In Part II of my survey of the blog 'Migrant Knowledge,' I turn to a rich set of posts that treat societal knowledge about migrants from the perspective of two elite groups, so to speak, the state and its agents, on the one hand, and scholars, here primarily historians, on the other hand. Two additional perspectives appear in these accounts: the entanglement of state knowledge about migrants with the knowledge that migrants develop about the state and its expectations, a big theme here, and the influence that scholarship can have on migration policy and outcomes

Mark R. Stoneman

Humanities Commons

   Research, Resources, and PerspectivesBlogging Migrant Knowledge – Part IIJune 26, 2022  ~ Mark R. StonemanMigrant knowledge is not so much a concept as it is a research agenda.  Itcan foster work on what migrants know about their world, and it challengesus to think more about what societies, including states, know about migrants.In Part I of my reflections on our sister blog, Migrant Knowledge, I highlightedposts that focused on the knowledge of and about migrant children andyouth. Here I turn to a rich set of posts that treat societal knowledge aboutmigrants from the perspective of two elite groups, so to speak, the state andits agents, on the one hand, and scholars, here primarily historians, on theother hand. Two additional perspectives appear in these accounts: theentanglement of state knowledge about migrants with the knowledge thatmigrants develop about the state and its expectations, a big theme here, andthe influence that scholarship can have on migration policy and outcomes.State Knowledge of Migrants and Vice VersaIn "What's in a Name?," Eliyana Adler points out that the labels that statesand other actors attach to migrants "convey information at a variety oflevels." In our own time, for instance, "undocumented" and "illegal" are afamiliar pairing in U.S. politics and policy-making. "Illegal" expresses anegative image of people without the necessary permits to live and work inthe country, and it often conveys a broader anti-immigrant stance."Undocumented" attempts a more neutral description of people lacking theright immigration and residency status, although such people might stillpossess identity papers from another state. Policies and politics surroundingforeign nationals who have entered a country with an intention to establish anew home, permanent or temporary, are also conveyed in terms such as"refugee,” “asylum seeker,” “migrant,” and “immigrant," each with its ownconnotations and possible consequences. Adler uses this insight to scrutinize"the application of different terms to a particular group of Polish Jews duringand after the Second World War," those who sought safety from the Germanand Soviet invading armies in the Soviet Union.Page from "List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the U.S. Immigration Officer at Port ofArrival" for the S.S. Hannover sailing from Bremen to Baltimore, May 6–21, 1906, viaFamilySearch. This document includes Germans, Lithuanians, and Poles who hademigrated from the Russian Empire, providing information about their literacy, destination,cash on hand, and more. See Sebastian Bondzio's Migrant Knowledge contribution for moreon what the U.S. federal government sought to learn about would-be immigrants.Sociologist Ulrike Bialas is also interested in terminology and classification,albeit for its implications for migrants in the present. She notes, for example,a discrepancy between one young man’s description of his “adventure” inAfrica and the translator’s matter-of-fact rendering of the term as “flight.” Thechoice made the youth legible to the state without disqualifying him forasylum because of any overly literal interpretation of “adventure” divorcedfrom its cultural context, even if "flight" did not quite line up with the youth’sself-image. Bialas’s anecdote forms part of a larger argument about the needfor sociology to consider the utility of certain language before throwing itoverboard:A state maintains its immigration regime on the basis of its knowledge aboutthose seeking entry, whereas would-be migrants learn what that state islooking for and try to meet (or skirt) those expectations. Nonetheless,different "ways of knowing" can clash when the migrant encounters thestate's officials at the border. In the century-old example that AndreaWiegeshoff offers from U.S. immigration records, three kinds of knowledgecome into play: "private knowledge or memory" (of a young man seekingentry), "practical knowledge or experience" (of immigration officials), and"scientific knowledge or expertise" (anthropological, in this case). The youngman asserted he was half Hawaiian, so the Chinese Exclusion Act did notapply. The experience and biases of immigration officials led them to rejectthis story, however, and the court did not accept the anthropologicaltestimony offered in support of the supplicant's claims. It deferred to theimmigration officials' practical knowledge (including prejudices) and deniedthe young man's claim to residence.Wendy Rouse describes an apparently effective effort to work around theChinese Exclusion Act in the United States, albeit at the cost of familyseparations. Many parents in China obtained false papers for their childrenand taught them invented family stories to go with the papers. Their aim wasfor the children to join native-born families in the United States, to which theExclusion Act did not apply. Rouse writes that the stories children broughtwith them for immigration officials later had lasting effects on their offspring.Stacy Fahrenthold discusses the knowledge that Syrian American advicebooklets offered to would-be immigrants from the same region of theOttoman Empire before World War One. Those seeking entry did not have anExclusion Act to contend with, but they still needed to know "how to performthe role of the worthy immigrant" at Ellis Island. The booklets offeredguidance on this and on how to handle their later interactions with officialsduring the period of surveillance preceding naturalization. One had to learnand practice strategic self-representation in order to be understood andaccepted by the state's representatives.The state's efforts to regulate migration at—and increasingly also at aremove from—its borders is the subject of a piece by Ulf Brunnbauer. Hefocuses on the Habsburg state's efforts to hinder emigration and on thecounterstrategies of migration facilitators. The business of emigrationincluded agents at the local level who could leverage local knowledge andrelationships. Brunnbauer rejects the recurrent efforts of states to demonizemigration facilitators in narratives that emphasize their self-interested greedwhile obscuring the agency of migrants themselves. Instead, he views themas fulfilling a need. Picking up at a point just after the Habsburg empire'scollapse, Allison Schmidt looks at how Joseph Roth portrayed peoplesmugglers in lands of the former empire. The point of the exercise for her islikewise to overcome the powerful tacit knowledge about such activities thatwe have absorbed in our own lives.Scholarly Knowledge of MigrantsThese contributions to Migrant Knowledge are part of a broader conversationabout the production of scholarly knowledge about migrants and migration.The actual object of such study, however, is complicated by our relationship tothe terminology that states and other stakeholders use in the sources wework with. Isabella Löhr and Christiane Reinecke argue that the reflexive turncan help.Why, for example, did first-class passengers arriving in Britain in the 1920snot need an entry visa, but other classes had their papers scrutinized? Whywere Chinese workers excluded from the United States in the same period,but Chinese students were not? Why have "different mobilities … been cast as'immigration,' 'emigration,' or 'migration,' while others have not"? Finally, whydo the terms "migrant" and "refugee" overlap in some instances ofscholarship, but not in others?Not just terms but the metaphors we use can shape how we understandmigration. In Germany in 2015, for example, some members of AngelaMerkel's party took up the anti-immigrant language that had proved effectivein the fight to limit political asylum in the 1980s: "the boat is full."  Anotherproblematic metaphor portrays large numbers of migrating people asforming potentially dangerous bodies of moving water—big waves, powerfulstreams or currents, floods—that could take control of the boat, even break itapart and sink it.  Luise Fast interrogates metaphors used in a different bodyof scholarship about mobilities, "the historiography of encounter." She isparticularly interested in encounters between westerners and indigenouspeoples in North America's Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century. Atissue is how the visual and auditory metaphors she has identified shape howscholars write history.Elliot Young's "Beyond Chinese 'Coolies' as Victims" evinces a kindredsensibility, questioning not a metaphor as such but an overly influentialleitmotif. Although Chinese migrant laborers frequently endured terribletreatment, he argues, an exclusive scholarly focus on their victimhood blindsus to their agency.The shift in relationship between historian and subject that Young modelsenables him to see a connection with "the victim narrative pushed by today’santi-human trafficking scholars." As important as it is to take bad-faith actorsto task, an exclusive focus on the "wily trafficker" obscures the agency andotherwise complicated narratives of people who engage the much-neededservices of smugglers to bring them across the border. To be sure, theseimages work well for the prosecutor who wishes to win a case againstsomeone facilitating undocumented immigration, but they can severely limitthe possibilities of policy and scholarship.For her part, Julie Weise moves our attention away from the modes andmeans of migration to focus on migrant workers' interactions with the statein other situations. In three different regional and national contexts, staterecruiting and labor policies targeted workers. In the context of theseinteractions, workers developed their own understandings of citizenship, thatis, of what the state owed them, especially in terms of their safety and health.Weise would like to know how migrants developed, learned, and passed onthis important knowledge to others as the modern welfare state emerged.Next to these reflections on how to study migration there are twocontributions under the rubric "Revisiting the Classics," a blog featureconceived by Andrea Westermann that I hope will grow. Michelle Kahn offersa nuanced look at Werner Schiffauer’s 1991 ethnography Die Migranten ausSubay (The Migrants from Subay). The book's most valuable insight today,she argues, lies in its insistence that scholarship on migration look beyondthe host country as its main analytical locus:Donna Gabaccia, the author of several classics herself, looks at an older bookof considerable, albeit ambivalent reputation.Gabaccia's narrative includes Whyte's "own penchant for self-reflection" overthe years, but also his willingness to use his considerable influence, even as aretiree, to settle scores with detractors.State and Scholarly Ignorance of MigrantsLauren Stokes brings us full circle with a critical look at a 1977 sociologicalstudy commissioned by the West German government: Situational Analysis ofthe Non-Employed Wives of Foreign Workers in the Federal Republic of Germany.Stokes shows that the academically certified knowledge that the studyproffered merely confirmed the biases and prejudices of the client that paidfor it. The study ignored the country's gendered impediments to women'swage labor, which the interviewed women had described. In this way, thestudy provided cover to the state to continue doing nothing to helpimmigrant mothers hold a job. Such mothers, the study claimed, would notbecome wage earners because their male-dominated Mediterranean culturesmilitated against it.The study's findings did not even reflect the state of scholarship at the time.There were academics who knew better, not to mention the immigrantwomen themselves. If this embarrassing episode did not amount to explicitdisinformation, it can still be understood as an example of agnotology,  atopic covered on History of Knowledge under the rubric of "producingignorance." Sometimes states and other stakeholders want to know, butother times they would rather not, or they are culturally or socially incapableof doing so. In fact, debates about migration that hinge on overly narrowdefinitions and framing can lend themselves to agnotology, insofar as theycan obscure as much as they illuminate. Research, publication, and teachingagendas that subject migration studies to history of knowledge perspectivescan mitigate such potential for harm.Mark Stoneman is an independent editor and historian based in Washington,DC, though he has spent the better part of the past year in a caregiver role inNew Hampshire. Mark cofounded the History of Knowledge and MigrantKnowledge blogs, coediting them until this spring. He tweets under the handle@mstoneman.1. See Simone Lässig and Swen Steinberg, "Knowledge on the Move: NewApproaches toward a History of Migrant Knowledge," Geschichte undGesellschaft 43, no. 3 (2017): 313–346. ↩2. On the last point, see Rebecca Hamlin, "'Migrants’? ‘Refugees’?Terminology Is Contested, Powerful, and Evolving," Migration InformationSource, March 24, 2022. Thanks to Robin Buller for this reference. ↩3. See, for example, Ernst Eisenbichler, "Bayerische Flüchtlingspolitik: EineChronik der Abschreckung," BR24, September 3, 2014; and RobertBirnbaum, "'Das Boot ist voll' – Kritik in der Fraktion an Flüchtlingspolitikder Kanzlerin," Der Tagesspiegel, September 23, 2015. ↩4. For Germany, see, for example, Matthias Klein, "Metaphern überFlüchtlinge: Wir reden wieder von Wellen, Flut und Strömen," MiGAZIN,November 18, 2015. ↩5. See Robert N. Proctor, "Agnotology: A Missing Term to Describe theCultural Production of Ignorance (and Its Study)," in: Agnotology: TheMaking and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. Robert N. Proctor and LondaSchiebinger (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), chap. 1. ↩Suggested Citation: Mark R. Stoneman, “Blogging Migrant Knowledge – Part II,”History of Knowledge, June 26, 2022,https://historyofknowledge.net/2022/06/26/blogging-migrant-knowledge-part-ii/.Posted in Migration and KnowledgeDISCIPLINES HISTORIOGRAPHY HISTORY OF MIGRATION SOCIOLOGY STATE KNOWLEDGE1Is it not unwise to question categories in the hopes of demolishingtheir confining walls when those same walls also provide shelter?”As they grew and had families of their own, many paper childrenpassed on to their descendants two histories: the history of theirpaper family and the history of their biological family, public andprivate memories. Both stories were crucial to their new identities asChinese Americans. Storytelling thus became a crucial part of thetransfer of knowledge between the generations.”Migration researchers … analyze how discourses on migration arelinked to the worldviews, intentions, and interests of specific historicalactors. A self-reflexive perspective on migration research … entailsasking the very basic question of how migration research and otherforms of knowledge production contribute to a particular image ofsociety and mobile people. How does the production of academic andother formalized knowledge about migration help draw the linesbetween "inside" and "outside," belonging and non-belonging,inclusion and exclusion?”234Kidnapping and voluntary emigration were the extreme ends of thespectrum from total coercion to free choice, but most Chinese fellsomewhere in the middle. Their dire circumstances in China led themto choose a dangerous path of emigration and bonded labor.”. . . we tend to confine our questions to the geographic boundaries ofhost societies. We ask how host societies respond to the presence ofmigrants, how migrants interact with host populations, and howmigrants carve out their own spaces in—and, in turn, fundamentallyreshape—host societies. This approach, however, generally downplaysa crucial reality: migrants have lives of their own before they arrive inhost societies, and they never cease to maintain ties, whether physicalor emotional, to the homelands they leave behind.”William Foote Whyte’s study of Italian immigrants in the North End ofBoston was not particularly successful after its release in 1943. In theyears after 1970, though, Street Corner Society garnered great success. . . Paradoxically, specialists in Italian American studies found little tolove in the book. Here I argue that a hidden history of gender andethnic dynamics in the academic production of knowledge can explainthe paradox.”5‹ PREVIOUSKnowledge Notes: Books and ArchivesNEXT ›‘Will They Become Human?’ Romanies and Re-educationKnowledge in Postwar CzechoslovakiaSearch …More from “Migration andKnowledge”Marginalized MigrantKnowledge: The Reception ofGerman-Speaking RefugeeHistorians in West Germany after1945Anna CorstenGermans Go Subtropical:Migration and the Quest forEnvironmental-ClimaticKnowledge in South AmericaEduardo RellySome Useful Categories ofKnowledge for UnderstandingMigrationAllison Schmidt‘Will They Become Human?’Romanies and Re-educationKnowledge in PostwarCzechoslovakiaJan RandákOther ThemesSelect CategoryCopyright© German Historical InstituteWashington 2016–2022, exceptingthird-party materials and withoutprejudice to the rights of individualauthors.MetaSubmission GuidelinesHeader Image CreditsPrivacy PolicyImpressumSearch SiteSearch …SubscribeEmail AddressSubscribeSubscribe   HOME ABOUT AUTHORS ARCHIVEHistory of KnowledgeClose and acceptPrivacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use. To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Privacy Policy

Blogging Migrant Knowledge – Part II

https://hcommons.org/deposits/download/hc:47710/CONTENT/blogging-migrant-knowledge-–-part-ii.pdf/

Blogging Migrant Knowledge – Part II

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Humanities Commons