Migrants move, migrations are about movement, and so one would expect that studies of migration would reflect some of the dynamism and fluidity that comes with flows of real people. Yet many explanatory accounts of migration rely too heavily on fixed and stable “push and pull” factors that thrust migrants out of “underdeveloped” to “developed” countries, or on the essentialist and frequently Orientalist “attributes” or “social origins” that propel particular migrants in search of a better life. So it is most heartening to see a book that inserts movement and process so squarely into a field that depends so heavily on static categories to explain how and why people migrate across borders. Modern Migrations is a rich ethnographic study of the social networks travelled by Gujarati Indian migrants to the United Kingdom and United States. The book makes a timely intervention into contemporary discussions of migration and diasporas in the context of globalization by examining the life stories from a community that has been traveling across the world through a variety of complex paths for over a century. Preferring a “relational” approach that studies the active exchanges that make up such networks over the “substantialist” approaches based on the characteristics of immigrants and/or the countries they move to and from, this book examines the rich social networks that make up the messy, complex reality of migration with all its extraordinary opportunities and substantial hardships.
Although all chapters in the book draw from the extensive qualitative fieldwork that Poros conducted among the Gujarati immigrants in New York and London, chapters three and four contain the bulk of the empirical research. A sociologist by training, Poros is most like an anthropologist in these chapters, bringing to life quite vividly through several stories the opportunities and constraints experienced by individuals and families as they use various kinds of social networks to migrate from sending countries and adjust to life in host societies. We learn in some detail about family dynamics and obligations, marriage decisions within and across caste lines, workplace friendships and connections, different educational and work opportunities and choices, participation in religious and voluntary community associations, etc.—all serving to provide a rich sociological tapestry of the lives of a community in motion composed of individuals constrained by historical, political, and social structures, but nevertheless exercising much agency as they use, bend, and recreate social rules. Here it become evident that migration rarely occurs through the simple rational cost-benefit analysis of economic theory; rather, it occurs through the complex negotiations of embedded social relations. As a good ethnographer, Poros is quite aware of the various differentiations of caste, class, and gender within this rather diverse community, but rather than treat any of these categories as fixed, explanatory variables, her attempt is to show how these categories themselves are shaped and sustained as individuals use and transact through them in particular ways.
Similarly, the different networks of migration that she enumerates in the book are also not static routes of migrant travels, but are historically produced and sustained through relations of colonial power, different kinds of postcolonial ties, and long-established patterns of trade. All of these add up to create locally specific yet profoundly interconnected labor markets and transnational niche economies that span the borders of several contemporary nation-states. These historical connections are most fully elaborated in chapter 2 of the book that documents the long history of globalization and provides the necessary background to situating the individual life histories of the following two chapters. Thus, we meet the at least twice-displaced Gujarati Indian teachers recruited by colonial Britain to teach in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda in the first half of the twentieth century moving to the United Kingdom after the enactment of Africanization policies in postcolonial East Africa in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of them eventually finding their way into the motel business in the United States. A different kind of network brings Gujarati engineers and physicians schooled in institutions supported by US foundations and universities into professional jobs in New York and other American cities. A third kind of truly transnational network links the highly mobile but quite close-knit community of Gujarati diamond traders in Ahmedabad, Antwerp, Hong Kong, and New York. The two empirical chapters demonstrate in vivid detail that all these networks are sustained by the dense exchanges of money, information, influence, and other social goods among individuals and families so that we get a much fuller picture than most comparable accounts of what is actually going on in the dynamic process of migration.
One of Poros's theoretical innovations is to provide a typology of the three kinds of networks discussed above, each of which yields a different kind of migrant flow. Much of this analytical work is the substance of chapter 5 (see table on p. 162). Thus in addition to the “interpersonal ties” most commonly studied by migration scholars that produce “chain” migrations, Poros also describes the “organizational ties” that produce “recruits” into particular jobs (as the physicians described above) and the “composite ties” of family and community that rely on “trusties” such as in the highly lucrative but quite secretive diamond trade network where high levels of reliability and dependability are necessary. This typological analysis is quite useful in helping us see quite distinct (although overlapping) channels of migration, all of which have their own dynamics and momentums, and none of which can be reduced to, or deduced from, state-level immigration policies. Thus Poros is quite correct to point out, in the concluding chapter of the book, that top-down policies enacted to restrict immigration quite often fail simply because they don't account for the actual drivers of migration, which reside in the kinds of networks she identifies in the book. In doing so, Poros appears to be on the verge of making a significant contribution to questions of power in the analysis of migration policies and yet does not quite follow through on that promise.
Of all the concepts Modern Migrations grapples with, power (and concurrently the state) appear to be the most undertheorized. To her credit, Poros recognizes that power and inequality are most certainly at play in most social networks, and she rebukes scholars whose focus on coethnic solidarity within migration patterns draws attention away from the internal hierarchies in the distribution of resources, both material and ideational. But it would certainly have been a significant contribution to theorize more thoroughly the Foucauldian kind of capillary power that runs through her empirical analysis—the form of power that circulates through her networks, disciplining as well as empowering individuals, even as these individuals become the nodes through which state immigration policies become enacted and subverted and social rules bent, broken, and shaped. So when Poros suggests that “[c]ategories such as ethnicity … call out to be treated as empirical questions” (p. 157), it may also be helpful to remember that interstate migrations in which (state) power flows through social networks may well be shaping the category of the nation-state in interesting ways. Perhaps future empirical studies inspired by network studies of migration such as this book's might theorize how migrants in the age of globalization help reconfigure the nation-state.
