Theorising Transnational Migration ─ The Status Paradox of Migration

Societal transformations have recently stimulated political debates and policies on the integration of migrants and minorities in most Western European countries. While transnational migration studies have documented migrants’ cross-border activities there have been few empirically grounded efforts to theorise these developments in the framework of integration and status theory.

Based on a case study of Ghanaian migrants, this book seeks to understand integration processes and develops a theorem of the status paradox of migration which explores the interaction between migrants’ integration into the receiving country and the maintained inclusion into the sending society. It describes a characteristic problem for a large class of labour migrants from the global south who gain status in the sending countries by simultaneously losing it in the receiving countries of migration. This transnational dynamic of status attainment, which goes along with specifically national forms of status inconsistency, is what is called the status paradox of migration.

By bringing together two modes of national status incorporation within one framework, the status paradox provides an innovative perspective on migration processes and demonstrates the usefulness of a transnationalist integration theory. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of migration, transnationalism, politics, sociology and anthropology.

Boris Nieswand is a social anthropologist and sociologist. He currently works as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Gottingen (Germany). He has published on transnational migration, charismatic Christianity, the construction of diaspora and ethnography.