Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Nine
Conclusion: Immigrants in Space
In an era of sustained global movement across national borders of skilled
workers, business migrants, students, temporary workers, re-unifying family
members and refugees driven by civil war, persecution, climate change and
poverty, there is no such person as the average immigrant. Nor is there a
unique type of migration flow at a time of simultaneous brain drain and
brain exchange, permanent and temporary movement, legal and undocu-
mented cross-border travel. Dual, even multiple, passports, diasporic search
and solicitation policies by governments, cheap travel and instantaneous
global e-communication, all are re-defining the reach of citizenship, blur-
ring the borders of the nation state, and confusing conventional ideas of
national belonging and identity. Old narratives oversimplify and new con-
ceptualisations are required. In this topic I have turned to transnationalism
less as a theory than as a conceptual heuristic to make sense of new times in
international migration.
Nor is there a typical representative of the global Chinese diaspora of
30-35 million (Ang 2001). Both the contexts of individual biographies as
well as the meanings of individual subjectivities prescribe diversity and
complexity. A Census term like 'the ethnic Chinese' imposes a false blanket
of sameness over differentiated life experiences. Moreover, Census data fix
households in the freeze-frame maps of ethnic residential patterns that give
only a temporary impression of an overseas Chinese population that is
highly mobile transnationally.
Rather than lamenting that everything is unique and dynamic, it is more
helpful to look at conceptualisations less of containment and permanence
than of mobility and sojourning. Transnationalism is a valuable perspective
for thinking about those households for whom permanent residence, settler
status, is only one of a number of spatial strategies. Indeed the legal
status of the growing number of temporary migrants usually permits only
