| (iv) What are the immigrants' purposes? To escape permanently from a wretched background, or to earn enough to get married, or to set themselves up and then return home? (v) What are the values, beliefs and attitudes of the migrants towards their hosts? Do they accept status as inferiors and outsiders as legitimate? Or do they think of themselves as in some sense coming to their "home" country? I would, for example, guess that village Turks would expect to be treated as outsiders and labourers outside Turkey, and would be fortified for this experience by their own nationalist pride and their knowledge that all Muslims are superior to all infidels, no matter how technically advanced. How far such a view does in fact occur among Turkish workers, and how long it survives in daily life in Germany, would be interesting to discover. (vi) Finally, the demography of the immigration; the age and sex composition; and the ratio of active to inactive population, that is, how many of the migrants are active single workers, who have no spouses or have left them at home, and how far do they bring or acquire spouses and children? 3. Geopolitics (i) The relationship between the countries concerned, in political and economic terms. Italy, for example, is Germany's common market partner; Yugoslavs are subjects of a suspicious and potentially hostile government which discourages private migration. (ii) The distance measured in cost and trouble of the journey. A Dutchman in Germany can go home for the week-end,—but not a Pakistani in Bradford. 4. Settlement Patterns and Housing Arrangements Are minorities more or less segregated from the natives? Has a deliberate policy of dispersion succeeded as with the Dutch Indonesian refugees? Is housing provided by the employer and tied to the job? Are immigrants left to fend for themselves in an unfavourable private market? 5. Interpersonal Relationships/Social Networks: a) Home Ties Garbett and Kapferer have suggested the relevance of networks; Mitchell and Barnes have suggested so many distinctions that I hesitate to use the |
| word metaphorically and loosely. Yet plainly the links of personal relationships are an important factor in immigrant behaviour. Since we are discussing populations and not individuals, we must talk of a typical network rather than a number of individual ones. But obviously the strength of home links is highly relevant. (i) The supply of information about the host country available to intending migrants will affect the flow, and their reactions on arrival. (ii) It is commonly remarked that normally—and particularly for those from relatively closed communities, where people are accustomed to depend on personal contacts and multi-stranded ties,—chains of contact are established so that migrants move to kin or neighbours in the host country. Such contacts prepare for their arrival, providing somewhere to live, and even arranging a job to go to. (iii) A close tie to the home country provides security. In some cases,— Turks in Germany for example,—not only jobs but the right to renew permits depend on the buoyancy of the German economy. The alien village may provide, as it does for internal Turkish migrant labour, a form of unemployment insurance for Germany, since kin and land left behind will not allow a returning migrant to starve. (iv) Carefully maintained home ties, perhaps the custom of bringing a bride by arrangement from home, or even of sending children home to be cared for by close kin, may act to prevent the development of ties within and the acceptance of the norms of, the host society, as Mayer describes for Red Xhosa. b) Ties in the Host Countries (i) The homogeneity of the settlement area, and the opportunities for maintaining established ties with kin and neighbours from home— "homeboys ". (ii) How far do immigrants come into contact and form links with other ethnic groups or with natives? (Language is obviously of major importance). It is important to recognise the possibility that two communities—or presumably more than two,—may live in one area, yet avoid contact with each other; they may live, that is, in separate networks, which hardly touch, in spite of closely shared living space. While it is plainly possible on the basis of general impressionist personal observation to describe the degree to which networks do cross the boundaries of minorities, no one has, so far as I am aware, attempted to |
| devise a usable measure. Plainly there are two extremes: no links at all, and no detestable boundary at all. A way of measuring connectedness across boundaries,—that is a way of measuring the strength of boundaries in a social field,—would be extremely useful in many other sociological studies. This list of relevant variables is neither original nor in any sense definitive. Someone else could group these points differently, leaving out some and putting in others. But the complexity is even greater than this list suggests. English does not provide a simple way of saying that two things continuously affect each other, unless "interdependent" is held to mean this. Still less does it make it easy to say that a large number of things are constantly affecting each other. For example, A and B may so affect each other that each remains more or less constant, until C which has not formerly affected A or B, is changed by a coincidental change of states in D and E at the same moment, and alters the effects of A and B on each other. Such a train of cause and effect is not fanciful,—indeed it is too clear and precise. Yet to establish the plausibility of a chain of this complexity in an actual instance would require a vast amount of information, and almost certainly would be challenged,—legitimately if perhaps inconclusively,—by other social scientists endowed with sufficient passion either for the truth or for their own advancement, (or perhaps both!) to take the trouble to work over the data again in detail. I am arguing that almost invariably the explanations and analyses offered by social scientists are too simple and too general. They fail to meet the complexities of any one specific case, and even more they fail to account for a whole range of cases. But so long as we recognise and acknowledge this limitation clearly, we can both argue about particular cases and about the relevance of the analysis of one example to other, similar, examples. What we must have, and in detail, is the specific case material. Several papers provide analyses of particular countries or of particular minorities within those countries. But what is conspicuously absent is intensive study of a number of particular cases, based on direct personal knowledge of the people involved. One last difficulty remains. Several of these essays stress, in somewhat different language, that we are dealing with the meanings people bring to their social encounters. Both hosts and immigrants have been fitted out by socialisation in their pre-contact existence with cognitive maps and emotional responses which predetermine the meanings they attribute to the new situation. The technical research problems of discovering with reasonable confidence what these meanings are, are intense, the more so since, as I and others have remarked, the actual experience of immigration may rapidly alter them. |
| III - PERCEPTIONS, POLICIES AND PROPOSALS The relation between those responsible and empowered to take decisions and those who do social research is always difficult. The kinds of information which decision-makers need, or believe they need, are seldom what social scientists think to be the most important or interesting. But the emphasis on the contribution the perceiver brings to what he perceives has a further implication,—one perhaps we are forced in practice to ignore, but which I cannot forbear to point out. Raveau provides a clear example of this approach. In his discussion of negritude in France, he points out that the coloured French-born children of West Indians are inevitably endowed by their experience of growing up in France, as French citizens under a French educational system, with different values and different cognitive maps from those of their parents. He speaks of their need for a new, different "rationalisation" to explain their social situation from those which satisfied their parents. This remark implies that people's accounts to themselves and others of what they experience, socially, is not explained by what they are experiencing, but by their own attitudes and cognitive maps, which result from their socialisation, their "needs", and their position in the social structure. Such a view is widely current in contemporary sociology, though by no means new. On this argument, the views of social reality current among people responsible for framing, interpreting and executing policies are similarly limited. Indeed, Lambert's paper makes precisely this point about British official assumptions. It would seem to follow that if we want to influence policy, we have to do so by manipulating the values, cognitive maps and " rationalisations " of decision makers, and whether providing research data and ostensibly rational argument is an appropriate means to this end is perhaps open to question. The argument can be pushed further. What guarantee do social scientists have that their own perceptions of social reality are not limited, as they claim those of others to be, by their own socialisation and their own social position as career intellectuals in a particular professional environment? This argument is salutary in that it keeps us suspicious of ourselves, and tolerant of others. But no one can avoid the assumption that what he perceives as real is real, and those responsible for decisions have to base their decisions on this assumption. It is up to us to do our best to see that their perceptions are as accurate and sensitive as possible. Even if we rule out this basic scepticism, plenty of problems remain. Policy making implies goals as well as the means of achieving them. Lambert and Deakin point out that the early British reaction to immigration was to assume |