When Borders Migrate: Reconstructing the Category of ‘International Migrant’

Abstract

Using the Baltic states as an empirical example of a wider social problem of categorization and naming, this article explores the statistical categories of ‘international migrant/foreign-born’ population used in three major cross-national data sources (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurostat and The World Bank Indicators (WBI)). We argue that these seemingly politically neutral categories ignore historical processes of state formation and migration, and privilege the current ethnonational definition of the state. We demonstrate how, in regions with recent geopolitical changes, the international migrant category’s spatial and temporal constraints produce distorted population parameters, by marking those who have never crossed sovereign states’ borders as international migrants. In certain social contexts, applying the international migrant category to those who have never crossed international borders shapes and legitimizes restrictive citizenship policies and new forms of social exclusion. We further argue that, when uncritically adopting this category, transnational institutions assert territorial imaginaries embedded in ethnonational political discourses and legitimize exclusionary citizenship policies.

Pro-integration policies and the occupational expectations of immigrant youth

“…They are also likely to benefit from pro-integration policies in ways similar to those of other immigrants. Yet, they represent a distinctive type of immigrant that differs from an immigrant student as traditionally conceived (Gorodzeisky and Leykin, 2020). In order to ensure these students are not driving my results, I conduct an additional robustness check.…”

“…My results are robust to this alternative model specification. For more information regarding the issues with national identification of the immigrant groups discussed above, including how these identifications can reinforce existing ethnic divides, please refer to Gorodzeisky and Leykin (2020) and Gromme and Scheel (2020).…”

Is Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Owned by the Political Right?

“…For example, after the establishment of new independent postsocialist states in Central and Eastern Europe, people who migrated within the borders of a single socialist or communist federation before the fall of the Berlin Wall (e.g. USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), were retrospectively defined by transnational data-producing institutions as international migrants -even though they had not crossed international borders at the time of their migration (Gorodzeisky and Leykin, 2020). In some countries, such as postsocialist Latvia and Estonia, popular imaginations of migrants and national minorities were affected by representing Russian speakers who had arrived in the country during the Soviet period as international migrants (Dzenovska, 2018;Smith et al, 2002).…”

Criminalization of Women Accessing Abortion and Enforced Mobility within the European Union and the United Kingdom

“…We argue that the violence, enacted by the states, is also manifest in the expulsion that occurs when women have to travel in order to seek out abortion care, in what constitutes enforced migration. This migration, its criminalizing undercurrent, and the processes that cause it are not adequately captured through existing protocols, which tend to focus on discursively demarcated constructs of "migration" as a specific form of mobility (Gorodzeisky & Leykin, 2020).…”