Cultural psychology for a new era of citizenship politics

Abstract

In the current era of citizenship politics, both legal citizenship and cultural citizenship have become highly contested social categories and new bases for social discrimination. Psychological studies of migration thus need to consider more explicitly how shifting sociopolitical contexts shape migrant life opportunities and how migrants respond to their shifting circumstances. Cultural psychologists have much to contribute to this project given their focus on the ways cultural experiences are shaped at once by broader social determinants and the intentional acts of social agents who navigate diversely organized worlds. However, we argue that cultural psychologists need to integrate critical concepts into cultural psychological studies of migration to avoid both overlooking important determinants of migrant lives and inadvertently perpetuating social inequalities and discriminatory policies. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted with Polish “irregular” migrants in Canada and Sikh Americans, we show how critical concepts such as “illegalization,” “deportability,” and “cultural citizenship” can help expand cultural psychological inquiry to better understand contemporary immigrant experiences. We conclude with discipline-specific recommendations for building a cultural psychology fit for the study of migration in the 21st-century.

Keywords

Immigration citizenship cultural psychology cultural citizenship irregular migration illegal immigration

Over the last few decades, global migration has grown increasingly politicized and unequally distributed (De Genova & Peutz, 2010). Migration scholars argue that we live in an “Age of Migration” (Castles & Miller, 2009) marked not only by more voluminous and mixed migratory movements, but also increasingly stratified immigration contexts. With rising numbers of international migrants, advanced nation-states such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and European countries rely on immigration policies no longer to control but manage migrant movements and differentially segregate immigrants into different categories of citizenship status (Andrijasevic, 2009): top-tier migrants with social and economic capital are readily granted legal pathways to citizenship, whereas the greater majority of low-skilled migrants who do not meet immigration eligibility criteria are pressed to rely on temporary and/or “irregular” routes (De Genova, 2002; Menjívar & Kanstroom, 2014).

“Irregular” or “illegal” migrants refer to persons who enter, reside, and/or work in countries without appropriate state authorization. In recent decades, “irregular” migrants have become the fastest growing form of international migration, comprising an estimated 20 to 30 million persons (Koser, 2010). All around the world, “irregular” migrants live, work, and raise their families in the shadows of society, with limited access to work, social services, and legal rights. Fears of deportation in turn exacerbate their vulnerable experiences and dissuade them from accessing the few services that are available to them (De Genova & Peutz, 2010).

Observing growing immigration controls, anti-immigrant sentiments, and persisting “irregular” migrant numbers, migration scholars have turned to critical perspectives that study migrant “illegalization” as an exploitative sociopolitical process. From this view, migration policies and restrictive immigration contexts are shown to marginalize, segregate, and “illegalize” growing numbers of migrants who then serve nation-states as cheap and exploitable workers (De Genova, 2002). To emphasize the social production of migrant “illegality,” we leave “illegal” and “irregular” in quotes throughout this paper.

However, it is not just “illegal” immigrants who are affected by shifting global politics of citizenship. After 9/11, for instance, South Asian Muslim and Arab migrants who were legally residing in the United States and in many cases who were citizens of the United States were suddenly cast as unpatriotic and as belonging to the enemy camps. Maira (2011) argues that after the 9/11 attacks:

Questions of religion, racialization, national identification, and citizenship have taken on new, urgent meanings for Muslims living in the United States and Arab and Middle Eastern Americans more generally, as well as South Asians and others mistakenly profiled in the post 9/11 backlash, particularly (turbaned, male) Sikh Americans, some of who were attacked or killed for “looking Muslim.” (p. 111)

Similarly, Purkayastha (2005) argues that post 9/11 moments produced a heightened state of racialization for many South Asian citizens in the United States, as they became associated with terrorism and “Islamic Fundamentalism.” More recently, President Trump’s executive orders to ban immigrants from entering the U.S. from predominantly Muslim countries exemplifies how state agents can deploy foreign policy as a framework and justification for the direct and indirect racial profiling of South Asian Muslims in the United States (see also Douglas, Sáenz, & Murga, 2015).

In this paper, we show how in the current era of citizenship politics, both legal citizenship and cultural citizenship have become highly contested social categories and new bases for social discrimination. Based on this we argue that psychological studies of migration need to consider more explicitly how the politics of citizenship shape the life opportunities of diverse migrant groups. For decades psychological studies of immigrants focused on universal acculturation processes without systematically examining the way changing sociopolitical circumstances unequally constitute migrant experiences (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Ellis & Stam, 2015). More recently, social scientists interested in the psychological impact of immigration restrictions have documented how unequal immigration conditions adversely impact immigrant lives (e.g., Menjívar & Kanstroom, 2014; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 1995). However, more work is needed to capture the complexity of migrant experiences, which includes not only the ways social circumstances limit their realities, but also the ways migrants themselves understand and navigate increasingly stratified and culturally contested citizenship statuses (Bloch & Chimienti, 2011).

In our view, cultural psychologists have much to contribute to migration studies given their interest in the diversity of cultural experiences (Shweder, 1991) and importantly, in the way this experience is shaped at once by broader social determinants and the intentional acts of future-oriented social agents who navigate social worlds (Valsiner, 2007). Migration studies have been driven mainly by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists who, despite being interested in migration experience, have not relied on psychological theories to build their accounts of migrant lives. As a result, while migration studies have made major advances in understanding the ways, new immigration contexts restrict the possibilities of migrant lives, exploit their labor, and generate negative psychosocial outcomes, we know much less about how migrants make sense of increasingly precarious conditions, how they understand their identities, and/or how they reshape their psychic lives in response to their unique challenges (Ellis & Stam, 2017).

In a recent survey administered to internationally situated cultural psychologists, the following question surfaced as an urgent disciplinary concern: “How can we contribute a cultural psychological understanding of migration, refugees and irregular and illegal immigration in contemporary, industrialized societies?” (Glãveanu & Wagoner, 2015, p. 436). In this paper, we call upon cultural psychologists to explore critical migration theories and concepts in order to help expand our understanding of how global politics of citizenship shape the possibilities of migrants’ cultural experiences. Without considering the role of these broader political dimensions of cultural experience, researchers may not only overlook important determinants of migrant lives but also inadvertently contribute to the perpetuation of social inequalities and discriminatory policies.

We begin this paper with a brief discussion of cultural psychological theory to highlight how it can contribute to rich understandings of immigrant experience and where theoretical development is necessary. We then turn to ethnographic research projects conducted separately by each author to show how critical migration concepts can be integrated with cultural psychological inquiry to study the cultural experiences of Polish “irregular” migrants in Canada and American Sikhs. We conclude with discipline-specific recommendations for building a cultural psychology fit for the study of migration in contemporary industrialized societies.

Why cultural psychology

Although there is no single cultural psychology or cultural psychological theory, as a discipline cultural psychology is a member of a broader stream of sociocultural research that opposes classic epistemic divisions between mind and culture, selves and others, selves and society, etc. and instead studies how psychological life develops through cultural meanings, social traditions, and power relations within society (Shweder, 1991). Psychological life itself is viewed as an ongoing, socially constituted yet intentional process whereby goal-oriented, cultural agents are perpetually in movement, selectively interpreting, generating, and transforming cultural meanings according to their unique orientations toward the future (Valsiner, 2007). Cultural psychologists then observe how social agents reflectively draw upon social resources (Zittoun, 2007), internalize cultural meanings and signs (Valsiner, 2007), and/or embody normative modes of being that inhere in shared practices, customs and traditions (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999; Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013). Further, in an effort to undermine ideas of autonomous and unified agents, cultural psychologists emphasize multiplicity and dynamic tensions in the self and frequently study how psychological life develops dialogically—which is also to say, in the language of others and always in reference to others, whether real or imaginary (Hermans & Gieser, 2011). In so doing, scholars describe how social and intra-psychic worlds co-constitute one another in diverse cultural settings (e.g., Bhatia, 2007; Voestermans & Verheggen, 2013).

With dialogical, relational, and contextual understandings of human experience, cultural psychological research perspectives are well suited for the study of immigrant lives, which by definition involve movement across cultural settings and inter-cultural encounters (see also Kadianaki, O’Sullivan-Lago, & Gillespie, 2015). Cultural psychological studies of migration have examined immigrant narratives (Gómez-Estern & de la Mata Benítez, 2013), emotional expressions (Mirdal, 2006), opportunities for self-development (Kwak, 2010) and forms of personhood (Raval & Kral, 2004). Researchers have also explored the mixed tensions and contradictions that characterize immigrant identities. For instance, Hale and de Abreu (2010) reveal the fluid and contextual character of immigrant identities by observing their continual repositioning amid symbolic resources. Others have focused on the ways dominant discourses exclude immigrant identities and motivate resistance via hyphenated identities (e.g., Cypriot-Turkish-Australian; Ali & Sonn, 2010; Fine & Sirin, 2007). Kadianaki (2010) connects these ideas, conceptualizing immigrant identities as dynamic and dialogical; specifically, she argues that migrants “move” from one cultural position to another according to the power asymmetries of their sociopolitical contexts.

Yet, more work is needed to better understand how migrant experiences shape and are shaped by broader global political operations and inequalities. As Valsiner (2009) noted almost a decade ago, the focus on the dynamics of psychological phenomena in cultural psychology continues to be contextualized primarily in limited “here-and-now” contexts and not “the context of the context” (p. 30), which includes the historical, material/economic, and broader social and cultural materials that further constitute both psychological processes and researchers’ observations. For international migrants, acculturation experiences are shaped by the historical legacies, racial and gender practices, contexts of colonization and postcolonization, traditions, collective social imagination about communities and larger narratives of nation, nationality and citizenship that are present in both the host and homeland. Indeed, with the increasing discursive and material emergence of transnational diasporas, we can no longer insist on thinking about culture, race or gender as contained by national boundaries or as reified, polarized entities.

Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc (1995) have defined new “immigrants as ‘transnational’ whose lived experiences and everyday activities are shaped by multiple connections and linkages to several nations and cultures through travel, technology, and media” (p. 48). A transnational cultural psychology is thus needed to avoid reproducing nationally defined identity concepts and draw attention to the ways in which migrant’s psychological lives are shaped by neoliberal globalization, border politics, history of colonialism, and the complex and messy way in which the “here” and “there” are connected (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; Ellis & Stam, 2017). To move away from the assumption of a fixed, nationally defined cultural self that goes through various acculturation trajectories, we call for more fluid and politicized understandings of migrant experiences and identity that examine the broader sociological landscapes that form migrants’ material and structural conditions, and reveal how acculturation processes and migrant identities are continually shifting and unequally configured given the changing era of immigration politics.

Case study #1: Migrant “illegalization” and deportability in Canada

The notion of migrant “illegalization” is helpful for tracing how broader global contexts and politics of citizenship shape the social, economic, and biological life of “irregular” migrants. Critical anthropologist Nicolas De Genova (2002) defines migrant “illegalization” as the “legal production of migrant ‘illegality’” (p. 429), which takes place not only through laws but also through the operations of diverse state and non-state agents (e.g., employers, politicians, administrators) who variably draw upon the law and produce knowledge about migrant “illegality.” Importantly, from this view, migrant “illegalization” is an exploitative process that functions not to deport all migrants but deport some while rendering all others vulnerable and deportable. Deportability refers to the sociopolitical condition that characterizes migrant “illegality” and renders migrants vulnerable to exploitation as cheap laborers. It is because migrants live with “a palpable sense of deportability, which is to say, the possibility of deportation, the possibility of being removed from the space of the nation-state” (p. 439) that they live clandestinely in the shadows of society. Migrant “illegalization” thus functions to keep migrants in informal economies, working for minimal pay and with limited access to social services and legal rights.

Tracing migrant “illegalization” in Canada, sociologists Goldring, Berinstein, and Bernhard (2009) argue that increasingly restrictive immigration policies in Canada contribute to growing numbers of migrants with “precarious status.” Precarious status may involve (a) the lack of work authorization; (b) the lack of the right to remain permanently in Canada; (c) dependency on a third party for one’s right to be in Canada; and/or (d) the lack of access to social citizenship rights that are available to permanent residents (Goldring et al., 2009). In recent decades, Canadian state agents have not only prioritized high skilled, independent immigrants over family based sponsorship and refugees but also steadily increased demands for language skill and foreign credential requirements, offering citizenship to migrants who can demonstrate economic and social capital. At the same time, Canadian lawmakers have grown increasingly reliant on temporary foreign laborer to fill lower-skilled jobs: beginning in 2008, the number of non-permanent residents in Canada began to exceed the numbers of permanent residents in the same year (247,243; Pang, 2013).

A cultural psychological study of migrant “illegalization”: The case of Polish “irregular” migrants in Canada

Ellis’ (2015) ethnographic research traces how the trend toward the “precarization” of migrant labor and migrant “illegalization” shapes the psychosocial lives of newly arriving Polish migrants to Canada. Between December 2012 and July 2014, Ellis conducted in-depth interviews and long-term participant observations with 16 Polish “irregular” migrants living in Toronto, Canada. Polish immigration has a long history in Canada that began in the mid-18th-century and developed in several waves as Polish migrants escaped political occupations, the World Wars, and socioeconomic challenges (Library Archives Canada, 2016). Consequently, today more than a million persons in Canada (approximately 3% of the total population) identify as Polish Canadian¹ and there are many vibrant Polish Canadian enclaves that offer new immigrants access Polish goods and services, employment in the Polish language, and rich sociocultural contexts within which they can build meaningful lives. However, with limited options for permanent settlement in Canada, Ellis’ work traces how new waves of Polish migrants are relying on “irregular” migratory routes to meet their migratory aims.

Arrival

Studying the lives of “irregular” Polish migrants who arrived to Toronto, Canada between 2000 and 2014, Ellis found that all arrived legally either as temporary workers or tourists² seeking primarily to find work in Polish businesses in and around Toronto, as well as explore firsthand the prospect of moving permanently to Canada. Most were able to find low-skilled and informal jobs within several weeks after their arrival, with men working primarily in the construction sector and women in delis, restaurants, and cleaning businesses. Importantly, these were difficult and undesirable positions that were experienced as “drops in status” from job opportunities available in Poland. As one participant put it, “you have to break away from all that you stood for in Poland, all that you may have had there—suddenly you have zero, not even your [work] experience.” At the same time, because these jobs provided higher income and lifestyle opportunities that were not readily available in Poland, they engendered in migrants new desires to remain in Canada for longer durations.

With temporary statuses, migrants in Canada face limited options for regularizing their status: they could either (a) marry a Canadian; (b) apply to become international students; or (c) find an employer who would be willing to sponsor them. Since the costs of international student tuition were too steep to consider seriously, Ellis’ participants made difficult decisions to overstay their permits hoping that they would eventually find Canadian partners to marry or employers who would be willing to sponsor their stay. As such, overstaying meant entering even more vulnerable and precarious positions that over time would take their toll on migrants’ psychological and social lives.

Becoming “illegal”

As “irregular” migrants, Ellis’ participants continued to rely on informal work in the Polish Canadian enclave, where they received low and at times unpredictable wages; experienced exploitative and often demeaning work situations; and felt dependent on their employers for their limited job security. Outside of work they experienced limited access to social and health services as well as regular barriers to accessing education both for themselves and their children (Goldring & Landolt, 2013). Further, their limited knowledge of the English language and concerns about being apprehended by authorities deterred them from engaging with Canadians and/or working in Canadian businesses.

These trajectories exemplify how the process of “illegalization” presses migrants to build their lives as second-class members of society, serving as low-wage laborers in underground, ethnic communities. Accordingly, we argue that critical migration concepts offer useful tools for identifying the sociopolitical determinants that shape the cultural experiences of contemporary migrants. A critical cultural psychology could then help trace the psychosocial dynamics produced by migrant “illegalization.”

To this end, Ellis and Stam (2017) draw upon cultural psychological theory to trace how Polish migrants learn to become “irregular” as they develop alternative modes of being tailored to survive in deportable conditions. Prior to arrival, few had experienced low-skilled work and nearly all received help from their hosts to secure their first job in Canada. With time however, Polish migrants developed new social relationships in the Polish Canadian economy, which were instrumental for their success in Canada’s underground. With friends Polish “irregular” migrants could compare their predicaments, share concerns and frustrations, and receive guidance about best practices and coordinates for finding unauthorized work, healthcare, and other social services. Social relations were thus integral for Polish migrants to develop new understandings, strategies, and perspectives necessary for successfully navigating their “irregular” conditions—i.e., they learned what to do, what not to do, who to speak to, what to say, when to say it, and so on.

These learning experiences culminated in the formation of a new kind of “irregular” migrant agency, which Polish migrants referred to as kombinowanie. Although kombinowanie has no direct translation in English, Polish-English dictionaries propose verbs such as “to work on an angle” (Kombinować, n.d.-a) or “to contrive” (Kombinować, n.d.-b). One participant put it this way: “it’s simple, you have to find different ways for getting the same things done—‘musisz kombinować [you have to kombinować].’” In her anthropology of contemporary Polish culture, Agata Bisko (2014) defines kombinowanie as a central Polish cultural practice that grew prominent during the Soviet occupation when Polish citizens were pressed to rely on informal networks and illegal means to procure basic goods and services. Yet, whereas Bisko explains that the prominence of kombinowanie subsided following the country’s political independence, in the context of migrant “illegalization” in Canada, Ellis and Stam (2017) argue that kombinowanie constitutes a necessary agentic style developed to meet various challenges associated with “illegal” status. To explain her life as an “irregular” migrant, another participant said, “kombinuje cały czas [I’m constantly kombinuje]…nothing is impossible in principle; you can get away with many things, you just need to know how to do it.”

From a cultural psychological perspective, the practice of kombinowanie highlights how “irregular” migrants are never merely subjects of migrant “illegalization” but active, goal-oriented agents who develop cultural orientations and practices to address precarious immigrant contexts (Baerveldt & Verheggen, 1999; Valsiner, 2007). At the same time, kombinowanie brings attention to the ways contexts of “illegality” shape the possibilities of migrant lives, motivating them to adopt common patterns of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Importantly, living with “illegal” status was not just a matter of successfully navigating institutional barriers; it was also a matter of psychological training. All of the participants in Ellis’ study encountered regularly occurring yet unanticipated status-related threats, which every so often would undermine their livelihoods in Canada and generate acute fears of deportation. Such “moments of acute deportability” (Ellis & Stam, 2017) could be more or less severe, varying from a direct threat from a co-worker, to a health concern or a run-in with the police while driving. Yet, as they occurred repeatedly over the course of migrants’ “irregular” trajectories, they not only served to regularly remind migrants’ of their deportable status, but also, as fearful and unshakeable memories, they continued to plague migrants’ everyday lives, producing “lingering chills of uncertainty” that remained “at the back of migrants’ minds.”

To cope with their ongoing concerns, Ellis observed how Polish “irregular” migrants adopted common self-disciplinary tactics, whereby they downplayed, ignored, and/or rationalized their concerns, for example, by deliberately “not letting their fears get to them”; “focusing on the practical”; “having patience”; and “focusing on the now” in order to achieve their migratory aims (quotes belong to research participants). As these comprised common psychological tactics developed by migrants in response to fears and uncertainties associated with being deportable, they demonstrate how deportation regimes come to penetrate the psychological lives of “irregular” migrants.

Taken together, from a critical cultural psychological framework, migrant “illegalization” can be seen to operate at the psychosocial level through reoccurring, status-related threats, which every so often serve to remind migrants about their deportable status, and over time motivate unique sociocultural and psychological modes of being. A cultural psychological study of migrant “illegality” thus allows for a more nuanced, developmental understanding of how migrants’ lives are shaped not only by broader global and local contexts but also by migrants who navigate these contexts to achieve their migratory aims. Incorporating critical migration concepts into cultural psychological analyses allows us to observe how processes of acculturation are shaped by citizenship status, which delineates access to employment, social services, and political rights. With “irregular” status, Polish migrants do not acculturate into mainstream Canadian society. Instead, their status limitations compel them to build limited and precarious lives as second-class members of Polish Canadian enclaves.

Case study #2: Cultural citizenship and the post 9/11 era in the United States

While citizenship in the U.S. is typically formulated in political and civic terms—i.e., as a legal status—cultural citizenship can be thought of in terms of everyday practices and performances—e.g., obeying laws, engaging with the community, contributing to the state through taxes, living in “low crime” areas, observing religious practices, and so on (see Langhout & Fernández, in press). Miller (2001) emphasizes that cultural citizenship is concerned with the “maintenance and development of cultural lineage through education, custom, language, and religion and the positive acknowledgment of difference in and by the mainstream” (p. 2). Particular historical and social forces shape the practices and performances of citizenship, and norms and discourses about “good citizens” and “bad citizens” are often determined by groups that are in power (Bhatia, 2011, 2016; Isin & Turner, 2007; Maira, 2009). Importantly, cultural citizenship is a normative project whose meanings usually exclude groups who are seen as racially, nationally, and culturally different. Historically, within the US context, the idea of a “good citizen” has been used to refer to individuals who belonged to upper class, White, and Euro-American backgrounds.

U.S. naturalization and citizenship laws were since their inception based on racist ideologies that played a crucial role in shaping and defining immigrants’ experiences. First, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was passed as a response to the perception that Chinese immigrants could not assimilate into U.S. society. The 1907 “gentleman’s agreement” first limited Japanese immigration, then in 1917 Asian Indian immigrants were restricted, followed in 1924 by the Oriental Exclusion Act which suspended labor immigration from mainland Asia, and in 1934 the Tydings-McDuffie Act restricted Filipino immigration to the U.S. Following forty years of discrimination, citizenship through naturalization was denied to all Asians from 1924 to 1943. The main aim of sponsoring these Exclusion Acts was to make sure that the flow of non-European immigration was contained, and these immigrants were allowed “in” only to meet the demands of the fluctuating labor markets in the U.S. (Bhatia, 2007; Mohanty, 1991). Practices of stereotyping, racializing and othering are thus directly connected to the state-sponsored immigration laws of the U.S.

The contemporary context of increased Islamophobia in the U.S. needs to be analyzed within the context of colonialism, Orientalism, and the American foreign policy toward the Middle East countries. After 9/11, many American Muslims despite being American citizens were suddenly cast as outside the norms of proper citizenship and made subject to surveillance in schools, streets, buses, airports, housing projects, and other neighborhoods. This was also the case for Sikh Americans.

Bhatia’s previous work has emphasized how before the events of 9/11 many predominantly upper-class Sikh Americans had largely integrated and acculturated within the U.S. society (Bhatia, 2008a, 2008b). More than half a million Sikh Americans reside in the United States and their community is often described as high-achieving and successful minority group in the United States. After 9/11, however, their turbans, beards and their “brown identities” became much more visible and suspect in the larger public space, turning them into targets of racial profiling, scrutiny, hate speech and being framed as outsiders (Ahluwalia, 2011).

A cultural psychological study of cultural citizenship in the post 9/11 era: The case of American Sikhs

The interview that is analyzed here is part of a larger ethnographic study that looks at how the first-generation Indian diaspora respond to varying levels of racism and discrimination that they experience in their communities and workplaces (Bhatia, 2007). The second author conducted fieldwork in this Indian diaspora for 16 months between February 2000 and June 2001. Specifically, from August 2001 to January 2002, Bhatia conducted in-depth interviews with 38 first-generation Indian migrants. His participants worked for the local ABC computer company and lived in the mostly white suburbs of East Lyme and Old Lyme, Connecticut. Since the 1960s, these migrants have lived in small cities and suburbs of southern Connecticut, such as Groton, Ledyard, East Lyme, Norwich, Noank, New London, Old Lyme and Waterford. Most of Bhatia's interviews for this qualitative study were conducted in the immediate aftermath of the events of 9/11.

Bhatia (2008a) conducted his first interview with a Sikh man about three weeks after 9/11. Raju, a 43-year-old Sikh man, worked as biology professor in a local university. When Bhatia visited Raju’s home, Raju spoke about the murder of a Sikh man named, Balbir Singh Sodhi. The killer had mistakenly identified him as an Arab. Bhatia and Raju discussed another local event that had drawn national attention when a Sikh man travelling to New York was arrested, handcuffed and interrogated because the police suspected him to be a terrorist. Raju was aware of all the recent attacks on several Sikh people:

R: It’s a concern; it’s a concern that you know, we will be stereotyped. Uh, I would be stereotyped as an Arab, but um, you know, I’m kind of prepared for that, and I always place mirrors in my mind if someone were to come and tell me certain things, how I would react. The preparation is always to be, first to be very, very calm […] and to really try to so what I’ve done actually, I just realized um is, I try to make that extra effort to connect with people. Give everyone and myself a sense that this is, you know all, we’re all one, that what you feel is very similar to what I feel regardless of what I look like.

I: And in terms of how it plays out?

R: […] At the same time I will tell you one thing, I would not hesitate if I find that my life was in danger for any reason, I would not hesitate to (cut my hair), because of, you know because of having I believe responsibility and making sure that I, you know, (my children)

I: But you would, there would be a sense of loss if you had to do that

Raju was concerned about his son’s safety and he told the researcher that if his life were in danger because of the unwanted attention that came after 9/11, he would cut his hair and not wear the pagadi (turban). He said his family stood out in the public space and reflected on his responsibilities to his family versus his loyalty to his religion. Raju said that one of the reasons he would wear his pagadi would be to ensure his safety so he can fulfill the obligation he has towards his family. Raju was saddened by the dangers that the Sikh community has come under after 9/11. He stated he had come to believe that he was a citizen of the world and he was as American as his white American friends, with whom he played squash. Post 9/11, Raju’s narrative about being a Sikh American had changed and he expressed fear that his beard and pagadi would become the object of scrutiny from his friends and neighbors especially from strangers in public places. Immediately after the events of 9/11, he was cautious about not being seen in public places such as the grocery store or the mall. Bhatia’s interviews with other members of the Indian diaspora echoed Raju’s concerns about the threats of looking “Arab” “middle eastern” or Muslim in America.

For instance, in the post 9/11 days, 654 bias attacks were made against Sikh community members, including the murder of a Sikh man who was misidentified as an Arab. As a response to these numerous racial and religious attacks, the Sikh diaspora launched a public relations and educational campaign to counter narratives about their communities and educate the broader American public about the differences between Sikhism and Islam. Bhatia (2016) examined one public relations video produced by the Department of Justice in consultation and collaboration with the Sikh American Legal Defense Fund (SALDEF and Department of Justice, 2006)³ to showcase how the Sikh American community, while trying to educate the American public about Sikh American identity, inadvertently end up deploying a discourse of distancing marginality from Arab and Muslims Americans (see Bhatia, 2016).

The opening frames of the video focuses on a Sikh man who is wearing a red turban, a blue shirt, red tie, blue jacket, and khaki pants. He is using a hand-held video camera to film the Washington monument and Jefferson memorial in Washington DC. In the next scene, a white American mother, also a sightseer, sees the Sikh man becomes suspicious of his actions. She then runs down the stairs of the Jefferson memorial where she addresses two officers patrolling nearby:

Woman (mother): “Officers, there is a man up there wearing a turban and he’s taking a video. I don’t know what he’s doing and he’s really making me nervous.”

Officer 1: “Wait here and we’ll check it out.”

(Officers approach the man wearing a turban)

Officer 2: “Sir can you hold on for a second. How are you doing? We got a report of suspicious activity. Can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

Sikh man: “I’m sightseeing here and I am here with my family and I am an off-duty police officer. I am a deputy police sheriff.”

Officer 2: “Do you have any credentials on you?”

Sikh man: “Sure.”

(The man wearing the turban shows his badge to the two officers)

Officer 1: (Looks at the badge) “Sorry for the inconvenience.”

Sikh man: “Being a Sikh American. I get that a lot.”

Officer 1: “I understand. I understand.”

Officer 2: “Enjoy your trip.”

Immediately after this scene a narrator announces: “Officer safety is the first priority. However, in order to be safe and effective, officers must be able to differentiate between a threat and a stereotype.” Then a title appears on screen—Common Grounds—Sikh American Cultural Awareness for Law Enforcement. The narrator then says “Under emergency circumstances, events always determine an officer’s response. This presentation will address non-emergency and non-crisis situations, and provide guidelines to effectively recognize and interact with members of the Sikh American community.”

The video aims to correct common misconceptions in the American public that mistake Sikhs for Muslims. This PR campaign was a well-intentioned effort on part of the Sikh community to make sure that immediately after 9/11 they were not being targeted, threatened, or assaulted for being identified as Arabs and Muslims. The video aims at reclaiming Sikh citizens as respectable, educated and unthreatening citizens. One can argue that spreading cultural education and awareness about Sikh religion is crucial for the law-enforcement officers. Yet, the video does not offer any explanation of how 9/11 transformed the Sikh and Muslim diaspora as unpatriotic outsiders. Nor is there any serious attempt to answer the question: What is wrong with being a Muslim, or looking like an Arab or a Middle-Eastern person in the United States? (Bhatia, 2016). Recall the statement from the Sikh man in the video on being confronted by a police officer, “I am a Sikh American; I get that a lot.” In a multicultural democracy, why it is acceptable for a Sikh American to say that it is legitimate for him to be subjected to racial profiling and public scrutiny? The burden of explanation is also left to the Sikh community, that is, to distinguish their religion from Islam.

Furthermore, while portraying Sikh Americans as having a religious identity that is normal and non-threatening, the video nevertheless ends up depicting Muslims or immigrants from the Middle East as “threatening.” By contrasting and psychologically distancing themselves from the Muslim community, the Sikh narrators indirectly represent Muslims and their religion as violent and non-American. The video thus becomes a tool for renegotiating their citizenship status by enacting a discriminating marginality: an action that is intended to create distance between two marginalized groups rather than creating psychological acts of solidarity or empowerment. That is, the video indirectly conveys the idea that “We Sikhs may look like Muslims, but we are not the problem. The Muslims are the problem—so go after them.” The video does not answer several crucial questions: How come the woman in the video has the power to name the Sikh man as suspicious? Why do non-Muslim immigrants who look “Middle Eastern” react negatively to being identified as Muslims? And why are Sikhs presented as a cultural and not a cultural and racial minority?

There is a palpable feeling of racial erasure in the video as there is no mention of how the dominant system of whiteness as acceptable citizenship becomes juxtaposed against the “Sikh figure”—a figure that is construed as a non-citizen, a potential threat and an enemy. The Sikh man invites suspicion because of his otherness, his camera pointed at the Lincoln center, and his perceived resemblance to Osama Bin Laden. His identity as a Sikh is fused with the otherness of stereotypical images of Arab, Taliban, and Middle-Eastern bearded Muslim men wearing turbans and holding rifles—an image of otherness that is constantly flickering on the American news media channels. During times of national crisis, dominant racial groups can exercise their power, social privilege, and normative status by “calling out” the identity of those “others” who do not belong to their group, while some members of the dominant group feel that they have the power to nominate themselves as “safeguarding” the nation from outsiders.

We can thus see from a critical race perspective how there is a double erasure of race in the video discussed above. The hegemonic whiteness along with its set of racial practices and performance is not interrogated or made visible at all. Whiteness is the silent plot that moves the script along in the video but it does not name itself. Positioning the Sikh diaspora as a cultural group in the video allows them to re-imagine their religious identity through the psychological frame of being model and “good minorities” and gives them an opportunity to distance themselves from other minorities that are under the spotlight. Indian-Americans, including Sikh Americans, are comfortable with the idea that they differ from mainstream white America in terms of culture and ethnicity—but not in terms of their racial identity (George, 1997). More recently, second-generation South Asians and members of the Sikhs diaspora have resisted framing their identity through cultural traditions, rituals and have instead embraced a politicized discourse of race and racism in their representation of identity. We argue cultural psychological research needs to attend to the racial dimensions of cultural experiences as these intersect with other forms of discrimination and segregation that shape the lives of immigrants in the 21st century.

Discussion: Toward a cultural psychology of migration

Immigration comprises one of the most significant and most contentious global political issues of the 21st century. With increasing anti-immigrant sentiments and racist political rhetoric that unabashedly equates immigrants with criminals, bogus refugees, queue jumpers, rapists, terrorists, and the like, nationalist parties are rising in even the most overtly liberal of states, fueling apocalyptic imaginations and anti-alterity ethics. At the same time, growing presence and visibility of irregular migrants and refugees are motivating migrant rights organizations both nationally and internationally to give voice to migrants’ struggles and defend their rights. What are our responsibilities as social scientists seeking to explain these realities? Assuming that the knowledge we produce is itself situated and charged with its own political implications, how can we develop responsible knowledge that can give voice to the experiences of migrants and help generate positive social change?

These are undoubtedly large questions that surpass the scope of our paper. However, given our interest in expanding cultural psychological studies of migration, we conclude with some discipline-specific recommendations. To summarize these in advance, we suggest that cultural psychologists draw upon critical and transnational concepts and theories in their research not only to (a) more accurately account for the life situations of diverse immigrant groups but also to (b) question dominant understandings of immigration politics and (c) develop accounts of migrant experiences that underscore their humanity and point to possibilities for social change.

With respect to the first point (a), cultural psychological studies of immigrants need to attend to the politics of citizenship and the ways immigration policies determine opportunities for movement, employment legal rights, and social lives. Migrant “illegalization” provides a useful framework for tracing how immigration controls and restrictions function not to prevent international migration so much as differentially segregate migrants into unequal status categories (De Genova, 2002, De Genova & Peutz, 2010; Menjivar & Kanstroom, 2014). By drawing upon this perspective, cultural psychologists could develop knowledge not only about how these broader political and legal systems find expression in the everyday experiences of diverse migrant groups but also how migrants variably understand and navigate them (see also Ellis & Stam, 2017).

As demonstrated above, Polish “irregular” migrants in Canada experienced distinct social and institutional barriers that motivated them to develop common modes of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. To the extent that these experiences resemble those of other migrants with “irregular” statuses, they speak to the corrosive impact of migrant “illegality” on migrants’ psychosocial lives (Ellis & Stam, 2017). Willen (2007) and Gonzales and Chavez (2012) describe “illegal” migrants as “abjects” who are legally excluded from society yet socially included as expelled agents with limited rights. Migrant “illegality” is in turn seen to operate as a catalyst for distinct modes of being—or forms of “abjectivity” (Willen, 2007, p. 11). For instance, Willen shows how “illegal” West African migrants living in Israel developed common forms of bodily vigilance, disguised their bodies, sought to avoid authorities, experienced troubled sleep, and feared staying at their own homes. In similar ways, Gonzales (2016) maintains that migrant “illegality” operates as a “master status” that overwhelms other social categories (e.g., race, gender, age) by significantly restricting the developmental trajectories of undocumented Latin American youth and young adults who arrived to the United States as children. Our discussion of Polish “irregular” migrants in turn demonstrates how cultural psychological studies can help expose the psychosocial operations of migrant “illegalization,” including how migrant “illegality” motivates the development of unique cultural agencies tailored to overcome status-related barriers and fears.

Bhatia’s (2016) interview with a Sikh man and critical analyses of a police education video about Sikh Americans further exemplify why cultural factors alone are insufficient to explain the identities of contemporary East Asians and Muslims in the United States. From a critical perspective, what on the surface may appear to be a benign culturally informative education video is revealed to be a perpetuation of colorblind multiculturalism, Islamophobia and racist ideologies against both Sikh and Muslim groups. Critical race and postcolonial theory are thus helpful for showing how Sikh and other East Asian group identities in America gain their meaning through/in relation to racist and colonial ideologies as well as post 9/11 anti-immigrant political rhetoric. Further, the concept of cultural citizenship is important for tracing how global and national citizenship politics come to shape even legally residing immigrant groups who do not match white American cultural expectations. For despite their citizenship status, it is primarily because Sikh Americans as well as other South and East Asian groups are treated as “forever foreigners” whose belonging to the United States is perpetually questioned and contested that they are motivated to distance themselves from less desirable immigrant and religious groups (e.g., Muslims) and develop identities that bring them closer to dominant White culture (Bhatia, 2007).

These analyses clearly demonstrate the ways failing to account for political determinants of migrant identities can serve to perpetuate them. Such narratives of diversity also do not place any burdens on inviting whites as a dominant group to examine their white privilege and power and how their whiteness might be complicit in creating structures that promote hate, racism and oppression.

Accordingly, moving on to our second point (b), critical psychological studies are needed to question and avoid reproducing the unequal circumstances that lead to their formation. As a member of a broader “sociocultural turn” in the social sciences, cultural psychology assumes social epistemological principles that deliberately oppose positivist and individualist science (Ellis & Stam, 2015).⁴ Whereas social scientists originally founded their disciplines in pursuit of objective knowledge about social phenomena, scholars of the sociocultural turn (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Gergen, 1973) severely undermined such principles emphasizing instead the situated character of knowledge, observing knowledge as collectively produced and normatively constituted by historically situated practitioners (Fuller, 2002; Kirschner & Martin, 2010). Yet, while more recent streams of sociocultural inquiry have moved toward more critical and reflexive research practices that take as their central task to undermine regimes of knowledge that perpetuate injustice and inequality (e.g., Denzin & Giardina, 2010; Foley & Valenzuela, 2005), cultural psychologists have not developed equally critical research agendas (Teo, 2015). Whether or not cultural psychology as a discipline should move in such directions is a large question that exceeds the scope of our paper. For a future cultural psychology of migration however, we argue that critical and transnational perspectives are desperately needed not only to account for the growing politicization of citizenship and immigration, but also to undermine nationally defined immigrant politics and categories that serve to perpetuate limited and dehumanizing understandings of migrants.

This brings us to the last point (c). A future cultural psychology of migration cannot afford to hold on to nationally defined categories if it its aim is to underscore the humanity of persons who move due to global political transformations. Transnational perspectives are needed to answer such questions as, why do migrants move? What do they seek for themselves and their families? And what compels them to stay? Starting inquiry from the perspective of the nation-state means prioritizing bureaucratic categories (including immigration statuses, nationally defined cultures, and so on) over the perspectives of migrants who make decisions and navigate international contexts (De Genova, 2002). We call upon scholars to question these categories not only to expose how they contribute to unequal migrant experiences but more importantly perhaps, to develop new explanatory frameworks that can highlight the rationality of their decision-making processes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants in our studies for sharing their insights and experiences.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada (Postdoctoral Fellowship 756–2015-0561).

Notes

Author biographies

Basia D Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Child Development at California State University Sacramento. Her work examines the psychology of migration with a special focus on the experiences of undocumented immigrants. Working at the intersections of sociocultural psychological theory and critical migration scholarship, Ellis employs qualitative research methods to examine how increasingly restrictive immigration contexts shape the everyday lives of undocumented immigrants; and correspondingly, how immigrants variably understand and navigate these conditions to build meaningful lives for themselves and their families.

Sunil Bhatia’s scholarship specifically examines how concepts such as culture, power, and representation shape theories of acculturation, racial, and cultural identity in human development, critical and cultural psychology. His publications include books, American Karma: Race, culture and identity in the Indian diaspora (2007, New York University Press) and the recently published, Decolonizing Psychology: Globalization, Social Justice and Indian Youth Identities (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is the recipient of the American Psychological Associations prestigious 2015 International Humanitarian of the Year Award and the 2017 Theodore Sarbin Award for notable achievement in psychology.

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