Abstract
Scholarship on immigration in the Irish case owes much to sociology but also a lot to other social science and humanities disciplines. The three 2013 books that are the focus of this review exemplify how sociology like the societies it studies inevitably has permeable borders and contains many foreign elements and outside influences. Nation-states imagine themselves as homogenous even though these are inevitably the products of many waves of migration, displacement, settlement and resettlement. Likewise, sociology, for all that disciplinary boundaries might be inferred, cannot be conceived of as a hermetically sealed discipline. Fiction, television and film as well as the social sciences have grappled with the nature and extent of recent social change. We hardly expect fiction to offer empirical accounts of such change but here is often a richness to such narratives that frankly outshines what those produced by academics. What social science writing instead offers, at its best, are insights into social patterns, processes and power relationships within which people live their lives. The books examined here contribute to sociological debates using a range of interpretative approaches. All sociology is, of course, interpretative. Even the most apparently value-free empirical analyses come laden with interpretation. There are forms of sociological analysis that depend entirely on interpretations of text, on hermeneutics or discourse analyses of one sort or another. Whether the texts under scrutiny are accounts of research findings, official reports, newspaper accounts or television or cinema fictions the mode of analysis is one that is preoccupied with representations and how these might be interpreted to shed some light on the wider world.
Migrations: Ireland in a global world is edited by two human geographers, Mary Gilmartin and Allen White. It opens with an overview of the long history of the study of migration in Ireland. They describe Ireland as washed over with ‘wide tides’ of invasion, colonisation, emigration, exile, nomadism and tourism. Such ebbs and flows into and around and out of Ireland make it (like anywhere else) a place where identities are fluid and far from fixed. The notion that immigration is a new phenomenon in the Irish case is hardly credible. Waves of Norse, Norman, Scottish and English emigrants preceded any sense of Ireland as a distinct nation in the modern sense. Writings on the experiences of older, smaller immigrant communities such as Huguenots and Litvak Jews also anticipate many of the themes of the recent literature that deals with large-scale immigration over the last two decades. But, as Gilmartin and White observe (p. 2), for many decades the study of migration was dominated by historical accounts of emigration: ‘In this literature, Irish migration to North America has received a considerable amount of attention. There have also been historical studies of Irish migration to Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina and to mainland Europe. Compared to the volume of such writings the literature on migration to Ireland is slight and it generally focuses upon the very recent past. Yet, for much of Ireland's history, emigration has coexisted with immigration and these migrations can only be properly understood within wider contexts. But such arguments, Gilmartin and White observe, are generic ones that apply to other countries also.
This is not a book to turn to if you want to understand where particular immigrant groups have come from and how these have fared in Ireland. The value claimed by Migrations: Ireland in a global world is its focus on processes of migration and how these can be understood. Chapters are grouped into sections on migrant ‘networks’, ‘belongings’ and ‘intersections’. In their summary, a network approach highlights the links and connections between people and places across a globalised world. Chapters in the networks section reflect current academic debates on ‘transnationalism’ and ‘trans-localism.’ The second theme ‘belongings’ considers how migrant identities are ‘(re)produced’ and ‘performed’, and the ways in which places are made and remade as a result of processes and experiences of mobility (p. 229). Gilmartin and White approach the concept of place through the notion of ‘meaningful location’. They are interested in how places are represented or depicted within particular constellations of social relations. Particular places, they argue, cannot be demarcated from others as containers within which people have distinct experiences. All places are fluid ones affected by a range of global and local processes as well as by national ones. Presumably, all such processes are as true of one place as another though at a high level of generality.
Many of the chapters in Migrations: Ireland in a global world depict patterns of migration to and from Ireland as components of broader movements of people around the world. For example, the experience of asylum seekers in Ireland cannot be understood in isolation from a wider analysis of the European Union. But is there anything distinctive about the experiences of asylum seekers in Ireland? In keeping with previous qualitative research on the Irish case, the chapter by Angele Smith entitled ‘Betwixt, between and belonging: negotiating identity and place in asylum direct provision accommodation centres’, suggests not: The life of the asylum seeker is uncertain, transient and not of their own making. There is little sense of living in the ‘here and now’ and so it is not surprising that most asylum seekers I spoke to lived not in the present but worried about the past and the traumas of the life they had left behind; and worried about the future and what would happen with their application if it were successful or if were not. The accommodation centres are places of legal, social and spatial limbo for asylum seekers. They are ‘borderlands’, on the outskirts of Irish society, and places of marginalization (p. 174).
Smith writes that asylum seeker centres are transnational spaces: ‘They are places where their inhabitants learn the practices of Irish society; a place where many cultures meet, and where there is a negation between inclusion and exclusion, between belonging and non-belonging (p. 169)’. These transnational spaces, she writes, ‘construct new multiple, mobile and shifting senses of identity and belonging across and between places (p. 169)’. Another chapter, ‘African migrants in Ireland: the negotiation of belonging and family life’ by Liam Coakley draws on eighteen interviews with migrants from a number of different countries. The interviewees are anonymised not only by changing the names of participants but by obscuring their countries of origin, religion, ethnicity and other details of their past circumstances. We are left with fragments which work, up to a point, to illustrate the dynamics of generic transnationalism. We learn that ‘Sarah’ is a married mother of two from some unspecified country in central Africa with family members living in France, Belgium and the USA, but not much else. Or that ‘David’, a single migrant from West Africa, who in a quotation contrasts his current experiences of loneliness with being well-known in his (unspecified) community of origin, is now a student in Ireland but financially supports the schooling of an unspecified ‘someone’ in Kinshasa. There are now quite a number of articles and book chapters where asylum seekers and other migrants are described as negotiating their identities in clunky academic language that is not how these might have variously put it themselves. The result here, but not only in this book, is that the experiences of such migrants are rendered generic.
Some of the chapters that most successfully illustrate the workings of migrant networks draw on traditional historical approaches to emigration and upon the literature on the Irish Diaspora. For example, William Jenkins’ examination of Loyalist networks in Ireland and Canada during the 1880s draws on historical sources from both places that enables him to show how transnational ethnic and political networks organised around Orange Lodges in Ulster and Canada operated. Another excellent chapter, also in the ‘Networks’ section, by Breda Gray, ‘Migrant integration and the “network-making power” of the Irish Catholic Church’, again builds on historical scholarship on the Irish Diaspora. It compares Church networks for Irish emigrants in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States with similar networks aimed at supporting Catholic immigrants in Ireland.
The research behind New mobilities in Europe: Polish Migration to Ireland post-2004 by Torbens Krings, Elaine Moriarty, James Wickham, Alicja Bobek and Justyna Salamónska is based on six waves of interviews with twenty-two migrants. These were re-interviewed every four months or so between 2008 and 2010. The aim was to consider how the self-understandings, ambitions and aspirations of these interviewees changed (or not) over time. The interviewees were selected from those working in the four of the main sectors of the economy where Poles were employed in Ireland (construction, the hospitality sector, financial services and information technology). Interviews were conducted during the economic crisis that followed the boom years during which they moved to Dublin.
Sixty thousand new jobs were created in Ireland between 2001 and 2003. Employment grew by a staggering 240,000 jobs between 2004 and 2007. Annual job vacancies hugely increased from 85,000 in 2004 to 142,000 in 2007, an increase of almost seventy per cent. The Irish labour force hugely expanded by over 300,000 people in the same period. This was largely accounted for by inward migration from the new European Member States and in particular from Poland. Cheap air travel made Dublin easier to reach from Warsaw than Warsaw was from many provincial Polish villages. Facebook, MSN, Skype and other internet tools – ‘the software of migration’ – put prospective migrants in contact with job opportunities in Ireland. A number of interviewees were portrayed as ‘free movers’ who followed friends and social networks. Unlike classic patterns of chain migration family ties were not so important (p. 60). The authors also argue that for some interviewees moving to Ireland from Poland fostered a sense of European identity rather than some kind of Polish-Irish one (p. 127).
One of the main arguments of New Mobilities in Europe is that motivations for such migration differed substantially from those associated with classical patterns of migration. The work biographies revealed by interviews with participants across a two-year period involved considerably more than just the pursuit of linear career progression. The migrants who participated in the research in this case were typically skilled or well educated. Census data has found that migrants are on average better educated than Irish citizens and even where comparisons are like for like – between say, younger Irish people who tend to be the best educated and similarly-aged migrants, this is still the case.
Interviewees typically took starter jobs when they first arrived in Ireland. Most managed to progress to jobs that reflected their skills – they were willing to accept pay cuts in order to do so – and most weathered the economic downturn successfully. Some had left better-paid jobs in Poland to move to Dublin. For example ‘Karol’ left ‘a well-paid and interesting job’ in customer services in Poland with the aim of spending a year in Ireland with his girlfriend. He initially worked as a kitchen porter, worked as a labourer on a building site, and then moved to an entry-level position in the banking sector which did not pay as well. After six years in Ireland he returned to Poland to open a business. ‘Olga’ similarly came to Ireland for what she thought of as a gap year. Six year later she was still working as a waitress but now lived in North America having worked as one also in the United Kingdom. Pawel, a civil engineer, explained that he had ‘got really tired of Krakow’. He moved to Ireland to see something new. For him it wasn't about the money, nor could he find a job in his profession in Ireland – he worked as a cycle courier – but rather it was about being young with a chance to travel and seizing the opportunity whilst it was there. By 2010 he was employed as an engineer back in Poland. Many interviewees had careers that were not confined to any one occupation or sector.
The authors are at pains to emphasise the individual agency of their research subjects. They emphasise how Polish migrants made their own choices in often difficult circumstances whether to take a job that paid well but allows no prospects to develop their skills, to move to jobs that allowed them potentially to develop their skills but on lower pay or leave Ireland for some other destination. Their findings corroborate existing labour market research that has emphasised the concept of the ‘immigrant penalty’, where migrants were found to hold less skilled jobs or receive lower pay than Irish workers with similar education and skill levels. Amongst some of the most skilled interviewees there was a perception of a ‘glass ceiling’ when it came to management positions. Some migrants were displaced from the Irish economy during the economic crisis. Yet by 2011 new Member State migrants still accounted for six per cent of the Irish labour force. By 2010 sixteen of the twenty two migrants first interviewed in 2008 still lived in Ireland (p. 128). A number of those who left Ireland migrated elsewhere and did not return to Poland. The authors emphasise that the recession was only one factor in their decisions to leave Ireland.
The contrasts between Polish and asylum seeker transnationalisms, and how these are portrayed in both books, are striking. The former enjoy the right to travel and work throughout the European Union. The latter experience the EU as Fortress Europe and, in the Irish case, are not legally entitled to seek employment. Yet, the fragments of interviews with asylum seekers presented in Migrations: Ireland in a global world hint at underlying complex reasons why they made difficult journeys to Ireland beyond the standard presumption that they were fleeing persecution. A study using research methods similar to those used in New Mobilities in Europe or some other approach that develops detailed individual or family case studies over time would be of considerable value.
The focus of Zélie Asava's The Black Irish Onscreen is on representations of race and immigration in Irish cinema and television. In the history of cinema and television much of this representation has been problematic. It is easy to forget how recently black actors have emerged as prominent protagonists in Western cinema. The films she examines were selected according to criteria that included a central focus on race issues and having some innovative approach to racial representation which challenged such tropes. Her aim was to investigate how black and mixed-race Irish identity is positioned in Irish film and television and, in doing so, to contribute to wider debates about nation, identity and belonging in the Irish case. Part of the value of Asava's study is how it brings together a significant body of work, not all of it well known, that has engaged with race, racism and social change resulting from immigration through the Republic of Ireland. The fictions she examines address racism, explore inter-ethnic families, examine cultural hybridity and raise questions about identity as this might be experienced by individuals as well as presumptions about national identity. Such fictions might be understood as tentative efforts to envisage social interrelations and interactions, even though cinema and television tends to fall back on stock stories and narratives. The analysis of these narratives she undertakes is of value to sociologists insofar as these engage with and represent ideas of identity, culture and power relationships. Cinema and television are also institutional contexts in themselves that warrant sociological analysis. Inevitably, she explains, how her own background informed her intellectual vantage point: As a Irish-Keynan woman with dual citizenship, who is both Anglophone and Irish, and has lived in several different countries and cultures, I have shared experiences with other Irish people both in Ireland and abroad and have a personal understanding of the racial histories concerned, from my parents’ experiences and my own (p. 12).
A recurring figure in The Black Irish on Screen is the Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga who has been in many Irish films including Trafficked (2004) where she played a sexually exploited Nigerian woman. In the 1970s-set Breakfast on Pluto (2005) she played a young Irish woman. In 2010, in series one of the television crime drama Love/Hate she played the girlfriend of a gang member played by Robert Sheehan. In some roles Negga has been presented as an Irish woman who just happens to be mixed-race. Negga has also been cast in American and British films and television programmes, including World War Z (as a scientist), Agents of Shield (as a supervillain) and Misfits as the terminally ill British girlfriend of a black British main character. She was also cast in Twelve Years a Slave in a small part that was edited out of the final version of the film.
Immigrant characters are now commonplace if generally peripheral figures in Irish television drama and cinema. According to Asava, mixed race characters are usually presented in isolation from their families, or as having dislocated families. When they are presented (unexplained) as Irish, this on one hand suggests a liberal or colour-blind outlook but, again, they tend to be depicted as outsiders (p. 81). Immigrants are inserted into some such dramas to make a didactic point. For example, in Adam and Paul (2004), directed by Lenny Abrahamson, there is a brief comic encounter between two pathetic homeless Irish drug addicts and a self-reliant Bulgarian emigrant. There have been some efforts to foreground immigrant stories. In Abrahamson's 2007 television drama Prosperity, in the fourth and final episode ‘Pala's Story’, the eponymous character is a Nigerian refugee separated from her son who works as a cleaner. The soap Fair City has featured many immigrant storylines. One of these from 2005 has focused on a Nigerian family which was accepted by most of the locals but experienced racist attacks, one in which their house was burnt down and a member of the family killed. Another from 2013 concerned the exploitation and sexual harassment of a Zambian au pair. The 2014 crime drama An Bronntanas (The Gift) portrays a Polish migrant living in a Gaeltacht who is learning Irish. In real life Polish has overtaken Gaelic as the second most commonly spoken language in the Republic of Ireland. A Nick Cave song, sung in Polish and English, plays over the closing credits of the first episode of An Bronntanas.
The Black Irish Onscreen appears in an Irish Studies series. The stated purpose of Asava's textual analysis of Irish cinema is to interrogate concepts of Irish identity, history and nation. Simply put, immigrant identities are mapped onto Irish themes and the focus is on how these challenge existing Irish identities. This vantage point is very different from the transnational human geography and sociology perspectives of both Migrations: Ireland in a global world and New Mobilities in Europe. In both cases it is not presumed that migrants (as distinct from immigrants) are self-consciously in the process of becoming Irish. Both kinds of representation are necessary if we are to understand the lives of migrants and the responses to immigration that sometimes circumscribe these.