In today's global politics of identity and difference, the migration condition is symptomatically central for [Stuart] Hall, for it speaks through a ‘double syntax’ in which difference may be driven toward the all-or-nothing danger of ethnic absolutism—or it may … enable us to learn something from diasporic survival about how to live with others and otherness.

Kobena Mercer, introduction to Stuart Hall (1994/2017), The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity and Nation, pp 10–11

Contextualizing migration

Migration has been one of the most pronounced ways through which societies have transformed over the course of history. According to the United Nations (UN) migration report for 2017, there were about 258 million migrants globally, up from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000 (see Table 1). While much of the extant theories and theorizing about migration has taken shape in Europe and North America in regard to ‘incoming’ migrants, the reality is that Asia to Asia migration is the biggest flow of people, and 106 million of the 258 million global migrants were born in Asia. Between 2000 and 2017, Asia gained about 30 million migrants followed by Europe at 22 million and North America at 17 million.

At the same, more than 50% of all international migrants live in ten countries and areas, with the largest number residing in the United States (50 million or about 19% of the world's migratory population). This was followed by Saudi Arabia, Germany and the Russian Federation with each of them hosting around 12 million migrants each. In the US, immigrants represent about 15.3% of the entire population, in Saudi Arabia, 37% of the population, in Germany, 14.8% of the population and in the Russian Federation, they represent 8.1% (Migration Policy Institute, 2017). Perhaps most urgently, the number of refugees and asylum seekers due to forced displacement has continued to rise with the developing world hosting around 83% of the world's refugees and asylum seekers. In this context, Turkey had the largest refugee population globally, hosting about 3.1 million of such migrants due to growing humanitarian crisis and war in neighboring countries, most urgently in Syria. In all, these numbers indicate that there are several trends that are relevant for how we theorize transnational aspects of migration.