The immigration scholarship of Stephen Castles
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Author | Jock Collins |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.13108 |
COMMENTARY
The immigration scholarship of Stephen Castles
Jock Collins
Department of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, New South Wales, Australia
Correspondence
Department of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway, New South Wales
2007, Australia.
Email: jock.collins@uts.edu.au
DOI: 10.1111/imig.13108
Received: 1 December 2022 Accepted: 5 December 2022
311
wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/imig
Stephen Castles, who has been a leading migration scholar and migration theorist for five decades, has passed away
aged 77. From 1986, Stephen was the Director of the Centre for Multicultural Studies at Wollongong University,
Australia. In 2001, Stephen then moved to Oxford University as Director of the Refugee Studies Centre and worked
at Oxford University till 2009 when he returned to Australia to take up a position at the University of Sydney until
his retirement in 2017. Stephen has left a legacy of a remarkable contribution to an understanding of the complex,
changing dynamics of global migration, the ways that this migration transformed sending and receiving countries and
the lives of migrants themselves.
Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (Castles & Kosack, 1973) – his first major contribution
to the field – was very influential and made Stephen's reputation within the global migration research community.
Embedded in a Marxist political economy theoretical framework, the focus of the book is how the logic of the global
capitalism (how the international mobility of labour for capital accumulation in Western Europe) situates immigrant
workers into the class structure of Western European countries in an inferior, racialised position. Here, class politics
matter, the other side of the coin of migrant labour and capital accumulation, with attention on the way that trade
unions respond to migrant labour and the way in which immigrant workers are incorporated into the working class
as inferior strata. The book provided detailed historical background and empirical trends on migration flows as well
as a focus is on the lives of migrant workers and their families: housing, education opportunities for themselves and
their children and social aspects of their life. The prejudice against and the racism that migrant workers face in the
countries into which they settle is a critical part of the contribution of the book, leading to the conclusion: ‘immigra-
tion helps to stabilise the capitalist order, not only economically, but also politically’ (Castles & Kosack, 1973: 481).
His second major book contribution to the field – Here for Good Western Europe's New Ethnic Minorities (Castles
et al., 1984) – addressed the increasingly important issue of temporary migration, a theme that he returned to in later
books, including Back to the Future? Can Europe meet its Labour Needs through Temporary Migration? (Castles, 2006). His
book Citizenship and Migration: Globalisation and the Politics of Belonging (Castles & Davidson, 2000) was at the cutting
edge of the citizenship debate that still resonates strongly in Australia, Europe, Scandinavia and North America.
Stephen's publications addressed the increasingly important issue of forced migration to Europe (Castles & Van Hear,
2005), including States of Conflict: Causes and Patterns of Forced Migration to the EU (Castles et al., 2003). Stephen's
global focus shifted his gaze to sending countries and fieldwork in Africa and the relationship between global migra-
tion and development in Migration and Development: Perspectives from the South (Castles & Delgado Wise, 2008).
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.
© 2022 The Authors. International Migration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Organization for Migration.
Int Migr. 2023;61:311–313.
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