This critical dialogue has provided a pleasant opportunity to consider the intersection of language and politics. Both Ringe’s work and my book question the role of languages. We argue that languages are more than just markers of group identity. Instead, when individuals use some “standardized” vernacular (per Ringe)—that is, a lingua franca (per my book)—this has positive externalities, whether it is depoliticizing politics or facilitating exchanges across diverse populations. This focus on individual multilingualism is much needed in the political science literature ranging from institutions to immigration, from the Council of Europe to China.
Ringe’s review raises two points that are helpful for identifying future avenues of research. The first is methodological: How do we measure migrant networks? One option is to directly ask respondents to self-identify who is in their networks. The challenge here is that people conceptualize networks differently. For example, someone in a bridging network—that is, one characterized by use of a lingua franca—may only identify the few family members around them as being in the network. But if the mechanism is about contact with diversity, such self-reported measures could ignore the different people with whom migrants regularly interact but do not consciously recognize; for example, their brokers. Alternatively, we could use an other-identification strategy where the researcher asks a third party, such as a community leader or maybe a broker, to code the networks. Such other-reported strategies, however, require so much investment and resources and have possible community leader-specific biases. Perhaps one solution is to triangulate between the self- and other-reported measures and examine the gap.
The second point concerns avenues of future research and is conceptual in nature: Where do migrants go? When it comes to the Chinese in Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), there is a bit of a neither-here-nor-there dynamic. On the one hand, the Chinese immigrants’ journeys are different from those of Latinx in the United States or Muslims in Western Europe. In both latter cases, there is an assumption that the move is permanent. But this is not the case for the Chinese in CEE, many of whom see CEE as a temporary destination. On the other hand, their journeys are also different from those of the Chinese in Africa. The Chinese in Africa are often laborers employed by Chinese state-owned enterprises for fixed periods, at the end of which they return home. This is not the case for many of the Chinese immigrants in CEE, who see it as a place to be an entrepreneur and to raise a family. Although Chinese diaspora scholars may note that this pattern is similar to that of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century or of Latin America today, the same attention is missing in the English-language literature and those focusing on the Global North.
And this is by no means a phenomenon exclusive to the Chinese, CEE, or both. Consider research on Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the United States. There is a tendency to assume that the group is fixed in the United States. Yet, there is also a substantial subset of the AAPI population that returns to Asia—and then back to the United States. When considering how these migrants move about, it is not surprising that AAPI lack the same group consciousness as Blacks or Latinx. We need to find ways to relax the monodirectional, static conceptions of migration patterns.
Many thanks to Nils Ringe for the wonderful review and to Daniel O’Neill for the opportunity to participate in the critical dialogue.
