Migrant enclaves: disempowering economic ghettos or sanctuaries of opportunities for migrants?

an article by Dieu Hack-Polay (Lincoln International Business School, Lincoln, UK) published in Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy Volume 13 Issue 4 (2019)

Abstract

Purpose
This paper aims to examine the migrant dilemma about operating extensively in migrant enclaves vs integration in host communities.

Design/methodology/approach
The paper is a critical literature review contrasting views and perspectives of the role of migrant enclaves in migrant integration and contribution in new societies. Research in the area of ethnic enclaves has been polarised: on the one hand, the optimists argue the critical benefits of migrant and ethnic community networks, thus downplaying potential drawbacks of such networks and the disadvantage externally imposed on migrants; on the other hand, the pessimists overemphasise the disadvantages of ethnic enclaves, portraying them as ghettos of alienation.

Findings
Based on the social solidarity integration model and immigrant-host and social interaction theory, the paper posits that migrant community networks could intentionally or unintentionally engender cultural alienation, worsening an already precarious educational, cultural and economic exclusion. Thus, migrants could remain in lower societal roles and experience limited upward social mobility if they operate exclusively within migrant and ethnic networks. However, ethnic enclaves, at the same time, offer the initial psychological nurturing on which future successful socialisation work with migrant communities can be built.

Research limitations/implications
From a research angle, the theorisation of migrant enclave requires a new approach, which identifies dynamism and contextualisation as central to the debate.

Practical implications
From a policy perspective, the research suggests the rethinking of the role of community support systems (and the wider enclave debate). The organisational implications the research suggests a shift of the organisational paradigm in the way migrant organisations manage themselves and support members in the enclave.

Originality/value
This paper’s contribution is to take a duality approach to studying the ethnic enclave and posits that this will engender effective social policy that helps reduce economic inequality.

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Destination dumping ground: The convergence of ‘unwanted’ populations in disadvantaged city areas

an article by Lynda Cheshire (The University of Queensland, Australia) and Gina Zappia (University of Tasmania, Australia) published in Urban Studies Volume 53 Number 10 (2016)

Abstract

Academic and lay discourses around disadvantaged urban areas often draw on the language of ‘dumping grounds’ to encapsulate the poverty, marginalisation and social problems often found there. Yet the concept of a dumping ground remains insufficiently theorised.

This paper addresses this issue by identifying five constituent features of the dumping ground:

• the perception of people as waste whose fate is to be discarded;
• the need to accommodate this human ‘waste’ and the logic by which places are selected for this purpose;
• the mechanisms through which this spatial sorting occurs as problem populations are moved to their ‘rightful’ place;
• the relations of power which enforce or encourage this mobility; and finally,
• the reactions of incumbent residents in neighbourhoods that are compelled to host unwanted social groups.

In the second part of this paper, these themes are illustrated via a case study of the Australian city of Logan where residents complain that their city has been treated as a dumping ground in order to explain its poor reputation.

Full text (PDF)

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