The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and Social Inequalities
Title
The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and Social Inequalities
Author
Faist, Thomas
Research Area
Class, Status and Power
Topic
Social and Economic Inequality
Abstract
The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labor and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces; because of the cross‐border diffusion of norms; and because there are implications of migration for social inequalities within national states. In earlier periods class differences dominated political conflicts, and while class has always been crisscrossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language; it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened over the past decades.