Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas

Abstract

Don't live the world as if you were renting or here only for the summer, but act as if it was your [mother's] house.-Nazim HikmetThis article provides a comprehensive overview of the quantitative dimensions of contemporary world migrations and diasporas, as well as a commentary on qualitative dimensions of pertinent English-language scholarship.1 It oers a global context within which scholars may situate their work order to enhance communication and comparability across scholarly disciplines and regions. Scholars who study world migrations and diasporas Europe are not often conversation with those studying these migrations and diasporas North America or the Gulf states. !e same can be said for scholars who study world migrations and diasporas Malaysia, China, or Australia, as well as South America, Africa, or the Caribbean. Similarly, scholars approaching these topics from the paradigms of postcolonial theory, anthropology, cultural studies, demography, history, comparative literature, or sociology do not o!en enough engage relevant scholarship outside of their paradigm. Only occasionally do scholars of dierent disciplines gather together to present their work at scholarly meetings, and even then we seem to speak different languages.2 Disciplinary differences are healthy and important for the range of perspectives they contribute, but an overarching framework-such as the one oered here-will better enable us to make comparisons across place, time, and social contexts, and to deploy our conceptual categories in a relational manner.3Developing such an overview of current migrations and diasporas requires acknowledging the serious limitations inherent to the task. Demographic data are always subject to both random and systematic error; accuracy migrant demography is especially elusive. Terminology and measurement tools vary according to who is doing the counting and how they construct their categories. Since demography is always connected to place, dominant ideologies, laws, categories, and nomenclatures where the counting occurs introduce variations. Demographic statistics speak to those who have been counted; there are many reasons why migrants might evade enumeration, for example, due to legal or political status. Furthermore, some enumerations persons born on a state's soil are considered foreign-born if they maintain the nationality of their parents and have not naturalized, while other states may count them as native-born. These variations are tied to state ideologies of nation and citizenship and corresponding rules concerning naturalization (where available), thus making it difficult to compare quantitatively across sites.The numbers provided this article can offer a general framework for understanding the breadth and character of world migrations and diasporas today. However, it is incumbent on specialists of each migrant location to do the tough investigative work needed for quantitative precision and comparability, including revealing those who are uncounted. Finally, demographic data on migrants tend to be organized by country of birth, potentially masking meaningful distinctions between different groups from the same country of origin. Although the data presented here were tabulated and published (by others) as data, I use the term Arab world migration to highlight that we are not necessarily describing cultural or ethnic groups, but people who come from a particular place. There are many indigenous and diasporic peoples living in, moving through, and leaving the world who are not Arabs, such as Berbers, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Circassians, to name a few.In the process of searching for comparable quantitative data, I discovered that categories of quantification have a reifying tendency that has infected our qualitative research as well. These categories direct our gaze specific ways that cause us to highlight certain matters while overlooking others, creating an overall imbalanced body of scholarly literature on world migrations and diasporas. …

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