The Challenge of Migration in a Janus-Faced Europe by Laura Zanfrini

Author:Laura Zanfrini
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030011024
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.4 Between Diversity and Uniformity

It is quite superfluous to note, once again, the reasons behind this turn towards the ‘call for uniformity.’ Certainly, they have to do with the condition of inequality and disadvantage that marks the experience of migrants and their offspring, thus making them an emblematic example of the failure of the ambition to build an inclusive common society. Not surprisingly, the most controversial choices—such as those concerning the family reunification procedure—are often supported by the political aim to prevent segregation and discrimination, particularly towards the most vulnerable categories, such as women coming from ‘patriarchal’ cultures. All of this is within a context marked by the “ethnicization of sexism” (Jäger and Jäger 2007), which, for instance, associates Islam with gender violence and female subordination.

Mirroring a more general tendency towards ‘workfare’ activating labor market policies26 (Hemerijck 2012), migrants are also more and more the target of measures aimed at improving individual activation in order to reduce migrants’ ‘burden’ on the welfare system and assistentialistic drifting. Within a context reframed by a neo-liberal rationale, the poor and otherwise disadvantaged must be offered opportunities, not a ‘patronizing State’ (Amaya-Castro 2017). However, since activation policies are generally inspired by standardized procedures, these kinds of measures can function as a “divisionary tool,” excluding migrants not in line with certain patterns (professional or not), and influencing their incorporation into the labor market. As stressed by some critical analyses (Anderson and Osman 2008), this kind of risk involves a different sets of policies aimed at individual empowerment and employability, particularly—which is even more impressive—in those institutional contexts claiming to be more universalistic.

Generally, the misunderstanding of the link between diversity and inequality hampers the possibility of preventing and contrasting discriminatory behaviours at both the macro and the micro level, possibly producing counterintuitive and paradoxical effects.

Once again, it is useful to focus attention on immigrant offspring—those that French researchers have suggestively defined as the young issus de l’immigration, almost to evoke the nature of an unexpected and unwelcome phenomenon. On the one hand, they share the fate of their native peers, to such an extent that they can be viewed as the archetypes of the youthful condition tout court. On the other hand, it is the very fact of descending from an immigrant family that delivers to these young people—who in many cases have not directly experienced international mobility—the legacy of the migrant condition. Besides influencing the opportunity structure they will be able to access in order to pursue their life and work projects, this legacy cannot help but influence their feelings of belonging to the society in which they live, and in which they were born, most of the time.

This crucial question for the present and the future of inter-ethnic cohabitation has a ‘private’ declension, represented by individual experiences and sentiments leading descendants from immigrant families to a different position along the insider/outsider continuum, as discovered by psychological studies (Berry et al. 2006). From a sociological perspective, on the other hand, it is interesting to observe

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