Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
attributes and dispositions are embedded in migrant lives and carried with
them to new settings. Besides such obvious cultural traits as language or
food, there are others that are borne from East Asia to Canada. Important
in the story of millionaire migrants will be the fundamental significance of
the meaning of property and property relations. The over-determined cen-
trality of real estate in capital accumulation in Hong Kong in particular
would become a major - and conflictual - part of the meeting of newcomers
and long-established residents in Vancouver. A distinctive feature of the cul-
tural geography of East Asian immigration has been the fashioning of a
distinctive urban landscape reflecting an Asian modernity, sometimes con-
flicting with nostalgic white settler preferences for Euro-Canadian heritage.
Landscape interpretation is a sophisticated part of the geographer's art
(Duncan and Duncan 2004) and landscape would become a significant
source of friction between new arrivals and the long-settled.
These three themes underscore some of the pervasive and substantial geo-
graphical dimensions of transnationalism that we shall frequently encounter
in the following pages. Far from a mere metaphorical presence, geography is
an abiding - and not always welcome - constituent member of any transna-
tional social field.
The Globalizing State, the Business Migrant
and the Neo-Liberal Stage
Two principal players will occupy the transnational spatial stage in this
account, the nation state and the enterprising migrant. The stage itself has
been significantly re-set by national and international neo-liberal policy
regimes since the 1980s. Neo-liberalism has been defined as 'a theory of
political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best
be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills
within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property
rights, free markets and free trade' (Harvey 2005: 2). The institutional
framework of neo-liberalism has been assembled by nation states that
are either willing directors of a globalizing enterprise policy or else believe
that there is no alternative to its imperatives. Such an ideology lauds indi-
vidual entrepreneurial skills and we will see that in immigration policy this
fixation has extolled that imagined mover and shaker,
homo economicus
or
rational economic man (sic),
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incarnate as the business immigrant, an
exemplary figure with a long and successful résumé played out in various
global settings. Policy in many states has steadily moved toward prioritizing
economic migrants, and Canada has refined its talent hunt not only
for skilled workers but also business people with entrepreneurial skills and
discretionary financial capital.
