A Bourdieusian Perspective on the Migration Industry

(Image Source: Japan Focus)

(This article was written as part of an academic essay assignment)

Going back to one of Week 2’s readings, Ali (2007) wrote of a “culture of migration” amongst the Hyderabad youth and how they would approach migration to the US (p. 47). Week 3’s article by Liu-Farrer (2016) very interestingly states that affluent Chinese nationals have a culture of emigrating for means of achieving upward social mobility (p. 499). Week 6’s article by Kristol and Dahinden (2020) even suggests that marriages between a couple of different cultural backgrounds – no matter how dissimilar - is indicative of how cultural and class categories are mutually intertwined to normalize these “Swiss marriages” (p. 46). Put simply, what this goes to show is that culture is advertently linked with how people migrate. However, how culture is linked with the operation of the migration industry is two-fold and can be explained through Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of; 1) the Habitus, and 2) cultural capital. 

Bourdieu was a prolific French sociologist known for his work on the dynamics of power in society, and how power is subtly expressed within social orders – namely in the form of social, cultural, and symbolic capital (Power, 1999). In one of Week 9’s readings by Lindquist (2010), the author suggests that labour recruitment agencies in Indonesia act as brokers – sending documented migrants outward to countries such as Malaysia and Saudi Arabia to work as domestic or plantation workers; this is a major industry as there are reportedly some 4.3 million Indonesian migrant workers around the world today. I argue that culture plays a big role in creating numbers like this, and the Bourdieusian theory of the habitus will explain why this is so. According to Dimitriadis and Kamberelis (2006), a habitus is “a set of dispositions that generate and structure human actions and behaviours” (p. 68). How this relates back to the article is very simple; the author mentions how the poorest families in Lombok, who depend highly on temporary wage labour, would seek to migrate abroad when they have the capital to do so; and for Bourdieusians, in so doing would actually be an example of a partly unconscious social action driven by an individual’s unique social history and socially constructed predispositions – perhaps derived from experiences and social interactions living in poverty, and seeing your peers work abroad. This is their habitus. So in this context, we can say that the reasons why Lombok is one of the largest “migrantsending” regions in Indonesia is precisely because of the accumulated social experiences of individuals that grew up in an environment that; 1) encourages migrating abroad for work; 2) puts family first, as remittances is the only way to put food on the table, 3) has no other choice, as other industries (i.e. tourism) are not developed enough to make a living, 4) did not provide access to higher levels of education, and 5) has a long heritage of labour migration. 

To this end, all of these factors drive group behaviour in Lombok in the very same way that drives the Chinese out of Fujian Province in China. According to Keefe (2009), Fujianese residents have been traversing the world for over three decades – facilitated by underground “snakeheads” – where they live and work as illegal immigrants in countries like the US (p. 33). This article mirrors exactly the sort of Bourdieusian logic discussed earlier as Fujian Province itself has always been an “unusually outward-looking corner of China” (p. 35). Additionally, the authors noted an anomaly in this region – the richer it got, the more people that emigrated (p. 36). This is not mere coincidence. Such phenomenon could be explained using Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital (in addition to the habitus), which is a collection of three forms; 1) embodied, the form of knowledge that resides within us; 2) objectified, material objects used to indicate social class; and 3) institutionalized, the way in which society measures cultural capital (Richardson, 1986). In this context, we can say that the embodied state is the experience of Fujianese family life and society, which is predominantly rural, agrarian and communal - like most of China before the deagrarianization period (Kung, Cai and Sun, 2009). On the other hand, the objectified state describes one of the reasons why some Fujianese leave the province, and that is due to “relative deprivation”, or the “uneven distribution of material comforts” (p. 36) suggesting that the knowledge of your neighbours doing better than you is enough intrinsic motivation to call up a snakehead, and leave the country. This leads to the institutionalized state where a Fujianese’s worth is determined by his or her willingness to leave behind family and change their destiny for the better. In fact, such self-determination is valued within societies like Fujian province - for those unwilling to make the sacrifice are deemed as “unambitious, if not downright lazy” (p. 44). Coupled with their inability to integrate into the “new economy” (p. 36), we can say that the typical Fujianese villager simply has not acquired enough cultural capital in the form of education credentials, material wealth, and societal etiquettes for “city life” to do well in their own rapidly developing (and competitive) country – forcing them to leave. 

All in all, it is understood from the readings that the migration industry operates on both legal and illegal frameworks – from Indonesian domestic servants employed by brokers to Fujianese sojourners ferried by snakeheads. I argued that to fully understand the industry would require looking at the sociological origins as well, and that the interplay between habitus and cultural capital proves these origins to be important. Though this is not to say that Bourdieu was omniscient, but just that his theories provide an alternative perspective – one that looks at it from the barest of levels in the same way that neuroscience looks at behaviours on the molecular levels. If labour recruitment agencies and snakeheads are the engines to the migration industry, then cultural capital and habitus is the diesel that powers it.