Susan Ossman – Paths of serial migration

Susan Ossman examines the stories of people who have lived in several countries, and asks that we avoid identifying them by birthplace or ethnicity, or measures of social class developed in the place they presently live. Before coming to conclusions about their identities, we must pay attention to their concrete pathways and the ways in which their journeys are transformative.

To get a glimpse of how transnational political consciousness might be generated in the future, we might look to cosmopolitans and travellers, immigrants and members of diasporas. Yet, the very ways in which these “kind” of people are identified tends to deprive us of many of the most profound insights one might gain through a life in motion. In order to truly listen to the stories of people who have lived in several countries, we must avoid identifying them by birthplace or ethnicity, or measures of social class developed in the place they presently live. We must pay attention to their pathways before coming to conclusions about their identities: this involves paying more attention to how people are transformed from being refugees or exiles into illegal aliens and immigrants at some point in their journey.

Beyond the binary of host/home country

While definitions of the exile or the refugee are mainly about where one is not, immigration tends to involve structured movements between two places. It is a matter of life in between. But what of those who become immigrants and then move on to yet another country? Serial migrants often explain their move to a third country as a kind of “escape” from the binary relationships of host to home. They emphasize how leaving behind the world of binary oppositions has led them to a more measured way of effecting comparisons among the places they inhabit. Making the third move, they say, leads to a clearer sense of personal agency and opinion. Some suggest that the experience has led them to an almost anthropological interest in the intricacies of social practices.

Rather than encouraging thoughts about the nature of a universal polis, people who live through several countries develop a kind of practical comparative politics. One cannot add up or generalize their experiences to come up with some kind of cosmopolitan vision or picture of the global citizen, precisely because they move among actual places. They might “test” how human rights, race or gender differ in their successive homes. Yet, the differences among the political and social spaces they traverse are not a theoretical matter. Particular paths even through a given nation will lead people to engage with different questions. Thus, even the settled nation state is pulled out of place by the way they relate to specific other places.

Some serial migrants say they move in search of a place that corresponds to their political ideals or in order to work for a global cause. But most have motivations that are less readily translated into a political vocabulary. Leila seeks to find or recreate anew the multi-lingual, international climate she experienced growing up in Tangiers. Today, she says, that city has vanished because visa regulations have cut it off from Europe. Meanwhile, she had “found” the kind of social climate she cherished in Tangiers in Montreal and Toulouse. Ingrid was born in Germany, then moved to East Africa in her youth. After years spent in Canada, she lives now in Bahrain. There, she finds historical connections to East Africa that parallel her personal story. How different these accounts of imaginative displacement are from the usual descriptions of immigrant nostalgia! They implicate complex emotional and social comparisons as they navigate many time zones.

Alternative routes of migration

We tend to think of immigrants as moving to richer, more democratic countries. Cosmopolitans might take alternative routes toward exotic (if despotic) locations But the mobility of serial migrants I have been interviewing in the context of an ongoing study does not necessarily follow any particular pattern. Marie moved from France to Senegal to Bahrain. Mohammed from Morocco, to France to Canada, then back to Morocco. Although their collective movements cover the world, and most speak several languages, they balk at the idea that they are cosmopolitans, given the elitist connotations of the term. In fact, those I have spoken with are not rich. They tend to downplay the importance of economic motivation in explaining their peregrinations. Indeed, many have left relatively comfortable environments repeatedly to face unemployment or take up less prestigious positions elsewhere. Today, all are legal residents or citizens of the places they reside. But they did not all start out that way. This has led me to explore the legal side of their migrations to consider what their experience indicates about the emerging economy of mobility.

The comparative advantage of serial migrants comes from their bureaucratic and social comparative experience. Their moves have made them experts in manipulating rules and filling out forms related to residence and naturalization. One might interpret their apparent refusal to move according to common goals of economic betterment as a practical demand for a kind of freedom, as many claim. One might also wonder whether they might not be seeking to increase in what we might think of as their “mobility capital”.
The experience of moving from place to place without the aid of a multi-national, when one is not a diplomat tends not only to build a person’s bureaucratic acumen. It opens up new geographic, linguistic and political spaces for action as well as contemplation. Collecting passports and residency papers gives someone a stake in several polities at the same time as it opens up new possibilities for future actions, including some that might intensify relations among the serial migrant’s different territories.

An ethics of motion

The apparent lack of patriotism and sound economic sense of serial migrants like myself are worth questioning for what they tell us about the way we might find togetherness in the world in the future. We might develop a political imagination shaped by meeting places along particular pathways, a politics shaped by an ethics of motion instead of the search for common ground. How paths across the world are limited, by whom, and how, are questions serial migrants ask themselves, and they are at the heart of developing a mobile, transnational sociology. Attention to the limits as well as the direction of motion will help us to develop more dynamic approaches to equity, accountability and freedom.

Further links

Experimental nations (review)

Three faces of beauty (review)

Special issue: migration unbound, recent articles
Tags: anthropology, cosmpolitanism, migrants, susan ossman