Human, Migration and Culture

Moving away from one place to another is nearly always a major event in human lives. Migration, an extremely cultural event, tends to expose one’s personality, it expresses one’s loyalties and reveals one’s values and attachments often previously hidden. It is a statement of an individual’s world view. Where people are faced with oppression and become stranger for dominant discourse, they choose to escape, to seek life elsewhere. There is a common sense knowledge of migration as a phenomenon which is in most part culturally produced, culturally expressed, and cultural in its effects . Culture, then, as a distinctive system of shared meanings and a symbolic organisation of experience characterizes a particular society or social group. The focus on differences in ways of thinking expressed in language, beliefs, rituals, and myths, and interpreted from a wide range of cultural texts, has been and necessarily remains a central concern. With the departure one is protesting against the cultural pattern of the established system.

In most countries, there is not one culture but many and that this plurality of cultures has a structure of its own, with some cultures dominant and others subordinate. Most obviously, migrants differ in their cultural characteristics and in their class cultural backgrounds and in their political values, in their ethnicities and religious affiliations, and in their gender, generational and identities. The identity however, is nurtured in its relationship with culture, to the place where one belongs. Identities are not attributes that people have or are but resources that people use, things that they do. With this view, with civil right movements the identity became political. However recent critiques of national identity, for instance, have illustrated the ways in which the nation has been marked as feminine - as vulnerable and morally susceptible to corruption - and, therefore, in need of a guardian. Cultures, in any case, do not work on their own to produce migration effects, nor does migration alone affect the cultural character of places. In practice, culture intersects with capital to bring about social and economic change in cities and regions. Migration is customarily conceptualised as a product of the material forces, it has also produced many new structures of inequality and exploitation as well as opportunism. Other perceptions emphasis on migration either as a rational economic purpose for individual advancement by responding to the economic signals of the job and housing markets, or as a virtual prisoner of social class, and thereby subject to powerful structural economic forces set in motion by the logic of capital accumulation. Large number of workers have left their homes and have gone to live in the metropolitan heartlands in an effort to exploit the wage earning opportunities available there. However, changing technologies and the scale of their impacts on human morals and the body have run through large portions of twentieth century representations of law and order. With new technologies future industrial expansion is unlikely to necessitate either the recruitment or the importation of a large new workforce. In consequence we may well have seen the last of the migratory flows.

Migration is, at heart, an attempt to circumvent institutionalized inequality, but in making this attempt migrants face many obstacles, regional and class structures in their countries of origin, and a further set of racial and class divisions in their countries of settlement. If migrants are exposed abroad, they are little better off at home. Such tensions have many dimensions, but the driving force behind racial and ethnic polarization is invariably to be found in competition for scarce resources. Hence tensions between natives and immigrants are invariably most acute during periods of recession; and they are most easily sustained where the newcomers are easily identifiable. It is small wonder that race relations have become such an explosive political issue globally.

Similarly political migration is reactionary to attempts of the nation’s rulers to enforce dominant national trends. Politically charged migrants choose to move away from politically based deprivation and social bias. In the face of introducing more restrictive immigration and asylum laws it is necessary to question the premises that have led to the erection of barriers to keep the influx of refugees out. And there can be no meaningful comprehension of migration to the north that does not take into account the conditions in the south that exacerbate movement. Building higher walls only offer temporary respite from the chaos beyond the borders. In other words, refugees right to remain in safety and dignity should have been protected. According to Goodwin-Gill, the right to remain is conceived as ‘sense of not having to become a refugee, not having to flee, not being displaced by force or want, together with the felt security that comes with being protected’. Protection and security indeed are both future critical issues which need rethinking. Countries throughout the world have attempted to curb immigration, either in an attempt to bolster their political identity or to reassure their increasingly vocal domestic population that they will not be outnumbered by new immigrants who are increasingly tenacious to seize scarce resources.

In this context, the role of population as a variable in the political economy of nations, in economic growth, and in sustainable development has been controversially debated among scholars for centuries. Since population deals with birth and death, sex and marriage, with gender roles, with intergenerational relations and interregional migration, it tends to be a very emotional topic, touching upon the foundations of culture, religion, and national identity. Population size, structure, and spatial distribution matters a great deal at the local and national levels. More over, the increasing globalization of human migration and financial flows as well as of population dependent consumption and emissions, makes it increasingly important to look at the population variable from a global perspective. Overpopulation places a tremendous strain on the environment and further devastation comes when the economic growth and development sought by these populations leads to excessive consumption. An increasing number of people obviously requires providing more energy, home, food, and jobs and creates more trash, pollution, and development. We need only consider the world’s large urban centres like new York, new Delhi, and Mexico City to understand the environmental devastation that follows from human overpopulating. Where the society becomes over crowded, resource-demanding, and technologically complex, there is less need for large families. Environmental problems force us to turn to stewardship in order not to destroy our life supporting house. The efforts of women and women’s groups to improve the quality of urban life are valuable and help raise public consciousness of the need for sanitary improvements and city cleaning projects. The issue of over population has particularly made migrant women not to limit their existence in child bearing and productive role. Social exclusion always comes along with the burden of raising too many children. Poor women in developing countries often bear the disproportionate burdens of low income, poor education, lack of jobs and limited social mobility. In many cases, their inferior roles, low status and restricted access to birth control are manifested in their high fertility. According to this argument, population growth is a natural outcome of women’s lack of economic opportunity. If women’s health, education, and economic well being are improved along with their role and status in both the family and the community, this empowerment of women will inevitably lead to smaller families and lower population growth.

Perhaps one of the greatest hindrances to dealing with the migratory crisis is the forced migration. To arrivals, the violence appear to be simply a natural, albeit alarming, by-product of nation-state formation. Admittedly, much of the migratory crisis, a phenomenon common to many states in formation is due simply to its nation-building efforts during transition periods. While immigration concerns are made more concrete by focusing on physical sites of border crossing, these sites are frequently signifiers for much broader, wide-ranging, and punitive efforts to police national identity. Despite popular claims of improved international mobility and calls for intensified globalization, borders are being reconstructed rather than retired and the global social and economic conditions that facilitate their use as political rallying cry for increased immigration controls continue.

But wherever they may be, everyone is faced by the changing structure of the global economy. International migration is primarily a consequence of global inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power. The spread of markets by globalization outpaces the ability of societies and their political systems to adjust to them. History is the evidence that imbalance between the economic, social and political worlds can never be sustained for very long. The Great Depression was the heavy price for industrialized countries to pay and learn their lesson. Political stability requires social safety nets and other measures for decreasing economic inequalities and to compensate the victims of market failures.

The global economy remains highly unstable and grotesquely inequitable, and the global environment continues to deteriorate rapidly. All the new differentiations such as populism, nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and terrorism have in common is that they make use of the insecurity and misery of people to push forward their own self interest agenda. The more wretched and insecure people become, the more likely they cede to involve in process of differentiations.

We have to choose between a global market driven by deadly rivalry and calculations of short term profit, and one which has a human face. Between a world which condemns a quarter of the human race to starvation and moral degradation, and one which offers everyone at least a chance of prosperity, in a healthy environment - between a selfish ‘free for all’ in which we ignore the fate of the less fortunate, where most abusive are winners and a future in which the strong and the successful accept their responsibilities to deal fairly.


The words of the wise ones in quietness are more to be heard than the cry of one ruling among stupid people ( Bible, Ecclesiastes 9:17).


References:

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Human Development and the Environment, edited by Hans van Ginkel, Brendan Barrett, Julius Court, and Jerry Velasquez; United Nation University Press, 2002

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