© Copyright, Fondazione Cariplo - I.S.MU. Milano.
Stampato a Milano nel mese di Agosto 1997
Tipomonza - Via Merano, 18 - Milano

Working group 3

Demographic Changes and Social Cohesion

Steve Vertovec
CRER, University of Warwick, UK

The lively Workshop discussion developed around the following issues.

I. Identification of Issues

[A] What are the ‘uses’ of demography in examining immigration and social cohesion? Here the participants discussed matters surrounding the distribution of public resources, economic factors related to demography (such as labour replacement) and the need to understand macro-processes (including migration patters, fertility and morality rates). A Key question was also raised: is concern with ‘demography’ and immigration really a mask for concerns with the changing ethnic or ‘racial’ makeup of society?

[B] What are some of the most important aspects of ‘social cohesion’ related to these and related to these and related topics? More questions than answers were involved here, including: ‘is there an imagined "threshold of tolerance" in any society which immigration issues breach? Is increased heterogeneity always associated with conflict? Does spatial concentration of groups create some sort of societal imbalance? What does ‘disaffiliation’ (the term invoked by Decouflé) involve? How is this notion specifically attributed to immigration?

II. State of Knowledge

[A] One overarching view which arose specifically in this part of the workshop was that ‘we are all prisoners of our national perspectives, concepts, models and traditions’. However, the question was raised as to whether everyone (particularly in popular public discourse) shares an implicit Malthusian paradigm: assuming that systems are stable until reaching some ‘overload’ point - here, due to immigration. In response most participants concurred that immigrants cannot be blamed for changes happening on a broader scale (affecting gender relations, family structures, the labour market and other economic domains, and largely associated with globalization). We must de-link the common perception that immigration-related demographic change is responsible for the ‘breakdown of social cohesion’.

[B] Spatial concentration was also discussed in a variety of ways in the Workshop, including an emphasis that is multi-causal, and can be either welcomed as potentially empowering for immigrants or avoided as a threat to commonality.

[C] Illegal immigration was discussed here too, especially by way of pointing to the fact that many modes of immigration and many immigrants themselves which, only ten or twenty years ago were considered legitimate, have recently been ‘criminalized’. Another dimension of this topic was raised, namely that the closed-border policies of European countries has created a ‘greenhouse for criminality’ in terms of stimulating the trafficking of humans.

III. Directions and Prioritiesof Research and Policy

• [A] Participants identified several key areas of research which are in need of development; these include:

• the ‘spatialization of data’: that is, rendering demographic material in readily digestible format, especially in maps, which may help policy-makers;

• researches must network themselves more and better in order to share experience on data collection;

• there is a need to treat the ‘host’ and migrant populations as a single social field (in order to avoid an approach which wholly problematizes the migrants and ignores larger processes of change);

• there is a need for much more microdata (including ethnographic work), longitudinal studies, and rigorous comparative research;

• regarding issues of concentration, we need to collect information and analyses not just about ‘where people sleep’ (i.e., their residence), but where they work, how they get there, where they undertake their social activities, and how they are concentrated temporally in their work, travel and leisure activities;

• with specific regard to demography, we need to understand better such matters as: how do attitudes, practices and patterns surrounding fertility change in a society? What can the patterns of mortality among migrant groups tell us about their patterns of adjustment? How can we best differentiate significantly different modes of migration (including internal v. international, skilled v. unskilled, ‘commuting’ v. long-term, and transnational v. transplanted)?

[B] participants also identified aspects of policy which are in need of development; these include:

• recognition that the ‘fragmentation’ of social relations may simply be the formation of new patterns and networks which should be welcomed;

• there is a need for creating ‘multiple points of access’ by which immigrants can participate in social, cultural and political activities;

• policies, institutions and local leaders should foster practices which promote positive interactions among immigrant and ‘host’ populations based on common interests (e.g., cleaning up housing estates, etc.).

Back to index
Previous Section
Next Section