Immigration societies and the question of ‘the National'

As globalization has brought about a re-scaling of governance of political and economic life in the form of increased localization and trans-nationalization (Jessop, 1993; Brenner, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2004), migration scholarship has undergone a similar shift, privileging local/urban (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2010; Smith, 2000; Ellis, 2006) and trans-national (Levitt, 2001; Basch et al., 1994) scales as their major objects of inquiry. This shift has undoubtedly advanced our understanding of the complex spatiality of both immigrant experiences and contemporary migration management practices. Yet, in this rescaling, ‘the national’ has become, at best, a sort of afterthought or, more often, simply by-passed. One of the reasons behind this circumvention has been, especially in critical scholarship, the palpable uneasiness with the national as a politically desirable site of investigation. This, in turn, might have to do with an analytical conflation of the national with the concept of the nation-state, which at times has been associated with oppressive elements of both state power and difference-eradicating nationalism.