Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas

Don't live in the world as if you were renting or here only for the summer, but act as if it was your [mother's] house.-Nazim HikmetThis article provides a comprehensive overview of the quantitative dimensions of contemporary Arab world migrations and diasporas, as well as a commentary on qualitative dimensions of pertinent English-language scholarship.1 It o"ers a global context within which scholars may situate their work in order to enhance communication and comparability across scholarly disciplines and regions. Scholars who study Arab world migrations and diasporas in Europe are not often in conversation with those studying these migrations and diasporas in North America or in the Gulf states. !e same can be said for scholars who study Arab world migrations and diasporas in Malaysia, China, or Australia, as well as South America, Africa, or the Caribbean. Similarly, scholars approaching these topics from the paradigms of postcolonial theory, anthropology, cultural studies, demography, history, comparative literature, or sociology do not o!en enough engage relevant scholarship outside of their paradigm. Only occasionally do scholars of di"erent disciplines gather together to present their work at scholarly meetings, and even then we seem to speak different languages.2 Disciplinary differences are healthy and important for the range of perspectives they contribute, but an overarching framework-such as the one o"ered here-will better enable us to make comparisons across place, time, and social contexts, and to deploy our conceptual categories "in a relational manner."3Developing such an overview of current Arab migrations and diasporas requires acknowledging the serious limitations inherent to the task. Demographic data are always subject to both random and systematic error; accuracy in migrant demography is especially elusive. Terminology and measurement tools vary according to who is doing the counting and how they construct their categories. Since demography is always connected to place, dominant ideologies, laws, categories, and nomenclatures where the counting occurs introduce variations. Demographic statistics speak to those who have been counted; there are many reasons why migrants might evade enumeration, for example, due to legal or political status. Furthermore, in some enumerations persons born on a state's soil are considered "foreign-born" if they maintain the nationality of their parents and have not naturalized, while other states may count them as "native-born." These variations are tied to state ideologies of nation and citizenship and corresponding rules concerning naturalization (where available), thus making it difficult to compare quantitatively across sites.The numbers provided in this article can offer a general framework for understanding the breadth and character of Arab world migrations and diasporas today. However, it is incumbent on specialists of each migrant location to do the tough investigative work needed for quantitative precision and comparability, including revealing those who are uncounted. Finally, demographic data on migrants tend to be organized by country of birth, potentially masking meaningful distinctions between different groups from the same country of origin. Although the data presented here were tabulated and published (by others) as Arab migration data, I use the term "Arab world migration" to highlight that we are not necessarily describing cultural or ethnic groups, but people who come from a particular place. There are many indigenous and diasporic peoples living in, moving through, and leaving the Arab world who are not "Arabs," such as Berbers, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Circassians, to name a few.In the process of searching for comparable quantitative data, I discovered that categories of quantification have a reifying tendency that has infected our qualitative research as well. These categories direct our gaze in specific ways that cause us to highlight certain matters while overlooking others, creating an overall imbalanced body of scholarly literature on Arab world migrations and diasporas. …