processes” (Short and Kim 1999:9). Pertinently, most global cities have a high degree of ethnic plurality and a wide range of goods and services from around the world constituting hubs of fusion (Short and Kim 1999:39; Urry 2000). However, not all of them are cosmopolitan, and not all cosmopolitan cities are major global cities. For example, Short and Kim place Tokyo in the former group and Montreal in the latter (1999:85); decisive for them, a cosmopolitan global city is noticeably less narrow and provincial in its outlook (85). There is something then to Conley’s (2002) argument that the cosmopolitan condition means thinking in terms of “the world as city.” Theoretical Impasses in the New Cosmopolitanism Contemporary considerations of cosmopolitanism as a potential discursive resource for thinking differently about social justice in a ­globalizing

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world are reshaping social theorists’ concepts of desirable forms of community and belonging (Calhoun 2003; Delanty 2003; Inglis 2012). However, the political element of transnational governance institutions (or, more precisely, their absence and/or underdevelopment) has received the most emphasis, to the neglect of the analysis of social life in global cities (see Harvey 2009).The recent literature on cosmopolitanism also prioritizes normative theorizing (what belonging to the world and humanity as a whole should imply), ignoring the concrete basis on which people already “belong” on a globalizing planet (Beck 2004; Delanty ­2009:15–16; Fine 2003). Its recent forms, especially those reliant on engagements with Kant (1970a, b), stress universal human rights and focus on extending the spheres in which human rights can be exercised. This includes considering how some form of state institution might facilitate and protect rights (see Cheah 2006; Harvey 2009; Leung 2009; Pollack et al. 2000; Szerszynski and Urry 2006; Woodiwiss 2002). The ostensible promise of the present moment is that globalization will make possible the “globalization of democracy” – “the rule of law and shared participation also within the field of international affairs” (Archibugi 2004:438). The progressive cosmopolitanist agenda in such approaches advocates the development of institutions of transnational democratic governance, usually with the valorization of human rights playing the dominant normative role. However, ontological and methodological idealism in contemporary normatively oriented cosmopolitan theorizing is an impediment to generating viable social justice proposals pertinent to mobility. The normative theoretical contours of contemporary cosmopolitanism derive from the idea of the universal membership of all persons, as citizens of the world, in global forums of civic life that transcend and displace the nation-state as the basic sphere of civic life, a position that is indebted to Kant. Yet for Kant, “the cosmopolitan ethic requires that individuals (presumed citizens of one state) would have the right to hospitality when they cross clearly defined borders (particularly for purposes of trade)” (Harvey 2009:18). Hospitality then circumscribes mobility rights: the host has a right to tell “the other” to move along – it is the other who has the moral obligation to be mobile (18). Indeed, for Kant, “Permanent residence for foreigners is inconsistent with the requirement of common [national] descent” (26) and societal belonging. Habermas offers a modified Kantian approach to cosmopolitanism. Following Kant, he sees cosmopolitanism as something of a “rational necessity” (Fine and Smith 2003:480) carrying the force of a moral

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imperative. In advocating for this process, he seeks a basis for “cosmopolitan solidarity” – a moral force transcendent of those on which individual states depend, but something less than a centralized world government, which he calls “world domestic policy” (Habermas 2001:56). H ­ abermas contends that “the decisive question is whether the civil society and the political public sphere of increasingly large regimes can foster the consciousness of an obligatory cosmopolitan solidarity” (55). Cosmopolitanism for him does not as yet have an expressed concrete reality. For example, he argues, reductively: “Europe remains integrated only through markets.” This observation runs contrary to Durkheim’s point that markets, since dependent on contractual forms, always have the “collective conscience” as the third party to all contracts: the real social forces of moral obligations and the juridical subjects they constitute are the precondition for contracts (Durkheim 1984; Pearce 2001). The concreteness of cosmopolitan life as it occurs in global cities thus cannot be a referent for cosmopolitanism in Habermas’s conception. Ostensibly, cosmopolitanism will exist only once people follow his prescriptions. Delanty advocates an empirical sociology of cosmopolitanism in order to articulate a new normative justification for cosmopolitan sociology. However, much like Habermas, he does not link globalization and cosmopolitanism (Delanty 2009:85). Rather, cosmopolitanism is “expressed in more reflexive kinds of self-understanding” (77). As he states, “cosmopolitanism refers to an orientation that resides less in a specific social condition than in an imagination that can take many different forms” (14), which manifests itself in the subjective attitudes of people willing to encounter the other and let such encounters affect them (86–9). As Harvey (2009) convincingly argues, this new cosmopolitan theory is unable to grapple adequately with concrete social realities. Less worrying for him than its privileging of normative cosmopolitan theorizing, is its tendency to ontological idealism. This is not much of a surprise, in the light of Kant’s liberalism and philosophical anthropology (29), in which subjective orientation is decisive for understanding the normative sphere (see also Saito 2011). Much like Kant, the new cosmopolitanisms fail “to ground their theories in spaces and places in effective ways,” thus privileging “philosophical reflection,” neglecting the “practical requirements and basic human needs” and “social movements that are engaged in transforming the world” (Harvey 2009:94). Habermas, for example, conceives of cosmopolitan solidarity in idealist terms. As Fine and Smith clarify, it “refers to a transformed self-­consciousness

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on the part of world-citizens that orientates thinking away from any association with national interest or identity” (2003:471). Similarly, “solidarity” becomes an ideational principle that already works, to a limited degree in civil discourse, appearing to be the precondition for a democratic consensus that should then actualize itself in the form of normative rules, i.e., criteria for making decisions about the justice of any social action, independent of local, communal, and state forms. This kind of idealism makes it very difficult to grasp the extent to which mobility is integral to life in global cities and hence to actually belonging in a cosmopolis. Ontological idealism in Habermas and Delanty then redoubles itself as normative cosmopolitan ideal. So, even while Delanty develops a sociological approach to cosmopolitanism, he wants us to believe that cosmopolitanism resides solely in people’s heads (see also Saito 2011:126–7). There is also a methodological problem impeding normative approaches to cosmopolitanism because of how it imposes normative principles on empirical analysis, even if unwittingly. This procedure is similar to the “ideological” method (Durkheim 1982) and utopianism that Durkheim criticized (Pearce 2001:14). As Durkheim persuasively argues, it is impossible to generate valid knowledge about an existing reality by judging and assessing it in terms of a concept of a future utopian society that does not yet exist: the non-existent is no help for understanding existing reality (Durkheim 1962). What is thereby obscured by normative theorizing is the methodological priority of focusing on existing states of affairs, explaining them to create new concepts from which to develop viable regulative ideals. Moreover, utopianist method, by stressing what “ought to be,” misses the point that “the ought” is an “is,” the “is” of social life: what people do, how, and under what conditions, actualizes “oughts” (see also Plouin 2010). It is here, however, that Durkheim’s problematic has purchase because it focuses on how empirical sociology can ground a “science of morals” that Kant’s humanist metaphysics precludes (Jones 1994). A Durkheimian turn however, does not mean dismissing “the new cosmopolitanism” but rather calls for a reflexive sociological move, treating the new cosmopolitanism itself as a significant social fact, much like the socialism of Durkheim’s day. He viewed socialism as a “cry of anguish” (1962:40). However, in contrast, the new cosmopolitanism expresses new collective aspirations for global society to be something more and something better than it is. Crucially, transformations of social morphology and the division of labour were the starting point for

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Durkheim’s conception of how the very form of solidarity and hence the normative basis of highly complex and interconnected socialities had changed. Ironically then, the new cosmopolitanism, with its emphasis on a shared cultural ethic and dream of discursive consensus, betrays its romanticism about an anachronistic model of community. As such, it hinders development of an empirically informed conception of cosmopolitan belonging and hence, too, of a form of justice appropriate to it. The reality that transnational migrants are mobile and work in a global division of labour in global cities suggests that conceptualizing how new circumstances produce changes in solidarity, could be helpful to advocating for more socially just cosmopolitan conditions. d i m e n s i o n s o f c o s m o p o l i ta n b e l o n g i n g : a neo-durkheimian approach

For Durkheim, solidarity depends on the constitution of the commonalities of social life. From a mobilities perspective pertinent to social justice, three dimensions of commonality stand out: the existence of a shared infrastructure (i.e., morphology) facilitative of routine mobilities, the pragmatic know-how of routine movement (see both above), and the mundane normative consequences of morphology, practices, and knowledge. Attending to these dimensions provides a basis for considering the social facts of cosmopolitan life, including its emergent implicit normative criteria, and hence a way of resolving the impasses of idealist approaches in linking substantive social scientific analysis to normative theorizing about what the cosmopolitan condition ought to be. While Durkheim’s sociology may not seem to many social scientists to be a particularly adequate or pertinent resource for contemporary cosmopolitan theory, a range of contemporary scholars have dealt with objections to the development of Durkheimian approaches to cosmopolitanism. Beck and Urry’s charge of “methodological nationalism” has been refuted by Bryan S. Turner (2006), Chernilo (2006, 2007), and Inglis and Robertson (2008). Mestrovic and Lorenzo’s analysis of global moral outrage over American military abuses at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq is instructive too (2008). The offence people took to war crimes is indicative of the reality of a global collective conscience, with implicit distinctive criteria of cosmopolitan social justice. Following Durkheim, Mestrovic and Lorenzo argue, “We must not say that collective abuse shocks the international community because it is criminal, but rather that it is an international war crime because it shocks the

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international collective conscience” (2008: 188–9). The spread of the anti-sweatshop movement similarly evinces the contemporary actuality of a cosmopolitan morality (Kurasawa 2004:244). Turner productively disarticulates “the social” in Durkheim to show that his sociology does not depend on the concept of society cum nationstate (see also Plouin 2010). Furthermore, Inglis and Robertson (2008) offer a compelling explication of the pertinence of Durkheimian sociology to developing a concept of “globality” and a critique of Beck. In a reflexive move, they argue that the globalization of Western sociology with its focus on “society” is itself indicative of a globality. According to them, “We could regard this process as involving the globalization of the idea of ‘society’ itself, rendering it part of an emerging scholarly ‘world culture’” (10). Durkheim’s liberal internationalism and his failure to address colonialism, class inequality, and imperialist restrictions of movement and involuntary migration certainly compromise his cosmopolitanism (Pearce 2001:70–4; see also Inglis 2011). However, as both Pearce and Plouin argue, it is nevertheless possible and desirable to retheorize elements of Durkheim’s corpus in more adequate and productive ways. Durkheim’s own interventions highlight the reality that cosmopolitanism remained a significant concern of his throughout his work, elements his critics miss. In an address of 1899, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” he argues that “national loyalties were real and valuable, but they should not be exclusive and they should be extended in an internationalist direction” (Durkheim in Lukes 1992:350). In 1900, he stated: “Doubtless, we have towards the country in its present form, and of which we in fact form a part, obligations that we do not have the right to cast off. But beyond this country, there is another in the process of formation, enveloping our national country: that of Europe, or humanity” (Durkheim in Lukes 1992:350). Cosmopolitanism thus broadens obligations to concern humanity as a whole. Later, in 1915, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1995) argues that “there is no people, no state, that is not involved with another society that is more or less unlimited and includes all peoples… There is no national life that is not dominated by an inherently international collective life. As we go forward in history, these international groupings take on greater importance” (428; Inglis and Robertson 2008:19). Watts Miller (1996) argues that Durkheim developed his own cosmopolitanism, focusing on “a universalist ethic of man,” an idea of a global, human patrie” and “a political society involving sentiments of

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a­ ttachment to it and so, we could say, a sense of a common citizenship” (245; see also Cladis 2005:401). In this respect, Durkheim retained some Kantian sensibilities with his commitment to moral individualism. As he states, “Human dignity ... is at the root of the moral ideal of contemporary societies” (1974:89). According to Watts Miller, Durkheim’s resulting argument is that “a basic reason for a cosmopolitan expression of a shared identity is the same as for its expression in a local human patrie. It is the need in civilized moral politics to respect differences and to govern and conduct disagreements through an attachment to one another, a solidarity that transcends them” (Watts Miller 1996:246). But Durkheim rooted the power of this normative idea and ideal in social reality, not in a universalistic a priori like Kant. t h e i n s t i t u t i o n a l b a s i s o f c o s m o p o l i ta n i s m : m i g r at i o n , morphology, knowledge and morality

Durkheim analyses social life in terms of several strata shaping institutions, each of which may help to beneficially integrate and regulate people, including their movements and quality of interactions. D ­ urkheim defined “institutions” as “all the beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collective” (1982: 45). In broadest terms, institutions refer to “certain ways of acting [that] are imposed, or at least suggested from outside the individual” (248), facilitative and regulative of collective life and its array of associations. The task of institutional analysis means attending to the constituent components of institutions and how they combine to exert integrative and regulative social powers that are by definition outside individuals while at the same time constituting their inner orientation to social life (Durkheim 1978:83). Integrative social forces beneficially bind individuals to groups to generate development paths beneficial to the dynamism of a society, including its members; integration is constitutive of dynamic belonging. Regulative social forces provide a check on unbridled egoistic pursuits of social power by individuals and ensure a harmonious (if necessarily agonistic) articulation of all social institutions such that no one institution (e.g., political or economic) can dominate at the expense of others and hence to the detriment of the societal whole (Durkheim 1984; 1951). This articulation of external social forces constituting individuals’ capacities as social persons constitutes the basis of belonging. His conception of the different modes of belonging, however, also refers to the power of movement in creating it.

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In Durkheim’s sociology, mobility plays a role in the formation of institutions because population migration and the infrastructural and communicative networks that accompany them lead to the reconstitution of how people’s interactions are regulated and integrated, or simply, morality (Durkheim 1982:55–8; Lukes 1992:228). Durkheim’s basic analytic distinguished between three elements: first, morphology: the “substratum of social life” (1982: 57), including material infrastructure (e.g., roads and communications networks); second, institutionalized norms such as “legal and moral rules, religious dogma, financial systems, etc.” (52), including systems of knowledge; and, third, social currents: “movements of opinion” and “transitory outbreaks … great waves of enthusiasm, indignation and pity” (52–3), as in the global outrage over Abu Ghraib. Because Durkheim did not subscribe to a reductionist materialism, we cannot assume that morphology (e.g., material infrastructure) is more “real” or enduring than ideas. The sociologically pertinent point is to “treat social facts as things,” assessing the extent to which they are resistant to modification by acts of individual or collective will (Durkheim 1982:60; Stedman Jones 1996). Currents of opinion or ­ beliefs, for instance, can be adamantine (e.g., the abstract idea and ideal of human dignity) and deeply resistant to change, whereas we can tear down buildings, reroute roadways, and repeal legislation. Durkheim’s work suggests that we benefit from considering the institutionalization of mundane cosmopolitan life along these dimensions in which the regulation of mobility frames cosmopolitan belonging. Vis-à-vis cosmopolitanism, referring to these strata highlights its constituents at the mundane level of the institutional regulation of people’s practices. This sensibility requires close attention to the immanent normative regulation of mobility. Four dimensions inform my Durkheimian approach to mundane cosmopolitanism – migration, morphology, knowledge, and morality; each is examined in turn. Migration, Mobility, and Urban Life For Durkheim, population migration is a major force of change in social (and hence moral) life, especially as concerns the emergence of highdensity urban centres (Durkheim 1984; see also Andrews 1993:131; Lukes 1992:168). He thus anticipates the more recent attention to globalization, global cities, and migration, as we saw above. Population migration led to the “progressive condensation of societies in the course

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of historical development” (Durkheim 1984:201–2). As migrants seek employment opportunities emergent in cities with their more complex division of labour, new forms of social organization based on occupation emerge, displacing the traditional bases of organization dependent on family life in particular (xlv–xlvi). The concentration of people affects mobility – for example, expanding “the number and rapidity of means of communication and transportation” (259–60). The moral “density of society” (i.e., the multiplication of varieties of regulation) thus increases too, as more and different kinds of people, things, and ideas come together (203). According to Durkheim, population movement changes the material infrastructure, which in turn intensifies social difference and dynamic density. Populations responding to the pressures of growth spur movements that “become more numerous and more rapid, and migratory paths are channeled out as these movements occur. These form the network of communications. Such movements are especially active where several of these paths intersect: these are the towns” (1984:288). For Durkheim, “the communication network is only the channel which has been cut by the regular current of commerce and migrations, etc., flowing in the same direction” (1982:58). Such dynamics break down previous social barriers and forms of belonging (e.g., kinship loyalties) that segment groups but simultaneously constitute the potential for new ones. Thus changes in social morphology are both a result and consequence of people’s mobility. A Common Cosmopolitan Morphology For Durkheim, social morphology is the material and concrete basis of social activity, both responding to and facilitating movement ­(1978:79–80; see also 1982:241–2). Durkheim’s conception of social morphology thus shares empirical referents with Urry’s concept of “mobility systems” that “permit predictable and relatively risk-free repetition of the movement in question” (Urry 2007:13). While Durkheim gradually shifted his position on social morphology (Andrews 1993), he used the term to address how material infrastructure shapes and facilitates social interaction, communication, transportation, and exchange, studying “the forms taken on by societies when settling on the land” (Durkheim in Andrews 1993:124), with one key dimension being “land utilization and the human occupation and modification of the land, according to individual and social needs, including settlement,

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f­ortification, house styles, routeways, roads, etc.” (Andrews 1993:126). In short, “The constitution of this substratum directly or indirectly affects all social phenomena” (Durkheim 1978:88). Morphology thus deals with what Urry calls “routeways through which people, objects and information are circulated” (Urry 2007:52), and these routeways are the stuff of mundane, routine social life (46, 88). Extending Urry’s point in Durkheimian terms, global networks and pathways are to be treated as the morphology of global sociality as manifested in global cities; they are its substratum, a kind of “immobile” materiality that “structure[s] mobility experiences” (Urry 2007:54; see also Short and Kim 1999:53). Durkheim’s position anticipates Castells’s emphasis on morphology in his account of the role of networks in globalization. It is the open, transborder characteristic of networks that most interests Castells (2001), because they “constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes of processes of production, experience, power, and culture” (76). This substantial change is “characterized by the pre-eminence of social morphology over social action” (Castells 2001:76). There are thus good reasons to reject Delanty’s claim that mobility “is not the critical feature” of cosmopolitan community (2003:165), for the basic elements of life in global cities require mobility and mobilities systems. At the more local and concrete level, social life is also shaped by the built environment since it is a manifestation of collective representations. Durkheim argues that “the social fact is sometimes so far materialized as to become an element of the external world. For instance, a definite type of architecture is a social phenomenon; but it is partially embodied in houses and buildings of all sorts which, once constructed, become autonomous realities, independent of individuals. It is the same with the avenues of communication and transportation, with instruments and machines used in industry or private life which expresses the state of technology at any moment in history, of written language, etc.” (Durkheim 1951:313–14; see also Pearce 2001:27). With his sense of the impact of social morphology on social life, ­Durkheim also anticipates pertinent insights of contemporary urban geography. Thrift, for example, points out how the night-time lighting of city roadways affected the “complicated logistics of the car, the van and the truck” (2008:80). Time-geography in particular attends to these physical components of social life, which involve “an appreciation of the biophysical, ecological and locational realities which impose

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constraints on the performance of the social system” (Thrift 1977:5). Moreover, morphology, as a sociological concept, corresponds to what a geographer has recently called “urban infrapower: durable assemblages of resources and connectivity” (McFarlane 2011:55–6). As regulative of practices and connections, urban infrapower is concretely normative because it enables and constrains the possibilities of conduct for all persons subjected to it. We can extend Durkheim’s sensibility by maintaining a focus on a shared social morphology. The morphological similarities among global cities (i.e., their homogeneous characteristics) facilitate practical compatibilities within and between them (e.g., make it easier for travellers and migrants to use the same or similar equipment in many different cities). In this respect, “converters,” “adapters,” and interface protocols for electronic equipment, digital files, and communication are perhaps apt analogues to what also happens at the level of social practices. As Short and Kim note, there are “increasing commonalities between large metropolises around the world including built environments, specific lifestyles, policy instruments and dynamic business atmospheres. The prevalence of postmodern architecture in big cities throughout the world makes them look more similar. Increasing connections between cities across borders, such as sister city projects[,] have led to the adoption of similar policies in urban management” (1999:11). Morphological commonalities thus facilitate the application of analogous motilities in a variety of different cities. Homogenization, led by American influences, is substantially the work of “international lawyers, architects, copy-writers and financial analysts” (Short and Kim 1999:76). This homogeneity helps highly mobile elites use these centres easily. Frequently, however, migrants from the country are also “creating strikingly similar urban spaces all over the world: spaces whose physical appearance varied but whose basic set of functions, whose network of human relationships, was distinct and identifiable” and surfaced as a “contiguous, standardized pattern of institutions, customs, conflicts and frustrations” (Saunders 2010:3). The homogenizations and harmonizations that are part and parcel of globalization are facilitative of navigational ease and the analogical transposition of motility in multiple urban contexts. Learning how to manage in London helps people thrive in Toronto, or Stockholm, or Tokyo. The global presence of corporations selling office supplies, financial services, or meals makes finding things one needs easier and more convenient. But these homogenizations depend on underlying morphologies

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and standardizations, whether in transportation and communications networks, in shipping or inventory software, or in computer programming languages. In short, Durkheim’s concept of morphology helps in conceptualizing a collective, pervasive substratum of cosmopolitan commonalities facilitative, integrative and regulative of mobilities within and between global cities. Knowledge and Mobility For Durkheim, knowledge is an eminently social product, emerging in and through collective representations; it serves as a primary contributor to enduring social bonds (Durkheim 1982, 1984, 1995). The constitution and transmission of common knowledge even facilitates mobility: if “the population clusters together in our towns instead of being scattered over the rural areas, it is because there exists a trend of opinion, a collective drive which imposes this concentration upon individuals” (1982:58). In his sociology, knowledge is synthetic, a derivative product combining people’s sense perceptions and the “collective representations” that organize them (e.g., the calendar, language, concepts, symbols) (1982, 1984:53–4, 1995:13). Minimally then, changes in morphology and the increasing movements of people, things, objects, and so on, characteristic of cosmopolitanism, collectively affect sense perceptions and hence too knowledge. For example, different people may see a particular airport roughly the same way, but some will know better than others how to get through it, or find a decent quick meal on a stopover. For some, arriving at one airport means “home!” and hence has deep subjective meaning, while for others, it doesn’t. In this respect, Durkheim’s conception of small societies, contra his own position, can apply to urban morphology: “Since everyone is similarly placed in relation to these things, they affect every individual consciousness in the same way… Consequently the common consciousness has a definite character” (1984:229–30). Knowledge also constitutes a major element in the broader set of coordinates through which human beings organize social life: “Collective ideals can only be manifested and become aware of themselves by being concretely realized in material objects that can be seen by all, understood by all, and represented to all minds. Drawings, symbols of all sorts, formulae, whether written or spoken, animate or inanimate objects, provide examples of such concrete realizations” (Durkheim 1974:94). In the early 1970s, Henri Lefebvre developed Durkheim’s sociological focus on representations, which David Harvey (2009:142) mistakenly attributed

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to Ernst Cassirer, to generate an analytic of space and its impact on collective organization (Shields 2006) in which space is “lived through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre in Shields 2005:175). Such mobility knowledge is frequently “tactical,” involving “operations (ways of doing)” (Thrift 2008:76), and is a kind of technology, embodied in human practices, constituting the “background for everyday life” (88). Contemporary urban geography highlights the extent to which this knowledge is mundane, common, and inherent in urban life, involving “sensing, knowing, gesturing” (McFarlane 2011:55–6). Cities, for example, are “learnt on an everyday basis,” requiring “tactical learning” on “multiple spatiotemporal rhythms – from walking to longerterm temporalities like migration” (9). “Wayfinding” describes one way of understanding this kind of mundane mobilities knowledge and refers to how people use signs, maps, global positioning systems and the like, to navigate routeways (1–2). In this respect, mobilities know-how in the conditions of morphological homogeneity in global cities is very much a kind of common knowledge “constructed from below” (Hardt and Negri 2009:121). The mundane navigation of everyday life constitutes a framework of both commonality and belonging, based on acquired, shared dispositions towards spatial and temporal coordination (see also Jorgensen, Fallov, and Knudsen 2011:24). Morality and Mobility For Durkheim, “morality” refers to the basic component of the social world that allows people to transcend egoistic appetites and orientations and fulfil duties and obligations to other people. Morality is something mundane that emerges from the practicalities of people’s associations (Cladis 2005:397; see also Chernilo 2007). Durkheim defines morality as “a system of rules of action that predetermine conduct” that exist in “so many moulds, with given structures, which serve to shape our behaviour” (1962:24, 26; see also Lukes 1992:112–13). For example, if the convention (obligatory, institutional social fact) is to walk on the right side, even if one can shorten one’s travel by walking on the left (an egoistic calculation), staying on the right fulfils a duty to facilitate others’ ease of movement, thus transcending an egoistic inclination. Morality then is the result of constitutive regulative and integrative forces inherent in social practices (see also Shove 2002:2). All human practices, including movement, carry a normative valence, whether witting or not, and all social practices actualize a prior normative force of the

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social e­ nvironment in which they take place (Plouin 2010). Aggressive driving and lack of courtesy on the road, for example, “are very often read as violations of moral codes by other drivers” (Thrift 2008:81). But this kind of mobilities regulation also has knowledge and morphological components. Morphology itself has a directly moral dimension, channelling conduct in some directions and making it difficult for people to pursue others. In his strongest terms, Durkheim argues that “the communication network forcibly prescribes the direction of internal migrations or commercial exchanges, etc., and even their intensity” (1982:58). This dimension affects not only local social life, he writes, but international life too: “Avenues of communication which have been constructed before our time give a definite direction to our activities, depending on whether they connect us with one or another country” (1951:314). Indeed, how people orient themselves to urban life and how they navigate it “are some of the most powerful forms of regulation and control, not least because they are generally below the level of public comment. They include mundane objects such as traffic signaling systems and the software embedded in virtually all forms of urban life” (Amin and Thrift 2005:15; see also Crang 2001:193). At the level of social relations, “infrastructures (road systems, parking spaces, cars, public transport, etc.) influence people’s ability to meet [social] obligations and at the same time shape expectations of normal social participation” (Shove 2002:3). The above dimensions of a Durkheimian analytic – migration, morphology, knowledge, and morality – can ground a mobilities approach to cosmopolitan life as a way to rethink cosmopolitan solidarity, belonging, and its emergent, immanent, normative coordinates. Together, they produce what I call “mundane cosmopolitanism.” Its emergence in turn provides a realist (non-idealist) basis for cosmopolitan claims of social justice pertinent to mobility. m u n d a n e c o s m o p o l i ta n i s m , m o b i l i t y , a n d s o c i a l j u s t i c e

Pheng Cheah argues that “it is doubtful whether transnational migrant communities can be characterized as examples of cosmopolitanism in the robust normative sense” (2006:493). This position is unpersuasive, however, because it is culturalist in its conception of robust norms. Consequently, it neglects global networks, hubs, morphology and the global division of labour as a basis for “cosmopolitan solidarity.” Certainly geographical and social differences among cosmopolitan cities matter,

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but we need to take the commonalities seriously too (Cladis 2005:386; see also Hardt and Negri 2009:121). As Calhoun (2003) argues, echoing Durkheim, there are “a variety of different solidarities … organized in different ways” (547). Solidarity, for Calhoun, takes several forms: “interdependence and exchange”; “common culture,” which produces a “sense of shared belonging”; “the very notion of humanity”; “structures of social relations”; public communication; and “being joined to each other by material power” (547–8). Durkheim’s work points in this direction. Indeed, for him, “we already have some form of solidarity” (Cladis 2005:388) but must investigate its qualities and the likely consequences of it being developed or not. Durkheim sees “solidarity,” the constitutive social bond, as the basic condition for human life together – “forms of social regulation that lead individuals to engage in activities that create feelings of identification with other members of society and with society as a whole” (Pearce 2001:60; see also Cladis 2005). The commonalities of social life make possible a vast array of different kinds of social interaction. As Urry (2007:47) and May and Thrift (2001:4) note, Durkheim’s account of “moving together rhythmically” in moments of collective effervescence (Durkheim 1995:217–18) indicates how a mobilities dimension helps create a common sense of solidarity. Mundane experiences – sympathizing with being stuck in a traffic jam, or with commuting during rush hour with thousands of other people, or with someone running to catch a bus that has just pulled away from a stop – exemplify just this kind of quotidian solidarity in cosmopolitan life. In every sense of the concept, cosmopolitan life is making a new solidarity, dependent on morphology, mobility, and motility, actualizing new normative reference points for life in common. Thinking in terms of mundane cosmopolitanism thus allows us to conceptualize cosmopolitan solidarity along the lines of daily practices, not trans-state civics as argued by the likes of Habermas. Mundane cosmopolitanism designates a form of belonging, deriving from commonalities in global cities and crystallizing in conditions that regulate and facilitate people’s routine movements and navigational know-how. After all, in mundane life, people “find obligations, roles, expectations, desires and requirements that are not of their doing” (Plouin 2010:57) that constrain them because they are external. Durkheim’s central point is that individuals arrive and act in a pre-existing social milieu that, in varying degrees, intensities, and effects, is external to them and that this externality also constrains and so regulates their activities, making them social. Thus, normative forces arise from

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the social world, not from subjective orientations or “spot” negotiations as economists would say. For instance, that a few passersby may glare if one walks against the flow during rush hour in a subway station, is a consequence of social forces external to individuals rooted to widely held expectations about obligations to follow common conventions. Cosmopolitan belonging in these terms is thus a result of social mechanisms (morphological, moral, and epistemic). A theoretical focus on the subjective orientation to “the other,” central to much normative cosmopolitan theory, misses this possibility. To be in the cosmopolitan frame of belonging is to confront the constraints and enablements regulative of mobility and mobility know-how. As Shove (2002) states, “Participation in relationships, activities and taken for granted routines [affects] the effective accomplishment of which constitutes a necessary condition of societal membership” (1). In sum, the components of the mobility of populations, the increasingly homogenized morphology of the cosmopolis, motility (mobility know-how) and morality combined, constitute an emergent frame of cosmopolitan belonging arising from below, a frame conceptualized quite differently from that of the normative theories of the new cosmopolitanism. The notion of “emergence” is significant in this regard because it pertains to what happens as a consequence of the combination of different forces, such as migration, morphology, knowledge, and morality. What I have aimed to show above is that there is a form of cosmopolitanism (i.e., a set of normative principles) that has emerged from below in global cities as a result of this combination. Crucially for Durkheim’s sociological reasoning, “A whole frequently very often has very different properties from those which its constituent parts possess” (1978:76; see also 1982:39). The emergence of distinct properties points to the importance of the contingent formation of new kinds of sociality irreducible to the causal powers of prior existing forces, such that when they relate in an enduring way they generate new properties from the prior, contingently combining elements. Since social justice for ­Durkheim requires “the development of a morality based on the nature of things, and on the other hand social arrangements that realize society’s true potential” (Pearce 2001:81), grasping that mundane cosmopolitanism has emerged and has distinct regulative and integrative properties can have practical-political implications for creating more socially just conditions. Thinking in these terms allows one to take the mobilities dimensions of life in global cities as a primary reference point for social justice proposals.

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Mundane Cosmopolitanism and Social Justice Basing social justice claims on existing social realities does not imply a commitment to the status quo (Cladis 2005:387). After all, the still emerging form of organic solidarity that Durkheim sought to understand “was to embrace all citizens, but it was based on a particular – far from neutral – set of goals and ideals: the protection and extension of human rights; an economy accountable to human welfare (as opposed to the maximization of profit); the freedom of critical inquiry; and a secular state that respected yet was not based on religion” (387). In Durkheimian terms, the elements of mundane cosmopolitanism are normal social facts, external to individuals, regulative of individual practices (and resistant to individuals’ wills), and integrative and pervasive in generating a common life to which people in the cosmopolis belong as a matter of course. But this kind of sociological understanding also provides leverage for making normative claims about other social facts that impede cosmopolitan life and are harmful to it and hence can be judged pathological. Indeed, the motility advantages of cosmopolitan elites provide just such a clue to emergent norms – for example, businesses prefer cities with qualities such as “urban sociability’ (sites good for meetingness)” (Urry 2007:243). Elites, too, “generally have ‘greater capacity to exert autonomous control over their own trajectories through time and space and to subordinate the schedules of other[s] to their own’” (Warde et al. in Shove 2002:7). Attending to such mundane, if elite, social facts rather confirms that, even though they are mundane, they reflect something “normal” in social organization (in Durkheim’s sense) because they emerge from existing social reality. But this also implies that obstacles to ongoing, rather routine, unscheduled participation in them for everyone because of substantive inequalities are pathological. Exclusion then means being “unable to participate in the social groups, worlds and networks … unable to accomplish those practices (many of which involve co-presence and mobility) required for effective social participation” (Shove 2002:1–2). In Durkheim’s terms, this injustice is about “situations where people are differentially subject to necessity” (Pearce 2001:77). A Kantian departure point for cosmopolitan theory quite reveals its weakness once these social realities are taken into account. For instance, the multitudes of people in cosmopolitan global cities do not need rights of access to the cosmopolis in order to belong – they are already there. Cosmopolitanization does not simply undermine ethnic, national, or other communal identifications, because it displaces and transposes the

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very register of identification and the privileging of cognition and culture vis-à-vis the concept of belonging. The issue then shifts from the subjective tolerance of “strangers” (Cheah 2006:494; Saito 2012]) to “the mobile relational sense of ‘becoming together’” (David Featherstone in McFarlane 2011:164). Assessing normal and pathological manifestations of cosmopolitan life thus provides a way to ground social justice claims in social reality. In order to avoid utopian, likely unviable policy (Pearce 2001:44–5, 81), Durkheim postulates that plausible knowledge of what is the case, why, and how is necessary for developing proposals for social justice (see Pearce 2001:76). For Durkheim, “justice” is a regulative ideal about societal well-being premised in large measure on substantive equality (Milbrandt and Pearce 2010:251, 253). In societies with an advanced division of labour, realism means opposing and seeking to change conditions that harm and block the development, dynamism, and diversification of human social potential, since they are unjust and contrary to the emerging principles necessary for organic solidarity. Substantive inequality, lack of accessible, democratic governance, and the absence of, or apathy towards, knowledge of complex societal conditions, together with the means for producing, communicating, and reflecting on them, are all thus unjust. Similar social justice sensibilities can apply to cosmopolitanism. General Policy Framework Principles Durkheim cautioned that “the sociologist’s task is not that of the statesman. Accordingly we do not have to set out in detail what [some] reform should be. We need only indicate its general principles as they appear to emerge from the facts” (1984:1). With this in mind, I offer a provisional set of principles for developing criteria of social justice pertinent to cosmopolitan life and its inherent mobilities dimensions. Of course, this does not preclude other criteria, priorities, or fields of social justice intervention, but the principles delineated below might, I believe, help improve and render more humane, the social conditions of the multitudes of people in the cosmopolis. Deepen democratic municipal governance  A cosmopolitanism from below focusing on mobility would provide more accessible avenues for democratic governance, arising from the municipal level, thus differently leveraging the moral power of municipal governance

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institutions to national governments (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006:9; J. Robinson 2004:574). Valorize “convenience”  True to the etymology of the word, we could valorize “convenience” or “coming together” as a realist principle of cosmopolitanism. The expectation is to envisage a form of community that is able to move together by making it easier to move around, satisfy obligations, engage in associations, and hence belong. Valorize “viscosity”  Minimizing the chances that people, things, etc. will accidentally collide – reducing “friction” – and hence valuing low viscosity as a common good, seems apt for the mobility dimensions of cosmopolitan life. A world of mobilities, with increasing population density in global cities, can become more just by facilitating mobilities and mobilities systems in which people are less likely to impede the actualization of trajectories of mobility for others. Democratize the development of morphology  Because morphology helps shape social life for everyone in global cities (even if elites have more mobility options), regulating it with the interests of all in mind is crucial. Infrastructure investment is thus key, especially vis-àvis not-for-profit mass transit. Such transit should be affordable, accessible, extensive, frequent, and well able to handle multi-mode transitions (e.g., among walking, cycling, driving, riding, and flying). Facilitate the generous exchange of mobilities knowhow  Being generous with the exchange of knowledge was a major normative principle of Durkheim’s sociology, as we can see in his attention to its role in education and occupational training (1984). Facilitating generous exchange of mobilities know-how in the cosmopolis would help increase social justice. As McFarlane argues, “urban learning” needs to be a part of “inclusive cosmopolitanism” (2011:166). Moreover, for Durkheim, a healthy, contemporary state is to facilitate democratic communication, precisely as a means for developing a concern for justice (1992). Simple wayfinding things can be very effective in this regard, such as developing universal, easy-to-read pictographic signs in globally standardized font sizes, at standardized heights, and in sharply contrasting colours. Achieving a more socially just cosmopolitan world of mobility, conceptualized from below, faces challenges; Durkheim was well aware that

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social justice was something to fight for (Pearce 2001:62). Democratic struggles for adequate infrastructure are common (Rao 2006:229). For instance, lack of infrastructure has impeded development of global cities in Latin America (Hales and Pena 2012:9). Developing not-for-profit mass transit faces battles over tax justice about who benefits and who should pay; how to problematize this issue deserves critical scrutiny. User-pay models aim to introduce moral calculation into governance but are inadequate to assessing the broader social benefits accruing to everyone that would facilitate more just social conditions. Contemporary infrastructure deficits are harmful consequences of the predominant form of supply-side, pro-capital accumulation policy. At the global level, the dominance of exploitative capitalism, dependent on cosmopolitan life, global cities, and cosmopolitan sociality (e.g., for its own affairs) makes an issue of democratically valorizing “the common” (Hardt and Negri 2009:124, 340; see also Durkheim 1984:xliii–xliv). Moreover, the degree of substantive inequality in global cities and the proliferation of slums and poverty in many of the world’s largest cities themselves impede democratic participation. It is thus important to address conceptually and politically “how class, ethnic and other differences become instantiated in socio-spatial structures” (Harvey 2009:91). Facilitating democratic engagement and the devolution of real decision-making and governance powers to subaltern groups is thus crucial to socially just mobilities systems (see also J. Robinson 2004:574). Shove stresses that we need to question the valorizing of mobility in terms of seemingly ever-increasing demands on people, leading to an unsatisfying, frenetic, and fraught existence, with people “rushing around” (2002). In short, it is also necessary to think about the justice of our expectations, problematizing the likely consequences of the realization of some or other political project. These challenges notwithstanding, that they are recognized itself points to an emergent cosmopolitan conscience collective already exerting regulative social force on policy debates and struggles for social justice in global cities. conclusion

In contrast to the idealism of new cosmopolitanism, the neo-Durkheimian approach to the mobilities dimensions of cosmopolitan life explicated here points to a quite different basis for normative claims cognizant of the significance of mobility, mobilities systems, and mobility know-how as a real basis for cosmopolitan social justice. Cosmo-

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politan global c­ ities, with their distinct form of solidarity, can then be thought about as a real basis for a mundane cosmopolitan social justice beneficial to the multitudes on the move as a matter of course. The framework proposed here can perhaps, by advocating for the facilitation of cosmopolitan life, provide a basis for better appreciating the realities of cosmopolitan belonging, crucially too for people who are not conventional “citizens.” It is not just that the “world is on the move” at the aggregate level that is significant. Rather, it is the fact that multitudes move, know how to move, and move together in routine, mundane ways to actually constitute immanent forms of regulation and belonging that is pertinent to a realist sociology of cosmopolitanism. The worlds of mobilities in global cities are changing the world. Whether the results are just is an important matter to consider, a task for which Durkheim’s sociology is well suited. acknowledgments

I thank Suzan Ilcan, Frank Pearce, Doug Aoki, Sourayan Mookerjea and the anonymous reviewers for their input and Randelle Nixon for her research assistance. Responsibility for any errors and omissions is mine alone. I presented an earlier version of this paper to a symposium at the British Centre of Durkheimian Studies, Oxford University, in October 2010, and I thank the participants for their insightful comments, ­Willie Watts Miller in particular. The University of Windsor provided me with an environment conducive to this project in the summer of 2012, for which my profound gratitude. Finally, I thank my Dad – the first cosmopolitan I ever knew – and Claudia DiNatale for her support and for sharing with me countless conversations about ontology and social justice.

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4 Integrating High-Tech Immigrants and Temporary Workers in Canada’s New Economy Structural Limitations to Mobilities

lloyd wong and karl froschauer

introduction

This chapter examines an aspect of the mobility-knowledge nexus that revolves around skilled migrants to Canada participating in the hightechnology sector. These newcomers include many from Asia, particularly from India and China, engaging in transnational forms of mobility – geographical, economic (avenues and circulation of capital), symbolic (of information and ideas – technical know-how and expertise), and social (up and down the job/occupation ladder). Their multiple mobilities and interconnections augur well for the emerging mobilities paradigm. The relationship between processes of migration, transnationalism, and diaspora is crucial to mobilities research (­Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006:10). While tabloid media commonly depict migrants in the developed world as poor, uneducated people of colour who strain state services (Cresswell and Merriman 2011), the reality is that they are extremely diverse. They include many people with extensive education and high skills. For example, between 1996 and 2000, high-tech computer programmers and computer systems analysts were the two most common intended occupations of all skilled immigrants, and most of these groups came from China, India, and Pakistan (Citizenship and Immigration Canada [CIC] 2003:4). Even after the decline in the high-tech sector in the early 2000s, computer programmers and technologists were still in the top five occupations for immigrant workers. In 2004, the fast-track

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Information Technology Professionals Software Program directed into the sector approximately 1,200 workers, with the majority from India (CIC 2005: 1). That year, computer programmers and technologists ranked second, right behind engineers (many also in high-tech) among such immigrants’ preferred occupational categories (Volpe 2005).This policy complemented the regular movement of high-tech workers as temporary foreign workers and regular immigrants who eventually landed high-tech jobs. This situation contrasts with their severe underrepresentation in management in the largest high-tech firms, indicating lack of social mobility. While an earlier preliminary study of Asian information technology (IT) professionals in Canada by Badrinath Rao (2001) suggested that discrimination was present but not prevalent, this issue warrants further research. As part of the immigration experience, racism and discrimination are fairly substantial in Canada (Reitz 2007:27), and systemic racism and discrimination in employment and the workplace are well documented (Agocs 2004; Agocs and Jain 2001; Teelucksingh and ­Galabuzi 2005) and include differential treatment of many visible minorities in recruitment, hiring, and promotion. Social justice in the workplace is an important issue, and we conceptualize it here in the context of organizational justice, a concept that emerged in the 1980s ­(Greenberg 1990:400) and that we define as fairness in the workplace. Much of the literature distinguishes two types: distributive and procedural (Clay-Warner, Reynolds, and Roman et al. 2005; Eskew 1993; Goldman 2001; Greenberg 1990:400) – fairness in the distribution of rewards in the workplace and fairness in how workplace procedures distribute those awards, respectively. This chapter aims to answer the research question about how Canada’s new economy integrates high-tech immigrants and temporary workers. There are two major sections. The first section examines the extensive literature on the analogous U.S. experience as a comparative backdrop. Then the second section looks at Canada and examines these migrants’ participation in the high-tech sector in terms of representation, limits to mobility, the glass ceiling, and issues surrounding systemic discrimination and organizational justice. At the methodological level, we present data from several sources – secondary sources, face-to-face interviews, a literature review on economic mobilities, and content analysis of high-tech publications. These multi-scalar methods and levels of data help us address the challenges of mobilities research (D’Andrea, Ciolfi, and Gray 2011).

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Citizenship and Immigration Canada let us use its data on temporary work permits. The census of Canada reveals the over- or under-­ representation of immigrants in high-tech occupations and their incomes (through multiple regression analysis), so that we can determine the glass ceiling and income inequalities. Since the 2001 census uses the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), we apply three contemporary NAICS-based definitions of high-tech occupations from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); the American Electronics Association (AeA), now part of TechAmerica; and BC Stats, from British Columbia’s government. We interviewed 19 Chinese entrepreneurs and workers in the high-tech sectors in Calgary and Vancouver in 2007 and 2008. We used a standard interview questionnaire of approximately sixty questions lasting from one to two hours. We could thereby explore in depth participants’ human, social, and cultural capital, their ethnic strategies, the utility to them of symbolic mobility for business and high-tech information, and their perceptions of barriers. Additional sources of findings stem from a literature review of economic mobilities relating to immigrants to Canada and a content analysis of a list of the top executives of the 100 largest BC high-tech companies from Business in Vancouver magazine in 2005. In this list, we identified and counted ethnic Asian names to assess representation. U.S. research reveals a five-prong pattern in immigrants’ experience: • •

•

• •

over-representation in high-tech over-representation of Asians, particularly Chinese, in high-tech professions, but a glass ceiling vis-à-vis management positions severe under-representation of Asians on boards of large high-tech firms incomes, especially for Asians, below those of non-immigrants selection and streaming by government policies into high-tech, with the program for temporary H-1B visa workers depressing wages and exacerbating income inequalities

Our two case studies – of the United States and of Canada – pose additional methodological challenges when we approach them as studies in mobility research. For example, D’Andrea and his colleagues’ recent work on high-tech labour, mobility, connectivity, and sociability in Ireland point to these challenges. They find regional innovation-based development in the Shannon region of Ireland’s midwest – “an ideal setting for

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researching mobilities and modernization as the region … leverages institutional initiatives to capture transnational mobilities of professionals, capital, and knowledge to and from the region” (2011:151). Further, within mobility studies they note the challenge for “a critical reorientation that interfaces experiential and structural dimensions of mobility” (157). After immigrants move to the United States and Canada, preexisting structures may limit their entry into high-tech work. Mobilities and Inequality Scholars have not examined conceptualizations and measurements of social stratification in any great detail in terms of conjunction and connections with mobilities (Ohnmacht, Maksim, and Bergman 2009:7). This chapter focuses on how multiple mobilities, and their intersections, facilitate inequality among recent high-tech immigrants and temporary workers to Canada. While these migrant workers can move more readily than people who face economic barriers and immobilities, many of them confront inequitable income and opportunity because of social exclusion and poor access. The new mobilities paradigm (Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007) can help us contextualize this inequality as well as connect the various factors that shape it. High-tech immigrants and temporary workers’ movement to Canada embodies geographical, economic, symbolic, and social forms of mobility. In mobility systems and mobility governance (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006:2), the migration regime entails national and international regulations and laws to control the movement of people (see also chapters 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 16). Canada subjects high-tech migrants to policies on economic immigration and temporary migration. Since many of the high-tech immigrants are Asians, Cresswell’s notion of constellations of mobility (2010:18–19) suggests that historical forms of related mobilities of Asians into Canada may influence current mobilities. In this regard, we can contrast the transnational labour history and mobilities of Chinese into Canada as two time periods: then and now. Then, from the 1880s until the imposition of the sequential and increasing Head Taxes from 1885 to 1923, the Chinese provided temporary physical capital in the form of coolie labour. Now, which covers the past three decades or so, current labour migrations involve both long-term and temporary human capital in the form of highly skilled labour. Hence we should consider the politics of mobility that produce social relations that subordinate and favour migrants in complex, h ­ istorically changing

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interrelations in terms of class and ethnicity (Cresswell 2010:21). Beyond the constellations and politics of mobility we use the concept of production of mobilities (Cresswell 2006) as an interpretive framework for assessing high-tech migrants to Canada and their geographical, economic, symbolic, and social mobilities. Canadian immigration policy has shifted from emphasis on humanitarian to economic immigration. Back in the 1970s, the ratio of humanitarian immigrants (refugee and family class) to economic (directly relating to the labour market) was 60:40. Today, it is the reverse. Thus geographical mobility in terms of immigration now relates more to economic factors. A number of researchers have studied this relationship of geographical and economic mobilities. Economic mobilities associated with international population movements can include those that capital facilitates or assists – Stahl’s (1991:163) capital-assisted migration (CAM). The recruitment of immigrant or temporary workers by multinational high-tech companies and corporations in Canada is an example. However, economic mobilities need not involve companies or corporations directly. In capital-linked migration (CLM), business persons or capitalists can migrate through business-migration programs solely because they possess a certain amount of capital and business know-how (symbolic mobility) (Lloyd Wong 1993:173). This program has brought in many high-tech entrepreneurs to set up companies in large urban centres such as Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. At another level, economic mobilities also include the transnational avenues and circulation of capital that relate de facto to the movement of people across borders. Immigrants to Canada may carry capital with them and bring in more later. For example, data for 1986–2002 indicate that immigrants brought with them $26.4 billion (Lloyd Wong and Ho 2006:253); of this total amount, Chinese newcomers accounted for $14.9 billion. Economic and geographical mobilities need to link with other forms of mobilities, as transnational forms of geographical mobility encompass not only economic but also symbolic mobilities, such as the circulation of information and ideas, technical know-how, and expertise. While Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006:11) discuss informational mobilities as ones relating to media and immobile infrastructures, they have links to immigrants’ geographical mobilities, such as capital-assisted migration, as we saw above. Here knowledge and information travels with, and is embodied in, the person who is on the move, whether an

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immigrant or a temporary worker. Many immigrants now enter ­Canada under the economic class; a points system ranks highly both their education, in the form of credentials-based or expert knowledge, and their work experience. Thus their knowledge and information – part and parcel of symbolic mobility – facilitate their mobility. Mobility is not uni-directional, as transnationalism research has shown. For example, the traditional notion of brain drain (or gain), is just as apt to be brain or knowledge circulation involving the mobilities and practices of highly skilled and knowledgeable immigrants. Research by Saxenian (1999, 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2006) on immigrant workers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, California, has uncovered a crossregional, transnational space where immigrants transfer skills, technology, human resources, and organizational expertise between California and certain countries in Asia such as China, India, and Taiwan. Research by Varma (2006) on immigrant Indian scientists and engineers in the United States also suggests that the brain drain and push-pull models of international migration are obsolete as globalization and transnationalism include more than just economic factors. Recently in Canada, Devoretz and Ma (2002) and Devoretz and Zhang (2004) have argued that Canada acquires a great deal of human capital in triangular transfers with Hong Kong and other places. These examples link migrants’ symbolic mobility with their geographical mobility. However, Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006) relate informational mobility to immobile infrastructures and media, so that high-tech migrants are also likely to rely on symbolic mobilities (see also chapters 13, 14, 15, and 16) relating to the internet, websites, online professional journals, international conferences, and transnational social and business networks. In other words, the circulation of knowledge in the high-tech sector occurs not only through brain circulation but also through symbolic mobilities that transnational information technology (such as the trans-Pacific information highway) allows. While geographical, economic, and symbolic mobilities may appear to be liberating, they involve issues of equity and social mobility. The new mobilities paradigm, as Cresswell (2010) points out, needs to keep notions of fixity, stasis, and immobility in mind. For high-tech migrants, their geographical mobility may be an opportunity and privilege vis-à-vis the immobile. However, these mobilities may be forerunners to subsequent and relative immobilities. Canadian policy-makers encouraging trans-Pacific migration have helped foster transnational economic mobilities but also unequal social mobility for high-tech

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immigrants in Canada’s new economy, as this chapter shows, affecting income, employment, and access to management positions, particularly in urban high-tech knowledge clusters. They have advanced a kind of social mobility that streams immigrants from India and China into hightech knowledge clusters either as immigrants with residency rights or as contract workers with low pay and temporary residency. The latter program may be a way of depressing wages in this sector that increases overall income inequalities between immigrants and non-immigrants (Grant 2013). Our research findings link symbolic mobilities to social and organizational justice. Such conceptual lenses uncover a unique pattern of immigrant integration in high tech: over-representation of Asian immigrants, barriers (a glass ceiling) in their access to higher positions, wages below those of non-immigrants, and government policies that stream immigrants into high-tech in ways that may depress wages and foster income inequalities. In order to understand this unique structure of inequality, we compare immigrants from Asia with native-born ­Americans and with native-born Canadians. We look at the U.S. case in terms of over-­ representation, the glass ceiling, representation on boards, and differences in earnings. We analyse the Canadian situation in more detail, incorporating material from our interviews, as we present evidence for, and an explanation of, the over-representation of immigrants in hightech, immigrant perceptions of the limits to their mobility, the glass ceiling, temporary workers in high-tech, and the issues of systemic discrimination and organizational justice. t h e c a s e o f t h e u n i t e d s tat e s

Over-representation of Immigrants in High-Tech As Silicon Valley matured in the 1980s and 1990s, immigrants – both as highly skilled workers and entrepreneurs – moved increasingly into the high-tech region. By 2000, immigrants comprised 11 per cent of the U.S. population (Malone et al. 2003) but 53 per cent of scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley, with over one-quarter of them from China, India, and Taiwan (Saxenian 2005:36). In 1990, only 32 per cent of the ­Valley’s scientists and engineers had been immigrants (­Saxenian 1999:12; 2002a:22). Bernard Wong (2006:4) points out that large numbers of Chinese and Indians have entered the high-tech sector in the (San Francisco) Bay area, including Silicon Valley, and cites their

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over-­representation. However, structural inequalities and limitations (in income and promotion) faced many of these newcomers, as the U.S. Department of Labor found out. The Glass Ceiling The U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1991 established the Federal Glass Ceiling Commission (FGCC), and the Department of Labor (1991) stated that minorities had plateaued below women at lower levels within the workforce. While the notion of the glass ceiling operates at various levels, the discussion here concerns the internal structural barriers within organizations (Federal Glass Ceiling Commission 1995:8). Woo (1994), in a background report for the FGCC, presents three pertinent findings: first, Asian Americans are likely to experience overrepresentation and cluster in the sciences and engineering; second, they receive a lower yield, or returns, for their education, in income and promotions; and third, they are under-represented in management in most occupational sectors and thus face structural barriers into management and also into higher levels of management. Since the FGCC’s final report in 1995, the literature on the glass ceiling has continued. Several scholars have studied the situation for Asian Americans. For example, Tang (1997, 2000) finds a racial hierarchy in science and engineering and lower odds for Asians switching from technical engineering to management than for Caucasians. Further, they are less likely to reach managerial positions, even after researchers control for birthplace, length of U.S. residence, and other demographic characteristics (Tang 2000). Fernandez (1998) also demonstrates a glass ceiling for Asian Indian Americans in the Bay area, including Silicon Valley, by using U.S. census data to assess the “cost of race” assumption, even after she factors in variables in human capital. Varma (2002) uses the provocative term “high-tech coolies” to refer to Asian Americans clustering in lower-level technical positions. Moreover, she refers to their barrier in science and engineering as the “silicon ceiling” (Varma 2002:345; 2006:79). Bernard Wong (2006) interviewed Chinese in-migrants to the Silicon Valley and notes that they frequently mention a glass ceiling. Shih (2006) points to a pervasive public discourse in Silicon Valley extolling its commitment to meritocracy, while ignoring the glass ceiling. Further, she finds that Asian women and men experience a different structure of opportunities from

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their white counterparts. In the United States, vertical social mobility shows its structural limits also at the boardroom door. Asian Representation on Boards Bernard Wong (2006:4) reports that a survey of Silicon Valley’s top 150 public companies found that 89 per cent of the chairs and chief executive officers (CEOs) were white, and only 10 per cent were Asian, although Asians comprised 31 per cent of white-collar and 57 per cent of bluecollar workers in high-tech companies. According to data from the 1990 census (Saxenian 1999:17), while Chinese and Indians accounted for 6 per cent and 2 per cent, respectively, of Silicon Valley’s high-tech professionals, they made up only 4 per cent and 1 per cent, respectively, of managers. The glass ceiling for Asian Americans suggests that minority status in general may affect wage and executive mobility. Earnings Differences Research comparing Asian-American and white incomes shows considerable variation. Indians’ income, according to the 1990 census, is comparable to whites’ in the professions and slightly less in technical occupations (B. Wong 2006:32). In contrast, in the sciences and engineering, Indians earn more than whites (Varma 2006:82). For the Chinese, Bernard Wong (2006:32) finds incomes in professional and technical occupations marginally less than those for whites, but he does not control for demographic and personal attributes. In addition, visa programs that emerged in response to industry lobbying and immigration market condition movement of migrants into high-tech sectors. The controversial H1-B Visa program brings many high-tech temporary foreign workers from India (35 per cent), China (9 per cent), and the Philippines (5 per cent) (Miano 2005). The controversy over the program has not abated; Miano (2005, 2007) concludes that H1-B workers earn significantly less than Americans in the same occupation and same state. According to Chakravartty (2006:179), Indian entrants faced considerable discrimination and had to negotiate racial hierarchies not only with whites but also with fellow immigrants. Luthra (2009) sees them not really as “cheap labour,” but rather as flexible labour. In summary, the U.S. high-tech sector has an over-representation of immigrants, and several research studies point to the existence of a glass ceiling for Asians.

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There is under-representation of Asians on the boards and in managerial levels of high-tech companies, and Asians earn less than whites. the canadian case

Do high-tech immigrants to Canada experience similar over-representation in the high-tech sector and similar structural limitations to mobility? Does the state – the federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration and provincial governments – direct highly skilled immigrants into regional high-tech sectors, as American authorities do? These are key questions to address. Scholars often speak of the international movement of people in terms of the movement of labour, but other aspects, such as their associated symbolic and economic mobilities, may play a role, as we see below. We look first at data on immigrants’ over-representation in the high-tech sector. Then we focus on how the over-represented Chinese experience a glass ceiling. Unlike the United States, Canada has detailed analysis of human, social, and cultural forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986; Ong 1999). We explore the extent to which Chinese immigrants in western Canada use such forms of capital in the high-tech sector. Over-representation of Immigrants in High-Tech Using the complete 2001 census data, we were able to define high-tech occupations via three standardized definitions that used the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Then we calculated proportions of immigrants in the high-tech occupations and in the total labour force. Further, we cross-tabulated proportions of the labour force in high-tech by place of birth (elsewhere and Canada). Table 4.1 shows the high proportion of immigrants among workers in high-tech (as three organizations define this sector) in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and all of Canada. For Alberta, immigrants make up 15.4 per cent the labour force and 22.6 per cent of high-tech workers; for British Columbia, the figures are 26.1 per cent and 35.2 per cent, respectively; and for Ontario, 28.4 per cent and 39.5 per cent, respectively. Nationally, the figures are 18.9 per cent and 29.3 per cent, respectively. This national finding approximates the figures of Hall and Khan (2008:277), even though they used different occupational classifications. Thus the over-representation amounts to 7.2 per cent for Alberta, 9.1 per cent for British Columbia, 11.1 per cent for Ontario, and 10.4

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Table 4.1  Immigrant composition of high-tech occupations* and the total labour force, selected provinces and Canada, 2001 Selected provinces High-tech as defined by

Alberta

bc

Ontario

Canada

OECD AeA BC Stats

20.9% 22.3% 24.6%

33.3% 34.2% 38.2%

38.4% 38.7% 41.5%

28.6% 28.5% 30.8%

Mean**

22.6%

35.2%

39.5%

29.3%

Total (N)

373,060

431,795

1,258,845

3,392,525

Immigrants in labour force

15.4%

26.1%

28.4%

18.9%

Over-representation of immigrants***

 7.2%

 9.1%

11.1%

10.4%

* We use three NAICS-based definitions of high-tech occupations: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the American Electronics Association (AeA), currently Advancing the Business of Technology), and the BC statistical agency (BC Stats). The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) provides the most contemporary classification of occupations for measuring high-tech occupations. ** Mean of the three definitions. *** Calculated by “subtracting immigrants as a percentage of the total labour force” from the mean percentage of immigrants in high-tech occupations for each province and for Canada. Source: 2001 Census of Population, accessed at the Prairie Regional Research Data Centre, University of Calgary.

per cent for Canada as a whole. These figures are akin to Saxenian’s U.S. findings for 1990, where immigrants made up 24 per cent of the labour force in Silicon Valley and 30 per cent of high-tech workers there (1999:11). Another way to assess over-representation is to, first, separate the labour force into two groups, immigrants and Canadian-born, and, second, calculate what proportion of workers in each group work in high-tech. In Table 4.2, we see that immigrants in Canada are more likely than the Canadian born to work in high-tech. While 3.9 per cent of Canadian-born work in high-tech, 7 per cent of immigrants do. The same trend emerges in our three provinces, although they vary in degree. In Alberta and British Columbia, 4.1 per cent and 3.6 per cent, respectively, of Canadian-born workers are in high-tech, and 6.6 per cent and 5.5 per cent of immigrants, respectively. In Ontario, the figures are 4.7 per cent and 7.7 per cent, respectively.

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Table 4.2  Percentage of total labour force employed in high-tech occupations*, by birthplace (nativity), for selected provinces and Canada, 2001 Nativity Province

Immigrant

Canadian-born

Total labour force

Alberta British Columbia Ontario

6.6 5.5 7.7

4.1 3.6 4.7

4.5 4.1 5.5

Canada

7.0

3.9

4.5

640,650

2,751,875

3,392,530

Total (N)

* See note to Table 4.1. The figures in this table are the means of these three definitions. Source: As Table 4.1.

Explanations for Over-representation Immigrants’ high-tech over-representation stems from Canada’s immigration policy and its relationship to the global political economy and the global immigration marketplace. Government control of mobility undoubtedly influences immigrants’ participation in the new economy and in high-tech – most notably, the Federal Skilled Worker Program and the Canadian Business Immigration Program, which emphasize human capital and symbolic mobilities, to direct people with skills pertinent to the new economy towards high-tech. The Federal Skilled Worker Program was formerly independent class immigration, which worked in economic terms – immigrants added “value” and brought “returns” to Canada. From the late 1960s to the 1980s, family-class, humanitarian immigration dominated, but by the 1990s Canada was selecting immigrants through the revised point system and, as we saw above, was establishing a ratio of 60 per cent economic to 40 per cent humanitarian terms of selection. This policy shift coincided with neoliberal restructuring, and Simmons (1999) calls it “designer” immigration, which stipulates newcomers’ human capital requirements. Thus immigration policy favours high-tech skills and streams new arrivals. Canada also competes with other countries, such as Australia and the United States, for entrepreneurs and highly skilled workers. Potential emigrants often compare potential destinations, and one factor they look at is immigration policies.

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Limits to Mobility: Interviews In face-to-face interviews, we have used Bourdieu’s (1986) insights to explore the limitations to Chinese immigrants’ mobility, despite their efforts to acquire the human, social, and cultural capital to integrate in a high-tech economy. Their description of their everyday experience illuminates the interface between the experiential and structural dimensions of mobility (D’Andrea et al. 2011:157). New Chinese immigrants in western Canada developed and acquired the requisite human capital in both countries of origin (such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore) and Canada by attending universities and other secondary institutions. Here the acquisition is of ‘general’ human capital through institutionalized educational, skilling, and training programs, rather than of ‘specific’ human capital through ethnic businesses or the ethnic community (Ashton et al. 1999). Our interviews in Calgary and Vancouver revealed how human capital and the hightech sector articulate with each other (see Bourdieu 1986). Immigrants had completed a variety of university degrees. Eighteen of the nineteen had at least a bachelor’s degree – over half had done so in Canada, and the rest in their country of origin. Two of the three immigrant owners of businesses had doctorates, and several, master’s degrees. One worker held three master’s degrees, in business administration, education, and science. On arriving in Canada, more than two-thirds studied further – language (including English as a second language) and at university (completing commerce diplomas and bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorates). Many did so to obtain high-tech jobs, and quite a few workers and owners found that university attendance created connections and job opportunities. Specifically, workers developed connections to jobs, and entrepreneurs developed their social networks. At the time of the interviews, Chinese immigrants played a significant role in small high-tech businesses. In Vancouver, they discussed the value of immigrants, particularly to small software firms. Several mentioned that immigrants had to “work harder” than native Canadians to succeed. Some thought their immigrant status advantageous – they found creative ways to overcome obstacles when looking for work or setting up a business. One described how her Hong Kong work ethic and skills in anticipating problems helped her solve business problems in Canada: “Because I used to work in a really fast-paced environment in Hong Kong, and we are more resourceful in trying to find some solution, and I

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try to foresee the problem before the problem really pops up ... Because I found some people from here, they don’t really foresee [software programming] problems, they just fix them … With the software program, if they can’t find a solution right away, then they probably think ‘I can’t fix it.’” All interviewees agreed on the major role of immigrants in Vancouver high-tech. They network and use ethnic strategies to enhance their innovative skills. Three-quarters of respondents in Calgary and Vancouver attended meetings of professional and alumni associations, with three in Vancouver also participating in immigrant associations. One respondent headed a professional association, many sat on the board of the Calgary Chinese Professionals and Entrepreneurs Association or the Calgary Chinese Elderly Citizen’s Association and one Vancouver entrepreneur is currently on the board of Fuel Cell Canada. Others are members of, or served on the board of, the Canada–China Association of Science and Technology, and one consulted for the semi-professional Microsoft Dot Net Programming group. In Vancouver, many participated in SUCCESS, a predominantly Chinese ethnic association serving immigrants. Immigrants working in other sectors tend to rely on co-ethnics for information about business in Canada. However, in high-tech, Chinese immigrants learn about businesses and technology from a variety of personal interactions but also from the internet, websites, online professional journals, and international conferences. Business associates, general business media (on the internet), and friends are the most useful sources of information. Among Vancouver immigrants, sources included the Association of Computing Machinery, the Business Intelligence Journal, the Microsoft System of Development Network, a number of high-tech websites, mostly online magazines and online articles, and various sites on the information highway. Similarly, in Calgary Chinese immigrants find business associates, general business media, and friends invaluable for such information. When we probed about what kinds of information the majority cited the markets, comparisons (international, business, technology, and so on), opportunities, new technology, general networking, and the exchange of information, ideas, and technical knowledge. Less than half of respondents in Calgary mentioned ethnic business or professional associations. Online communication enhances exchange of transnational information. One Chinese high-tech worker kept up to date on high-tech b ­ usiness

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and technology: “Yeah, every day I spend several hours in reading a magazine or online searching or browsing.” Another added: “Definitely, I got lots of information from a couple of Chinese technology websites.” One programmer of education software replied, “Yeah, websites, that’s right, so I do check, let’s say Mandarin websites, to get some information about WebCT. Or you check on maybe WebCT programming on websites.” Workers used Chinese language websites to start more in-depth searches in English publications. For example, one programmer commented: “Sometimes, if I’m not familiar with the materials, probably I would go to some Chinese website and to see in my native language, and when I get a sense of it, I would do more deep search using English.” Business and technical information moves symbolically between China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Canada not only through brain circulation but also through infrastructural computer technologies. The majority of Chinese immigrants cannot use their human and cultural capital extensively. Two-thirds of respondents reported significant limitations in small high-tech businesses, which raises questions about the fairness and equity of their treatment. Interviewees highlight episodes, complexities, and ambivalent realities that pose other questions. How did they use their cultural capital at work? Was their second language an advantage or a disadvantage? Did they overcome the language barrier? Did they adjust to the cross-cultural context of western Canada and its workplace culture? Being an immigrant and relying on previous and new cultural capital can help and hinder Chinese high-tech immigrants. About one-third of interviewees felt that being an immigrant and having new cultural capital (such as a Canadian education) assisted them. Several thought that having studies in Canada put them on a par with Canadian-born colleagues with the same level of education. Four saw advantages to being an immigrant – it gave them insight and understanding about how to relate to people and understand their culture (they saw themselves as more adaptable). One person claimed that “being Chinese gives you a cultural understanding too. It makes it easier to relate to people. I try to understand their background.” Another felt especially at an advantage because he had adapted to Canadian culture and learned to speak English well. “I would say it helps, because I don’t care what you do, communication is very, very key to your success in any career. If you can think and speak and understand how the corporation or how the natives work, then you have a big advantage. Because you have to understand how they think, [what they say], and they have to understand you

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­ ithout effort. So in my mind, I think it’s very important to leave the w baggage behind … I believe culture is fine to stay at home, at your own personal world, but in a business world you have to act business-like. And when I say business-like, I mean, when you are in Canada you have to act Canadian businesslike.” Also, participants who do business frequently with companies or contacts in China felt being an immigrant especially advantageous. They understand the business culture in China and develop good working relations, being conversant in both languages and cultures. As one said, “It does provide a better understanding of how they [immigrants] do business compared with the native-born Canadian. So that is an advantage.” About one-third of interviewees believed that speaking another language has working advantages. In Vancouver, one said “If people can think about a problem in more than one language, they can see different aspects of a problem.” He continued “Yeah, I think it definitely is an asset, because different cultural background, different language, do make people think differently. So as a Chinese, the way you think [is a] little bit different from other people, so that’s good when you solve the [computer] program errors, your approaches may be different, which is good, [you] have a choice, you can choose your way, or you can discuss an alternative way.” In Calgary, some respondents felt it a small asset – especially when dealing with another person who speaks the same language or when the company does business with China – but the majority found that another language has not assisted them at work. More Vancouver respondents thought knowledge of a second language an asset, especially in communicating with clients in China. However, two-thirds of respondents believed that being an immigrant provides no advantages in the high-tech economy. They still struggled with language and cultural differences every day, and their lack of Canadian work experience was a disadvantage. Most identified cultural factors as creating barriers for them, whether as workers or as owners. They discussed cultural barriers in terms of communication – difficulties in understanding terminology, the system, and processes within firms; in locating funding; and in navigating the law. For example, one said, “When immigrants came here, their language provides no advantage. In the same interview situations, maybe employers give the highest preference to local people and Canadian experience.” An owner talked about working with clients. For her, “disadvantages that come across in my work life is the talking to clients, because if I [would] speak their own language more fluently, or if I were born here, then probably my clients

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would talk to me more often, or be my friend. If my client is willing to be my friend, then it would be easier to get a contract. I think it makes everything easier.” In addition, understanding how to present oneself and how to act in front of future employers puzzled some participants. Excellent English is crucial. But even if an immigrant is bilingual, interrelations with co-ethnics provide comfort and trust. As one respondent claims: “I deal with lots of high-tech key personnel that I know speak Chinese. But without exception they can speak fluent English as well, so I don’t need to use Chinese as leverage … The only thing is that I feel a slight advantage when some of my clients of Chinese descent work in the high-tech area … you feel some kind of closeness. So I think there is an advantage there. But it’s not a language thing, but more that they know we are more like-minded, so they believe if you are like-minded than you are more or less thinking along the same lines and also that you wouldn’t shaft them.” Although some find comfort in cultural affinity, even when fluent in English, for most Chinese immigrants language in the high-tech s­ector remains a problem. For example, one claimed that “the language is still the major problem for the immigrants, especially for the immigrants from China. Yeah. I didn’t see [English as a problem for immigrants] from India because they’re educated [in English] from as a child.” One worker observed that skilled information technology workers are fine, because people worry less about their language. But in some other sectors, employers have a “big concern about your language. They’re concerned about the communication ... Because I studied here … I had chance to improve my English. But for some people who came directly from China as an immigrant … they are not good in English. So they have a very hard time finding a job.” He also noted cultural differences. Another respondent said that although language and culture can be difficult at work, communicating socially can be even more of a problem. Another emphasized the domestic preference for Canadian credentials and experience: “There’s a barrier when you come into this area. First things … they want Canadian experience … they want qualification from Canadian professional associations … Even they [immigrants] are very good doctors already, but they cannot practice medicine here. That’s a big barrier.” So most respondents thought being an immigrant has put them at some sort of working disadvantage, especially because of the language barrier and cultural differences. The language and working style differ: “Because in China it’s a different working system and the differences are

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very strong,” one participant said. Another had never experienced any disadvantages in Calgary’s high-tech sector but did so while working in China: “The only disadvantage may be because you are the same race as the people you deal with, so there maybe a little bit of take it for granted from the supplier side. If you’re a Westerner going to China, they would more than likely treat you better … Because of the cultural difference, they may treat the Westerners better.” The Glass Ceiling Work by Carol Agocs and Harish Jain (2001) pointed out that in Canada the numbers of upper-level managers increased between 1987 and 1996, but not the proportion of visible-minority members – strongly suggesting a glass ceiling. More recently, Pendakur and Pendakur (2007) found that Chinese immigrants in particular face a glass ceiling, especially for men earning the most. Thus Chinese immigrant high-tech workers may experience a glass ceiling vis-à-vis management positions. The evidence for its existence rests here on two basic measures. The first is the proportion of Chinese-name managers in the 100 largest BC high-tech companies. Since immigrants (many of them Chinese) are over-represented in high-tech, this should be the case at higher levels of management in BC’s 100 high-tech firms. The second is wage or earnings disparities between immigrants and Canadian-born workers in high-tech occupations. Here we use multiple regression analysis and control for gender, experience (age as proxy), and education. If there is a wage discrepancy, then one can assume that immigrants concentrate in lower-wage occupations and lack occupational mobility. High-tech Magazine (Business in Vancouver 2005) lists the 100 largest BC high-tech companies, ranking them by number of local employees. The companies are both private and public (stock exchange) corporations, including the BC branches of transnational corporations. As we saw above, analysis of earlier Canadian censuses reveals that approximately 35 per cent of BC high-tech workers are immigrants. Since most immigrants these days in Canada are from Asia, then one would expect a similar proportion among top executives of the one hundred largest BC high-tech companies. However, the 2005 list contains only six Asian (Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Pakistani) names cited as major decision makers (see Table 4.3). Only three Chinese names appear: no. 44, Raytheon Canada Ltd, an air-traffic systems and training firm, identifies

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Table 4.3  Top executives with Asian names among the 100 biggest BC tech companies (ranked by number of local employees) Rank

 

23

ACCPAC Canada Inc.

313

25

Xantrex Technology Inc.

300

44

Raytheon Canada Ltd Digital Dispatch Systems Inc.

140

Ascalade Technologies Inc. Agilent Technologies Limited Canada

 95

52

70 94

bc

staff

121

 56

Product

Top executive

Accounting and business management software for small and mid-sized businesses Advanced power electronics for the mobile, distributed, and programmable power markets Air-traffic control systems and training Wireless mobile data solutions, including computerized dispatch systems Cordless telephone manufacturers Communications electronics, semiconductor products, test and measurement devices, life sciences and chemical analysis tool

Gary Nishimura, senior vice president, R&D Mossadiq Umedaly, chair

David Wang, site executive Vari Ghai, president and CEO

Edmond Ho, CEO (resigned 2008) Lawrence Loo, president

Source: Business in Vancouver (2005).

David Wang as site executive; no. 70, Ascalade Technologies Inc., which makes cordless telephones, identifies Edmond Ho as chief executive officer; and no. 94, Agilent Technologies Limited Canada, a communications electronics firm, names Lawrence Loo as president. These data show severe under-representation for Chinese. Disparities occur also in the distribution of earnings of minorities and immigrants. In Canada, the data and literature over the past two decades clearly demonstrate income disparities among immigrants and ethnic minorities. For example, Pendakur and Pendakur’s (2007) work on earnings continues to corroborate a fairly long string of research that has identified lower wages and incomes for immigrants and visible minorities. They analyse Canadian census data for all individuals, rather than focusing on high-tech workers, and examine different levels of earnings. South Asians face barriers at lower income levels (20th percentile); blacks, at all levels; and Chinese, particularly at the top levels (80th and 90th percentiles) – all amounting to evidence of a glass ceiling generally.

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According to Lloyd Wong and Carol Wong’s (2006:265) analysis of Canadian scientists and engineers in the 2001 census, immigrants’ income was approximately $5,000 less than Canadian-born, as was a Chinese income versus white. They generated these figures while controlling for human capital variables such as education and experience. Hall and Khan (2008) analyse the variation of immigrant earnings in high-tech across Canadian cities and show that immigrants in the larger and more high-tech–intensive cities have the largest gap from non-immigrants. Their findings are particularly relevant here, because our qualitative analysis focuses on immigrants in high-tech in Calgary and Vancouver, which figure on Hall and Khan’s list. They construct their definition of high-tech industries and occupations from Canada’s Standard Industrial Classification (SIC-E), which Statistics Canada last reworked in 1980. In contrast, we use the NAICS (1997, slightly revised 2002), which Statistics Canada now employs. As BC Stats (2001a:2, 2001b:4) points out, NAICS is both more up-to-date and more detailed. Regardless of the high-tech definition, immigrants earn considerably less than the Canadian born, by an amount ranging from $5,861 (AeA – American Electronics Association) per year, through $8,286 (BC Stats), to $8,404 (OECD) (see Table 4.4). Since we controlled for gender, experience (age), and education, the figures indicate the actual cost of immigrant status with respect to income. These figures contrast with Hall and Khan’s (2008:278) finding of only $632 (SIC). However, their figures are not directly comparable, as ours control for three factors. Nevertheless, our results nationally approximate theirs for Vancouver and Toronto, where high-tech immigrants made approximately $5,500 and $9,700, respectively, less. Unfortunately our analysis did not include a breakdown of income by city. Temporary Workers in High-Tech Both the U.S. H1-B Visa program and, Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) introduce inequalities through streaming guestworkers into the high-tech labour market. Canadian high-tech companies hire them in a form of capital-assisted migration relating to economic mobility as well as to labour migration. Such “unfree” labour is precarious, and the potential for subordination and exploitation is much higher (Bolaria and Bolaria 1997:200). While many high-tech workers migrated in the 1990s, the Canadian government partnered with the Software Human Resource Council in 1997

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Table 4.4  Income (in Canadian dollars) for OECD, AeA, and BC Stats definitions of hightech workers in 2001 (unstandardized (b) and standardized (B) regression coefficients) Independent variables OECD Age Gender (female = 1) Education (years of schooling) Nativity (foreign born = 1) Constant R squared N AeA Age Gender (female = 1) Education (years of schooling) Nativity (foreign born = 1) Constant R squared N BC Stats Age Gender (female = 1) Education (years of schooling) Nativity (foreign born = 1) Constant R squared N

b 828.17 -12110.76 3323.76 -8404.02 -30356.61

b

0.171* -0.111* 0.185* -0.072 * 0.075 7,744

741.05 -13095.93 2462.04 -5861.14 -16186.24

0.184* -0.136* 0.164* -0.057 * 0.084 8,141

736.01 -12277.80 2788.02 -8286.53 -20274.23

0.163* -0.109* 0.169* -0.074* 0.071 7,427

*p