Book 4 – English and Politics

L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD II

Chapter 17
English and migration
Korina Giaxoglou and Naz Rassool
 Introduction
Who are migrants? What is the direction of migration from and to the
UK historically?
The migration history of communities (to and from Britain to Asia and
vice versa) goes back to colonial times and the early trading settlements
in India and the British East India Company in the 1600s, which
prompted movements of people from Britain to India as well as from
India to Britain (Visram, 2002). These movements led to the creation of
different communities, which along with the range of communities
constituted through past and ongoing internal and international
movements of people, make up contemporary Britain.
From early sea-voyagers to traders, labourers and other people forced
to move away from their places of origin for short or extended periods
of time, migration has always been a central feature of human life and a
catalyst for change.
Nay Hannawi
Motivations for Migration

• People’s movements from one place to another are

motivated by a range of factors – personal, political,
economic and environmental – as well as by language.
• Modern migration, in particular, is characterised by the
mobility of people at a scale that’s deemed to be
unprecedented. This change in the pace of migration is often
attributed to processes of globalisation which, as you saw in
Chapter 4, are having an impact on how language varieties
are used and valued in different contexts.

Nay Hannawi
Migration destinations:

• Where would you or someone you know choose to migrate

to?
• What would influence your decision?

Nay Hannawi
The Role of English in Migration

The increased ‘value’ that English has acquired in many parts of the world through
processes of globalisation as well as through colonisation (Chapter 3) has meant
that access to English increasingly determines the migration of people from one
place to another, particularly across international borders. English can
facilitate the movement of people, because of its status as a lingua franca – local
or global –
 and it can encourage migration to particular places.
• People may actively choose to migrate to Anglophone countries because they
already speak English or in order to improve their English-language skills.
• However, English can also be used as a tool to control people’s movements and
livelihoods when, for example, it’s set as a requirement in language fluency tests
as part of citizenship applications, through which migrants can acquire the right to
live and work in a country.
Migration, thus, forms an important site for investigating language diversity as well
as for critically examining the way difference is represented and negotiated in
everyday and institutional contexts.

Nay Hannawi
Key themes discussed

In this chapter, you’ll continue to explore the intersection of language

and politics, focusing on contexts of migration.
You’ll start by considering some of the key motivations driving
people’s mobility in relation to the patterns of migration that these
have given rise to in the modern world and their intersections with
language.
You’ll then move on to examine the role of language choices in
shaping specific portrayals of migrants and migration.
This will form the background against which to reflect on the role of
English in migrants’ daily and professional lives.
In the final part of this chapter, you’ll assess the effectiveness of
language policies in citizenship frameworks that purport to facilitate
migrants’ integration into their host societies.

Nay Hannawi
1 Patterns of migration and language
 Why do people migrate? ( Activity p. 46)
People may have personal, political, and economic reasons for migrating.
 Economic reasons involve migration from rural to urban areas as people
are attracted by employment opportunities, higher incomes and a better
quality of life. Indeed, most people who migrate do so to countries with a
better standard of living than the country of origin.
 Reasons to migrate can also be political, as with the family of one of this
chapter’s authors, Naz Rassool, who moved from South Africa to the UK
during the period of the struggle against apartheid. Sometimes people are
forced to seek refuge abroad because of political factors such as
discrimination and persecution based on ethnicity, religion, sexuality or
gender, which may be either tacitly or overtly supported by the state
concerned.
Language can also play a role in decisions to migrate, as in the case of
British people moving to other English-speaking countries of the world, or
people from Britain’s former colonies moving to the UK.
Nay Hannawi
1 Patterns of migration and language
The different reasons motivating the decision to migrate have often
been described in migration studies as including pull factors (attractive
factors which encourage people to move to a country or another
place) and push factors (reasons to move away from somewhere),
which account for cases of both voluntary and forced migration.
As you may have noticed in the above activity, though, it’s not always
easy to categorise an individual’s or a group’s motivation to move as
one or another type of factor. Individual or family decisions to migrate
are never entirely categorisable as push or pull and they aren’t always
fully voluntary or forced. In real life, decisions are based on a complex
mix of factors, which need to be understood in the broader social,
political, and historical contexts and in the light of the specific life
trajectories of the people involved. These broader contexts are
captured in indicative patterns of migration that you’ll consider next.

Nay Hannawi
Modern migration patterns

Modern migration is often described in terms of

three successive time periods from the 1940s until
the 1990s with additional periods added from the
start of the twenty-first century onwards.
Each of these periods involved simultaneously
different types of people’s movement motivated by a
range of factors and giving rise to distinct types of
migration patterns (Migration Data Portal, 2021).

Nay Hannawi
Modern migration patterns

As you can see in Figure 2, these patterns are

described using labels, for example labour migration
or climate migration, that highlight the main reasons
personal, economic, political or environmental – as
well as the historical contexts of migration

Nay Hannawi
Modern migration patterns
After the end of the Second World War (1939–1945) labour shortages in
Europe in the sectors of materials production, construction,
manufacturing and the service sectors created work opportunities that
became pull factors for those looking to improve their lives. An example of
this type of migration, known as labour migration, is illustrated in the case
of women and men from Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, Trinidad
and Tobago and other islands, who were encouraged to come to Britain as
workers under a bilateral agreement between their countries of origin and
the UK.
Another example of labour migration to the UK during the same post-
world war period is the migration of ex-seamen from Mirpur, Pakistan,
who were also encouraged to migrate to Britain under the open borders
policy of the British Nationality Act 1948. These people settled in the UK,
contributing to the economic growth of the country well after the
immediate post-war period, while maintaining their ties with friends and
family in their countries of origin.

Nay Hannawi
Chain migration

The connections that migrants maintain with family

and friends in their countries of origin motivated others
to migrate knowing they could count on the support of
already settled members of their family or extended
network. The availability of this kind of support served
as another pull factor for prospective migrants to come
to the UK, giving rise to patterns of chain migration.
Examples of chain migration are Hindi communities in
Southhall, England; Greek communities in Victoria,
Australia; Korean communities established in Riverside,
California (1905), as well as in New York City, NY,
Seattle, Washington and Dallas, Texas.
Nay Hannawi
Modern migration patterns
Patterns of migration result in the emergence of new linguistic varieties and new
ways of communicating. Many of the people who moved to Britain during the
post-war period were already speakers of English and they also brought along their
own languages, including, for example, Jamaican Creole or ‘Patois’ in the case of
the Windrush generation or Mirpuri and Pahari in the case of the Pakistani
seafarers.
The varieties spoken by migrants and their speakers came into contact with local
ways of speaking, including the varieties spoken by other migrant groups. This
contact, which was particularly intense in multiethnic urban communities, gave
rise to what some linguists refer to as multiethnolects (Cheshire, 2019). This is a
broad term that describes the hybrid linguistic and stylistic repertoires of features
often used by speakers of mixed ethnic groups. The term marks the distinctiveness
of these repertoires from those used by any one minority group, which are known
as ethnolects. Although at first sight, these terms seem to focus on ethnicity at the
expense of other aspects of linguistic variation, multiethnolect captures the use of
innovative linguistic features and practices that aren’t restricted to any one ethnic
group or a heritage language.

Nay Hannawi
Modern migration patterns
In the case of English, such a multiethnolect, called London Multicultural English
(LME) (sometimes described in the media as ‘Jafaican’), emerged at the end of the
twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century out of young people’s
use of the variable language features in circulation in mainly urban diverse
contexts combined with features from the working-class dialect known as
‘Cockney’, particularly in inner-city London.
Typical features of this way of speaking, variants of which are also found outside
London, including Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester, include the use of a
staccato rhythm, a new pronoun (man), and a new quotative expression (this is +
speaker, as in this is me ‘let’s go to the park’ rather than I said ‘let’s go to the park’
or I was like, ‘let’s to go the park’), among other features common among young
speakers (Cheshire et al., 2013). Similar multiethnolects have emerged in European
cities with high levels of immigration, including Stockholm, Berlin and Copenhagen.
These have often become targets of critique in the media associated with the
rhetorics of anti-diversity (Warren-Smith et al., 2020), disregarding the
sociolinguistic conditions of their emergence and uses.

Nay Hannawi
Modern migration patterns
Public narratives about migrants are often based on
the use of a limited set of metaphors that build up an
overall negative evaluation of groups of people and
end up heightening negative emotions, such as fear
and a sense of threat.
For example, critical discourse analysis of press
coverage of migration discourses across different
national contexts including Austria, Bosnia, France,
Malaysia, New Zealand, Spain, the UK and the US has
pointed to the common use of ‘water’ metaphors, e.g.
a flood, a wave, a tide, overflow, a tsunami.
Similar to the liquid substance of water, which is
difficult to both stop and contain, the use of these
metaphors construct migration as something that’s
hard to control and, thus, as a threat to the nation
state and to sovereign control. Also common,
particularly in US and EU media sources between 2015
and 2016, are metaphors that construct migrants as
‘objects’ or ‘commodities’ (e.g. burden,ashare of
refugees, packed, numbers which are being processed,
redistributed, whittled or exchanged) (Arcimaviciene
and Baglama, 2018, p. 7).
In these metaphors, emotion is suppressed by
the emphasis on anonymous and abstract
masses and the dehumanisation of the
women, men and children whose livelihoods Nay Hannawi

are at stake
2 Media language and migration
threat-fear⇢ hostility

• As Arcimaviciene and Baglama (2018, p. 11) observe, the use of these

metaphors serves to legitimise ‘us’ (the ‘insiders’ who are ‘morally
right’) and delegitimise ‘them’ (the ‘outsiders’ who are ‘morally
wrong’) as ‘others’ or, in Parker’s (2015) words, as ‘unwanted
invaders’ who are to be prevented from coming to a country or
remaining in it. Similar representations of migrants as unwanted or
undesirable can be traced back to past representations, for example
of the Windrush migrants (Taylor, 2020). The fact that the use of
these metaphors has become conventionalised in the media, as the
extensive body of research on this topic suggests, highlights the deep
entrenchment of these negative narratives about migrants that
support a ‘hostile environment’ and anti-immigration policies.

Nay Hannawi
2 Media language and migration
The counter-story (human-interest)

• The proliferation of negative portrayals of migrants has also led to

attempts to change the divisive negativity arising from them. During
Europe’s so-called ‘refugee and migrant crisis’ in 2015, when large
numbers of people fled conflict-ridden countries such as Syria,
Afghanistan and Iraq, trying to reach Europe using dangerous
crossings, the media turned to human-interest stories. These stories
provided the public with more relatable narratives and images of the
real-life experiences of migration. However, it was often the case that
stories of tragedies suffered by migrants and their families gained
centre-stage and, in some cases, turned into sensationalist news and
(social) media spectacles.

Nay Hannawi
Media language and migration
The counter-story (human-interest)

In the reporting of Alan Kurdi- the boy from Syria who

drowned in the Mediterranean, when his boat was
capsized, and was found on the shores of Turkey….

• How similar or different are the language choices

in the headlines and cover lines? .
• What kinds of metaphors are used? .
• What kinds of portrayals are promoted through
these language choices and what is the emotional
impact of these portrayals?

The ways in which migration and migrants are talked

about and the related public narratives need to be
continuously considered in a critical manner, given
their important implications for everyday behaviours
towards migrants and their communities as well as
for the design of institutional policies, including
citizenship frameworks. Nay Hannawi
3 English and the experience of migration

 The increased value attached to English language proficiency results in large flows of students from
countries across the non-English speaking world to countries such as the UK, USA, New Zealand,
Australia and South Africa, to attend English language courses or to learn English by immersing
themselves in English-dominant countries.
 The drive for English which stimulates this type of migration is associated with the high status,
prestige and the perception of improved employment prospects associated with English (as discussed
in Chapter 16) i.e. a positive ideology linked with English
 English is seen as a source of :
• cultural harmony since it provides a means of communication between different groups of people
around the globe.
• Prosperity and a better life style, being proficient in English gives one the opportunity for upward
social and economic mobility. Having a linguistic capital in English is a valuable, asset in today’s global
world.
 The status of English also shapes many settled migrants’ relationship to the language, for example
creating in them the desire and aspiration that their children acquire an identity as English speakers
 Migrants’ perceptions of the importance and social capital of English are each shaped by their own
trajectory and biography and have a bearing on their everyday language and literacy practices, as well
as their identities.

.
Nay Hannawi
3 English and the experience of migration
Vignette 1: Rakshanda Ahmed
Vignette 2: Pedro pp.57-60

Analyze the experience of the two migrants considering the following

questions:
What language resources does each interviewee list as part of their
daily language practices and what is the place of English in these? .
 What is each interviewee’s view of and relationship to English? .
 What aspects of the interconnections of language and the migration
experience does each vignette highlight?.

Nay Hannawi
3 Mobile Communication and Migration
Smartphone-based language practices among refugees
p.61

Analyze the experience of the experience of the different members of

the Syrian family in Germany and evaluate the role played by digital
media in the migration experience:
What language(s) is used by Omar the dad, Kadira (the mom), Elayla
(the daughter, who is interpreting for her parents)?
 What is the educational background of each? .
 What does each use the smartphone for?.
How is the smartphone a part of the experience of migrants?

Nay Hannawi
3 Mobile Communication and Migration
Smartphone-based language practices among refugees
p.61

Nay Hannawi
3 Mobile Communication and Migration
Smartphone-based language practices among refugees
p.61

Nay Hannawi
4 English in citizenship frameworks

Obtaining citizenship of a new country can be an important way to

secure the right to live and work in that country.
In the UK, for example, there are different ways to apply for different
types of British citizenship or naturalisation, depending on one’s
circumstances, that grant different sets of rights.

Citizenship here is understood as a ‘political-legal status which reflects

a set of rights and obligations that constitute the relationship between
the individual citizen and the state’ (Wee, 2011, p. 125).

Nay Hannawi
4 English in citizenship frameworks

In the UK, there are different options for getting the citizenship:
- A person could be qualified as a British Overseas Citizen with a passport proving it, although
this doesn’t automatically grant him the right to live or work in the UK. To gain this right he
would have to qualify as a British citizen.
This could be automatic if one of his parents was a British citizen when he was born or had
‘settled status’, ‘indefinite leave to remain’ or ‘permanent residence’ which would grant him
the right to leave the UK for an indefinite period of time without losing his ‘right to return’ as
well as to vote in elections.
If none of the above applies to his case, he’d have to take the Life in the UK test which
assesses candidates’ knowledge and understanding of British history, traditions and everyday
life through 24 questions. He’d also need to submit required documents and evidence to
prove he’s been living in the UK during the last 5 years and he might need to do a speaking
and listening test to prove his knowledge of English.
Language fluency has become a major criterion for gaining residency and qualifying for
citizenship. Citizenship tests have been used in the USA and Canada for many years, while in
the UK and other European countries, New Zealand and Australia they came into being during
the first decade of the twenty-first century – in reaction partly to external terrorist threats and
partly to a perceived growth in, and concern over, ethnic diversity. (See example p. 70)

Nay Hannawi
4 English in citizenship frameworks
Aim of Citizenship tests
The official aim of citizenship tests is to help migrants integrate into a
receiving country by developing a common view and approach to life in
society, and therefore to support social cohesion. Other political
factors are put forward by governments of receiving countries,
including the need to screen out people who might be deemed to pose
a threat to society. The English language requirement in general can be
seen as fulfilling two purposes: first, to enable migrants to
communicate with other citizens from outside their communities and
therefore to integrate and become part of the broader community;
and, second, to facilitate access to the labour market. Government
statistics tend to suggest that the extent to which migrants are fluent
in the main language of their country of adoption influences their
ability to become employed within the mainstream labour market.

Nay Hannawi
4 English in citizenship frameworks

Discussion
The Canadian test appears to test the ability of candidates to interact
with others in English, focusing on communicative skills needed in
everyday social situations to a greater extent than the US one. For
example, a potential migrant to Canada must show their ability to
understand basic spoken statements while, to enter the USA, people
must write dictated sentences. The focus in the US test is on an
abstract notion of meaning, rather than how meaning is constructed
between people .through communication. For example, the US test
requires candidates to read a sentence ‘in a manner suggesting to the
USCIS Officer that the applicant appears to understand the meaning of
the sentence’ – whatever this manner may be – while the Canadian
test mentions taking ‘part in short, everyday conversations about
common topics’ and showing knowledge of ‘enough common words
and phrases to answer questions and express yourself’
Nay Hannawi
4 English in citizenship frameworks
Evaluation/ Criticism

The very fact that the tests differ in detail and focus calls into question the validity
of the construct of language fluency that they’re designed to test.
• How can these tests be so necessary if they require very different competences
from migrants?
• Why should countries have different requirements? One reason is that the tests
aren’t required for functional or literacy reasons, but social and political ones.
McNamara and Shohamy (2008) point out that high levels of language proficiency
tend to be required in countries which have experienced intense debates over
migration. They highlight three main objections, summarised as follows:
o First, people have the right to use a language of their choice and this right is
violated when governments impose a language on them.
o Second, prior to migration, many migrants have no access to language classes or
opportunities to learn.
o Third, migrants are capable of acquiring the language of the receiving society as
and when the need arises, and of using other languages to fulfil social duties such
as voting or working
Nay Hannawi
Conclusion
As Capstick (2020) notes, the close examination of these diverse stories
and experiences encourages ‘a more mobile account of the analysis of
language practices, one which tracks across national borders, and
appreciates the challenges of power and discrimination in all parts of
the world’ (p. ix). In other words, aided by new communication
technologies, migrants’ language practices must be understood not
only in the context of expectations and practices in their host
countries, but also as orienting towards those of their home countries,
shaped by global structures of power and inequality. Importantly, the
study of language in contexts of mobility and migration provides
insights into migrants’ flexible translanguaging practices, and their use
of resources from diverse linguistic repertoires – something that can
also lead to the emergence of new varieties, as you saw in the case of
urban multiethnolects.

Nay Hannawi