In (Western) European immigration countries, migrants are desperately needed as a source of cheap labor, at the same time they are the targets of ever expanding and violent bordering processes and they function as scapegoats for many of the crises that Western societies are facing. This is the migrant’s paradox, the starting point of Suzanne M. Hall’s extremely rich book, from which she explores how migrants living in the urban margins make work and livelihoods in conditions characterized by multiple displacements and dispossessions. The book is based on an extensive ethnographic study of shopkeepers located in deprived high streets in five UK cities. The study was conducted between 2012-2017 with a large research team.
Immigrants in the UK, just as in other Western European countries, live under brutal contradictions and conditions, arising from the financial crisis and austerity governance and the ever-extending reach of border(ing) politics. In this hostile context, the focus of the book are the practices of shopkeepers on these high streets, examining how different kinds of displacements, of citizenship status, of work, and of affordable places, impact on migrants’ practices (and struggles) of making work and livelihood, on sense of belonging, and on acts of resistance. Looking at practices in marginalized places such as high streets “open(s) up a theoretical and contextual space to explore how global migration, urban marginalization, and human capacities intersect” [19]. In writing the book, Suzanne M. Hall writes the streets as world, across spatialities and temporalities, always being attentive to how local processes are related to longer histories of colonialism and imperiality and the continuing significance of race and whiteness, as well as economic processes linked to “global mobility, extraction, consumption, and distribution” [17].
Central to the analysis is the idea of edge(s). The migrants that form part of the study can be viewed as an edge population, living in edge territories, working in edge economies, disposing of a citizenship at the edge, along which the chapters are structured. Analyzing how migrants are relegated to edge territories, how they make work and livelihoods in edge economies, and how they show unheroic forms of resistance essentially serves to show the human side of migration—against the prevailing political and economic “human residualization” [120]—and the extreme efforts that migrants have to go through and face everyday amidst brutal political and economic contexts.
In the first chapter (The Scale of the Migrant), Suzanne M. Hall recounts how the climate in the UK has become ever more hostile towards immigrants. Essentially, politicians of all parties approached migration issues under the header of control, making migration a matter of numbers, statistics and targets, followed by increasingly stricter and far-reaching border policies, e.g. through the UK Immigrant Acts of 2014 and 2016. These border policies are implemented through highly discriminatory practices such as policing, resulting in a situation of heightened uncertainty and insecurity for immigrants. The “triad of hostility”, made up of ideology, law, and enforcement [42] culminated in the Windrush scandal and the “Go home” campaign in which white vans with billboards saying “Go home or face arrest” drove through immigrant neighborhoods in London, “asking” illegal(ized) immigrants to voluntarily return “home”. These bordering policies obviously shape the lives of migrants in the urban margins. However, the streets are also the places where new associations and allegiances are formed, with the aim to circumvent the control of the state. The streets are the places through which the state-informed view of migration and migrants becomes challenged.
Taking us to the “Edge Territories” (chapter 2), Suzanne M. Hall turns to stories of arrival—recounting the migrant shopkeepers’ highly precarious journeys that included many stopovers across various countries, each part of the journey requiring new knowledge, draining energy and resources. Questions asked in the chapter are how migrants come to settle in certain parts of the city, how they develop a sense of belonging, and how “race and place overlap to produce a pattern of migrant emplacement in the city” [60].
Central to understanding edge territories and why and how migrants become shopkeepers/entrepreneurs in the margins are the effects of global economic processes, namely long-term unemployment, and the shift to part-time work. With the examples of Narborough Road in Leicester and Stapleton Road in Bristol, Suzanne Hall shows how part-time and self-employment are crucial for work prospects in the margins, in a context of a racially restrictive labor market and labor exploitation that is a fundamental characteristic of racial capitalism.
To illustrate, Bristol’s Stapleton Road is dominated by immigrants from Somalia, many of whom came to the UK after having received asylum in another European country. Their onward or double migration is a result of and reflects the structural disadvantage that asylum seekers and refugees face in European labor markets, e.g. the lack of work permits during the asylum process, or the difficulty to get education degrees recognized. The long and multiplied journey also point to “protracted and multiple processes of displacement that are profoundly damaging to human prospect” [75]. As becomes clear in all chapters, many shopkeepers had a degree beyond high school, many spoke two to three languages. For many migrants, becoming self-employed was a response to structural disadvantages, the general underinvestment in migration and the blaming of migrants for social ills, and it often meant a process of de-skilling. Foregrounding this hostile environment for immigrants, and how it forced them to certain—marginalized—spaces also renders ad absurdum any political talk about and insistence on migrants’ integration or assimilation.
Moving from edge territories to edge economies (chapter 3), the reader learns about “practices of work and meaning-making in the margins” [87], understanding work as being more than just labor. Just as edge territories, edge economies were particularly affected by the financial crisis, austerity measures and the accompanying job losses particularly in public service—a sector that many migrants relied on for formal work. The higher rate of self-employment among immigrants should therefore be seen as a reply to structural disadvantages and constraints, not as a preference or particular ‘talent’.
The conditions and restraints the shopkeepers living and working in the margins have to face is work outside of formal employment, no access to capital, and a financially struggling customers base. In this context of recession, hustling becomes important, as an “economic repertoire that is predicated on being underresourced, its incremental nature emerging in social and spatial form” [90]. Based on Rookery Road in Birmingham and Cheetham Hill in Manchester, the author traces the path “from textile mill to taxi ranks”, exploring how the long-lasting economic conditions of exploitation relate to and are expressed in the streets.
We learn that edge economies, even though they might seem “local”—particularly in contrast to corporatized work/business that is found in the (literal and figurative) center—are constituted by wider interdependencies, relating for example to multicultural repertoires that are “required to sustain exchange” [91] on the trading streets. Moreover, while making live and work in the streets depends on economic knowledge (and learning), social care and cultural competencies are equally important.
The streets described in this chapter illustrate the high variety regarding “temporal and spatial configurations”, given the starting places of the migration journey and the time that people have had their shops for, which ranges between 20 and 5 years. A calculation of employment on Rookery Road that estimates that every unit provides on average three to four jobs illustrates the economic significance of street trade. Despite this significance, the margins rarely play a role in urban planning, which is primarily concerned with the centers that figure strongly in urban growth strategies.
The relation between state and street is further illustrated with the example of form-filling economies that have emerged as a response to ever-tighter immigration policy and controls. Collaborations to circumvent control or help with migration-related bureaucracy come in different forms, from responsive, to barter and multilingual forms and they can be regarded as “mundane […] acts of resistance” [106], “to contest austerity governance and its punitive effects in edge territories” [107]. There is a strong immigration specialism in the streets that is targeted to the people living in the streets who are affected by the state bordering practices that stretch into daily life. The rise of these form-filling economies also needs to be viewed in the light of austerity measures and the cutbacks of legal and public services, that used to offer support in questions related to immigration and citizenship.
Overall, the chapter underlines that the described forms of hustle show an agility and dynamism, but one that emerges due to exclusions from “wider and more established circuits of exchange” [116].
The next chapter is about forms of “unheroic resistance”, taking us to Rye Lane in London. In the center are the “unheroic repertoires of resistance forged through active subdivisions of space, reinventions of tenure, and formations of loose coalition” [119]. Rye Lane is part of the Peckham district, which faced an intensive regeneration agenda. It is a frontline that is pushed more and more towards the center, through state urban planning. Planning for regeneration means planning for centrality, in the process of which (racialized) populations considered as problematic are regularly displaced. Given the focus on centrality for planning systems, the question is who gets to define the meaning of progress in terms of regeneration. Usually, multicultural street trade is considered secondary compared to the common and uniform entertainment and retail facilities that dominates the urban centers. Suzanne M. Hall recounts how public discourse portrays Rye Lane as a sink area, clearly illustrating a discriminatory debate and ideas/values of aesthetic configurations of place that are strongly influenced by whiteness, i.e. the lifestyles of the dominant group. Planning for regeneration is thus always a threat for people inhabiting the urban margins.
However, migrants are not passive receivers of planning policies, but have developed their own forms of resistance. Focusing on the traders on Rye Lane shows how they have “become fluent in the bureaucracy of planning processes” [123]. Since the “edge population” does not present a coherent “ethnic” or “working-class community”, forms of resistance and protest are not readily available, but usually appear as responses to specific crises. For example, following disputes between racial and religious groups, a trade association was formed to calm the tensions and mediate between the involved groups. The financial crisis led to customers having less money to spend on the streets, and the regeneration plans of the city were yet another threat of displacement.
In relation to these last two crises, a common form of resistance on Rye Lane lies in the subdivision of spaces, which is an expression of “urban mutualism” [139]. It is a response to the limited space that edge populations living in the margins have at their disposal, to the limited resources that newcomers bring with them, and the reduced consumption power of customers. These subdivisions are highly flexible arrangements, regarding the space that gets rented (which can be space for a chair up to a regular stand/shop, for any amount of time regarding hours per day or length of contract). By subdividing space, the space gets multiplied and thus available to those “who fall outside but adjacent to a formalized and increasingly unaffordable market with limited rental paradigms” [140].
Overall, the Rye Lane example shows that “in places that have little symbolic capture, inhabited by citizens who are overcategorized, and overpoliced”, forms of protests are not readily available to the residents (viewed in contrast to, e.g., right to the city protests). The multiple displacements that people in the margins are faced with limit the possibilities of street resistance. The struggles that are found in the streets are unheroic, but they create “a space for a locally emergent politics that engages with wider claims of belonging, outside of the center” [149].
Through a focus on “Citizenship at the Edge”, the last chapter provides a summary and further reflections on the results and discussions of the previous chapters. Edges are produced through bordering, through a constant sorting of people, resulting in the production of a “displaceable” population having to make their livelihood under conditions of dispossession, precarity, uncertainty, and state surveillance. The nature of the lives of people pushed to the edges can be regarded as highly stressed [154], and they consistently have to engage in the very hard work of “hanging in there”. What would have to change to make live more bearable in the urban margins? Obviously, our thinking would have to move away from the borders, instead focusing on the myriad forms of movement and “the possibilities these entail for a more varied comprehension of territory, authority, and citizenship” [159]. Focusing on crossings instead of borders draws attention to the multiple ways of learning and widening (cultural, communicative) repertoires that migrants acquire throughout their journeys. Taking into account migrants’ contributions would also mean giving them the right to work, for example while waiting for a decision over refugee status, coupled with stricter labor laws that combat against exploitation of the most vulnerable groups.
Planning, as an extension of state practices, could also be more responsive to what is needed in the margins, instead of approaching the margins through the lens of centrality. This requires learning from the margins, engaging in ‘repair’, thereby engaging “directly with assets that are in place rather than to replace them with what is out of place” [166]. This would also entail giving a stronger voice to local experts, instead of hired professionals from outside. Not surprisingly, what needs to be ensured is an affordable infrastructure, including spaces to live and work. Regarding the third dimension of migration, hanging in there, we need to recognize how migrants living at the edge create spatial and cultural possibilities to produce a sense of place, behind and beyond the dominating notions of whiteness and centrality. Here again, the idea of crossings serves to “contest multiple discriminations and to forge new solidarities” [180].
Without a doubt, ‘The Migrant’s Paradox’ is an excellent book. As the summary of the chapters has shown, the analysis is extremely rich, and it connects to a variety of topics that are discussed in sociology, geography, urban planning and architecture. Throughout the book, Suzanne M. Hall connects her research to conceptions of space, the meaning of urban infrastructures, racial capitalism, migrant city-making, building on authors such as Doreen Massey, Abdoumaliq Simone, David Harvey, Neil Smith, Saskia Sassen, Nicholas De Genova, and Stuart Hall, just to mention a few. Suzanne M. Hall never cites an author to refute his or her idea, but only in high appreciation of the work they have done – something that is not at all evident given the conditions in academia and the wish to distinguish oneself, sometimes at the cost of others.
Every chapter presents a skillful weaving together of theory and empiricism, giving plenty of room to the voices of the shopkeepers. Equally noteworthy are the visual elements that enrich the analysis, depicting migrants’ journeys in relation to space and temporalities, as well as the social spaces and subdivisions of shops on the studied high streets.
What I appreciated most in the book was undoubtedly the highly human approach towards migration and its related phenomena. Suzanne M. Hall’s careful and considerate writing is such a treat given the general hostile environment towards immigrants in Western societies. Her decidedly human approach, which foregrounds the small, but extraordinary achievements of migrants in the face of brutal political and economic contexts, should be an example to follow for all migration scholars.
