This week on International Horizons, James Hollifield, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Tower Center for Political Studies, Southern Methodist University (SMU), discusses the epistemology of migration studies and delves into some of its foundational works.  Hollifield addresses how modern migration regulation is related to the invention of the nation-state and how, in order to understand migration, one needs to study imperial and post-imperial systems.  Moreover, Hollifield discusses internal migration, which is an old phenomenon caused mostly by the industrialization of urban centers since the nineteenth century.  Finally, Hollifield explains the causes of internal displacement and how it relates to migration, by way of a comparison between the cases of the American continent and that of Europe.

John Torpey  00:16

What is migration?  Who does it, why, where, where do they go, and what do they do when they get there?  And how do academics study the phenomenon?  Why does it matter to the rest of us? 

John Torpey  00:31

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

John Torpey  00:52

We are fortunate to have with us today James Hollifield, who is Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Tower Center at SMU. He also is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC and a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Hollifield has written widely on issues of political and economic development, with a focus on migration. Among his major works are Immigrants, Markets and States (Harvard University Press 1992), L’Immigration et l’Etat Nation (L’Harmattan 1997), Pathways to Democracy (Routledge, 2000), Herausforderung Migration— Perspektiven der vergleichenden Politikwissenschaft (Lit Verlag 2006). Recent books include Understanding Global Migration (Stanford UP 2022), Controlling Immigration 4th edition (Stanford UP 2022), Migration Theory 4th edition (Routledge 2023), and International Political Economy: History, Theory and Policy. Thanks for being with us today, James Hollifield.

James Hollifield  02:49

I’m delighted, John,

John Torpey  02:50

Great to have you. So let’s focus on this migration theory book, which, as I’ve just mentioned, is coming out in yet a fourth edition. And you’ve published it with Caroline Battelle, herself from a different field, namely anthropology. It’s partially an overview of the field of migration studies, and partially a kind of intellectual history of the field. So maybe you could tell us about, you know, the aims of the book and why you think it’s been so resilient?

James Hollifield  03:23

Well, I have to give my colleague Caroline Battelle all the credit, because it was her idea to do this book. She just felt that, as scholars, we labor away in our little disciplinary silos. And we, we always are unaware very often what’s going on in other disciplines, sometimes deliberately, so sometimes just by oversight. And of course, if you don’t know what’s happening in the other fields, if you’re studying a topic like migration, you may end up reinventing a lot of wheels, shall we say? So we decided that it was very important to get us out of our silos, to try to understand what kind of research questions we were asking, what’s the theoretical framework? How are you framing those research questions What kind of data are you using? What kind of methods are you using? So in short, we wanted social scientists to really talk to each other.

James Hollifield  04:28

So the subtitle of the book, John, is Talking Across Disciplines. And as you yourself have pointed out, migration is inherently an interdisciplinary – you have to approach it from an interdisciplinary standpoint, because if you just look at something like structure and agency, John, are we talking mostly about agency here when people are on the move or is the structure social class and other things like that? Does it have something to do with the choices that they make, and don’t forget when they get where they’re going, they have to get integrated into society. So that’s another, you know, big, big topic.

James Hollifield  05:10

So I will just conclude by saying that my colleague, Caroline, she worked for 20 some years to try to turn me into an anthropologist. And I worked for 20 some years to try to turn her into a political scientist. And I think we sort of met halfway. You know, I still don’t do a lot of idiographic ethnographic research, so I’m not focused so much on the individual agency of migrants. And she has as much dislike for the state and politics and policy, as when we started this project. So you get the point.

John Torpey  05:47

Interesting. Yeah. I mean, we all get into disciplinary silos. And, as you may know, I kind of got into the migration studies business by accident. I mean, the book that I wrote on passports was really about the development of modern state infrastructure, and how did it distinguish its inhabitants, its citizens, from other people, and that sort of thing. And I didn’t really certainly didn’t think of myself as a migration person. But it was one of these things that came to seem, to me anyway, just ubiquitous. And, so much of human history is simply about moving around, although, in our world, I think we’ve come to be mainly concerned about the traversal of international boundaries.

John Torpey  06:40

And so I want to ask you later about the place of internal migration in all of this, which I think has tended, for the reasons that I’ve just suggested to kind of fall to some extent by the wayside despite its arguable importance. But in any case, I mean, can you talk –and I was also thinking about Bernard Bailyn’s one or more books, I can’t remember– about the peopling of North America, which I thought was an interesting kind of term. You know, because I guess there was, in a certain sense, no United States to immigrate into at the time that he’s talking about. So it’s this process that temporally in history is doesn’t fit the kind of categories of immigration and migration that we use now. So I wonder if you could talk about that. I mean, it’s migration or human mobility is just simply so essential, so central to the human story, that everybody in some sense, is studying it. But just, you know, be curious what you would say about that?

James Hollifield  07:53

Well, as you probably know, John, I’ve written for decades now about something I call the “migration state”. And every time I take pen in hand and start working on this, I always remind people about the invention of the passport. That, you know, wasn’t that long ago. Yes, John, you’re sort of a foundational scholar in this field. And it wasn’t that long ago that people had much greater freedom of movement before the hardening, if you will, of the Westphalian system of nation states. If we go back far enough in time, there were no nation states, we people were not tied necessarily to a specific territory, they weren’t they didn’t belong to a government, they weren’t subjects of the crown or whatever.

James Hollifield  08:48

So this whole thing about the advent of the nation state, John, and how it, especially how it came to control every dimension of our lives, especially in the 20th century –of course, nationalism, goes back to the 18th and 19th century, but the nation state– came down on people stopping mobility, you know, trying to determine who belongs to whom and where. And as you know, John, war had a lot to do with this.

James Hollifield  09:23

As nation states went to war, and of course, we I always remind people that –I’ve written extensively about the liberal state. The liberal state is based on a social contract. It’s based on the idea of a demos that you know who your citizens are, your people are. So liberal states are caught in this what I call a paradox. How do you how do you remain open to movement and to migration, because we societies and economies desperately need people.  They need labor, especially now that we’re in a situation where populations are stagnant and shrinking. So you need openness, but at the same time you need closure. So, we’ve been living in this paradox, I would say for the past 100, 150, 200 years really.

James Hollifield  10:16

But, so I think I would like to draw people’s attention to my work about the migration state. And that it’s one of the absolute key functions of the modern state. You know, the state has to protect the territory, protect the people. So it has a security garrison function. But the state, especially in the 18th and 19th century, took on an important economic function. It’s supposed to make economies grow and prosper. And that’s one of its responsibilities. And migration is, as we know, economists have taught us this is absolutely key to that growth.

James Hollifield  10:57

But then, so I would say, in addition to having a garrison state, and having a trading state, what Richard Rosecrance called a trading state, in the 19th, and especially the 20th century, 21st century, we have seen the development of what I call a migration state, where you have to make decisions about who gets in how many people, what kind of status are you going to give them. And that’s not just liberal states in the Global North, this is applies equally to states in the Global South. So in my recent work, I’ve really, we really extended this idea and really began to study migration, the Global South, and we’ve come up with this idea that there are varieties of migration states. I can get into that, if you would like.

John Torpey  11:41

Well, why don’t you go ahead and talk about that, because as you point out, in this introduction, you and Caroline Battelle point out in the introduction to this new edition of migration theory. You know, the literature has tended to be focused on the Global –what we now, I think, in some ways problematically called the Global North. But in any case, a lot of the world has been left out. So tell us what you’ve been thinking about that?

James Hollifield  12:09

Well, I do think that in the migration field more broadly, we have had a very ethnocentric political bias, focused, you know, where did the field of migration studies begin? It began really in the United States, to some extent. I can’t remember if Ravenstein was British or American, but in the field of geography, sociology. I mean, the modern field of migration studies was really in many ways invented at the University of Chicago, by sociologists the Park School. So, you sociologists, you were the ones who laid the foundation along with the demographers and the geographers for the study of this field, and it was heavily heavily sociological. It’s all about individuals, agency, about society, social class.

James Hollifield  13:11

And for many decades, of course, it was almost as if the state had disappeared from the study of, of migration. And then, of course, you had the growth of transnationalism, transnational studies, again taking us sort of more in a sociological, if not an economic direction. I think sociologists and economists basically ask many of the same questions; they have different methods, they use different data. But again, I would say political science, we were all late to the party. When I started working on this subject, you could count us on one or two hands at most; there were very, very few political scientists. So, I think the field of study of the politics of migration has really exploded in the past 30, 40 years.

James Hollifield  14:07

And, you know, we have now really begun to extend way beyond these settler societies, which, as everybody understands that the populating of places like the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa. These movements of people were not always a happy story. There were many indigenous peoples who were overrun, there was genocide. So, the growth and the extension of the nation state through the European imperial system essentially transformed the world. It transformed migration; it changed the way in which people move and why they move.

James Hollifield  15:00

So, when you look at what has happened since the 18th, and the 19th century, when you have the Great Transatlantic Migrations, you have to think about empire, you have to think about these imperial systems. You know, look at somebody like Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, whose grandparents came from Africa. Why were they in Africa? Because the British Empire moved people from South Asia around the globe. So you have to think about imperial systems. And you have to think about post-imperial states and post-imperial systems. I mean, how on earth could you study immigration in Britain, or France, or Belgium, or the Netherlands without thinking about empire? Spain, Portugal, we go on and on. So we’ve got post-imperial migration states.

James Hollifield  15:56

And then of course, you also have post-colonial migration states. One of the great chapters in this new book that we did Understanding Global Migration is written by political scientist Kamal Sadiq looking at the evolution, the building of an Indian migration state, you know, which is intricately connected with the old British imperial system. So I could go on and on.

James Hollifield  16:19

But we’ve got to think about how how states govern migration. What drives their decisions, and we develop this typology of migration states, everything from the settler societies, which evolved into liberal migration states, to post-imperial states, post-colonial states. And my colleague, Erin Chung at Johns Hopkins insisted that, in Asia, we have to think about a developmental migration state, you know, because migration is so key to national development strategies in place like the Philippines, for example, which exports people all over the world,

John Torpey  17:00

Right, fascinating. I mean, but as I read the new introduction, I was struck by one thing that seemed to me get relatively short shrift, and that is internal migration. I mean, when I was working on the passport book one of the things that immediately strikes one, as an American, is that one of the major aspects of the regulation of movement was the slave system. And the fact that, we had a population –I think it was 40% of the South at the time of the Civil War, or something like that –of people who were not allowed to move it. I mean, except for, very limited ways, perhaps with passes, and then you learn about places like China have had this hukou system forever and ever, and the propiska system in Russia and the Soviet Union.

John Torpey  17:55

And so, we tend to forget that –because we’re now focused mainly on people coming in, who comes in, what are they going to contribute to us? What kind of problems might they present, and that sort of thing. But until the mid 19th century, and of course, Ari Zolberg wrote about this, till the mid 19 century, a lot of the biggest issue was really about people not getting out. And so, so in any case, it’s sort of in that sense of kind of internal migration problem, phenomenon that, I think, has fallen, relatively speaking by the wayside. I have a colleague in sociology you may know, named Jim Jasper, who has written about people moving in the United States. And there’s some thought that this, the relative decline or slackening of patterns of internal mobility within the United States is a sign of our relative, you know, declining innovation and declining interest in staking out a new claim kind of somewhere else. But I wonder what you would say about the place of internal migration in the larger picture that you’re presenting in this book?

James Hollifield  19:12

Well, again, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, and always going back to the state, but I mean, the states did, as you pointed out, develop the capacity for regulating and controlling internal migration. But I think if we look back historically, to the, especially the 19th century, even the 20th century and today for that matter, when you think about internal migration, when I think about internal migration –I started my career more or less as an economic historian –I think about industrialization. I think about rapid economic growth transformed so many societies, and when you have this rapid economic change and social change, you have a rural exodus. And the people move in very large numbers from the countryside to the cities, you have the phenomenon of urbanization. And if you look at Germany, for example, Germany was a country, which went through a very intense period of industrialization with a massive rural exodus. And even though Germany was growing very fast during much of that time, it couldn’t absorb all the surplus population. So where did the Germans go? Catherine, the Great recruited them to come to Russia, and millions of them went to the United States and the Americas and all over the globe. So you have to think about the rural exodus and the internal migration that happened in Germany. And this happened, of course, in Britain as well.

James Hollifield  20:47

One odd exception is, is France, which, which didn’t go through a very intense period of industrialization. And the French, the French peasant farmers wouldn’t leave the land, they wouldn’t go into the cities. So, you know, as the historian Jerrab Morriel has pointed out, the French had to invent a working class. Well, where did they go to find workers? They went first to Belgium and Germany and Switzerland, and then to Italy and to Poland. So they had to import workers in the 19th and 20th century, you know, to feed the fires of industrialization and economic growth.

James Hollifield  21:27

Now, if you get into this period in the 20th century, where, as I said, states become hardened. They become increasingly authoritarian, often totalitarian. You know, try moving around in Stalinist Russia, for example; that is, where people move where they lived was very, very carefully controlled. And we know, the same thing was true, you know, in the People’s Republic of China, as you mentioned, with the hukou system.

James Hollifield  21:56

But let me just fast forward to stay on this topic of internal migration. And here’s where economists and sociologists and political scientists and historians all come together. When we went into the process of building a North American integration through the NAFTA process in the 1990s, the government said, “Oh, we once we open Mexico up to trade and investment, migration will stop; people will no longer be need to come to the United States and work”. Well guess what, John, it was exactly the opposite. You know, the opening up of Mexico resulted in millions of Mexicans leaving the countryside, a massive rural exodus, because all those little farms, state subsidized farms, the ejidos, they disappeared, so people could no longer, they didn’t have a livelihood. So they moved to the big cities in Mexico. And, of course, the cities of Mexico couldn’t absorb this large population. So they keep coming north and they move across the border into the United States.

James Hollifield  22:58

So, this is what my colleague Philip Martin, he called this a “migration hump” and “migration spike”. You have a surge in migration, internal migration, followed by international migration. So,I just want to point this out and how somebody like Doug Massey, who studied this for decades through the Mexican migration project and documented all this stuff. So we social scientists, sometimes the governments would do well to listen to us and pay more attention to what has happened historically. And we should have known that there would be a large movement of Mexicans who have –by the way, now we’re past the migration hump, and to over 2 million Mexicans have gone back since 2007. So why are we building a wall or trying to build a wall to stop them? Maybe we don’t want people to go home, we should keep them here. So at least as far as Mexicans are concerned, we know that there’s a lot of another thing going on at the southern border of the United States. Maybe we’ll come back to that later.

John Torpey  24:04

Well, you’re gonna start to run out of time before too long. And I do want to ask you about some internal migration that you’ve been writing about and concerned about, and I think that we also need to be concerned about, and that is the phenomenon of internally displaced persons. And, I mean, this is not exactly the same thing. But I was struck by the fact that, I think his name is Joko Widodo, the President of Indonesia has just moved the capital from Jakarta, which is sinking, yes, to another island, to Borneo. Now, how much of this town that he plans to make the capital is already there? I really don’t know. But, you know, it’s going to involve a massive movement of people now. Then how many of these people would be in this other place, I’m not sure. But anyway, it’s the phenomenon of forced migration of a kind that, however, doesn’t involve the refugee phenomenon or the definition anyway. So I wonder if you could talk about the importance of the IDP phenomenon in the contemporary world.

James Hollifield  25:15

Well, I actually have in my head since and I just came from a meeting in Washington, DC, where we were talking about this at the Wilson Center. They are now exactly, according to UNHCR, the UN High Commission for Refugees, there are 103 million people of concern to UNHCR. These are people who have been displaced; they are forced migrants. And UNHCR categorizes these people that are about 24 5 million refugees. These are people who are refugees; they’ve been, they’re caught in camps, or they’re being in a process to be resettled somewhere. There are only about 5 million or so asylum seekers in the world. So we get really worked up about asylum seekers. But you know by far the largest number of people of concern are called internally displaced people. These are IDPs. And it’s over 50 million I think now.

James Hollifield  26:12

So what’s going on here? I mean, people are being forced to move internally. Why are they being displaced? Why are they being uprooted? Why are they being displaced? Sometimes, John, as I’m sure you know, it has to do with conflict. If there’s a civil war raging, look at what’s happening in Sudan right now, for example, you know tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are going to be uprooted. Look at what happened in Ukraine: how we don’t, we’ve lost count of how many millions of Ukrainians have had, have been internally displaced. They move from the battlefield in the east closer to the west to get away from the fighting. And of course, many millions of them have gone on into Europe, mostly women and children. So conflict is one of the things that drives this.

James Hollifield  27:03

But of course, the the thing that you alluded to, which is sort of looming out there, is there are other forces that are causing people to move. And of course, people move. It’s a funny thing about people, if they’re if they can’t survive somewhere, if they can’t make enough food, if they can’t eat, they’re going to move, they’re going to go somewhere else. So why are they losing their livelihoods? Well, there’s something called climate change. So you can’t grow coffee very well. And many of the places in the hills of Central America like you once could, so what are these people got to do? They’ve got to go somewhere. If you look at the Sahel, you look at Sub-Saharan Africa, vast swaths of Africa, where you’ve got drought and famine, people have they, they have to survive.

James Hollifield  27:57

So Alexander Betts at Oxford, wrote a book about this, he calls it “survival migration”. People are often want to live, they want to get to get their families to safety. So, the displacement, human displacement, forced displacement, this is increasingly a problem. And we do not have the mechanisms for dealing with this. We don’t have the resources, there’s no legal category for dealing with people like this. There’s no such thing as a climate refugee. That is not anywhere in the Refugee Convention or in international law. So what are we going to do with these millions of people who are going to be on the move? How are we going to manage that? How are we going to take care of these people? So you’re absolutely right, to allude to this issue and this phenomenon. It’s something that you and I are a little old, but our children, our grandchildren, they’re going to be confronted by this. So we better be thinking about it.

John Torpey  29:03

Right. And indeed, I mean, this gets us to the question that I also wanted to make sure I had a chance to ask you, and that has to do with, in particular but by no means only, the migration and the control of migration across, for example, the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe, and across our southern border, metaphorically referred to often as you know in terms of the Rio Grande. So a lot of people die in this process. And it’s a politically very explosive issue at this point. That certain people want migration to be controlled, or cut off perhaps, but in any case, it’s a political issue that can be very, very favorable or unfavorable for a politician. So anyway, the point is that a lot of people die in the process of our controlling our borders. And I wonder, if I think about this mostly idly without coming up with much in the way of solutions. But I wonder as somebody who really thinks about these things all the time, what would you say we should be doing to make sure that people aren’t dying because they feel they need to migrate somewhere to survive?

James Hollifield  30:32

Well, again, it’s a testament to the human spirit that people will go to great lengths to get themselves, and don’t forget their families as well, to safety, where they can survive. And often, it is literally a matter of survival; if you stay where you are, you’re likely to perish. You know, we know for example, about the violence that goes on in Central America that’s the driving factor. But it’s important to keep in mind, and I know this is probably something that you’re, those who watch this podcast will be shocked to hear it, but for much of our history, in the Western Hemisphere, we have lived in a relatively calm and peaceful neighborhood, compared to any other region of the globe. And yes, we are experiencing a surge in migration at our southern border. At first, it was the Central Americans who were coming in quite large numbers. But if you go back to this, this surge of Central Americans over the past few years, John, this this crisis, a humanitarian crisis at our border, did not rank in the top 15 crises in the world, in terms of numbers. So there are much, there were much bigger crises going on. So you would have to ask yourself, I mean, you know as well as I do that, in 2015-16, Germany absorbed over 1 million people, many of them Syrians, Afghans, and others. So if you look at what has happened in the Middle East and South Asia, or in Sub-Saharan Africa, or West Africa, East Africa, I mean, the humanitarian crises, they dwarf what we have been experiencing in this hemisphere.

James Hollifield  32:29

So, here’s where political scientists, I guess, have to come to the table. And you have to try to understand why has this become such a politically charged issue? And you alluded to this, I mean, people are concerned that the governments have control of the borders. And people aren’t rightly concerned about issues of rule of law. And if you look at the Global Compact for Migration and Refugees that was put forward a few years ago at the UN, the basic normal principle should be that movement, migration should be safe, orderly and legal. So this is neither safe. It is certainly not orderly, what’s going on at the southern border. And it is not really legal in the sense that you don’t have an absolute right to cross the border and demand asylum. You have a right to request asylum. But should you request asylum in the country where you are transiting? Should you request it before you leave? And of course, so many people are so desperate, they’re not going to wait for years to go through that process.

James Hollifield  33:58

So if you look at what’s happening at our southern border, I said we have been living in a relatively calm and peaceful hemisphere. Now we see that people are coming to the southern border of the United States from all over the planet. You know, the numbers are growing. You’ve got Ukrainians showing up there, they have a good chance of getting in if they can get to turn themselves into a border, a border guard, you have large numbers of Chinese people coming to this border. Of course, you have the Cubans, you have the Haitians. And years ago, I was writing about this and I said, “Boy, look at what’s going on in Venezuela. How long will it be before the Venezuelans find their way to the southern border of the United States?” Well, guess what? They are there. And when anybody asks you “Do we have a migration crisis in the Western Hemisphere?” You can say, “Yes, we do. It’s Venezuela”.

James Hollifield  34:54

Now we looking at 7 million Venezuelans who have fled their country, 2 million of them are living in Colombia, which has gone to great lengths to try to try to host this population and help these people, but many of them cross the Darien Gap. You know, I guess this is the Isthmus of Panama, it’s one of the most horrible, dangerous places on the planet. It’s a jungle. But it’s, again, a testament to the human spirit, that people have found a way, you know, to cross this impassable area, and make their way through very dangerous territory where there lots of gangs and smugglers involved, and get all the way to the southern border, and camp out and wait to see, when can I get across.

James Hollifield  35:45

So the Europeans have been dealing with this for decades, in much larger numbers. And it’s interesting, John, just to think about why did the Ukrainians getting such a warm welcome, as opposed to the Venezuelans or the Afghans or the or the Syrians, that you can pick your favorite nationality? Well, Ukraine is a huge country bordering on the European Union. Russia is now has invaded Ukraine. This has gotten everybody’s attention in Europe. So it’s an enormous security threat. The Europeans have come together and they understand that they have no choice but to welcome the Ukrainians. And yes, it is true. They see the Ukrainians as relatives, as cousins in many cases. You know, look at the Poles who take so many Ukrainians. So being in the neighborhood, having a cultural tie, having this enormous geopolitical stakes of this conflict with Russia are just too great. You know, you have to take care of these Ukrainians.

James Hollifield  37:00

And by the way, don’t forget something like 70 or 80% of them are women and children. So you’re going to turn the women and children back into the battle front? I don’t think so. So we have to be a little bit careful about jumping to conclusions here. But again, what responsibility does the United States have for the people who are moving, who are displaced in this hemisphere? That would probably take us the rest of the afternoon just to answer that question. We have played our own role in this hemisphere in terms of, you know, US imperial policy in places like Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, Cuba. So we do have a lot of responsibility for what’s happened in this hemisphere.

John Torpey  37:49

Fascinating. I mean, it’s just a tremendous overview of the world’s migration situation. I mean, we haven’t gotten into what’s going on in South Africa, for example, or whatever. There are many other kinds of situations that we could talk about,

James Hollifield  38:05

I would encourage the listeners to get a copy of this new book, Understanding Global Migration. The first chapter in the book is a fabulous chapter by a colleague, Audie Klotz, who teaches at Syracuse, and it’s all about South Africa, what’s going on in the southern African migration system. So get a copy of Understanding Global Migration, you can learn a lot from reading that book.

John Torpey  38:28

Okay. Good plug. We’re gonna have to end on that on that note. That’s it for today. I want to thank Jim Hollifield for sharing his enormous insights about migration, migration regulation, migration control.

John Torpey  38:44

Look for us on the New Books Network. And remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance as well as to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.