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Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant Strategies: An Introduction

Document Cited in Related
AuthorSaskia Bonjour,Sébastien Chauvin
Date01 August 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12469
Published date01 August 2018
Social Class, Migration Policy and Migrant
Strategies: An Introduction
Saskia Bonjour* and S
ebastien Chauvin**
ABSTRACT
The introduction to this special issue traces class at the interface between migration policy and
migrant strategies. Scholarship on the politics of migration and citizenship has thus far largely
neglected class. In contrast, we contend that discourses on migration, integration and citizen-
ship are inevitably classed. Assessed through seemingly heterogeneous criteria of “merit”and
“performance”, class serves as an analytical connector between economic and identity ratio-
nales which intersect in all migration policies, including those regulating family and humani-
tarian admission. Class-selective policy frames can function as constraints maintaining some
aspiring migrants into immobility or channeling different groups of migrants into separate and
unequal incorporation routes. Yet, policy frames can also serve as resources to strategize with
as migrants navigate and perform gendered and classed expectations embedded into receiving-
country migration regimes. We conclude that connecting policy with migrant strategies is key
to reintroducing class without naturalizing classed strategies of mobility.
INTRODUCTION
While the role of class inequality in shaping possibilities and impossibilities of migration, types of
transnationalism, modalities of return, and dynamics of incorporation has been substantially
addressed and ref‌ined in the last two decades (Zhou, 1997; Carling, 2002; Feliciano, 2005; Van
Hear, 2004; Rutten and Verstappen, 2014; Cederberg, 2017), its relevance in migration policies
and policy framings has only been marginally acknowledged in the scholarly literature since the
demise of post-World War II labour migration policies. A key reason for this neglect is that social
class as ascribed social group membership has become a relatively illegitimate criterion of discrimi-
nation in contemporary democratic societies, and thus may only appear in off‌icial policy in the
form of proxies such as economic resources, cultural values, education, individual “merit”or skill
(Shachar, 2006), which in turn can serve as substitutes for even less legitimate criteria such as race
or ethnicity (Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018; see Elrick & Winter [2018] in this issue).
The contributors to this special issue f‌irst came together to discuss the work presented here in
October 2015, at a mini-symposium on “Class, Gender and Migration”convened by Saskia Bon-
jour and S
ebastien Chauvin in the framework of the Conference Class in the 21
st
Century orga-
nized by the Amsterdam Research Centre on Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS). A central objective
of the symposium was to connect policy frameworks with migrant strategies, resources and cul-
tures. Holding the two together is key to approaching policy without taking policy categories for
* University of Amsterdam
** University of Lausanne
doi: 10.1111/imig.12469
©2018 The Authors. International Migration
published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf
of International Organization for Migration
International Migration Vol. 56 (4) 2018
ISSN 0020-7985
This is an open access article under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.

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