Intersectional migration research: Re‐centring governance structures

Within migration studies, the use of intersectionality as a theoretical, conceptual and analytical tool is increasingly gaining traction. Most of this research provides compelling empirical evidence demonstrating how migrants' intersecting social locations shape their experiences of migration and settlement (see also Clark-Kazak, 2024). These insights are important in understanding how social boundaries operate and the consequences they have for marginalised individuals and groups. While acknowledging the importance of analysing lived experiences of oppression, in this commentary, we argue for the significance of applying an intersectional lens to governance structures and their dynamics to shed light on state boundary politics (re)produced through policies, laws and discourses. While there is a great deal of discussion and contention on its different meanings, applications and aims, intersectionality posits that social locations—with a focus on gender, race and class—in society, at a given time and space cannot be understood in isolation from one another. Instead, these work together to produce unique material realities and social experiences of marginalisation, discrimination and exclusion (Davis, 1981). The term illustrates that single-axis frameworks which focus on either gender or race fail to explain how marginalised women are vulnerable to both gendered and racial discrimination (Crenshaw, 1991). An intersectional lens instead sheds light on the unique, many-layered experiences of discrimination and oppression that arise from intersecting social locations. Subsequent debates within North American intersectional, feminist research have centred on which social locations to include in the analysis, in particular, whether to expand these beyond gender, race and class—a move that has been criticised for watering down the central political aim of intersectionality to address Black and Brown women's inequalities (Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Fresnoza-Flot, this issue). European research has tended to centre the analysis on gender, ethnicity, nationality and religion, reflecting the different race histories in the United States and Europe (Davis, 2020). Important for this commentary, intersectionality scholars have debated which levels of analysis are the most fruitful to understand and challenge intersecting marginalisations: identities, categories of difference, processes of differentiation or systems of domination (Dhamoon, 2011). In migration studies, a growing number of scholars advocate for the importance of intersectionality both as an analytical tool and as a heuristic to highlight issues of marginalisation affecting individual migrants and groups (see Bastia et al., 2023; Scuzzarello & Moroşanu, 2023 for reviews, see also Clark-Kazak, 2024). This “bottom-up” lens (Scuzzarello & Moroşanu, 2023) has brought fundamental insights in migration studies highlighting important inter- and intra-group differences in migration and settlement. The analysis of how social locations of gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, nationality, sexuality and religion intersect exposes groups' and individuals' differential access to resources to migrate internationally (Pessar & Mahler, 2003), their agency as mobility initiators (Anthias, 2012), as well as their prospects and experiences of settlement in a new country (e.g., Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2017; Yurdakul & Altay, 2023). This work focuses largely on the experiential implications of intersecting social locations. While we are convinced of the importance of this research, we concur with Dhamoon's argument (Dhamoon, 2011), among others, that scholars could apply intersectionality to the analysis of both micro-level interactions (e.g., community-level and the individual) and of macro-level structures (e.g., global and national-level institutions and policies). Thus, we advocate for the need to expand the application of an intersectional feminist lens to migration governance and migration policy (Cleton & Meier, 2023; Scuzzarello & Moroşanu, 2023). Indeed, intersectional analysis of migrants' experiences of marginalisation somehow conceals that intersecting migrant categories created and reproduced by the state are reflective of social structures and power dynamics, not only of identities. Drawing on our research (e.g., Cleton, 2022; Scuzzarello & Carlsson, 2019; see also Korteweg, 2017; Kofman et al., 2015), we argue that intersectional analysis should be applied to migration governance structures to highlight how state and other institutional actors engage in boundary work. This matters for two reasons. First, intersecting state categorisations of migration are intertwined with patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism and heteronormativity and shape the production, content and directionality of migration by facilitating the mobility of some migrants over others. Individuals who are categorised as “skilled” are offered preferential routes to emigration and settlement (Kofman, 2014), compared with “low-skilled” migrants who instead are faced by temporary visa schemes and limited rights (Netto et al., 2020). Similarly, female marriage migrants, especially from predominantly Muslim countries, face complicated visa barriers that put them in a position of dependence on their spouse, are subject to intense scrutiny upon arrival and are seen as legitimate targets of specific “integration” policies (Moret et al., 2021). Second, migrants' acceptability, desirability and potential belonging to the recipient society are constructed exactly at the intersections of gender, race, class, perceived cultural and religious proximity, as well as being informed by neoliberal market logics (Yuval-Davis, 2011). States can marginalise migrants and ethnic minorities through policies and institutional practices that sort and organise them by categories of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class and sexuality, among others. Such intersecting state categorisations position migrants and their descendants as more or less “desirable” and compatible with a particular nation-state (Simon-Kumar, 2015). This importantly shapes migrants' (and their descendants') opportunities and life chances in the country of settlement. Research demonstrates how racialised non-Western migrants are discursively positioned as “unassimilable” by state actors in terms of both socio-economic skills and cultural compatibility. This legitimises how policymakers and politicians approach the need to “integrate” these migrants and their descendants (Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018). Relatedly, an intersectional analysis of governance structures and practices throws into stark relief the power relations of citizenship acquisition as intrinsically bound up with not only neoliberal “deservingness” criteria, but also how these intersect with colonial histories and its gendered and racialized relations that render them intelligible in the first place (Bassel, 2021). To pay heed to state migration policies and the boundaries they draw between communities means, in our view, to fully and critically engage with power structures and processes that create the conditions for migrants' intersectional experiences of marginalisation. Indeed, understanding how state categories work and intersect at the macro-level to legitimise the exclusion of specific groups provides scholars with the tools to harness intersectionality's original aims of promoting social justice and reducing inequality (see also Fresnoza-Flot, this issue). Moving forward, we call for greater dialogue between “bottom-up” and “top-down” intersectional migration research to provide knowledge about the relationship between social locations and structures of domination; to understand how they are mutually constructed by states and groups to create and justify difference; and to present how intersecting marginalisations are navigated and resisted by subordinated individuals and groups alone or through coalitional work. In line with feminist research at large, such transformative work is necessary to destabilise dominant exclusionary ideologies (see also Clark-Kazak, 2024). The opinions expressed in this Commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons. Not Applicable.