Migration research: global society with a migration background

Society and politics have two pressing practical questions for migration research: First: How can the integration of those migrants who are already here succeed? Second, are there more to come? Migration research itself certainly enjoys the attention it receives, but it also groans under the pressure of expectation to do justice to the two social imperatives behind these questions: that integration must succeed in order not to overstrain social cohesion and that immigration (therefore) also limited must be. Ultimately, behind the immense political interest in answers to the question of the causes of global refugee movements is the economic hope that the findings of migration research will not only make the fight against these causes "on the ground" effective,but above all it is cheaper than fighting flight itself and especially integration here. But is the subject up to these expectations and the understandable impatience of the public? And are its representatives even willing to provide these answers? At the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, they are now trying to provide at least an overview of the “status, challenges and perspectives” of the field with the new journal for migration research.to deliver these answers? At the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, they are now trying to provide at least an overview of the “status, challenges and perspectives” of the field with the new journal for migration research.to deliver these answers? At the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at the University of Osnabrück, they are now trying to provide at least an overview of the “status, challenges and perspectives” of the field with the new journal for migration research.

Reading the recently published first volume reveals a subject whose tolerance of the heterogeneity of its approaches must be perceived as an irreconcilable conflict. Hannes Schammann, for example, advocates pausing five years after the refugee movements of 2015/16 and asking yourself whether something like disciplining and canonizing the state of research and terminology would be necessary to consolidate the subject. After all, “numerous studies” have shown “too careless use” of terms such as asylum, flight or illegality. Unfortunately, the articles in this magazine show that this is less about carelessness than about a programmatic intention: Hardly any article asks with the necessary thoughtfulness whether one is interested in one of theIf you want to hold onto the term firmly established in politics and society, this very term will be pounded into the ground in the next article and all those who still use it will be put in the national corner.

For example the central concept of integration. “The discussion of migration”, as Boris Nieswand is still very cautious about, “appears compared to other social science subject areas as being permeated to a special degree by moral judgments.” He does not mean to imply that migration research “predominantly” pursues morally based knowledge goals. His only aim is to show that it does not act outside, but rather “within a moral reference space”, but that this has not yet been “reflected in a systematic way”. Ludger Pries also reflects on this action, but asks whether the sociology of migration should stick to the “concept and goal of integration” at all. For Erol Yildiz and Heiko Berner, however, that's not even worth asking.They apodictically start with the accusation that because of the “inherent norm of the term majority society”, the migration research using it “contributed significantly to the reproduction of ethnic-national differences”. Integration “condensed” into a “persistent everyday myth”. Instead, in their contribution, which they want to understand as a “resistant and subversive practice”, they advocate adopting the “post-migrant perspective”. They demand nothing less than a “radical break with the basic premises” of the conventional migration discourse and its “categorical separation between migration and sedentarism”. After this break it becomes very fundamental: sedentariness is also a myth, while migration is the norm.The term integration with its "judgmental distinction between locals and newcomers" must disappear, at best one could speak of the "postmigrant localization" of the people. We're all on the move, so we're all migrants? One wonders whether this is still carelessness or agitation.