What Can We Learn about Migration and Migrants from Southern Scholars? A Brief Discussion

Abstract

Within the United States, there is a dominant focus on international migration and international migrants' assimilation and integration efforts, along with separate conversations on intersecting structures that marginalize non‐white migrants and citizens. Trafficking and refugee studies are relatively small and distinct fields that mostly remain outside dominant scholarly conversations on migration, especially in sociology. This essay presents one strand of conversation by scholars in the global South who center forced migration and conceptualize all migrants, internal to international, as part of one model. The discussions by the Calcutta Research group open up complex histories, social inequalities, and the need to discard the colonial logics embedded in the study of migration and migrants.