Political Geography 21 (2002) 971987 www.politicalgeography.

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Geopolitics by another name: immigration and the politics of assimilation

C.R. Nagel
Department of Geography, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU, UK

Abstract In this introduction to the special issue on the geopolitics of migration, I discuss some of the problematic elements of current approaches to migration studies. In particular, I comment on the concept of transnationalism as it has been applied to immigrant communities, and argue that claims about immigrant transnationalism resemble contemporary and historical polemics on the non-assimilation of immigrants. I propose that our understanding of the dynamics of immigrant-host society relationships must begin with an understanding of the geopolitical contexts in which migration takes place. I illustrate my argument using the case of Arab Americans in the aftermath of September 11, and I conclude by urging a reconsideration of the concept of assimilation as a politics of sameness. 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Immigration; Transnationalism; Geopolitics; Assimilation; Arab Americans

Introduction On the cover published after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, The Economist proclaimed September 11, 2001, The Day the World Changed. It perhaps is more accurate to say that the worldor at least the perception of the worldchanged mainly for Americans, whose sense of isolation from foreign conicts and threats was badly shaken by the attacks. Soon after the September 11, it surfaced that the terrorists, abetted by lax immigration control and liberal visa provisions for foreign students, had insinuated themselves into American society with great ease, possibly nding safe harbours in Muslim and Arab American communi-

E-mail address: c.r.nagel@lboro.ac.uk (C.R. Nagel).

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ties for years. The terrorists of the Al Qaeda network appeared to be a new kind of enemyone to be combated not only in far-off lands, but also at home through the stricter policing of borders and the closer surveillance of foreigners living within those borders. Thus, immigration control from the outset became a cornerstone of the war on terrorism, closely linked in public discourse and policy to Americas efforts to protect itself against an array of shadowy menaces. Immigration and geopolitics are usually treated as separate topics of study, and only a few scholars have used the term geopolitics of migration (see Sassen, 1999; Tesfahuney, 1998). But recent events make plain that the regulation of mobility is fundamentally a geopolitical exercise, involving the formulation of spatial strategies and territorial arrangements to preserve the integrity of borders and to contain perceived external threats (Collinson, 1996). The conuence of geopolitical strategising and immigration control, while very explicit following September 11, is not a novel occurrence. Instead, we see in recent discussions of national security and immigration a rehashing of long-running, racialised narratives on the penetration of external menaces (e.g. Islamic fundamentalism, demographic explosions, terrorism, disease, and so on) in national space through immigration. These narratives inform not only the regulation and control of borders, but also the treatment of immigrants and minorities within these borders (Tesfahuney, 1998). The aim of this special issue is to unravel some of the connections between the formulation of politicalterritorial orders, the regulation of human mobility, and the structuring of social difference within national societies. The papers are very diverse in their approaches and their focus of study, and they deal with different categories of migrants and different reception contexts. But each speaks to the linkages between territorial boundaries and the construction of othernesslinkages enacted at different geographical scales through legal categories, labour and asylum laws, social welfare policies, and public discourses of citizenship. Before introducing these papers in greater detail, I wish to explain some of the key theoretical trends in the study of migration. As in many of other elds of study, migration research has been marked by efforts to adopt a more global perspective highlighting transnational networks and ows. The new emphasis on transnationalism and globalisation contrasts with traditional sociological approaches, which have focused on the integration and assimilation (or lack thereof) of immigrants into national societies. While the transnational perspective has provided a much-needed critique of assimilation theory, it has also (re)produced some problematic assumptions about immigrants and their relationship to receiving societies. Because transnationalism is fast becoming a new paradigm in migration studies, it is critical to examine its shortcomings and to propose new ways forward. Understanding migration as a geopolitical process, I will suggest, provides a way to evaluate the signicance of contemporary migration and the politics surrounding it that avoids some of the pitfalls of the transnational approach.

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Interrogating transnationalism and the non-assimilation thesis The concept of transnationalism highlights the linkages that immigrants maintain with their homelands and with their compatriots in other host societies. Accounts of transnationalism typically start from the premise that contemporary immigrants face a fundamentally different set of circumstances, rooted in globalisation, than did immigrants of the past. Earlier generations of immigrants, it has been argued, entered bounded national societies in which adherence to national norms was expected and dual citizenship prohibited. The lack of high-speed transport and communications technology meant that immigrants had no choice but to sever their ties with their homelands and to set down roots in their adopted country. At the same time, the plentiful existence of low-skilled manufacturing jobs in industrialising societies ensured a level of socio-economic mobility necessary for adaptation to take place (Portes, 1997). In contrast, the transnationalism approach contends, contemporary immigrants must adapt to a global system marked by ux and instability in which economic and cultural ows escape the control of nation-states (Appadurai, 1991), and in which new modes of political membership (e.g. dual citizenship and denizenship) erode traditional, exclusive forms of citizenship (Mandaville, 1999). In this uid, globalised context, immigrants do not develop rm ties to their host societies, but instead, construct social elds that cross national borders (Basch, Glick Schiller, & Blanc-Szanton, 1994; Kearney, 1995; Rouse, 1991). Specically, they retain social, nancial, and political links to their homelandslinks that are encouraged by the governments of many sending countries, who view their emigres as important sources of remittances, investment capital, and votes (Itzigsohn, 1999; Laguerre, 1999; Lessinger, 1992). The combination of these factors has led to the formation of communities whose members claim political membership in more than one state, contribute to the economies of more than one state, and, thanks to improved transport technologies, maintain a physical presence in more than one state (Vertovec, 2001). The transnationalism literature has presented a plethora of cases describing the border-straddling existence of many immigrants in industrialised states (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1999; Glick Schiller, Basch, & Blanc-Szanton, 1992; Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2001; Levitt, 2001). But some migration scholars argue that advocates of the transnationalism perspective have overstated their case, creating a stark dichotomy between past and present migrations where one is not warranted. These critics cite evidence of transnational practices in previous generations of immigrants and argue that transnationalism cannot be spoken of as a novel phenomenon or one that precludes eventual integration (Kivisto, 2001).1 While I agree with this
1 There are several other critiques of transnationalism and the related concept of diaspora. Anthias (1998), for instance, argues that the literature on transnationalism and diaspora privileges national identities and does little to uncover differences that exist within immigrant groups in terms of class and gender. Mitchell (1997), meanwhile, has criticised the celebratory tone of the transnationalism/diaspora literature, arguing that transnational practices are used just as often to promote the capitalist interests of diasporic groups as to subvert nationstate identities.

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critique, I would suggest that a less obvious but equally problematic issue concerns the way in which some transnational theorists employ and historicise the concept of assimilation. To its advocates, the transnational approach represents a repudiation of traditional assimilation models, most often applied to the US case, which posit that immigrants over time tend to lose their distinctiveness and to become more like the mainstream, as measured by rates of intermarriage, language use, residential location, and so on. But transnationalism advocates do not reject the assimilation model altogether. Rather, they suggest more or less explicitly that assimilation no longer describes the social trajectories of present-day immigrants, and that assimilation is no longer an appropriate concept for interpreting the lives which are not contained within national borders2 (for instance, Basch, et al., 1994; Clifford, 1994; Vertovec and Cohen, 1999; for a critique, see Nagel, 2001). While I do not wish to defend assimilation theory, I do wish to interrogate assumptions about assimilation and non-assimilation found in transnational literature. In particular, I would like to draw attention to the curious convergence in academic and popular discourse regarding the attachment (or lack thereof) of immigrants to their host societies. Like scholars of transnationalism, many politicians, social commentators, and political pundits assert that todays immigrants remain bound to their homelands and ethnic identities, and that they are less inclined to adopt national norms and values than were previous waves of immigrants. In some cases, popular commentators speak of immigrant non-assimilation in relatively positive terms. There is a conservative school of thought, for instance, that praises immigrants for maintaining their distinctiveness and their traditional values at a time when such values (e.g. patriarchy, self-sufciency, entrepreneurialism) are being eroded by feminism, welfare dependency, and rampant consumerism in the West (Fukuyama, 1993). But in most cases, the prospect of immigrants identifying with and pledging their allegiance to foreign nations is greeted with alarm. After September 11, popular journals and internet forums were replete with commentaries on the alleged nonassimilation of contemporary immigrants, Arab and otherwise. For instance, one contributor to a recent edition of the conservative quarterly, The Social Contract, entitled The Terrorists Among Us, speaks of the utter lack of attachment of immigrants to a destination country (Horowitz, 2002, p. 143). Likewise, they decry the devaluation of citizenship, singling out growing acceptance of dual citizenship as facilitating un-American activities and promoting separatist attitudes (Renshon, 2001). In a similar vein, Linda Chavez, former head of the US Civil Rights Commission, suggests that multiculturalism has taught that ones allegiance to ones ethnic group takes precedence over allegiance to the US or adherence to democratic values. Speaking of Palestinian American youths, who have expressed their support for the intifada in the West Bank, Chavez contends, These young people may have been born in the US, but they are Palestinians rst and foremost (Chavez, 2002).

2 Some scholars, like Portes (1997) and Castles and Davidson (2000) also have spoken of transnationalism as one path of integration that exists alongside traditional paths of assimilation.

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Thus, while normative content varies widely, both scholarly and popular accounts of contemporary immigration rest on the assumption of non-assimilation. What is interesting about the non-assimilation theme is that it seems to recur every few decades in immigrantreceiving societies. Indeed, there appears to be a general tendency in every era to imagine that the current wave of immigrants is not capable of or willing to assimilate. American politicians and academics in the early 20th century, for instance, endlessly debated the suitability of immigrants for membership in the American polity in terms of their assimilability (Jacobson, 1998). Paralleling todays transnationalism arguments, it was frequently assumed that immigrants of the time owed their allegiance to foreign states and did not value American citizenship. The histories of other settler societies, such as Canada, are replete with these kinds of assimilation debates, as well (Anderson, 1991). And while European immigration history is usually treated as distinctive from that of the settler societies, very similar themes are also to be found in the political discourses of Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere (Sassen, 1999; Silverman, 1991; Spencer, 1997).3 The recurrence of the non-assimilation theme in various guises suggests that rather than reaching a historical turning point in immigranthost society relations, we are perhaps witnessing the iteration of a common narrative in Western industrialised societies. As in the past, the current non-assimilation argument is intertwined with assertions (sometimes fearful, sometimes celebratory) of the erosion of sovereignty, the devaluation of citizenship, the permeability of national borders, and the permanence of newcomers foreignness. In focusing the debate on whether transnationalism is new or old and whether immigrants assimilate or do not assimilate, we neglect to explain the complex negotiations of power and identity implicated in the denition of social membership and assimilability across historical and geographical contexts. I would like to suggest in the following section that explaining the dynamics of immigrant inclusion and exclusion does not require a new theory of transnationalism as much as it requires an understanding of the geopolitical practices and discourses that underpin the regulation of human mobility.

Unravelling the geopolitics of migration The perception and treatment of immigrants in Western societies reect two contradictory impulses within the modern political economy. On the one hand, the functioning of capitalist economies requires the mobility of labour; political actors and economic interests within nationstates (especially in core states) routinely stimulate the movement of both skilled and unskilled workers across borders. This takes place directly through recruitment programmes, labour permit systems, and the creation of open labour markets (as in the EU), and less directly through the purposeful under3 In Britain, for instance, opposition to the immigration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th century was framed in terms of the inability of this group to assimilate. Interestingly, members of more established Jewish communities in Britain sympathised with these arguments, and strove to anglicise the newcomers as quickly as possible (see Glasman, 1991).

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funding of immigration enforcement agencies. Flows of labour (as well as of capital and commodities) are also instigated by colonialism, neo-colonialism, and in recent decades, the institutionalisation of neo-liberal economic policies (Skeldon, 1997).4 On the other hand, the nationstate system rests upon the states ability to police boundaries, to maintain sovereignty over national territory, and to dene and restrict membership in the national society through citizenship and other legal categories (Taylor, 1994). The process of solidifying politicalterritorial boundaries is profoundly racialised, resting as it does on the formulation of exclusionary and essentialist notions of national identity and belonging (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992). Contrary to the impression created by the literature on transnationalism, the states technical capacity to control borders and ows of people through them has greatly expanded. In fact, the control of borders and the restriction of social membership has been treated with ever greater urgency with the establishment of social welfare rights (Klein-Beekman, 1996). The tension between the drive to secure a mobile labour force and the drive to x nationstate boundaries is an inherent characteristic of core, developed states (see Miles, 1993; Samers, 1999; Sassen, 1999). Globalisation, in expanding ows of capital, commodities, and workers, has perhaps set these contradictions in greater relief, but it has not altered the nature of the contradiction itself (for instance, Andreas, 2001). Throughout the history of the modern nationstate system, this tension has given rise periodically to panics about oods of immigrants and the threats they pose to national cohesion and to citizenship. While these panics often erupt during times of economic downturn, they just as often appear when national economies are visibly thriving on the labour of newcomers. These panics, as I suggested earlier, tend to revolve around notions of assimilation and assimilability.5. The world outside: assimilation and geopolitics While notions of assimilability reect the assessment of foreigners within national boundaries, these notions are based upon particular mappings of the world outside ones own borders. In this respect, there is a very close relationship between a majority societys attitudes toward immigrants and the way in which members of that society imagine the rest of the world. In the US, Europe, and other immigrantreceiving contexts, conceptions of a groups ability to assimilateto adopt the values and characteristics of the nation and thus to share in its destinyare tightly bound

I do not mean to suggest that all migration ows or individual migration decisions are purely economic in nature; clearly, people migrate for a variety of reasons. My point is simply that the capitalist system requires the mobility of labour across borders and creates the conditions necessary for this mobility. 5 This is true even in states that pursue multiculturalist policies. Multicultural policies afrm cultural differences, yet they also set forth parameters of difference, and dominant groups remain the ultimate arbiters of which forms of difference are acceptable and which threaten national coherence. It is not uncommon to hear the advocates of multiculturalism speak of certain cultural identities and values as incompatible with the goals of integration and diversity (for instance, Asad, 1990; Dwyer & Meyer, 1995)

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to broader understandings of the relationship between the nation and other peoples and places. Assimilation, in a sense, should be interpreted, in part, as a geopolitical discourse through which political actors make sense of our place in a wider system of political, cultural, and territorial entities (O Tuathail, 1992). As with all geopolitical discourses, assessments of the suitability of immigrants, as intimated above, are intertwined with racialised notions of national destiny and superiority. In the late 19th century, such notions reected widely held beliefs in eugenics and pseudo-scientic racial categories, which posited the Anglo-Saxon stock as morally and intellectually superior to a host of inferior, degenerate races populating the rest of the world (Jacobson, 1998). The prevailing attitude was that inferior races (be they in Latin America or in big city ghettos) required heavy handed, sometime paternalistic, guidance and control (Slater, 1997). Today, with overtly racist theories deemed unacceptable in public discourse, conceptions of inherent difference of outsiders and the outside world revolve around ideas of culture and religion, as evidenced in the headscarf controversy in France (Zolberg & Woon, 1999), the Rushdie Affair in Britain (Asad, 1990), and as I will describe subsequently, the aftermath of the terrorist bombings in the US.

The othering of Arab and Muslim immigrants post-September 11 Events following September 11 are very instructive in revealing the connections between geopolitical discourses and practices, public understandings of the assimilability of different immigrant groups, and the regulation of national space. Following September 11, government ofcials urged the American public to refrain from blaming Muslim- and Arab-Americans for the terrorist attacks, and issued warnings to those planning revenge attacks against US citizens of Arab and/or Muslim origin. These admonishments, while laudable, were very telling of the marginal position of Arabs and Muslims in the popular imaginationcertainly, it was not necessary to warn members of the public to refrain from attacking white Christian males after the Oklahoma City bombing. The irony of the governments hasty defence of people of Arab heritage, of course, is that the cultural marginality of this group has been fed for decades by the relentless demonisation of mass social movements in the Arab world opposed to US policies (Said, 1981). Despite the White Houses constant assurances that America is not at war with Islam,6 much of the rhetoric emanating from the White House, Congress, and the mainstream media has suggested, in fact, that the Judeo-Christian West has embarked on its own jihad against an illiberal Muslim world. Discussions of Muslims and Arabs, be they in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Dearborn, Michigan, have been ` -vis the West. For the past year, a parade punctuated by a sense of otherness vis-a

To avoid the impression that the US is waging a battle against Islam, the Bush administration added North Korea to the Axis of Evil; Bush also back-pedalled from his initial use of crusader terminology in responding to the terrorist attacks.

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of experts has appeared on television to uncover the Arab mind and to make sense the Muslim world and Islamic fundamentalism, all of which have been treated as unitary objects decipherable through Western analysis. The perennial Middle East experts, such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, seemingly vindicated in their Orientalist worldview by the terrorist attacks, have consistently represented Islam as a unied religious-cultural entity prone to extremism. Indeed, the whole of Muslim societypolitical formations, social practices, individual behaviourshas been explained in a most facile manner in terms of the theological positions allegedly set forth by the Islamic faith. The language surrounding the Islam/West dichotomy has been very stark: they hate our values; the world is either with us or with the terrorists. In this geopolitical map, there is remarkably little recognition of the ambivalence many people in Arab countries (and elsewhere) feel toward American power, and few attempts to understand the reasons for this ambivalence. The hundreds of thousands of Arab immigrants in America occupy a particularly uneasy place in this geopolitical vision of the world. Arab Americans are a relatively prosperous immigrant group. Surveys and census analyses show that people claiming Arab origins have higher incomes than the population at large and are more likely to have an advanced university degree; they also claim the highest percentage of business owners of any immigrant group (Arab American Institute, 2001). Yet Arab and Muslim Americans,7 for better and for worse, have not typically been labelled as a model minority. On the contrary, their position as citizens and/or residents has always appeared tentative in the context of frequent and often bloody conicts between US and Arab or Muslim interests in the Middle East (e.g. the Iranian Revolution, the bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut, the Intifada, and the Gulf War). Arab immigrants, since well before September 11, have been the target of so-called secret evidence hearings and security proling measures, and community organisationsespecially those supporting Palestinian charitieshave frequently complained of harassment by law enforcement agencies. And while George W. Bush courted Arab American voters (particularly in the swing state of Michigan) in 2000, most mainstream political candidates have rebuffed the endorsements and nancial support of Arab American political action committees (Joseph, 1999). September 11, in this sense, did not alter perceptions of Arabs and Muslims as much as it reafrmed the suspect status of these groups in the popular imagination.8 In the aftermath of September 11, the baldest statements regarding the precarious position of Arab Americans have come, unsurprisingly, from right wing journalists. Debbie Schlussel, a popular gure on cable news talk shows and a self-declared

7 The Arab American population is overwhelmingly Christian, owing to earlier waves of Lebanese migration. Recent ows of Arab immigrants, however, are believed to be predominantly Muslim. It should be noted that most Muslims in America are not of Arab origin (Arab American Institute, 2001). 8 Joseph (1999) has provided an interesting account of the ambivalence that greeted Arab immigrants even in the late 19th- and early 20th century, when federal courts heard several cases to establish whether Arabs were Asian, and therefore ineligible for citizenship, or white. Edward Saids works have also detailed the historical development of the negative meanings attached to Arabness in the US and Europe (for instance, Said, 1981).

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Middle East expert, for instance, contends that America will soon become another France, which, she claims, is now a radical Muslim country due to apparently unlimited immigration and high fertility rates among Muslim immigrants (Schlussel, 2002). Schlussel berates Bush for pandering to pro-immigration radical Muslim groups operating in our borders, and accuses Arab American congressional representatives (calling one, California Republican Darryl Issa, a Hezbollah mega-fan) of making it easier for undesirables to immigrate to this country. To be sure, Schlussel and her ilk thrive on inammatory rhetoric. But the sentiments expressed in her column can be found in a multitude of more respectable forums. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an inuential Washington think tank that frequently testies before Congress, has repeatedly conated Middle Eastern migration with terrorism. The newest tack in their arguments has been to warn American Jews that more Arab and Muslim migration means a rising incidence of anti-Semitism and decreasing support in Washington for Israel. While some of the centres members take a moderate position on Arab and Muslim immigration, many papers published by CIS are rife with claims that Islam by its very nature is prone to extremism, intolerance, and violence, and that Muslim immigration threatens the countrys security (for instance, Steinlight, 2001).9 Most disturbing of all are the many unattering remarks about Muslim and Arabs made publicly by congressional representatives and government ofcials, including the Attorney General, John Ashcroft. In this context of ambivalence and, in some quarters, outright hostility, towards Arabs and Muslims (and immigrants more generally), Arab Americans have been at pains to prove their patriotism and to convince the American public that they are loyal citizens. For many decades, the general thrust of Arab American activism has been to rebut negative portrayals of the Arab world in the media and to transform Arabness (and Muslimness) into a mainstream, innocuous ethnic signier. Material published by Arab American organisations, while often geared toward events in the Middle East, has highlighted the all-American credentials of the community, portraying Arab immigrants as ordinary folks pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and contributing to American society in every way possible. A good example of this is
9 Steinlights remarks, I think, are worth quoting at length for the way in which he simultaneously condemns the entire Islamic faith and associates the beliefs and attitudes of all Muslims with the alleged tenets of that faith as expressed in the Quran. Steinlight, needless to say, does not subject the sacred texts of Christianity and Judaism to such an analysis. He states,

In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, there have been countless exhortations from public guresnot to scapegoat all American Muslims and to protect them from reprisals. Of course such exhortations are timely and necessary. But far more questionable have been the continual references by politicians, clergy, and the self-proclaimed people of good will to our common religious heritage, and the repetition, ad nauseum, of the mantra that true Islam does not practice or preach violence and hatred. As any one even vaguely acquainted with the Koran knows, numerous Surahs preach hatred and violence and call for ruthless war against unbelievers in the name of Allah. This is not a distortion of Islam; this is the language of its most sacred text. And it is but a short step from classic Islamic supremacism and supercessionism to hatred, a short step from the belief that ones own faith possesses absolute truth to the readiness to inict violence, even death, on those who chose to stand outside it (Steinlight, 2001)

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a pamphlet published by the Arab American Institute listing the scores of wellknown politicians, entertainers, sports gures, and business people who claim Arab heritagethe aim being to show that Arabs do not threaten Americas values but contribute to its cultural, economic, and political life. This list has been reproduced on a number of other Arab American websites in the past year. Since September 11, community activists have redoubled their efforts in a multitude of ways. Immediately following the attacks, Arab American organisations condemned the terrorists and offered sympathy to the victims. Websites were redesigned with red, white and blue graphics; one site even allowed viewers to play the Star Spangled Banner. In Detroit, home to Americas largest Arab community, American ags sprung up in front gardens; one poll in Detroit revealed that 61% of the Arab American community felt airport proling to target potential Arab terrorists was justied (Niemic & Windsor, 2001). Meanwhile, the hysteria regarding the inltration of Arab terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists on American soil has led to a urry of new immigration and national security proposals, including the restructuring of the INS and the formation of an Ofce of Homeland Security. Even though the arrests of thousands of men of Arab and Muslim descent that followed September 11 yielded only one indictment, policymakers and legislators have rushed to tighten border security and, more worryingly, to widen the governments power to detain and to deport immigrants. These measures dovetail with efforts in the past several years to restrict welfare rights of immigrantsefforts targeted at Latino immigrants and promoted by many cultural conservatives fearing cultural balkanisation10 and the browning of America (see Zolberg & Woon, 1999). Yet it must be emphasised that these new policing measures fall well short of actually reducing ows of immigrant workers. Indeed, the Bush Administration, beholden to business interests and eager to court Latino votes, has portrayed itself as friendly to immigration, much to the consternation of Republican hardliners. Far from changing the world, as The Economist claims, September 11, at least as far as migration is concerned, has simply reproduced the contradictions embedded in the nationstate system.

Transnational politics or the politics of assimilation? The transnational perspective urges us to focus on the homeland afliations and border-straddling social networks of contemporary migrants. But I have tried to show that the single-minded attention to transnationalism in recent years has been problematic. It would be very unfair to equate academic approaches to transnationalism with anti-immigrant demagoguery, as most accounts of transnationalism are highly sensi-

10 The signicance of balkanization imagery in describing the impact of immigration on urban landscapes is described by Ellis and Wright (1998).

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tive to the plight of migrants and view transnational practises as a means of coping with marginalisation (e.g. Rouse, 1991). Nevertheless, there has been a remarkable and ironicconvergence in academic and popular discourse regarding the erosion of citizenship and the subversion of national identity through transnational identities and activities.11 In pointing out this convergence, I wish to suggest that the assumption that immigrants are not assimilating and that they remain tied to their homelands requires as much, if not more, scrutiny than actual transnational behaviours. The transnational approach, I believe, underestimates and shifts attention away from the tremendous power that host society narrativeshowever unstable they may beexert on immigrants;12 it also underestimates the desire among many immigrants, even as they act to preserve their identities and traditions, to be included in the mainstream (see Kymlicka, 2001). In focusing on the assimilatory pressures of the host society and the assimilatory aims of immigrants themselves, I am not advocating a wholesale embrace of traditional assimilation theory. The many critiques that have been levelled against assimilation theoryfor instance, that it is teleological, that it assumes the existence of a uniform host society, and that it essentialises ethnicityare entirely warranted. But the concept of assimilation, I would like to argue, remains pertinent to our analyses of immigration politics and the politics of immigrants. Assimilation is perhaps best understood as a politics of sameness articulated through the discourses of social membership that circulate in immigrant-receiving contexts. The dynamics of assimilation, I have tried to show, are set in motion by the geopolitical systems in which contemporary migration takes place. The construction of political territory, the spatial enclosure of the nation, and the containment of external threats (including oods and hordes of immigrants) are processes laden with ideological conceptions of self and other. Immigration, in a sense, brings the the foreign into the bounds of the nation, and immigrants are evaluated according to the wider narratives of racial, religious, cultural, and/or civilisational differences that inform the host societys perceptions of and relationships with the world outside of its borders (Miles, 1993). Immigrants, having entered the formal boundaries of the state, must situate themselves within the social boundaries of the nation. There are undoubtedly many immigrants who continue to be engaged with their sending societythis was certainly the case even when immigrants did not have the benet of cheap and fast communications technologies. But it does not necessarily follow that contemporary immigrants and their children are any less implicated in the politics of assimilation or under any less pressure to conform to dominant conceptions of appropriate behaviour, appearance, beliefs, or social practices.
11 Some conservative commentators have noted this convergence, and have criticised the trendy enthusiasm for transnational practices among liberal academics (e.g. Steinlight, 2001). 12 Guarnizo and Smith (1998) go against the grain of much of the literature on transnationalism by arguing that transnationalism does not weaken the nationstate or national identities, but in fact, is predicated on their existence. However, the focus of their analysis remains on sending societies, and not on the host society.

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In sum, societal determinations of whether a group is assimilable or assimilated are eminently ideological, but they set into motion actions and interactions that are material and visible in everyday life. To become the same or one of us requires innumerable acts of conformity and accommodation through which immigrants (and other minorities) position themselves in dominant spaces and spheres, often in the face of exclusion and marginalisation. The major aw of assimilation theory is that it has tended to treat assimilation as a natural, inevitable process of immigrant adaptation, measurable through a standard set of indicators, not as an uneven and contentious process by which immigrants and host societies negotiate the boundaries of social membership. 13 The transnational framework, while posed as an alternative to assimilation theory, does not challenge the basic, ecological understanding of assimilation set forth by this theory. It merely applies traditional conceptions of assimilation to earlier waves of immigration or to specic types of immigrants. Many migration scholars, I believe, have been too hasty to dismiss the contemporary relevance of assimilation when the concept continues to pervade our commonsense understanding of the relationship between immigrants and host societies. Migration literaturenot to mention popular literatureis rife with assumptions about which immigrants are assimilated and which are not; we somehow seem to know when a group has become one of us and is no longer an interesting topic of study. I am arguing that such common-sense assumptions about sameness and difference require a great deal more interrogation, and that we need to explore what assimilation means in substantive terms to immigrants and host societies: how does an immigrant group come to be perceived as indistinguishable from the dominant society? How is the dominant society imagined by those included in and excluded from its boundaries? How do immigrants conceptualise their position in the host society? How do they assert membership and position themselves in dominant spaces and spheres? The ability to answer such questions, I believe, begins by understanding assimilation as geopolitics by another namea politics of sameness bound up with the construction and regulation of political space at multiple scales.

Summary and description of papers I have tried in this brief introduction to present a critical overview of one of the key theoretical frameworks found in migration literature today. It was this same aim
13 It would be unfair, however, to say that assimilation theorists have ignored exclusion and the politics of conformity. Gordon (1964), for instance, spoke at length about various ideologies of assimilation that have circulated in American society since the 18th century and their racist overtones; he also spoke of the pressure for immigrants to conform to the norms and values set forth by the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority and their simultaneous exclusion from the privileged circles of dominant society. He did not, as critics often contend, present a na ve picture of a homogenous American society. But his famous multidimensional model does treat assimilation as an ecological processthe result of natural tendencies at work in the interactions between newcomers and host society members. Alba and Nee (1997), in their defence of assimilation theory, make note of this shortcoming, and argue that assimilation scholars must focus on understanding the causal dynamics that underlie assimilation.

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to critically evaluate theoretical approaches in current migration studies that inspired a group of us at the Nottingham Trent University to host a conference on international migration in September 2000, the theme of which was New Patterns, New Theories. The conference papers selected for this special issue explore the geopolitical processes implicated in migration and immigrant settlement, revealing the multiple ways in which the institutions, policies and social discourses of nationstatesand the contradictions and ambiguities thereinmediate the experiences of immigrant groups. These accounts are rooted in concrete examples that explain the relationship between immigrants and host societies, not only in terms of legal membership, but also in terms of social membership enacted through political participation, sense of belonging, and access to rights. All of these papers are concerned with the ways in which the regulation of borders and the creation of national space marginalise immigrants and structure their participation in the economic, political, and cultural life of host societies. They are also concerned with the ways in which immigrant incorporation (and marginalisation) takes place at different geographical scalestransnational, national, and metropolitan. To begin, Lynn Staeheli and her colleagues evaluate interrelated debates regarding the impact of new technologies on political participation and the incorporation of contemporary immigrants into the political systems of their host societies. In particular, they ask whether the Internet provides a new political space for immigrants, and if so, whether this space facilitates their incorporation or fosters their attachment to homeland identities. In posing this question, Staeheli et al. are addressing two sets of claims found in the current literature: rst, that the Internet, for better or for worse, is radically transforming democracy and second, that immigrants citizenship practices are becoming deterritorialised and cosmopolitan rather than bound to a single nationstate. Their ndings, though tentative, urge a greater degree of caution in making either claim. Their survey of websites suggests that the Internet may be used more to provide information about or for immigrants than to mobilise immigrants themselves to political action. The authors ask, if immigrants do not use the Internet as a forum for political debate, than what forum do they use? Are there forums through which immigrants challenge their exclusion and assert their membership in the political community? This research raises some basic questions that are too often neglected in current research: How do immigrant groups conceptualise citizenship and social membership? In what ways do they negotiate their membership in different political communities? How do political claims differ between and within immigrant groups? Eleonore Kofman addresses a different component of current debates on citizenship and political community. It has been argued in recent years that formal citizenship has become less signicant with the extension of human rights provisions to immigrants in Western host societies. Kofman challenges this claim, arguing that the proliferation of migrant categories and statuses over the past several decades and the bewildering array of legislation on entry, residence, and employment has led to highly uneven access to rights among immigrants. Kofman also addresses the claim that the local and the transnational provide new spaces in which immigrants can participate as political actors. Citizenship, she argues, is enacted at multiple geo-

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graphical scales, but neither the local nor the transnational scales can be viewed as somehow more democratic or inclusive than the national. A key point in Kofmans analysis is that national regimes remain the most important entities in terms of structuring migrants rights, and that the contradictory imperatives of nationstates continue to place constraints migrants ability to exercise rights and to participate in host society institutions. Rochelle Ball and Nicola Pipers analysis of immigrant rights in East Asia provides a good illustration of these contradictory imperatives and their impact on migrant workers. Their analysis is particularly valuable in its focus on both the sending country as well as the receiving countryin this case, the Philippines and Japan, respectively. For the Philippines, a major labour exporter, a key policy aim has been to deregulate the workforce, in part by placing the responsibility for labour conditions entirely on employer and employee. Meanwhile, in Japan, the destination for many Filipino workers, the aim of public policy has been to limit the stay of migrants and to prevent permanent settlement of those without ethnic ties to Japan. The result of these different policy orientations has been a lack of state protection emanating from either the Philippines or from Japan for thousands of migrant workers. Like Kofman, Ball and Pipers analysis suggests that international human rights conventions have had only limited effect for many migrants, and that the issue of citizenship remains paramount as far as immigrant rights and well being are concerned. In their conclusion, they speak normatively of the role that NGOs must take to ensure that exporters and importers of labour protect the rights of migrants. Finally, Allen Whites article on asylum-seekers in Britain picks up on the themes raised by the other three contributorsthe unevenness of immigrants access to rights, the overlapping spatial scales that mediate immigrants experiences, and the political construction of community and group identity. White draws in particular on the growing literature in critical legal studies, which examines the ways in which laws and legal systems shape everyday geographies and the way in which access to legal knowledge is spatially differentiated. While asylum laws are promulgated at a national level, they take on substantive form in the local institutions where asylum seekers apply for refugee status and where they seek legal advice. There are, however, important variations in local institutional settings with respect to the ways in which legal workers (solicitors, community advocates, paralegal advisors) understand legal processes and their relationship to asylum seekers. The end result is a diverse geography of refugee experiences that contrasts with the homogeneous representations of asylum seekers found in dominant societal discourses. These papers provide just a glimpse of the exciting work being conducted in the eld of migration studies by geographers and others. The topic of migration has been rather marginal in the subeld of political geography. Our hope is that these papers show migration to be relevantand indeed, central toissues that have long concerned political geographers, including geopolitics, territory, scale, and citizenship.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank David Slater for all of his efforts in putting together this special issue. I also wish to thank the contributors to this issue and all those who participated in the Conference on International Migration at Nottingham Trent University in September 2000. Last, but not the least, many thanks to Dan Trudeau for his extensive and challenging comments on earlier drafts of this paper. References
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