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

Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Inna Leykin

פרסום מחקרי: פרסום בכתב עתמאמרביקורת עמיתים

תקציר

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.

שפה מקוריתאנגלית
עמודים (מ-עד)142-158
מספר עמודים17
כתב עתSociology
כרך54
מספר גיליון1
מזהי עצם דיגיטלי (DOIs)
סטטוס פרסוםפורסם - 1 פבר׳ 2020

הערה ביבליוגרפית

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2019.

Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

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