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As the discussion above indicated, ‘decolonizing’ is a highly contested agenda. But the idea that colonialism should be an important part of how we make sense of the present is, surely, less contentious, particularly in contexts where it has been elided. Recent years have seen a growing number of scholars arguing for greater acknowledgement of colonial histories and their legacies for contemporary migration issues. For example, Mains et al. (2013: 132) observe that ‘despite the material links between colonialism, postcolonialism and migration, social scientists in general have been slow to address this intersection’ (see also McIlwaine 2008, cited in Mains et al. 2013). Tudor (2018) and De Genova (2018) specifically articulate this lack of attention in terms of a neglect of postcolonial racism and racialization, and observe that there is a strong sense in the field that to speak of racism is either to be racist, or (relatedly) that such observations are (or should be) the exclusive interest of scholars of colour (see also El-Tayeb 2011; Boulila 2019; Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015; Michel 2015; Walia 2014). Rivera-Salgado (1999) noted twenty years ago that race and ethnicity are ‘frequently either ignored or treated as a consequence of migration flows and considered to be a problem “here” not “there”’, but this pattern has not significantly shifted. Certainly any increased recognition of ethnicity rarely also then understands ideas of racial or ethnic difference to be rooted in long-standing practices and processes of colonialism (see Hall 1978 for more on this).

The interconnectedness of migration studies as a project of university institutions, with migration management as a project of national and international policy-making institutions, is relevant here. Because migration scholars do not only speak to each other and have esoteric intellectual discussions about the dynamics of migration, they are also invited into these national and international policy-making fora. The language of migration scholarship and that of migration governance are therefore deeply entangled and interdependent. Institutions such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its non-refugee, migration-focused sister organization, the IOM (International Organization for Migration), are key players in this relationship and themselves emerged from colonialism. The UNHCR was founded to support European refugees exclusively following the Second World War because the colonial and settler-colonial powers did not want people of colour to have full access to human rights (Mayblin 2017). Its remit expanded as a consequence of the demands and activities of movements for decolonization. The IOM, meanwhile, was founded to settle Europeans (at a time when Europe was thought to be overpopulated) in Africa (at a time when African countries were not thought of as sovereign nations) (Hansen and Jonsson 2014).

Bridget Anderson (2019: 2) has suggested that ‘perhaps we are experiencing not an “age of migration” but an age of migration research’ (emphasis in original). Studies of migration first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Gabaccia (2014) argues that in the United States studies of migration were primarily based in social anthropology and revolved around the application of ‘assimiliationist theory’ to different social groups who were deemed ‘immigrants’ (see Fitzgerald 2014). When we tend to speak of the institutionalization of migration studies as a ‘field’, we are referring to the period after the Second World War when states and international organizations began funding research on migration and refugees. The development of migration studies thus presents an interesting example of a ‘state science’ (Gabaccia 2014). Whilst interdisciplinary, the field grew around the demands of states and the international community to track and account for the movement of people ‘globally’ (Donato and Gabaccia 2015). But, more specifically, this was concerned with the mobility of people from the Global South to the Global North in periods of decolonization and under what would later be called ‘globalization’ and the further entrenchment and expansion of neo-liberal capitalism. The provision for this type of research grew in the United States and in Europe, in the latter under the emergent funding landscape of the European Union (EU) and within a broader biopolitical interest in the cost and benefits of migration, demographics and population management (for example, see the establishment of Osnabrück’s Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) in 1991).

This history of course shapes the field today. Whilst it would be a mistake to see all migration studies as overdetermined by the need to create policy-relevant research and to produce research that maps onto the interests of states and international organizations for the capture of funds, these factors strongly shape what constitutes appropriate knowledge and determines research agendas across migration studies (see Hatton 2018 on the United Kingdom and German context). To Scholten (2018), the dangers of this ‘co-production’ of knowledge have led to migration scholars reproducing forms of methodological nationalism and reifying state concepts such as ‘integration’, ‘sovereignty’ and the ‘migrant versus citizen’ divide (also see de Genova 2013). Whilst more ‘critical’ intellectual projects have shaped the field in terms of engagement with theories of ‘transnationalism’ throughout the 1990s (see Blanc-Szanton, Glick Schiller and Basch 1992), and more post-structuralist-influenced approaches to mobility and spatiality (Urry 2007), this environment has not been conducive to a sustained engagement with postcolonial and decolonial theory or even a broader engagement with historiography (Gabaccia 2014). The often superficial engagement with history is evidenced by the long-held view in key migration study textbooks that continue to periodize ‘contemporary migration’ (i.e. after the Second World War) as ‘new’, ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unique’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014).

In spite of the colonial blind spots within migration studies, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the field has completely ignored colonialism. Migration theories which draw on world systems theory (which is also an intellectual point of departure for decoloniality) are notable in taking account of colonial histories in their analyses (Richmond 1994; Satzewich 1991), and textbooks on migration studies almost always cover this theoretical field (see Brettell and Hollifeld 2008; Castles, de Haas and Miller 2014; Martiniello and Rath 2012). World systems theory (see Wallerstein 2004) makes sense of the world in terms of the incorporation of increasing numbers of states into the global capitalist economy and the consequent emergence of a worldwide division of labour which has uneven impacts on different societies. It divides the world into core, semi-periphery and periphery and argues that the core and periphery are locked into a relationship of exploitation and dependency which structurally prevents peripheral countries from developing. There are clear implications for migration studies here in that migration would then be understood as part of much broader relationships between states and societies. As wealthy ‘core’ economies became increasingly dependent upon low-paid migrant labour from the peripheries from the 1970s, international labour migration came to be seen as an important element in relations of domination between core and periphery. What is now called South–North migration therefore, from this perspective, reinforces relations of dependency.

There are criticisms to be made of the extent to which world systems theory adequately accounted for, or then instrumentalized, race and gender in the world system (Grosfoguel 2011). Nevertheless, this is undeniably a corner of migration studies which has sought to incorporate an account of historical colonial power relations in seeking to make sense of the present. Equally, Latin American decolonial work on the ‘coloniality of power’ is indebted to world systems theory even as it departs from its primarily economic focus (Quijano 2000). It is here that we see emerging some decolonial analyses of migration which are alive to the importance of colonial histories, and indeed presents (Grosfoguel, Oso and Christou 2015).

A postcolonial awareness is also visible in, if not central to, other areas of migration studies. Scholars who research the European context often, for example, note the movement of migrants from former colonies to former metropoles in the second half of the twentieth century (Geddes and Scholten 2016). These ‘postcolonial’ migrations have given rise to many studies which, though more often cited in sociologies of race and ethnicity or cultural studies (for example, Cohen and Jonsson 2011; Gilroy 2002b, 2004; Hall 1996c; Wemyss 2009), nevertheless overlap with the concerns of migration researchers (for example, race and racism as legacies of empire are strong themes in Joppke 1999). Those who research the settler colonies as ‘countries of immigration’ also often note the colonial history of those countries, albeit often too briefly and rarely with an engagement with settler colonialism as an ongoing phenomenon. Those who work on what is increasingly dubbed ‘South–South’ migration are, furthermore, offering a wellspring of non-Eurocentric analytical frameworks which, if not necessarily centring colonial histories, are certainly working against Eurocentrism and are very much alive to the connected colonial histories that link different parts of the world (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019).

There are, nevertheless, prominent volumes in the field which barely mention colonialism, postcolonialism or decolonization (e.g. Brettell and Hollifield 2008; Carens 2015; Faist 2000; Kivisto and Faist 2010; Sassen 1999; Soysal 1994). Likewise, postcolonial and decolonial scholarship is frequently ignored as a way of theorizing migration in key textbooks (even those professing to ‘diversify’, for example Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020). There are also many postgraduate ‘Refugee and Forced Migration’ programmes at ‘world-leading’ universities which cover neither these themes and theories nor issues of race and racism. As historical-structural approaches, such as those deriving from world systems theory, have been dismissed as overly structurally deterministic and have fallen out of favour, with them we have lost a focus on global racism and the legacies of colonialism as structuring axes of inequality and im-mobility. The focus has moved towards the more agential meso- and micro-level theories of ‘communities’, ‘networks’, ‘circulations’ and individual migrants within the context of globalization. But at the same time as acknowledging people’s power to act upon their own lives, these approaches pay too little attention, as previously noted, to structures of race and racism.

Refocusing on race and racism necessitates a renewed focus on the legacies of colonialism in contemporary power relations and particularly on the continued relevance of racial hierarchy for contemporary social, political, legal and economic life. Migration scholars tend to shy away from ‘race’ as a concept, as noted above, since it is associated with histories of racial science which we do not wish to lend legitimacy to. When studies do at least show an awareness of colonial histories, it is too often the case that colonial knowledge, racism and power are treated as something ‘in the past’ (see, for example, Castles, de Haas and Miller 2020: 312–16). Nevertheless, ‘race’ continues to hold meaning in the social world and racial ideas continue to significantly impact upon people’s lives (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Lentin 2020; Yancy 2016), as the recent renewed focus on racial capitalism has shown (Bhattacharyya 2018). In order to develop more adequate analyses of migration in the contemporary world, we need to acknowledge this and incorporate such analyses into migration studies.

A further issue is the extent to which migration studies continues to be quietly invested in ‘modernization theory’ (see Bhambra 2014). This is the idea that Europe and the white settler colonies at some point became ‘modern’ (wealthy, democratic, rational, secular, rights-based, egalitarian, capitalist, etc.), and that this process (the ‘European miracle’) was endogenous. In order for other parts of the world to become like Europe and its settler colonies (an aim assumed to be desirable), and particularly for them to eradicate poverty, modernization theory advocates that they can and should follow the path laid out by Europe and the wider Global North. This idea of modernization underpins the idea of ‘development’ (Escobar 1995). It centres Europe and European history as the reference point from which a road map into the future is imagined for countries deemed ‘underdeveloped’. The concept of ‘development’ is important in migration studies and is rarely paid critical attention. There is an assumption that development is the same as poverty reduction and that migration may facilitate or hinder this desirable process, or that from the opposite perspective development can facilitate or curtail migrations. That is not to suggest that poverty reduction is a problematic aim, but that we do need to acknowledge: (a) the colonial history which facilitated wealth accumulation in ‘the West’ – development in this part of the world was not endogenous and unrelated to impoverishment and exploitation in other parts of the world (Rodney 2018 [1972]) and cannot therefore be simply mimicked elsewhere; and (b) the ongoing power relations which facilitate inequality in both mobilities and immobilities but also in concentrations of wealth and poverty globally. An interrogation of the colonial origins of the idea of development facilitates an alternative framing of the issues at stake.

A growing number of scholars argue that our analyses of migration-related phenomena are enriched by an analysis which acknowledges histories of colonialism, and related racisms. On this theme, Adeyanju and Oriola (2011: 952) observe that ‘there is no notable scholarship in the existing body of literature on African migration that deals with the influence of the colonial discourse and ideology on Africans’ desire to immigrate to the West’. This is despite the fact that these discourses, which have endured the end of formal colonialism, are for them central to understanding the motivations behind African migration to the West, and despite the fact that African migration to ‘the West’ has received a significant amount of scholarly attention. Mains et al. (2013: 131) suggest that the critical interweaving of postcolonial theory and migration studies offers ‘a unique opportunity to reflect and ground our understandings of mobility in more complicated and (hopefully) sensitive ways’. A call to complication and complexity, then, goes to the heart of the potential of the bodies of literature discussed here.

But there have also been recent suggestions that a post- or decolonial frame risks reconfirming the national territory as a site of analysis (Anderson 2019; Sharma 2020). A central danger, some argue, is that migration researchers might be cementing or confirming the migrant/native distinction by working from such perspectives when what we should be doing is denaturalizing such binaries through de-nationalizing and de-territorializing our work (see also Davies and Boehmer 2019). We contest this reading of post- and decolonial perspectives though concede that too often binaries are reinforced rather than complexities embraced. Undeniably, anti-colonial movements have historically drawn on nationalist discourses as a move to resist colonial definitions of belonging, but this has not been without significant intellectual critique (for example, see Fanon 2008 [1952]). Equally, indigenous studies have been criticized for promoting an exclusionary ‘nationalist’ agenda and the debate rages about how solidarities can be built across colonial/modern lines of racialized distinction which were the very basis of the formation of settler-colonial states (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008–9; Tuck, Guess and Sultan 2014). While we would distinguish between projects of self-determination under conditions of colonial occupation on the one hand and anti-migrant nationalism on the other, the point here is that such struggles are certainly not the totality of intellectual discussion within decolonial or related fields.

The project of questioning colonial frameworks of hierarchical distinction (Mayblin 2017; Mignolo 2011a; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a; Wynter 2003), of understanding histories as made up of movements and interconnections between societies and peoples rather than separateness (Bhambra 2014; Krivonos 2019; Nisancioglu 2019), of challenging Eurocentrism (Alatas 2006; Amin 1988; Bhabha 2005 [1994]) and critiquing the ways in which legal, social and economic definitions and functions of border regimes produce certain migrants as a problem (Achiume 2019; Anghie 2008; Pahuja 2011) is the very antithesis of parochialism, nationalism and ‘us and them’ politics. We hope to show this at length through the course of this book but also acknowledge that all fields and perspectives have their own blind spots, contradictions and unrealized aspirations – we are certainly not arguing that there is not a lot of work to do in this area. In the next section, we sketch out some of the key foci of three fields of work that have offered significant inspiration to us in our own work and in exploring in this book what a migration studies that centres colonialism might look like.