What is it about?
People have always moved, but not everyone has the same freedom to do so. This article examines how governments, borders, economic inequalities, social status and widely shared ideas about different kinds of travellers shape who is encouraged to move, who is prevented from moving and whose movements are treated with suspicion. It challenges the idea that mobility is automatically a sign of freedom and opportunity. The same society may welcome tourists, business travellers and highly skilled professionals while restricting refugees, migrant workers or people without the “right” documents. The article introduces the idea of“regimes of mobility” to understand these differences. Rather than studying movement and staying put as opposites, it shows how mobility and immobility are connected and shaped by unequal relationships of power across the world.
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Why is it important?
Globalization is often associated with a world in which people, money, ideas and goods move ever more freely. But this apparent freedom of movement is highly unequal. Some people cross borders with little difficulty, while others encounter visas, surveillance, expensive procedures, restrictive employment conditions, detention or outright exclusion. The article shows that these experiences are not separate phenomena. The relatively effortless mobility enjoyed by some people is connected to systems that restrict, compel or stigmatize the movement of others. This is why the concept of“regimes of mobility” matters. Instead of automatically treating movement as freedom and staying put as restriction, the article asks us to examine the power relations that produce both. A migrant worker may cross thousands of kilometres yet be tied to one employer, while somebody who stays in one place may be exercising an important right to remain. Similarly, people may be forced to move just as they may be forced to stay. The approach also challenges researchers to look beyond national borders without ignoring the power of nation-states. Migration cannot be understood simply by dividing people into categories such as “internal” and “international” migrants or “native” and “foreigner.” What matters is how political, economic and social forces operating at local, national and global levels determine people's different opportunities to move, remain, belong and build a future.
Perspectives
For me, one of the most important messages of this article is that mobility should never be confused automatically with freedom. When we began developing the idea of regimes of mobility, much scholarship was emphasizing flows, movement and seemingly increasing global interconnectedness. There was something attractive about this perspective, but it risked obscuring a fundamental fact: people do not participate in this mobile world on equal terms. I remain particularly interested in the strikingly different meanings societies attach to people who move. The movements of tourists, international professionals or business travellers may be welcomed and even celebrated, while those of migrant workers, refugees or undocumented people can be represented as problematic or threatening. Movement itself is therefore not the issue. What matters is who is moving, under which circumstances, with which documents and resources, and how that movement is socially and politically interpreted. This is also why I find the relationship between mobility and immobility so important. We should not assume that moving is always desirable or that remaining somewhere represents failure. People may desperately want to move but be unable to do so. Others may be compelled to migrate when what they really want is the possibility of building a viable life where they are. Still others may travel enormous distances while remaining constrained by employment contracts, legal status or economic dependence. Mobility and immobility therefore need to be understood together. Ultimately, I see the regimes-of-mobility framework as an invitation to ask questions about power. Who can move? Who must move? Who is forced to stay? Whose movement is welcomed, and whose is feared? And, perhaps most importantly, who has the authority to make these distinctions? These questions remain essential if we want to understand mobility not simply as movement across space, but as a fundamental dimension of inequality in our interconnected world.
Professor Noel B. Salazar
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, February 2013, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/1369183x.2013.723253.
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