Chaika's Migration

Migration Questions #1

2006-10-24T04:09:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series of questions sent by Ed that I will try to answer:

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This is the first of a series of questions I will send you (if you want
and if you find it useful) which I want to ask you when you tell me you
want to study migration. At first, the questions will be very simply and
will perhaps seem naive or unmanageable, but as you provide answers,
they will increase in detail and complexity and interrelationships. This
method might also be helpful because I know very little about these
issues, and so you will have to explain things to me clearly and as from
the ground up.

There are, of course, two ways of approaching these kinds of questions.
One is to look at a case and ask them based on what the case reveals.
Another is to ask in theory. Perhaps the middle ground is to ask what
cumulative experience and study of theory has revealed.

a) What is "migration"?

b) In one sentence, how would you restate (a), i.e. what is migration?

migrating to lunch in an hour,

Ed

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I will respond soon!

Migration and Private Property

2006-10-19T00:01:00.001-07:00

Today, guest lecturer Professor Openheimer from Oxford University brought up an interesting point. In discussing the possibility of Russian capital markets, Openheimer mentioned that it is impossible to harness entrepreneurial energy without property rights.

This rings true with what Professor Vladimir Mau also said earlier today in relation to innovation in Russia. Throughout Russian history, people have come to depend on the state for entrepreneurial direction and have not developed their own innovative/creative spirit. During the Soviet Union, for example, there were no incentives to find new ways of doing things – better, cheaper, more efficient ways – as there was a government set plan that had to be completed no worse and no better than what was planned from above.

Professor Mau brought up an example of the meeting of the Russian Council for Education and Science (something like that) with President Putin in Zelenograd (a city aspiring to be the Silicon Valley of Russia). The results of the meeting show that the Russian R&D sector insists on priorities set by the government about what scientific developments will be important in the future. There is a lack of innovation from below – triggered by these same scientists in response to real, immediate social demand and financed by private entrepreneurs – which again manifests itself in the old system of asking the government to set priorities, which like everything from above will be too late, inefficient, and biased (of course, this is a very liberal view from a typically American, capital-market economy perspective).

It is already easy to see that entrepreneurial energy is difficult to come by in Russia. Add to that the condition that for Professor Openheimer seems essential to have entrepreneurship – property rights – and look at when such property rights were given to Russians (I think that it is the privatization period immediately after the fall of the USSR, since before then everything for centuries back into Russian history was either state owned or collective), and we get a pretty desperate picture for growing an innovative environment in Russia. But this is getting away from the topic, which is migration…

When I think of property rights I immediately think of settled communities. Traditionally, only those people who were settled in one location could own property. Nomads, for example, did not own anything – they used the land and then moved on and used other land without possession. Pushink describes the difficulty of not possessing something (be it land or his wife) for a Russian officer who goes to live with a gipsy tribe in his poem “Tsygany” (see other blog entry about this poem). In fact, I suspect that Russians were trying to pin such nomadic communities down because if they did not own property then the government could not collect taxes from them.

Using this traditional model by which one could own property, e.g. by living in one place/being settled, and believing in the relationship between private property and level of entrepreneurship (why? Because by owning something you are given a stake in improving it and making it better from your neighbor, competition is born and with it incentives to innovate), it can be very interesting to posit a relationship between the amount of human movement historically and the level of innovation in a country.

Today’s world of fast information and communication technology and advances in transportation make private property ownership a completely different thing from the past. Today, in order to own property one no longer needs to be settled. New property is often intellectual or virtual, therefore does not abide by the rules of physical space at all, and what is still physical can be quite mobile – for example one’s car or phone or even house (just read the inflatable house article!). Therefore, by extending the theory of property ownership and innovation, it seems that migration does not disturb the process of innovation.

Again: the relationship between private property ownership and migration has changed. Whereas before to own private property one had to be living in one place, today private property can travel with his owner wherever he goes.

In the Transit Zone

2006-10-17T06:41:00.000-07:00

During my crossing of the Ténéré Desert,
Whose name means something like
“Desert of all Deserts,”
I experienced the endless void
As a timeless space
In which standstill would be deadly.

As an artist I know the danger zone
When one leaves one’s base
To venture into “terra incognita.”
TRANSIT is the name of this zone.”

Heinz Mack (Pergamon Museum, Berlin exhibition of his work called “Transit,” October 2006)

It’s interesting that not only artists venture into this zone of transit, but this is something that all travelers experience.

Mack makes another point: “standstill is deadly.” By not traveling, not moving – are we not standing still? This afternoon I returned from a trip to Berlin and experienced first hand the need for travel to get a perspective on the country where one lives. It seems like I am already traveling a lot, and that my stay in Moscow is a voyage in itself to which I can compare life in the United States. But having stayed in Moscow for 3 weeks I am already accustomed to it and blind to some unique to the city ways in which its residents behave. Humans are incredibly adaptable!

It took this short trip to Berlin for me to notice the Moscow rush.. People always going somewhere, pushing, running – why is everyone in such a hurry? Why is there a constant feeling of restlessness and of fatigue? Life in Berlin feels peaceful and calm, almost like a little city. I think that by the scale of the city Berlin is a normal metropolis, but Moscow is of an entirely different scale.

The environment “eats you up,” in Ed’s words. I feel like I must conform in order to get things done, but traveling creates seeing. Instead of being taken with the wave of people in metros and on streets I consciously participate in it. For now I participate in it, but I what is better is that I have the choice of changing its course if I see how it is moving. I can start from my internal world, which because of the travel is refreshed

А ДУША ВЕДЬ ЕТО ТОЧНО
ЕЖЕЛИ ОБОЗЖЕНА
СПРАВЕДЛИВИЕ МИЛОСЕРДНИЕ И ПРАВЕДНЕЙ ОНА

Traveling does stir the soul somehow. By misplacing us and existing (for a few days or hours after having traveled) in a transit zone, neither here nor there, where we are able to see both worlds as semi-outsiders and bring a new look at an otherwise often static everyday life.

When a person travels he realizes where life actually takes place. It is only fiction that life occurs in social or public circles where we discuss the weather or debate about this or that government policy. Traveling, we always carry with us our own world and realize that despite our location or environment surrounding us, life continues. Life exists in these personal, deeply intimate spaces. In a constantly changing, unpredictable environment the constancy we have is within ourselves, where we turn our attention.

Such transit zones can also be physical places – not just states of being – like the no-man’s land middle zone between the two walls in Berlin. Interesting how these zones came to be ruled over by life, for example the space between the two Berlin walls, because it was untouched for many years, became excellent habitat for unique trees and flora to grow. Today, Berlin’s urban planners want to maintain the zone as a garden ring.

Nationalism in Russia and thinking about nationalism among immigrants

2006-10-09T03:33:00.000-07:00

Sergei Medvedev presents part of the Russian burden and problem the lack of “Russianness,” or the internal glue of nationalism to hold the state together. He argues that since its inception Russia has been controlled from above, it’s borders defended by expensive and difficult military campaigns, trying to hold the enormous state together.

Russia is a state, not a nation. If a nation is “local and exclusive, based on mythologies and rituals of collectivity,” a state is a project from above, with a “strategic, developmental and civilizing mission” (Medvedev, “Rethinking the National Interest: Putin’s Turn in Russian Foreign Policy,” 2004: 3).

It seems that Medvedev is presenting the lack of nationalism and the unformed Anderson’s “imagined community” (organically by press, radio and other mass media) in Russia as the source of Russia’s modern economic and political problems.

If the lack of nationalism is truly as problematic as Medvedev believes, then it is possible that states with a large population of immigrants will be affected by similar problems in the future. This is a giant leap to make and I’m not yet very clear as to the direct implications of a lack of nationalism for a country, but it seems that migrants are the ones with the most undeveloped sense of nationalism.

Paradoxically, migrants are often very aware of the country they left and the country they entered and may identify with one or the other more strongly as a result of the unique perspective they get by moving. Therefore, it seems nationalism is sharpened, but at the same time it is blurred since having settled individuals may no longer feel the same pull/allegiance to their home country and yet never feel themselves completely assimilated into their new country and culture.

One of the most conservative arguments against immigrants is that they do not bother to assimilate into the culture of their host country. Often, the claim is made, that immigrants don’t learn the host country’s language and settle in neighborhoods together where they are kept separate from the local population (this is both the tendency of people of the same kind to stick together, especially in difficult or new circumstances, and the fault of urban planners and local politicians who for various reasons – crime, “cultural contamination” – encourage separate neighborhoods for different groups). This is one of the arguments used by many “older” Moscow families who view the incoming migrant workers from the former Soviet republics and Central Asian states as a big problem. “They don’t even learn Russian!” the exclaim. “They don’t like Russia,” they also say. Well that’s not difficult to believe since the conditions that such workers live in are probably very miserable since Moscow is extremely expensive even to a westerner coming from the US or Europe.

Today Moscow is one of the most expensive cities in the world where a square meter of living or office space throughout most of the city costs between $3,000 and $5,000. Despite the high prices, people from many poorer countries and also from all over Russia are all coming to Moscow to work – this is the only place where one can earn money. Most of the money earned in Moscow is probably, like in the United States with Mexican migrant workers, is sent back to families living in the workers’ home countries. The workers themselves most likely live in very poor conditions and work difficult jobs during most of the day, selling fruits and vegetables, inexpensive clothing, and working in construction – the typical low wage immigrant jobs not requiring a lot of skills and easily replaceable.

Many families of Moscow and St. Petersburg Russians who have lived in the capital cities for many generations complain about the large amount of immigrants, usually of darker complexion than Russians, with different cultures and often a different (non-Eastern Orthodox) religion. Encouraged by government sponsored television programs, some believe that these immigrants are responsible for the increased crime and corruption in the city. Like the Mexicans in the US, the Turks in Germany, Romanians in Spain, etc., the Central Asians are doing the dirty work in Russia – work that not many native Russians (what is a “native Russian”? I mean old-time residents of the capital) would not do. One reporter on “Echo Moskvy” asked her listeners to consider how Russian grandmothers would fare on the food markets if all of the immigrants who today sell Kishmish grapes and potatoes suddenly stopped bringing their produce to Moscow.

Migrant workers that predominate in Russia often do not move with their families (is this true? I’m curious how many people more to Moscow with their whole families and how many only come to work). Their main purpose of coming to Moscow is to earn money they can then send back home. Naturally, it is not necessary for them to become integrated into the Russian culture (nor can they afford it) or learn the language more than necessary to write something like “trusy” (Russian for “underwear”) that they spell “tursi,” when they are understood with either spelling.

It is the function of the government to encourage the assimilation of immigrants into local culture by providing access to language classes or cultural programs instead of persecuting illegal immigrants. Those illegal immigrants that do bring their families find themselves an easy target. The recent events between Georgia and Russia have revealed a very brutal side of Russian policy towards immigrants, the direct target of which became children. The government issued an order to find Georgian families staying in Russian illegally by isolating Georgian-sounding last names of children in school and checking their parents’ registration. Political games of a few government individuals is trickling down into the population as the beginnings of a genocide. What is frightening is that many reasonable and educated people, in fact 30% of Moscovites,* believe that such policies should be pursued. Some even outright call for “deportation” of all Georgians from Russia.

“They don’t even like Russia, so why do they come?” many ask. Well it’s not easy to like a country where you are not made feel welcome in either the practical living or social situation, but one cannot help coming here since it is one of the only places where it is possible to earn any kind of money to survive.

PS. This is an interesting turn in the discussion, which brings me back to the role of the city in controlling and organizing migration flows. Moscow, for example, as a city with a particular urban layout and infrastructure must handle all of its millions of people some of which stay for generations and others which come and go. I think that the layout of a city can determine the immigrant experience (think for example of the construction of Paris, where poor immigrants lived isolated on the periphery, the result of which was the violence of the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 years). Of course, without a national consensus on immigration policy in general, nothing can be changed in the city to guide the immigrant experience. The city will itself adapt to the changes in population, but it predetermines a certain type of organization, and maybe this organization needs to be changed in order to meet the changing demands of the population and to ease the enactment of certain policies.

Also discuss: Pushkin’s “Tsygany” and Paperny’s “Culture One and Culture Two”

A basic question to ask in order to understand the role of nationalism in the formation of a state, its economy, politics, and society is: What function does nationalism play?

*check this statistic, from what Tetja Inna heard on Echo Moskvy.

Notes from Moscow

2006-10-03T02:11:00.000-07:00

One class and my Moscow everyday encounters have given me many ideas and prompted many questions regarding migration.

Sergei Medvedev teaches the "Problems and Prospects of Eurasia" class and he has a very interesting approach towards Russian politics, economics, and culture from the role that space plays.

For my own work, I think that space - or territory (is this a good definition of space?) - can be an important link that connects my interest in urban planning (the organization and management of space) with migration (the movement of people through space).

An interesting question I had during lecture today is:
What kind of space is necessary for the unobstructed movement of people?

Today Medvedev spoke about Soviet organization of towns. Russia, he said, is divided into regions each with their own pole, or central city. The local centralization mirrors national centralization, where the whole country is centered around Moscow. Most of the resources are organized around the regional capital, with peripheral areas under looser control and less developed. Few roads lead to these peripheral areas and regional borders are nearly impassible because they are formed by overgrown forests. In order to travel to a nearby regional capital, you have to take the road around the region and travel for many more miles than a direct route. 90% of all migration takes place within these regions and there is little inter-regional mobility.

This discussion led me to think that movement of people is determined by the continuity of space. If Russia is organized into these little regions, or compartments, or as one historian called it, a "chocolate bar," with the regional peripheries like chocolate fault lines, then people will move around the regions where routes are provided.

It would be interesting to visualize in this way the European Union and characterize its space. How fluid are the borders of all EU states and how do they determine where people move? Maybe I can visualize/map the space of continents and redraw the map of the world with the thickness of borders indicating their difficulty to cross and not necessarily country barriers. This would be difficult to get all of the information about the borders and regions and find a way to quantify it somehow in order to be able to draw it on some kind of scale.

Some other issues that I would like to mention related to immigration is another one of my Professor's claims that countries with similar GDP per capital have similar economic, political, and cultural levels/institutions. I thought that if he believes in this, then he would also agree that one can find a point of GDP per capita when immigration would begin and when it would stop (speed up or slow down). This would be a huge and easy economic argument for immigration, but just as I disagree with his general claim, I do not think it can apply to the specific example of immigration either.

Other ideas:

problems of mobility for the Russian state
Moscovite response to immigrants

What happens next?

2006-09-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

Dominic Bailey of BBC News shows the paradox taking place on the Canary Islands.

Holidaymakers and poor African migrants are both arriving to the islands' beaches. The migrants arrive in fishing boats, some emaciated while others in apparently good condition after days at sea. Both tourists and Red Cross workers distribute water and clothes to the immigrants and then they are taken away by local police to detention centers.

From the artilce, I get a sense that the migrants arrive in waves - they are tended to on the beaches and taken away. After one group is gone:

"The emergency tents of the Red Cross are taken down between landings. The cayucos are emptied of their stinking contents and sprayed clean before being broken up and taken away, the scar removed from the landscape of pleasure boats and giant ferries. Until the next time."

What happens to the migrants after they are taken away? And how long can this continue?

It feels like this situation is made to be normal, the system of taking care of the migrants is established and routine, but temporary. The migrants are like a tourist attraction, the tourist too, temporary. Strange..

These temporary solutions to deep, long term problems that manifest themselves in the need for the people to move, seem not just ineffective but very dangerous and problematic in the long term.

African migrants continue coming into Europe

2006-08-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Another article in the BBC today: migrants from western Africa are continuing to make the dangerous journey to Spain.

In fact, the article reports that more migrants arrived on the Canary Islands (a popular destination because it is closer to western Africa than mainland Europe) in August than has over the entire 2005 year.

EU's newly formed external fronteir agency Frontex cannot keep up with the flow of migrants. Once again, merely controlling the borders or creating more barriers to entry is not working.

Why isn't it working? It seems like a logical line of defence, and yet it doesn't address neither the past (what conditions in their home countries are prompting people to leave) nor the future (how the newly arrived migrants will live in Europe).

Taking off..

2006-08-29T16:59:00.000-07:00

On On-line public spaces

2006-07-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting article this week in Tim O'Reilly's blog, called 'Levels of the Game: The Hierarchy of Web 2.0 Applications.'

O'Reilly is the one who wrote a great expose on Web 2.0, What is Web 2.0.

In this article he mentions 4 levels of "Web 2.0-ness":

Level 3: "The application could ONLY exist on the net, and draws its essential power from the network and the connections it makes possible between people or applications. ... In the hierarchy of web 2.0 applications, the highest level is to embrace the network, to understand what creates network effects, and then to harness them in everything you do."
- O'Reilly also quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt's advice, "Don't fight the internet."

Level 2: "the application gains remarkable power by leveraging an online community"

Level 1: "The application can and does exist successfully offline, but it gains additional features by being online."

Level 0: "The application has primarily taken hold online, but it would work just as well offline if you had all the data in a local cache."

Quoting O'Rielly:
"What I found most insightful in Fallows' piece was the idea that Web 2.0 is ultimately based on trust. That's a nice grace note when we think about architectures of participation. They do ultimately rely on trust."

I find this very important as well, with increased reliance on more participation we are exposing ourselves to the basics of human interraction and that is held up together by trust. I think this is a very good contribution of Web 2.0 to society, that it is bringing about trust and encouraging it in people by engaging them in on-line participation. Trust is something that is often missing from our highly individualistic societies (note to self: review urban sprawl article, relates to development of individualism and isolation).

Very interesting: the combination of philosophy, anthropology and new technologies (e.g. Web 2.0)!!

Beginning in California

2006-07-17T10:55:00.000-07:00

This is my home for the moment. I will write on this page about my thoughts on the movement of people and issues of immigration. Also, I anticipate with great desire the day when I will once again take off and become a migrant myself. I'll share my stories and thoughts here.

Today there were some interesting articles on people's movement in BBC World News. I'll respond to these later, after work:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5193116.stm BBC article about EU rapid response team of border guards to patrol border areas

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5173326.stm Mark Mardell (BBC Europe editor) on living abroad

It's very interesting what people point out when they speak about what they miss about a country. These originally UK residents who responded to Mr. Mardell's blog say that what they miss most about the UK is their family and friends rather than any type of food or countryside. A longing for a particluar food or view, they say, can be satisfied with enough money and often quite cheaply. How strongly then, is our association with home an association with the people and personal relationships that we have in that place rather than an attachment to the land? Has that been different before? Have people gradually turned over their attachment/relationship with land?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3513889.stm Map of free labor movement in EU

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4970132.stm 2006 is year of Workers’ Mobility in the European Union.