HOW MUCH YOUR ETHNICITY MATTERS (IN MIGRANT STUDIES)?

This week we talk about ethnicity and migration, and more specifically about how certain scholars find annoying and inaccurate the dominant role of ethnicity in studies about migration. This is the first time that I write a response using data and statistics, it is just an attempt and you might find it awful, but please bear with me :)

The articles we will take into consideration are three: 

- Nina Glick Schiller, ''Beyond methodological ethnicity''

- Levent Sosyal, ''Beyond Second Generation''

- İbrahim Sirkeci, ''Migration from Turkey to Germany''.

Nina Glick Schiller's article raises a criticism towards the conventional ethnic-approach used to find out about the degree of integration of a migrant into a locality and the relationship of the migrants to their homelands. According to Schiller, an approach which takes ethnicity as the sole unit of analysis is inaccurate because ethnicity is not the only factor affecting one's integration (or non-integration) in the place of settlement, on the contrary both the place of departure and the place of settlement play a role.  

Furthermore, it  does not take into account ''the increasing fragmentation of ethnic groups in terms of language, place of origin, legal status, and stratification'', which matter as well. To better understand her point, try to think about the coexistence in Turkey of both Turks and Kurds, that the conventional ethnic approach would consider as one single unit (Turks).  

Her suggestion for a more accurate study is to take into account different, non-ethnic transnational factors which too constitute identity, such as ''familial, religious, economic, occupational, class, political, social, and locally based networks of interaction''. When such different variables are taken into consideration, in İbrahim Sirkeci we see that gender and region are the factors that have the biggest impact on migration (in gender terms, females seem to be more prone to migrate and in regional terms Kurds turned out to be more likely to migrate than Turks.)
 

A criticism similar to Schiller's is made by Portes (in Levent Sosyal). Portes laments that the ethnical approach ''groups the youths under pan ethnic labels, thus obscuring the characted and implications of the data'', and also like Schiller he suggests that analyzing ''the economic conditions, family arrangements, ethnic and racial identities, self-esteem, social capital, language competency and labor market achievement of the second generation is more appropriate'' than a method that does not separate ''place, ethnicity and culture''.

Likewise Sosyal -- firmly against the scholarship that identifies the first generation of migrants with ''the past'', the second generation with an uncomfortable state of ''neither here nor there'',the third generation with ''modernity'' -- argues that it is not where they come from that will predict whether migrants will integrate or not, but where they are at:  the place where migrants build their lives day by day.

He argues that Berlin, for example, with 12% of is population made up by foreigners (4% Turks), is a city in which diversity flourishes. Foreigners can swing among a great variety of intercultural youth clubs and express their rich and complex identities. In other words, in such invigorating environment, a foreigner ceases to be only a foreigner and takes other determinants: foreign student, foreign worker, foreign writer, foreign unemployed, foreign feminist, just to mention some possibilities. In places of settlement of the like, second generations migrants (regardless of their ethnicity) more than being stuck between borders, are free to walk beyond them, more than being alone, they are all one, and rather than living nowhere, they inhabit the now, here. 

In the movie ''Kebab connections'', the main character Ibo is a good example of second generation migrant who is well integrated in the place of settlement (his uncle has a restaurant and he creates commercials for it), but parental relationships still affect to some extent his actions. Think about when his German girlfriend Titzi finds out to be pregnant: Ibo's father is not so much alarmed because of the pregnancy out of the wedlock, but rather because of her Germanness. Here we can argue that ''home'' is initially synonim for ''darkness'' (I say ''initially'' because in the end we have the redemption and ''happily ever after''), while Germany and Titzi symbolize modernity and brightness. Do you agree? To what extent?  And do you agree with the Turkish stereotype the movie offers?