Migration, Ethnicity, and Urban Inequality in Europe

UCLA, March 2-3, 2012

A two-day international graduate student conference, organized by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies, the UCLA Program on International Migration, the Department of Sociology – Sciences Po, and the Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Over the past several decades, Europe and North America have been at once confronted and transformed by the advent of large-scale international migration.

While the migrants may sometimes have been wanted, they have rarely been welcomed, with frontiers made ever tighter, a change to which migrants have responded by finding new ways of crossing borders. While issues of border management, smuggling, and trafficking have become increasingly important, control policies have had limited effect, with the result that both irregular migrants and efforts to police them are pervasive. In addition, the countries of immigration find problems taking new form, as the migrants’ children have come of age, often understanding themselves as members of the societies in which they have grown up, and yet finding themselves not fully accepted.

The challenge of incorporation has been heightened by a complex set of factors. First, immigrant-origin populations have responded to their situation in a variety of ways, whether through protest, the development of new ethnic and religious identities, or more conventional forms of political mobilization and engagement. Second, exclusion has taken new form, driven by growing levels of inequality, changes in the fabric of urban areas, and the expansion of non-standard or precarious employment. Simultaneously, migration is feeding back to sending countries, whether through migrants’ remittances, investments, or political engagements, activities which complicate incorporation trajectories in the destination countries.

These are the topics to be discussed at a graduate student conference, to be held at UCLA on March 2-3, 2012. Part of an effort to both build an interdisciplinary network of young researchers and to begin a trans-Atlantic conversation, the conference is organized by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies and the interdisciplinary Program on International Migration, in cooperation with the the Department of Sociology at Sciences Po and the Berlin Graduate School of Social Science.