Abstract
In our article, we address how migrants in transnational spaces are affected by policies of citizenship, language policies, labor market, and education and training policies, among others. The analysis of autobiographical narrative interviews can provide methodical access to latently effective structures of transnational spaces. Transnational spaces can be conceptualized as opaque structures of multiply interconnected state, legal, and cultural transitions toward which individuals orient themselves biographically and in which they are simultaneously intertwined as collectives of experience. Transnational biographical knowledge is not only a result of subjective agency, but at the same time produces the structure of migration biographies, which are experienced and repeatedly reconstructed by migrating subjects. Through biographical policy evaluation we analyze policies and their simultaneous and sometimes paradoxical effects that force family members to find solutions for shaping their life practice. Thus, members of a family of several generations might be affected differently by policies due to their incomplete rights and family status, age, and gender. In reconstructing biographical evaluations, typical effects of the underlying policies can be discerned and critically assessed.
Biographical policy evaluation in transnational migration research
The transnationalization of research is interpreted in the following as a way of trying to grasp the changes which result out of migration processes at the level of acting subjects and the social spaces those subjects bring about. The prefix ‘trans’ was used by the pioneers in the development of this approach, Glick Schiller et al. (1992) in order to place the everyday worlds and ways of life of the immigrants into a new conceptual framework. The concept also serves as a critique of the dominant idea which sees migration as a one-way process that is limited in time and space, a move from the country of origin to the country of reception. In addition, it criticizes concepts of space in which the nation state is treated as the natural and secure ‘container’ (Pries, 1996) in which all social experience takes place. Thus, habitual concepts of emigration and immigration need to be rethought. The new space creates transnational identities which develop in ways that undermine rigid divisions between forms of national belonging. Transnational relations, conditioned by the rapid expansion of technologies of communication and mobility, also give rise to political, social, and cultural changes.
The concept of transnational social spaces is helpful toward grasping the phenomenon of biographical knowledge (Alheit and Hoerning, 1989) of subjects in different migrant generations interacting with one another (Apitzsch, 2009). This knowledge is accumulated and symbolized in the course of individual lives and of the lives of groups as a gendered process. On the basis of past, continuing, and necessary future separations and border crossings, such knowledge constitutes different and partly overlapping social spaces understood as coordinates of orientation for individual and group action. Biographical knowledge introduces the time axis into the constitution of social spaces, in the sense that accumulated experience represents the dimension of the past and biographical planning the anticipated future. The structures and effects of such border crossings and of the ways in which people deal with them in psycho-social terms in their biographies are linked to one another and interact with one another. Family members experience this process in different ways depending on their age, gender, whether they have older or younger siblings, and so on. Although each individual has his or her own biography, there are typical sequences of events which are specific to migration and which tell us a great deal about the invisible but very real structures of an immigration society, such as policies.
As a reconstructive research methodology, biographical policy evaluation can help to analyze and understand the workings and consequences of policies in many different contexts. While policies are constituted and effected top-down, their effects are unforeseeable and, as we argue, unknowable unless we take the perspective of subjects into account who need to orient their planning and decision-making in relation to them. Thus, by listening to and reconstructing how subjects have experienced certain policies, and especially also the interplay of different, often conflicting policies that conditioned their options, decisions, and action, we consider this as an evaluation of the actual effects of policies in people’s lives. We developed this methodology to investigate how policy decisions and measures at the local, national, and transnational level have affected the biographies of immigrants over several generations. Using the method of biographical policy evaluation, we identify and compare policies that have more or less conveyed the meaning and experience of integration and recognition to members of the older and younger generations in immigrant families.
Policies are designed and directed toward what are deemed ‘typical’ cases. These are the cases policy makers have in mind. But the specific situation of individuals often does not match the designated criteria; the individuals – and not the policies – are then treated as a problem. For example, access to health care for foreign students may not include their children, because students were not thought of as parents. Or a multi-lingual family’s application for an Au Pair will be refused because the respective policy defines families who can host Au Pairs as native speakers of the receiving country who are not bilingual. It can thus turn out, as we illustrate here with an example, that some policies provide grounds of exclusion for European citizens ‘with a migration background’, which is defined as having parents or grandparents born outside of Germany. In a biographical narrative interview with an academic couple raised and educated in Germany, both of whose parents had come as labor migrants from Turkey, their social mobility into middle class was the dominant topic. 1 After the end of the interview, rather inadvertently detailing her evaluative comment in a background construction 2 that things were not so easy in Germany for her family, Nervin told the story of how her application for an Au Pair from Turkey had failed. The city official in charge would not support her application and based his decision on a regulation that the family’s bilinguality in combination with their migration background would be an obstacle against the Au Pair’s access to German culture and language. The applicant’s objection that she and her husband had graduated from high school and university in Germany and could very well provide this access was not accepted by the official. He argued that while the case of an academic bilingual family ‘of Turkish migration background’ was not foreseen by the policy, he still would not change his decision. Nervin, who wanted an Au Pair from Turkey to improve her children’s bilinguality, was thus subjected to a stigmatizing and time-consuming fruitless effort. If this experience had not come up in an autobiographical narrative interview, the discriminating Au Pair policy regulation with its underlying notions of an ethnic understanding of ‘German culture and language’ would very likely have remained unnoticed, as well as the official’s willful decision to apply it to this family.
We argue that immigrants are especially dependent on policies since their access to residential rights, such as employment, education, and health care, among others, is highly regulated. Sometimes regulations are suspended, as by the Freedom of Movement act for EU citizens, but still apply to third country nationals.
In the following, we will describe and discuss examples from different kinds of research, which we mostly conduct comparatively because of national frameworks of immigration and citizenship policies. But first we turn to a short methodological explanation of this research approach in the sense of an analytical reflection on how objective structures and subjective interaction are involved in the production of data.
The epistemological frame of biographical policy evaluation methodology
Traditional policy evaluation methodology is mainly quantitatively oriented and focused on individual instruments and programs; program and policy objectives are compared to measurable program and policy outcomes. However, policy programs have to be understood also as socializing agents that have a long-lasting influence. Under this aspect, adequate social policy evaluation methodology has to consider not only the cumulative impacts of several policies on the target group in a given moment but also the processual character of this impact.
The main problem of traditional policy evaluation methodology can be seen as having to deal with unmeasured effects of unobserved heterogeneity (Schömann, 1997). This can be resolved by a processual perspective that opens the view for the significance of the life course, as well as life course changes as the framework in which policy measures develop their effects.
The methodology of biographical policy evaluation we describe here is based on the following three considerations: on the cumulative impact of more than one policy in a given biographical situation, the processuality of policy impact, and the aspect of human agency. The innovation for policy evaluation suggested by this methodology is the use of the biographical narrative interview, taking into account the agency as well as dependency of research subjects, their biographical knowledge, and expertise to develop a course of action along the priorities that they consider appropriate. We can thus gain insight into the experience produced by policies.
Furthermore, the multi-layered nature of the process of policy impact requires the narrative interview as a research instrument because it enables the investigation of the many levels of impacts that policy measures are deploying. In this sense, and in contrast to the traditional, program-oriented policy evaluation methods, the implementation of policy as biographical experience is at the center of biographical policy evaluation. The processual character of social exclusion as well as social integration requires a processual research method in order to be conceptualized and analyzed. Our methodology secures this processuality through a retrospective and reconstructive interview strategy. The reconstruction of biographical conditions, problems, and processes as well as of the specific impact of the policies on these biographical processes can be accomplished through biographical analysis.
Given that biographies are not only constructed through individuals but also constituted through social reality and objective factors, the method of the biographical interview does not only secure access to the experience and views of the concerned social groups but also to the ways in which macro factors and policy measures impact on biographies. Through the biographical approach it can be analyzed how individuals acting within the complexity of structural-objective factors and social policies are socialized in specific directions, which in turn directly affect their occupational development, their strategies adopted against exclusion and toward socio-economic integration.
Our biographical policy evaluation approach derives from the grounded theory methodology of Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) of qualitative data collection and analysis widely used for qualitative analysis in the social sciences and the biographical method developed by Fritz Schütze (1984, 2016) as a specification of grounded theory for biographical analysis (Apitzsch and Inowlocki, 2000). The biographical method does not only supply us with the instruments to collect data on experience and to analyze these data, but supplies us also with essential theoretical assumptions related to the structure of biographies. With reference to qualitative research in the Chicago School tradition, it was especially Fritz Schütze who developed new key concepts, in order to both unravel social phenomena which had been neglected in social research, such as processes of suffering and social disorder, and refine the methods of their analysis. His work shows how sociological understanding and knowledge rely on both the elaboration of theoretical concepts and the adequacy of data collection and analysis (Schütze, 1984, 1987). Schütze (1987) advocates that single case documents ‘are not only rigorously sequentially analyzed with regard to their contents but also concerning their procedures of reference and accounting’ (p. 544). What is first hidden in the technically recorded and transcribed materials becomes empirically and systematically analyzable by paying attention to formal features of the transcript, such as certain phenomena of disorder when explanations of earlier events and experiences are inserted later in the narrative, in what seems an unrelated context at first (so-called background constructions). These often turn out to relate to difficult experiences that were first glossed over but then find expression because the listener would otherwise not be able to follow and make sense of the narrative, and also because of the evolving reflexivity of the narrator.
Systematically analyzable concepts are, for example, ‘process structures’ in autobiographical narrative interviews. Four kinds of process structures within biographical accounts have been identified by Fritz Schütze (1984):
Those in which planning, initiative, and action are dominant (‘action schemes’).
Those in which institutional expectations and orientations are in the foreground.
Those which indicate a (potential) loss of control over one’s life because of heteronomous conditions (‘trajectory of suffering’, or ‘potential trajectory’).
Those which suggest an unexpected or unaccountable turn toward a creative transformation in the biography.
These process structures correspond to experiences and are represented in distinctive ways in the course of autobiographical accounts. In questioning the ‘taken-for-granted’ action orientation of many sociological theories, including symbolic interactionism, trajectories of suffering are of special sociological interest (Schütze, 1987). Under the influence of Anselm Strauss’ and Barney Glaser’s work on interactions between institutional processes and terminally ill patients (1970), as well as in cooperation with Anselm Strauss and his team of researchers (Strauss et al., 1985), Schütze and Riemann formulated a theory of biographical and collective trajectories (Riemann and Schütze, 1991). Trajectories represent a concept of social reality, which refers to both situations which are objectively (potentially) threatening and the interactive production and reproduction of threat, marginalization, and exclusion. They are processually structured, including in their ideal typical form stages of accumulation of the trajectory potential, of disorganization, break down, and new orientation (Riemann and Schütze, 1991).
Empirical fields of biographical policy evaluation: Some examples
The field of migrant self-employment
The method of biographical policy evaluation has been systematically developed since the end of the 1990s in connection with EU projects on self-employment in migration (cf. Apitzsch, Inowlocki, Kontos 2008). This approach discloses how different policy fields (immigration policies, entry regulations to national countries, access to the asylum procedure, policies in the fields of housing, and education, as well as support by volunteer associations) are biographically entwined, rather than remaining separate entities.
We selected cases from the field of (partly unexpected) professional success or failure in the fields of occupation and self-employment. Through biographical self-employment policy evaluation, we aimed to reconstruct basic biographical process structures of our research subjects and to ask for typical process structures that preceded self-employment – such as biographical action schemes, trajectories or institutional expectations, or creative changes – as well as those that were generated through the process of becoming self-employed and also through the policy impact under investigation.
Such an evaluation is a theory-driven approach. It implies taking into account the institutional framework in which individual action takes place and has to recognize that labor market behavior, for example, does not exist in isolation; rather, a systematic evaluation needs to consider the mechanisms and process structures that govern it. We first developed this approach in the field of migrant self-employment, as a process touching many aspects of the identity and the development of the self.
The interest of the evaluation is directed not only toward the intended aims but also toward the unintended impacts of policy. Since autobiographical narrative interviews allow insights into the self-coordinated, self-governed process of becoming self-employed and also into the latent structures of experience, the impact of policy on biographical processes could be analyzed in a comprehensive way. We could then ask what types of policy and which mix of policies could best support self-employment. In this sense, we thought of the process toward self-employment as a process that is interrelated with other biographical processes, reaching far back in the biography. The biographical approach based on the autobiographical narrative interview matches the notion of the biographical embeddedness of these policy impact processes. The research subject is asked to narrate his or her life story and not only the most recent years or issues concerning his or her professional life or participation in policies.
Last but not the least, the autobiographical narrative interview allows us to consider not only objective aspects of policy impact but also its subjective character and in this sense the self-evaluation of the narrator on his or her self-employment and the policy participation by relating policy success to the subjective perception of the policy participants. This opens the possibility to consider aspects of the quality of life that do not only refer to objective issues such as income but also to the capacity of the subjects to realize what they consider important for their well-being (Sen, 1992).
Similar to traditional and target-oriented policy evaluation methodology, biographical policy evaluation has to contrast policy impacts with policy goals. Therefore, a clear articulation of policy objectives is a prerequisite of the evaluation process, particularly when schemes may have multiple and occasionally conflicting objectives. The objectives of the schemes supporting the unemployed to self-employment vary from country to country (Meager, 1996, S. 495). However, at the most basic level, the output objectives of the schemes are similar: in the case of self-employment policies, to increase the flow from unemployment to self-employment. It is on the basis of this common objective, but most of all on the basis of accepted objectives in democratic societies such as the combat of social exclusion, the promotion of gender equality, of social participation, of an increase in autonomy and freedom of choice, that our evaluation takes its starting point. This comprehensive view on criteria for policy evaluation relies on the broad perspective of biographical policy evaluation. Biographical policy evaluation shares the assumption with target-oriented policy evaluation that policy evaluation can only be a cumulative policy evaluation. We pay attention to the impact of self-employment policies in relation to further policies that enable social citizenship and affect social exclusion and inclusion processes.
Moreover, another objective assumed for the policies is the support of successful self-employment and of its start. The newly self-employed have to fight for the survival of their businesses. Business failure is an effect of the open, experimental, and also risky nature of entrepreneurship. Research on the business survival of women and migrant enterprises show that they have a higher rate of business failure than other self-employed enterprises (Jungbauer-Gans, 1993). But what do success and failure mean? The biographical self-employment policy evaluation that point to the subjective aspect of self-evaluation of self-employment and policy participation open the view for problematizing the definition of success. The quantitative definition of success based on hard criteria such as income and years of survival of the business and of failure through low earnings or business collapse becomes partly challenged. Instead, the biographical definition of success and its subjective perception become part of the definition.
In summary, it should be noted that what emerges through the biographical method is the dimension of the capacity of individuals to handle and develop agency. Analyzing the capacity of individuals to actively develop strategies for reaching social integration, the adequacy of the policy can be shown to support existing potentials, agency, and strategies, as well as individuals in their effort to mobilize resources and to overcome biographical trajectories. A characteristic of an adequate and effective policy should be to actively support individuals in their effort to mobilize resources and to overcome biographical trajectories, and not to ignore or affect existing potentials of active social integration. Therefore, this enables us to detect processes and resources that have been ignored and to formulate concrete proposals on this basis for more adequate policies.
Scheme participants are typically concentrated among the more advantaged segments of the unemployed; they are more likely than the average of unemployed to be male, to have higher-level qualifications, and to have been unemployed for a relatively short period of time (Meager, 1996, S. 499). A comprehensive policy evaluation has to analyze not only the impact on the persons who participated but also the reasons of the absence of policy for persons who did not participate. This is most important for the case of the non-privileged self-employment we were studying. We thus not only asked what would have happened without these policies but also asked why people did not participate in these policies. Taking into account the notorious absence of policy participation of parts of the population under investigation, in some social categories and some national frameworks, the focus is on the dynamics of the process of entering self-employment and the impact of the absence of policy on this process. Analyzing biographical processes in cases of research subjects who started businesses without policy participation, we could gain knowledge on resources that could be mobilized and on potentials that had not been taken into account by policies or were counteracted through the structure of policy measures. On this basis as well, proposals for adequate policies could be formulated.
Comparative cases of cultural citizenship policies
We further developed this research concept in the Franco-German research network MIGREVAL (Apitzsch et al., 2019). 3 The aim is to compare the dynamics of belonging and exclusion among descendants of migrants in France and Germany within the framework of the cooperation between the universities of Strasbourg and Frankfurt am Main (cf. Apitzsch et al. 2014). We reconstruct specific cases to identify the biographical consequences of immigration regimes. The case studies we analyze are built on autobiographical narrative and narrative interviews with immigrant families and members of different local institutions. They are based on 120 life stories of immigrants and their descendants belonging to a total of 40 families and 44 interviews with social workers, active citizens, former migrants already settled, priests from churches, members of volunteer associations, and local authorities that immigrants have to do with. The narrative interviews were collected between 2015 and 2020 in Strasbourg and Frankfurt am Main by binational research teams. All interviews in our database were transcribed, re-read, and approved by the interviewees, who also chose pseudonyms. All identifying information was removed. The cases allow us to grasp how the subjectivity of the interviewees is inscribed in the social construction of their biographies with the researcher and with the people who play a role in the process of becoming residents in France and in Germany. We can thus gain more knowledge concerning the impact of migration policies on intergenerational relations, gender relations, and possible crises of cultural transmission. This concerns policies on the national as well as the communal level as experienced and evaluated by immigrants to France and Germany.
We explore the question of how policy decisions and measures at the local, national, and transnational levels have affected migrants’ biographies over several generations. Using the method of biographical policy evaluation, we identify and compare policies that have more or less conveyed the meaning and experience of integration and recognition to members of the older and younger generations – migrants and their adult children between the ages of 18 and 30. The focus is on three thematic areas where policies are effective: language acquisition, occupational success, and marriage strategies.
The analyses of narrated life stories are particularly suitable for this purpose, since, on the one hand, they allow the reconstruction of social processes in their depth and, on the other hand, they cover particularly long periods of time and make it possible to take a look at the long-term consequences of different policies. In this context, the categories ‘generation’ and ‘gender’ are necessarily of central importance, for example, when looking at the negotiation processes and the action strategies of subjects in the family context. Biographical research makes it possible to examine generational relations in their psychosocial dynamics, in their material exchange, and their ‘generational bearing’, that is, in their specific situation in contemporary history, and thus to understand how individuals react to drastic social changes and political measures and also resist them. We examined to what extent and how migrants and their families can rely on institutional support, in which ways they are refused or excluded by institutions and how these aspects affect intergenerational relationships.
In the course of EU integration, the policy-driven migration regimes change and overlap with each other in often paradoxical ways. The acting individuals and groups are nevertheless challenged to plan their life courses as diachronic, transversal to the overlapping and contradictory state and European control systems. It is precisely in this overlapping that the great biographical challenges lie especially for the descendants of the so-called ‘guest workers’ who immigrated through recruitment contracts. These challenges can neither be adequately captured by ethnographic snapshots alone nor by large surveys, because their interpretation would require the inclusion of the processual temporal dimension. The biography-analytical approach opens up the possibility of reconstructing historical developments also as changes in family cooperation over generations.
Biographical policy evaluation means that policies that appear in a biographical narrative are hermeneutically reconstructed both on the time axis of the entire narrative period of life and on the spatial axis of the social relations given in a particular spatial-geographical context. In the case of migration families, this context constitutes a specific transnational space. In the course of the analysis, the individual biographical decisions are confronted with the given political and legal contexts. In this way, it is possible to show both the achievements in overcoming biographical trajectories of more or less externally controlled action and the respective individual and social costs of such ‘coping strategies’. In the same way, the interaction of national policies and transnational biographical knowledge can be examined, including the changes in gender regimes induced and processed by this knowledge.
On generational relations and gender differences in transnational European migration
Europe-wide studies on the educational level and professional careers of the descendants of migrant workers recruited between the 1950s and 1973 have shown that the second and third generations of their families continue to be disadvantaged compared to the population without a migration background. In general, the data show that the descendants of so-called ‘guest workers’ in France and the Scandinavian countries have better school-leaving qualifications than in Germany, but that professional success is higher in Germany than in the other national contexts mentioned (Crul et al., 2012). In all contexts, however, the gender dimension proves to be of considerable importance. While girls with a migration background have comparable school and university degrees to girls without a migration background, the results of the male descendants of migrant workers are generally far below the respective national and international average. To explain these differences, biographical research has developed a theoretical model in the past two decades that is essentially based on the different ways in which the sexes experience adolescence. Male adolescents, who are traditionally freed from duties and responsibilities for family work and who are given a great deal of freedom outside of school and work, can usually only use this freedom under the conditions of a marginal social position in immigration in such a way that they distinguish themselves as outsiders in the peer group. In this context, the gender-specific manifestation of an adolescent-typical peer group orientation was regularly found among male adolescents, whereas in female adolescents the youth phase is typically family-oriented. Family orientation, however, by no means implies an ultimately tradition-bound youth phase among female members of the second generation. Rather, there is a ‘dialectic of family orientation’ in which the reflexive handling of one’s own family releases a considerable biographical transformation potential. It becomes apparent that the family orientation of girls often transforms into an increased individual educational orientation in the course of the migration process, when the desire for a successful migration is maintained, but the criterion of success gradually shifts from a successful return to the ‘home region’ (originally as such pursued by the parents) to successful educational and occupational prospects in the receiving country. This transformation process is supported by the fact that success leads to a gain in power, also within the family of origin. Mothers often see options realized here that they could not realize themselves but would have liked to (cf. Apitzsch, 2009).
If we look at the presented contrastive cases in France and Germany on the background of this empirically based theoretical model, we have to make some extensions of our model. Thus, we looked at cases of second-generation members active in the cultural sector. 4 In France, the policy of the ‘social city’ allows second-generation members to complement each other in terms of cultural citizenship and adequate employment in the cultural sector, whereas in Germany they tend to drift apart due to the stronger dominance of the cultural industry. Gender roles are no longer characterized by great differences in terms of educational attainment; rather, educational processes are experienced by both or all genders as processes of advancement.
In the social field of the study of care work and care policies, it is noticeable that in Germany it was extremely difficult to find members of the second generation in this occupational field. 5 This already seems to be a first research result: the path of integration through independent care work as a childminder does not seem to be a desirable goal for the second generation in Germany. For members of the first generation, on the one hand, especially for members of the middle classes in their countries of origin whose qualifications were not recognized in Germany, it seems to be a way of escaping the impasse of de-qualification and simultaneous overload through their own family care work. For members of the second generation, on the other hand, who want to enter the professional field of nursing, it is much more attractive in Germany to complete a university degree and enter work at a higher level of state professional recognition. In France, on the other hand, the profession of assistante maternelle is also attractive for the second generation (Glaeser, 2018: 253f.). The profession of assistante maternelle does not lead to a dead end: on the contrary, the state recognition of this activity opens up other possible career paths. This results in a very concrete outcome of the biographical policy evaluation for the German-French comparison with regard to the improvement of the situation in Germany. Thus, it can be concluded, ‘A recognition similar to the French framework conditions regarding the status as employees, payment, infrastructural support as well as subsidies for parents could lead to a considerable improvement of care provision via daycare parents’ (Glaeser, 2018: 346).
Communal policies for third country nationals toward obtaining residential rights and work permits
Since labor migration to Western Europe ended in 1973, family reunification has been one of the essential forms of immigration in several European countries (Kofman, 2004). In France, in 2016, 40% of residence permits granted were for family reunification (Héran, 2017). The family dimension also plays a major role in social integration and sometimes also in obtaining residence permits for people arriving in France as a family. However, members of the same family may have different rights (Fogel, 2019). What emerges from our research is the importance of the role played locally by municipalities in partnership with members of civil society to meet the needs of migrants who arrive destitute and in need of legal advice (Delcroix and Inowlocki, 2021).
While immigration policies are decided at nation state level and reflect international arrangements, their actual consequences for immigrants depend very much on local settings. Cities devise their policies toward immigrants in relation with and sometimes in contrast to national regulations. National borders are state-controlled, but on the local level, different agents negotiate immigration regimes, such as the municipality, various institutions of social work, NGOs, and other associations, in conjunction with immigrants who have no or restricted social and legal rights.
We focused on two local settings, the metropolitan regions of Strasbourg (France) and Frankfurt am Main (Germany). In 2017, the city of Strasbourg adopted a strategy to counter France’s restrictive immigration policies. Since then, local policies in Strasbourg are devised toward becoming a nation-wide French model of a ‘ville hospitalière’ (a hospitable city). Politicians and civil servants developed strategies to enable migrants to gradually enter common law. Such strategies consist in starting out from the legal status of one or some of the family members – most often a minor – to gradually ‘complete’ the rights of other family members. Children have the right to protection and education, whatever their residency status may be. They have the right to housing and to attend school, even when their parents do not have residency papers or visas. This local policy interrogates ‘urban citizenship’ vis-à-vis undocumented migration (Varsanyi, 2006). This policy contributes to the discussion on the role of cities in current migration regimes. It can be evaluated by analyzing how the biographical experiences and action orientation of the members of immigrant families reflect and contribute to innovative politics at the communal level.
Based on case studies of families (following the example of Bertaux and Delcroix, 2000), we can further show how the rights of various family members have progressively been completed by the way how immigrants, professionals, and politicians in the two cities jointly adapt to legal constraints concerning rights of residency, access to housing, education, employment and language courses, and how at the same time they devise strategies to overcome or transform these regulations. The insights we can gain from the biographical approach concern the experiences and interactions of migrants with members of different local agencies and institutions, their reflection and evaluation, as well as the strategies they employ in order to adapt to (or resist) given policies. Our reconstructive analysis of the biographical evaluation of immigrants’ encounters and experiences with institutions can yield critical insights on how policies are actually put into practice and work in different ways by enabling or, on the contrary, obstructing migrants’ efforts. The methodological challenges of such an approach imply establishing working alliances of trust and shared interest with our interview partners among immigrants and professionals, contextual ethnographic observation in the different locations, and a contrastive comparative approach in our analysis to understand the specifics of each local setting in relation to others.
For our case studies, intergenerational biographical narratives were collected from individuals and cross-referenced with the narratives of political actors and professionals responsible for designing and implementing immigrant reception policies and programs. The analysis of these interviews allows immigrant families’ experiences and evaluations to be compared with the points of view of professionals. The accounts are studied in connection with the administrative regulations concerning immigrants. The local application of these regulations is related to national, transnational, and European contexts. The analysis seeks to identify the effects of these policies during different phases of the lives of the two generations in an intersectional way and also to understand social mobility within families. This methodology results in a reconstruction of typical configurations of the effects of these policies. By studying the effects on conditions of training and access to the employment market of these populations, it becomes possible to identify the different processes at work in their social mobility. We chose cases from our database 6 to exemplify how immigrants evaluate their experiences with local policies that affected them and the support they received, as well as persisting problems from their point of view. Our case studies include social workers, other professionals, and volunteers. This dynamic mode of encounter, also based on observations, provides the means to understand how these persons make choices, build networks of relationships, and thus open up fields of possibility for their children’s future.
The following short case study concerns a father and his child who came to the Rhein/Main area in 2018 without legal documents. 7 Based on interviews and conversations with the father and child as well as with volunteers and activists who have been supporting them throughout their stay, the following reconstruction points out significant experiences of the father from his life story and important encounters with volunteers and different organizations and agencies. The aim is to understand the difficulties and impediments Jason and his son Alex encountered and the resources they relied on.
Jason, the father, was in his mid-thirties when he arrived in the Rhein-Main-area in 2018 from an EU country in Eastern Europe, where he had lived for about 10 years as an immigrant from a West African country. His son was born in 2009 out of a relationship with a woman from the majority population in the Eastern European country. After 5 months, she no longer wanted to take care of the child and also wanted no further contact to either child or father. Jason then took sole responsibility of the child and gave him his family name instead of the mother’s name that the baby had carried so far. He refused to hand over the child for adoption, as the state agency for children and youth suggested. As sole caretaker, he would have been entitled to receive state support for the child. But in spite of his repeated attempts to claim it, he was only given a small sum once and the refusal of regular transfer was accompanied by racist discrimination. In consequence, he left for the Rhein-Main-area. However, he could not find employment and had no place to stay. When his and his son’s existence became increasingly difficult, he contacted a volunteer organization which had been founded by – mostly – student activists in the Rhein-Main-area.
According to officials at the bureau for foreigners in Frankfurt, Jason’s resident status in the Eastern European country – an EU member state – did not entitle him to work in Germany. Thus, he would have been left out in the street with his son during winter, because there was no communal agency he could turn to. Volunteers from the association offered him and his son Alex a stay at their apartments for several months at a time. As Peter, one of the volunteers, explained, it was out of concern for the child that he provided room for Jason and Alex. Similarly, he had already let a woman and her children stay with him previously.
Jason soon found work as a room attendant in several hotels, but was refused a work contract because of his lack of resident papers. Thus, he could not show a pay slip over the course of several months that would have met the requirements of the bureau for foreigners, which demanded that he should be self-supportive and not rely on state transfer payments. This limbo situation continued for several months, which Jason and Alex spent in relative isolation in a room that another volunteer had provided for them. The father shopped for food and cooked for his son and himself, but they had no place to go to (such as a communal space provided for immigrants in Strasbourg). The isolation and bleakness of the situation was somewhat lifted by the enrollment of Alex to a regular school, which he was to join after the winter holidays. His enrollment was not questioned by the authorities, because of his citizenship in an EU country and also more generally because of children’s general right of access to school and education.
The debatable issue concerning Jason’s work and residence was whether the law of free movement within the EU would also apply to EU residents but non-citizens. A volunteer at the association established contact to a lawyer with experience in similar cases of parents without resident and work permits in custody of children. The lawyer – according to Peter – made it clear that there was no reason for employers to withhold a work contract because Jason was in fact allowed to work. Jason was then able to provide 3 months’ pay slips to the bureau of foreigners and was finally granted a residence permit. The permit was first issued for 1 year and then extended to 5 years, with permanent residence in view. Thus, legal advice proved crucial to resolve the tie between work and residential rights.
When Alex started school, he quickly learned German and made friends. Through one friend and her parents, Jason and Alex found temporary housing. When they had to move from there, their living situation deteriorated, as Peter told us, because they shared an apartment with five or six adults in a somewhat chaotic situation. Peter then helped Jason to apply to the housing office, where Jason received preferred status after a short waiting period because of the child. Finally, they fortunately were assigned their own affordable place with a long-term rental contract, in the proximity where Jason works and Alex goes to school.
Alex has done very well in school, soon speaking German fluently and faultlessly, and received good grades. He could fulfill his desire to play football and become member of a team. 8 However, Alex’s school does not seem to have a social worker and his teacher might not see the need for support, given Alex’s good grades. Access to social work would be very much needed, to relieve Alex from taking too much responsibility and a parental role when he accompanies his father to official agencies to translate. While the volunteers of the association have created the basis for a regular life for this family, especially by sharing their apartment, providing access to legal advice which proved crucial for work and residential rights, and then by supporting the successful application for affordable housing, they can of course not be expected to fulfill the roles of social workers and the professional advice they can give. The shortcomings of official support show in the absence of a communal social space where professional advice could be offered, and in the city’s refusal to supply a space that can be self-organized by the activists.
For Jason, better access to social services would be very important, because the volunteers who support him have reached their limits; they are not trained social workers but come from a variety of studies and professions and would not want to contribute to a de-qualification of social work (Mayer, 2018: 245). Also, paradoxically, Jason’s situation seems resolved, since he has work and an apartment and Alex does well at school. But it remains hidden to the school teacher that a social worker would be very much needed, to support Jason in his communication with the school and other authorities, while he is trying to hide his functional writing, reading, and arithmetic disability. This would have probably been better resolved in the context of the closely knit social support network in Strasbourg.
In the case of Frankfurt, there is no comparable notion to Strasbourg’s ‘hospitality policy’ and many social services geared to improve migrants’ lives. The German ‘welcome culture’ of 2015/2016 did not translate into structural communal support. Instead, associations of volunteers continue to provide what is existentially necessary for undocumented persons via donations they receive. The associations are politically active in the city parliament, negotiating with the different political parties and by creating a network with other associations, such as for fair work conditions, for the recognition of qualifications gained abroad, and for the support of migrant girls and women. The political aim would be to create centers run by migrants and refugees with the financial support of the city. While this is not yet in sight, there is some recognition by the city for the volunteer and activist organizations and partial funding for their initiatives.
Our aim was to show how local actors and policies support the efforts of migrants. Jason’s work and residence permit from an Eastern European EU country were first not recognized by the Frankfurt authorities. It is important to note that without the association’s support he would not have known where to turn to in the city of Frankfurt, since he was not asking for asylum but for the continuation of his residence and work status obtained in another EU country. It was of core importance that the volunteers established contact with an experienced lawyer who broke the tie between contradictory conditions of work and residential rights.
In conclusion: The evaluation of biographical knowledge as a methodical approach toward understanding objective structures
In our article, our aim was to understand biographical knowledge not only as a product of subjectivity but also as a reconstructive approach of often invisible, but nevertheless objectively effective social structures. The examples of transnational migration spaces we discussed show that in their possibilities of action and mobility migrants encounter and have to deal with policies of citizenship, language policies, labor market, and education and training policies. Moreover, policies can affect family members differently by assigning ‘incomplete rights’, depending on their relative resident and family status, age, and gender.
Policies interfere on different local, regional, national, and transnational levels. Our research objective of reconstructing the layered experience and reflection of transnational transitions is based on analyzing biographical knowledge which is endowed with great validity. The respectively different biographical knowledge of interacting subjects is layered and symbolized throughout the life course of individuals as well as among groups of people undergoing collective experiences. Due to necessary past, ongoing, and future separations and border crossings, different and partly overlapping social spaces are constituted in the sense of orientation coordinates of individual and group action. Every biographical narrative has plenty of descriptions of social spaces. We thus study the structures and effects of border crossings and their psychosocial effects in biographies of subjects who are interconnected and continuously interact.
Transnational space becomes discernible in the structure of the migration biography, which is produced and repeatedly reconstructed by the migration subjects through biographical work. Transnational spaces are not geographical locations or transport links between them, but rather multiple networks of national, legal, and cultural transitions to which individuals orient themselves biographically and in which they are simultaneously enmeshed as collectives of experience. The most convincing evidence that biographical narratives are not mere artifacts, illusions, and/or idiosyncrasies is the fact that almost every biographical narrative exposes a trajectory of suffering.
In biographical research, this is understood – as explained above – following Anselm Strauss and Glaser (1970) and Riemann and Schütze (1991) as the process in which the intentional scheme of action has to be abandoned and a person only reacts or is ‘processed’, mostly by institutions. As a rule, such trajectories are results of social interaction processes and typical for very specific – potentially or actually – threatening situations and the ways they are dealt with. Through case analyses, typical and recurring patterns of confrontation and corresponding process structures emerge. Family members who are involved in a migration process experience this process differently according to their age, gender, position in the sibling line, and so on. Nevertheless, there are migration-specific typical biographical processes that tell us a lot about the very real structures of immigration and immigrant society which are difficult to observe from the outside. This becomes particularly evident in collective trajectories such as flight from natural disasters, hunger, or war, within which the subjective experiences of migrants are constituted.
The biographical shape of the sequences of separations and border crossings in migration, reconstructed on the basis of an individual path, usually represents a certain type of objectively possible cross-border migration options. Through the reconstruction of a person’s biographical relationships in interaction with their families, insight can be gained into the process structures of legal, moral, and emotional border crossings.
Through biographical policy evaluation, researchers can discover the existence of policies that were initially hidden from their gaze when forming hypotheses due to the completely different life perspectives of those being researched. In biographical evaluation, the various policies are confronted with their political and legal contexts in order to place the critical evaluation on as broad a basis as possible. In this way, individual and collective success as well as the – often high – individual and social costs of dealing with institutional interventions and procedures (or else their complete absence) can be brought into view. Biographical analyses reveal that the solutions of the subjects concerned do not differ arbitrarily on an individual basis, that they do not follow an idiosyncratic illusion, but expose typical ways of the biographical processing of the underlying policies, which can thus become an object of critique, the yardstick being the social and individual facilitations or costs they cause.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.