ABSTRACT
People make decisions in response to a variety of desires, resources and needs. And the same is obviously true for migration decisions. Although push-and-pull theories or neo-classical approaches to migration have been criticized for their simplifying view (Faist 2000, Castles et al. 2014), migration scholarship still tends to focus on one mostly isolated cause of movement, such as economic, educational, career or forced aspects. These factors are usually equated with a corresponding subjectivity and the lifeworlds that these people are seen to inhabit. An approach focusing on economic factors would describe migrants as workers who search for higher wages. Other factors, such as personal and family experiences, are usually outside the scope of such deterministic descriptions. In contrast, the framework employed in this book places people’s decisions in relation to cultural beliefs and social patterns that produce certain expectations regarding migration. Such a view shifts attention from the conventional exploration of objective causes (“why do people migrate?”) to a more subjective stance (“why do people think that migration is something beneficial”)? Such a subjective stance aims to enhance our understanding of the complex phenomenon of migration. It underlines that migrants do not act in a mechanistic way, but that they make decisions in a given sociocultural and historical space. Their decisions reflect the social and cultural circumstances in their local environments as well as international trends. Migrants’ decisions about movement thus need to be interpreted with reference to the larger cultural and social spaces within which people come to think about migration. Expectations, as has been detailed in Chapter 1, are the analytical tool used in this book to understand who is seen as having to migrate, where they migrate to and what form their migration takes. These expectations are also linked to the perceived outcomes of specific forms of migration. They are anchored into the normative sets of social spaces that enact “symbolic power” (Bourdieu 1989) because they define socially accepted ways of being and doing.
