Figures of Migration in the Classical Sociologies of Marx,Weber,and Du Bois

Abstract

Migration is a topic of heated debate, yet it is relatively absent from sociological theory discussions. This article analyzes the extent to which structural de-thematization or specific framing of migration shapes sociological perspectives by focusing on approaches that have been canonized as “classics.” Through a rereading of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W. E. B. Du Bois, I address absences and show how these authors have nevertheless constructed certain figures of migration: as a passive figure of forced mobility, a threatening figure of otherness, and an active figure of social transformation. How these authors depict migration is both symptomatic of their approach but also of a contemporary sociological and sociopolitical discourse that can be critically reflected in relation to these works. By showing how migration is treated in these different intellectual projects, the article contributes to a genealogy of sociological thought and its impact on contemporary perspectives regarding migration, diversity, and inequality.

“Migration” and “society” are usually depicted as opposites in public debates across Europe and North America. Migration appears as a threat to society or as something that needs to be integrated into society. Such statements from dominant discourses of rejection and integration are not only indicative of the explicit ways migration is objectified and problematized, but they reveal much about the implicit imagination of national societies, which are presented as uniform, homogeneous, and sedentary. Sociological theories can irritate and counter this restrictive common sense with perspectives that differentiate social contexts and thereby deconstruct the problematizations of migration, as Schinkel (2019) points out in Imagined Societies, in which he develops a sharp critique of the integration and assimilation paradigm. However, our theories are also part of the problem insofar as the theories canonized in the Global North have long thought of modern society in national terms (Amelina et al. 2021; Bhambra and Holmwood 2021; Bielefeld 2003). Classical sociology has often ignored not only the imperial entanglements of European nation states but also other transnational relations and the migration movements associated with them (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021:ix; Jonsson 2020).

Against this background, I pursue the question of how migration phenomena are addressed or ignored in the classical sociologies of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W. E. B. Du Bois, that is, how they have established a particular and partially reductive view of migration in sociology and beyond. The article has three aims. First, I examine how sociological approaches treat migration in different ways, each constructing specific figures of migration. Second, I discuss to what extent the construction of these figures is symptomatic of the respective approaches and of classical sociology, that is, to what extent the presences and absences (de Sousa Santos 2014) of “migration,” its structural de-thematization or specific framing, shape the perspectives of sociological theory. Third, I discuss the extent to which these figures of migration and their respective limitations are echoed in current approaches to the sociology of migration and in broader discourses. This critique of historically constructed figures allows for a critical reflection on the current treatment of migration in public discourses, migration sociology, and sociological theory.

In many current sociological theories, migration is not problematized as such. However, it also hardly appears as a sociological topic in approaches such as Luhmann’s (2012) systems theory and other theories of differentiation that proceed from a concept of world society or Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory and neo-materialist approaches that reject the concept of society altogether, so the construction of migration in opposition to nationally defined societies is often lost from view. ¹ Other areas of sociology and public discourses tend to adhere to a paradigm of methodological nationalism and sedentarism in which migration appears marginal or problematic. These discourses often reproduce a dominant objectifying, categorizing, and culturalizing view. I elaborate on how such descriptions arise in the context of works by Marx, Weber, and Du Bois, addressing gaps but also showing how these authors—often in the margins of their work—constructed figures of migration that can be traced in contemporary analyses. In conjunction with a critique of methodological nationalism, Eurocentrism, and sentarianism, I problematize three tendencies in particular: the passivization (Marx), alterization (Weber), and hierarchization (Du Bois) of migration. These tendencies are reflected in current discourses because the (de)construction of the respective figures indicates a questioning of left-wing “migration critiques,” national integration paradigms, and the reproduction of binary distinctions between “good” and “bad” migration in social movements.

Taking up the current debate on the decolonization of sociology (Alatas and Sinha 2017; Bhambra and Holmwood 2021; Go 2016, 2017) and migration sociology (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020; Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015; Itzigsohn 2023; Mayblin and Turner 2021), I contribute to the reflection on the history of sociology and the possibilities of other sociologies by examining thematically specific approaches and blind spots. My aim is not to denounce classical sociology as a whole or the work of individual sociologists but, rather, to examine different thematizations of migration and explore what this reveals about the respective approaches (Boatcă 2013). In the context of the debate on how sociological theories can be used in migration studies to develop alternative perspectives to the dominant gaze on migration (Jørgensen and Schwiertz forthcoming), I aim to critically examine the tradition of sociological theory itself. I discuss the ways sociological theory has contributed to dominant discourses on migration and the ways critical migration studies can relate to sociological theory to disrupt dominant narratives of rejection and assimilation. By reflecting on and challenging the social (scientific) coproduction and bordering of migration and the positionalities involved, this article contributes to three strands of literature: reflexive approaches that foreground the situatedness of knowledge production and “de-migranticization” (Amelina 2020; Dahinden and Pott forthcoming); critical approaches that emphasize power relations, border regimes, and migrant struggles (Bojadžijev and Karakayalı 2010; De Genova 2017; Georgi 2019; Hess 2012); and postcolonial and decolonial approaches that stress global entanglements and alternative epistemologies (Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2010; Itzigsohn 2023; Mayblin and Turner 2021).

In the following sections, I first describe my discourse-analytic approach to (re)constructing figures based on a theme-oriented rereading of sociological theories. I then elaborate figures of migration, tracing how migration appears (1) in Marx as a passive figure of forced mobility, (2) in Weber as a threatening figure of otherness, and (3) in Du Bois as an active figure of social transformation. I relate these figures to contemporary approaches and discourses but without assuming causality. Still, the critique of these historical figures and their reverberations can sensitize a reflection on the current treatment of “migration” in the public sphere and in the social sciences. In the last section, I relate the three figures to each other, critically discuss their boundaries, and place them in relation to the sociological theories associated with them.

Such an examination of figures is important because their critical reflection sheds light on canonized sociologies and debates within the discipline and the broader public. Through the pointed (re)construction of figures from classical works, particular perspectives on migration can be excavated and put up for discussion, which can facilitate a problematization of such perspectives with regard to current discourses. This can trigger a truth effect in the sense of Foucault (1977), making the contingent and powerful fabrication of figures visible to open up spaces for rethinking migration beyond such figures or the form of the figure in general. These imaginaries of migration are socially constructed bodies of knowledge, but they have powerful consequences in everyday life because they shape the way migration is dealt with; they open up spaces for action, but they can also streamline and restrict spaces. Thus, the critique of figures can prompt us to rethink how migration is addressed in the Global North and the situation of those who are migrantized. ² Ultimately, this reflection of power-knowledge effects can encourage us to move away from such figures and develop more complex approaches to social theory that do not oppose migration and society but, rather, understand them as constitutively intertwined.

Constructing Social Figures: A Genealogy Of Sociological Perspectives On Migration

“Figures of migration” are understood as social figures through which migration movements are discursively represented and often problematized. In contrast to time-diagnostic sociologies, which condense their central theses into figures (Schlechtriemen 2024)—such as Bauman’s (1995) stroller, vagabond, tourist, and player; Bröckling’s (2015) entrepreneurial self; or Nail’s (2015) migrant, described as a constitutive figure of our time—I examine social figures that initially remain marginal and latent, figures that are not formed purposefully in the examined approaches but have to be (re)constructed in their reading with regard to particular aspects. Against the background of a “constructivist notion of theory” (Fuhse 2022), such a posteriori construction of figures helps relate different sociological approaches or strands of discourse to one another—with regard to similarities and differences, possible conflicts, or combinations—without assuming a causal relationship. (Re)Constructing figures is thus a technique of analyzing and comparing theories but also of linking sociological and broader social discourses from different contexts and times.

To draw out figures of migration in the traditional mainstream of sociological theory, I focus on canonized classics that are considered central to the discipline. Recent publications show the continued importance of Marx (e.g. Musto 2021; Ritchie, Carpenter, and Mojab 2022) and Weber (Brown 2023) and the growing reception of Du Bois that has been blocked for a long time (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015). All three approaches are actively debated in sociological theory and are increasingly subjected to a decolonial rereading, but few studies examine these “classical” sociologies with regard to the topic of migration and analyze why it remains largely marginal to them (FitzGerald 2022). Although the three authors themselves do not explicitly speak of “migration,” a term that has become increasingly common only in recent decades (instead, they speak of “emigration,” “displacement,” “wandering,” or “flight”), I use the term to relate their approaches to each other and to current debates. I selected these three approaches to highlight and contrast divergent figures of migration; thus, I discuss only parts of their respective oeuvre and its historical context, deal only with excerpts from the immense secondary literature, and refer only occasionally to the further development of the three theoretical traditions, in which central transformations of the past century are taken into account and in which some of the one-sided depictions I will point out are redressed. ³ Rather, I concentrate on a close reading of passages in the primary texts that I selected based on a review of the respective works, indexes, and secondary literature with the criteria of being particularly relevant to the topic of migration.

To this end, I develop a discourse-analytic approach that is less oriented toward understanding individual texts and works as units in order to reconstruct them hermeneutically or to develop an immanent critique. Rather, I examine the selected text passages as expressions in a larger discursive context of statements (Foucault 1972) for which they are regarded—and this is an analytic construction—as symptomatic. In this way, I work out how statements about migration are related to each other and condense them into specific “figures of migration” that are constructed in these texts but at the same time are a heuristic construct of my analyses. Thus, I do not primarily interpret the work or even the intentions of individual authors but, rather, examine their writings as if they were empirical material to work out a nexus of statements that I summarize pointedly as figures. However, the discourse-analytic approach is not strictly historical; rather, the statements analyzed in classical sociologies can be related to contemporary contexts. Referring to Foucault (1977), one could say that the synchronic discourse perspective on the historical documents is at the same time linked to a diachronic perspective: a genealogy that shows the continuing effects of the analyzed nexus of statements with contemporary discourses, thus reflecting the contingent history of current knowledge production about migration.

Marx: Migration As A Passive Figure Of Forced Mobility

Marx wrote before the professional institutionalization of sociology, and his works were only canonized decades later, in the course of the student movement of the 1970s (Connell 1997). Marx’s biography is marked by a history of migration, fleeing from Germany via stays in France and Belgium to England; however, in contrast to Du Bois’s writings, this personal experience is rarely explicitly included in his academic work. He addresses migration movements in passages on primitive accumulation, the industrial reserve army, and emigration from England in the first volume of Capital (Marx 1992) or when he deals with the position of Irish workers in England. From the dispossession and displacement of rural populations to urbanization and proletarianization, migration appears primarily as the forced movement of a population that becomes the pawn of capitalist transformation processes (De Genova 2019).

Primitive Accumulation: Dispossession and Displacement

In “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx (1992:874) describes the emergence of capitalism as a history of “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force.” Central to this history are the moments when “great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians” (Marx 1992:876). Marx (1992:876) describes the expropriation of land from the rural population as the essential underpinning of this process, using England as the “classic” example. Dispossession and displacement are fundamental to the issue of migration, with migration appearing as a “forced emigration” (Marx and Engels 1978:528) resulting from these mechanisms.

This idea is illuminated in Marx’s concept of doubly “free” workers, who are both “free” to sell their labor power and forced to do so because they are “free” from the means of production. As a “free seller of labour-power,” workers liberated from feudal conditions are encouraged to become a mobile subject who “carries his commodity wherever he can find a market for it” (Marx 1992:874). Migration is thus fundamental to capitalist societies because their mode of production depends on workers moving to wherever they are needed (although immobilization at these sites of production is equally important). The ambivalence of this “progress” becomes apparent: Marx shows how social coercion and constraints operate despite liberal rights and conversely, how those who are deemed useful can claim rights in order to sell their labor elsewhere.

But dispossession and displacement are more than prehistory. Contrary to Marx’s (1992:875) account, the violent process of “primitive accumulation” occurs not only at the beginning of the capitalist mode of production—as “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” and “pre-history of capital”—but is globally repeated and indispensable for the reproduction of capitalism. Luxemburg ([1913] 2003) and, more recently, Federici (2004) have pointed this out. Even today, processes of exploitation are linked to direct relations of domination and violence: Labor regimes are closely linked to militarized border and migration regimes (Georgi 2019). Therefore, in capitalist societies, we can only speak of free workers to a limited extent. The graduated disenfranchisement of migration in the Global North according to different statuses reveals different degrees of freedom and the connection between indirect and direct rule, which is obscured by the modernization theory assumption of a transition from a purely feudal (unfree labor) to a purely capitalist (free labor) society (Chakrabarty 2008). ⁴

Overpopulation and a Reserve Army

Marx’s (1992:781) remarks on the “Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army” are also interesting for the issue of migration. Here, he describes how populations are made superfluous under capitalism: through technological progress, the use of more suitable workers, and economic cycles. This creates a “disposable industrial reserve army” (Marx 1992:784), which is important for the capitalist mode of production to meet the demand for labor on an ad hoc basis but also serves as a deterrent to workers because it reminds them of their replaceability. This reserve army contains “a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital” and its “changing valorization requirements” (Marx 1992:784) whereby the colonies, in particular, are seen as a reservoir from whose “human resources” the imperial metropolises benefit. This reserve army is also a population that can be used to create competition in the labor market, or the appearance of competition, so that wages can be lowered and exploitation intensified with as little resistance as possible. This leads to an interplay between overexploitation and superfluousness: “The over-work of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve, while, conversely, the greater pressure that the reserve by its competition exerts on the employed workers forces them to submit to over-work and subjects them to the dictates of capital” (Marx 1992:789). The larger the reserve army is in relation to the active workers’ army, the greater the precarious surplus population. ⁵

Migration is key to this reserve army, which can be understood as a mobile surplus population. A doubly negative picture of migration is drawn, albeit with a critical intention: On the one hand, migration appears as “human material always ready for exploitation” (Marx 1992:784), that is, as a passive, disposable mass and an exploitable human resource of capital; on the other hand, migration is presented as a potential opponent of the already resident working class, or as an instrument that capital uses in the labor struggle to stir up competition and depress wages. The capitalist mode of production is dependent on migration insofar as it can make available other population groups in addition to those already resident (Marx 1992:788).

In Marx’s writings on the English “enslavement of Ireland,” a perspective of solidarity that includes migration emerges when he criticizes the treatment of Irish workers in England and addresses the tendency of the working class to contribute to its own division (Marx and Engels 1985:89; Deleixhe 2019). However, this criticism remains ambivalent with regard to the problematization of migration. On the one hand, Marx presents it as a fact that immigration makes the already settled workers worse off insofar as the English bourgeoisie “exploited Irish poverty to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen” (Marx and Engels 1985:88). The emigration of 1.6 million people from Ireland (1847 to 1855), forced by the 1846 potato blight and the associated famine, is in fact described as a threat to the English working class (Marx and Engels 1985:201). On the other hand, the deep “antagonism between the Irish proletarian and the English proletarian” that Marx diagnosed is not presented as a natural necessity but as one that is “artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie,” with the English and American governments hindering an alliance between the working classes (Marx and Engels 1985:88). The struggles between nations or national groups and the divisions that accompany these struggles are thus problematized as a strategy of the ruling class as “the true secret of maintaining its power” (Marx and Engels 1985:88).

Discussion and Discursive References

Overall, migration appears in Marx as a passive figure of forced mobility, as an ambivalent liberation from an existing social order through dispossession and displacement, as described with the concept of “primitive accumulation,” or with the concept of the “reserve army,” as an instrument of capital to make workers superfluous and available. In which current discourses do we find this way of thinking about migration? Marx’s economistic perspective is adopted in a broader sense—albeit under opposite auspices—in dominant discourses that emphasize the usefulness of migration, for example, in relation to the shortage of skilled workers and demographic developments in Germany. A passive figure of migration as forced mobility is also evident in structuralist migration theories that develop push/pull models or labor market theories in which migration appears as a pawn of social forces and as “human capital” (Brettell and Hollifield 2022).

In particular, Marx’s remarks on the reserve army and its contrast with the active workers’ army can invite people to see migration not as part of joint workers’ struggles but as a means of wage suppression, as has long been the case in the trade union tradition and in some cases still is today. An explicitly negative view of migration that follows from this figure can also be found in some traditionally left Marxist currents. Migration is seen as problematic because it appears to be an expression of capitalist, neoliberal social relations. This kind of argument can be found in the work of Wolfgang Streeck or Slavoj Žižek: From this perspective, anyone who is in favor of migration is on the side of capital or the neoliberal order. However, these anti-migrant discourses currently articulated on the left—not least by the well-known German publicist and politician Sahra Wagenknecht and her successful electoral alliance of (former) leftists—cannot necessarily be derived from Marx’s work and contradict his political conclusions (Basso 2021:217). The focus is no longer on criticizing the exploitation and marginalization of migration, but migration itself is understood as a means of exploitation and marginalization whereby a supposedly nonmigrant working class appears to be affected—a view that fails to recognize the actual composition of the working class and can hardly be understood without reference to a racist and colonial archive of knowledge. Even if the rejection of migration runs counter to Marx’s theory, which criticizes not migration itself but its objectification as part of capitalist exploitation, the figure of migration reconstructed in this context offers such possibilities for connection.

Along with these traces, which can be followed from one-sided, objectifying, and partly problematizing approaches to the figure of migration constructed by Marx, his work also offers other points of reference. I thus heuristically accentuated Marx’s analysis of dispossession, displacement, and instrumentalization in the passive figure of migration as forced mobility, which allows for the aforementioned one-sided approaches but should be understood in the broader context of Marx’s work as a figure of domination, which Marx constructs with the aim of scandalizing and overcoming this domination. Moreover, it is not only the self-accelerating mode of production that is central to his theory and that still significantly shapes our society today; rather, society is understood as divided, and Marx examines the resulting power relations and class conflicts. This connection between capitalist society and class society creates a theoretical tension that, in addition to analyses of the instrumentalization, exploitation, and control of migration, also opens up an analytic perspective on social struggles of migration, such as those taken up by the “autonomy of migration” approach and the materialist analysis of migration regimes, which are linked to (post)operaist or hegemony-theoretical currents in Marxist theory. This tension between domination and struggle can be understood dialectically as an interrelation with Marx. And so the objectifying figuration of dispossession and displacement can go hand-in-hand with an empowering political subjectivation in the context of migrant struggles (Schwiertz 2021), as articulated in the famous rallying cry: “We are here because you are destroying our countries.” However, in the texts examined here, Marx’s objectifying view of migration prevails alongside the potential for a subjective dimension. This is also evident in Weber, but in a culturalist version.

Weber: Migration As A Threatening Figure Of Otherness

Weber was late and hesitant in calling himself a sociologist. Moreover, like Marx, he did not become a classic of sociology until decades after his death, when, following Marianne Weber’s edition of his work, the selective reception by Talcott Parsons was decisive (Connell 1997). Weber began his work at a time when labor migration was on the rise and colonial narratives, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and especially anti-Catholic and anti-Polish resentments were becoming more dominant (Boatcă 2013). In line with these hegemonic developments and also contributing to them, the early Weber paints a threatening picture of migration in his studies on the agrarian economy of eastern Germany and in his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg. In his study of Weber’s political engagement, Mommsen (2004:76) writes that the Freiburg lecture was part of a discourse that made imperialism “socially acceptable” in Germany. According to Mommsen, Weber was a “staunch supporter of imperialist ideals” and advocated for German colonial policies. Weber’s racist and nationalist statements permeate his career: “Throughout his life, Weber attempted to turn organizations to which he belonged toward radical nationalist, anti-Polish sentiment and action, in science and in politics alike” (Zimmermann 2006:64). In this context, migration appears in Weber’s work as a threatening figure of otherness and as a cultural and economic threat to a nation.

Nationality in the National Economy

Weber’s Freiburg inaugural lecture, which he delivered in 1895 under the title “Nationality in the National Economy,” examines the connection between social class and nationality. He analyzes the latter on the basis of population statistics on language and religious affiliation, equating Catholicism with Polishness and Protestantism with Germanness. He concentrates on West Prussia, a province with “the character of a national borderland,” and focuses on the increase in Polish migration—although the concept of migration is only partially applicable here given that West Prussia had belonged in part to Poland until the end of the eighteenth century.

Weber (1980:429) concludes that “Poles,” in contrast to Germans, tended to “collect together in that stratum of the population which stands lowest both economically and socially.” He associates Polishness with an uneconomic culture, a low standard of living, and a high number of children (Weber 1980:430), in line with today’s racist stereotypes that associate migration with unproductiveness, precariousness, and large families. Weber believes he can explain this attribution of Polish migration to a socially disadvantaged situation by an objective examination of “racial differences.” According to Weber (1980:430), “the two nationalities differ in their ability to adapt to different economic and social conditions of existence,” and he intends to make clear “the role played by racial differences of a physical and psychological nature, as between nationalities, in the economic struggle for existence” (Weber 1980:428). Here, Weber articulates not only a racist definition and devaluation of social groups but also a naturalization of social inequality: The “lower” groups are supposed to be naturally on a “lower” level.

Furthermore, “good” German migration is contrasted with “bad” Polish migration. For Weber, Polish immigration becomes a social problem primarily because it displaces Germans. According to Weber (1980:432), there are two ways of shifting the boundary between two nationalities in one place, revealing his homogenizing conception of national societies, which is reflected in current debates on integration: first, through the assimilation of national minorities into the majority society and second, through the “nationality-displacement” of members of the majority society by these minorities. According to Weber, the latter happened in West Prussia so that the province became less and less German. Weber believes he recognizes a hidden, everyday war between ethnic groups that leads to the expulsion of Germans—what far-right conspiracy theories currently describe as “population replacement.” ⁶ Weber (1980:432), however, has empathy for German migration; he attributes German emigration to an urge for freedom:

[T]here are only masters and servants, and nothing else, on the estates of his homeland for the day-labourer, and the prospect for his family, down to the most distant of his progeny, is to slave away on someone else’s land from one chime of the estate-bell to the next. In this deep, halfconscious impulse towards the distant horizon there lies hidden an element of primitive idealism. He who cannot decipher this does not know the magic of freedom.

Here, rural exodus is described as an escape from conditions of servitude, although Weber speaks in a classicist manner of a “primitive idealism.” Weber certainly recognizes the emancipatory potential of migration—albeit only for the Germans and their idealistic desire for freedom, which makes it impossible for them to endure servitude.

Weber’s text reveals not only a contrast between “good” and “bad” migration but also the construction of a positively charged German identity (Barbalet 2024). As in colonial narratives, this is achieved primarily through “othering.” Weber (1980:434) writes that Polish peasants satisfy their meager needs in primitive ways, practicing traditional subsistence agriculture and avoiding the modern capitalist market. In contrast to the incompetent Polish “other”, he portrays (West) German small farmers as hardworking entrepreneurs; this devaluation of the other, who is supposedly only bound by nature and acts only traditionally—in Weber’s own basic sociological concepts—is linked to a revaluation of the cultivated “we” group, which is capable of acting goal- and value-rationally. More generally, this text shows how the colonialist distinction between modern/civilized versus traditional/primitive, often adopted in classical sociology, is also used to describe intra-European relations (Boatcă 2013).

From Biologistic to Culturalist Racism

One might ask whether Weber’s inaugural lecture can be linked to his broader work or whether it should be regarded as an isolated political intervention at the beginning of his career. However, such an exclusion is difficult to justify when one considers that according to the editors of the Max Weber Complete Edition (Weber 1993:535), this lecture is one of the most important documents of Weber’s early political and academic thought. Moreover, Weber did not so much reject the racist perspective of the inaugural lecture in later works but, rather, revised and differentiated it. The critique of biologistic racism, on the basis of which some speak of an anti-racist sociology in Weber, goes hand-in-hand with a culturalist “neo-racism” (Balibar 1991) avant la lettre.

On the one hand, there is certainly evidence for a critique of racism with Weber. In his much-cited chapter “Ethnic Groups” from Economy and Society, Weber (1978:385) argues less biologistically and focuses on the social construction of race, ethnicity, and nationality. The text was probably written around 1910, when Weber positioned himself against the then widespread biologistic concept of “race” at the first meeting of the German Sociological Association (Boatcă 2013:64). His analysis here could be critically referred back to himself to argue with Weber against Weber. Here, Weber (1978:389) writes that ethnic communities are by no means natural, as he had partly argued in his inaugural lecture; rather, they are based on a subjective “belief in common ethnicity,” are socially constructed, and arise in the course of political communitization. Migration can trigger ethnic group formation processes in which the rejection of “others” can lead to the constitution of an “own” group (Weber 1978:387). Weber articulates an analysis of constitutive alterization that can be reread as a commentary on his dichotomy between Poles and Germans.

Furthermore, one could ask whether Weber’s descriptions in the inaugural lecture do not contradict his approach of interpretive sociology given that he discusses the motives of German emigration but does not attempt to interpret the subjective meaning of the Polish peasants’ migration, which is viewed from the outside and ultimately attributed to simple instincts. On the other hand, it is questionable whether this is really a single initial flaw in Weber’s analysis or to what extent this representation is symptomatic of his Eurocentric representation of a development from traditional to modern societies and his social-theoretical model of a rational actor, which is defined exclusively in terms of a “Western” subject and thus Eurocentrist and Orientalist (Alatas and Sinha 2017:129; Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). This is illustrated by Weber’s statements on migration, which he continued to articulate in the years following the inaugural lecture.

Although Weber increasingly challenged biologistic racisms, the cultural racist perspective developed in his early writings also pervades his later work. Zimmerman (2006:53) sees this as an early form of “neo-racism,” which, as Balibar (1991) has shown, denies the significance of biological concepts of race and at the same time develops a system of cultural difference that, like race, serves to justify political and economic inequalities. According to Zimmerman (2006:53), Weber’s anticipation of neo-racist thinking, which, according to Balibar, only became established in the course of later decolonization and migration to the imperial metropolises, is related to his interest in migrant “minorities,” the Poles in Germany and in the course of his travels to the United States, where he met Du Bois, the Afro-Americans:

Whereas the era of overseas imperialism and explicit racism had Europeans conquering supposedly racially inferior others, the era of decolonization had individuals of apparently incompatible cultures immigrating to former colonial metropoles. . . . Weber pioneered a racism of exploitation and subordination rather than a racism of conquest. Weber’s later work on the religions of Europe, China, and India elaborated a culturally differentiated world that did not place Europe in the position of conqueror but rather in a position of adjacent superiority.

Whereas Weber’s inaugural lecture explicitly politically problematizes Polish migration as backward and criticizes the capitalist conditions that promote it in order to defend the identity of the German nation, some of Weber’s later works are less direct and examine rationalization processes from a global perspective. Nevertheless, his comparative cultural studies ultimately attribute dominant rationality to a Western culture. Even if Weber (2016:487) does not necessarily evaluate this rationality as better but problematizes the bureaucratization and “steel-hard housing” ⁷ of modern societies, which has made him an important reference point for critical theory (Dahms 1997), he reproduces the colonial figure of a rational and civilized West, which is constructed in opposition to an irrational and traditional non-Western “rest” (Hall 1992). In his essays on the sociology of religion, Weber replaces the variable “race” with “religion” to characterize the economy, society, politics, and psychology of the peoples he distinguishes, whereby the world appears as a differentiated space of largely unchanging cultural areas (Zimmerman 2006:68).

A good 10 years after his inaugural lecture in Freiburg, Weber (2016) depicts the United States with racist typifications that are similar to his opposition of German and Polish peasants. On the one hand, he sees the White Protestant migrants as cultural carriers through whom the “spirit of capitalism” reaches the United States, where it appears like nowhere else. On the other hand, Weber believed that Black settlements and Eastern European migration posed a threat to the United States that was potentially comparable to the situation in East Prussia: “[T]he enormous immigration of uncivilized elements from Eastern Europe” could create a rural population “that could not be assimilated by the historically transmitted culture of this country. . . . This population would forever change the standard of the United States and would gradually form a community of a very different type from the great creation of the Anglo-Saxon spirit” (Weber 1998:242; cf. Boatcă 2013). Culturalist narratives are reproduced in Economy and Society (Weber 1978), and ethnic minorities are indirectly problematized insofar as their presence is attributed to less rationalized and therefore backward societies (Weber 1978:389) that do not correspond to the “uniqueness of the West” (Weber 2016:100, translated by author). ⁸

Discussion and Discursive References

The figure of (threatening) otherness elaborated in Weber’s texts not only illustrates his view of migration and the supposed cultural others at the time, but it is also elementary for the Weber paradigm that is still in use today, in which the sociological relevance of social values and the cultural roots of rationalization in general and capitalism in particular are emphasized (Zimmerman 2006:55). Weber’s sociological theory cannot be described as entirely racist, but it was nevertheless formed in the context of (neo-)racist demarcations.

The related representation of migration continues to have an effect in discourses that portray migrants as an integration problem and cultural threat, producing colonial, racist images of the migrant Other. Huntington’s thesis of the “clash of civilizations,” similar culturalist analyses (Harrison and Huntington 2000), and sociological analyses of civilization (Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004) are explicitly linked to Weber’s comparisons of religion and culture. More recent culturalist studies of ethnic stratification and assimilation (Haller and Eder 2017; Koopmans 2016), with their monolithic cultural concepts (Islam vs. Christianity), can also be understood in the Weberian tradition, as can other forms of “groupism,” which Brubaker (2002:164) defines as “the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed.”

When Weber, as in Economy and Society (Weber 1978), attributes racism and the formation of ethnic groups to traditionalism and thus excludes them from “modernity,” he is ultimately referring to the ideal of ethnically homogeneous nation-states. This ideal corresponds to the goal of prevailing integration paradigms, according to which it is imperative to adapt to a national “dominant culture” (Leitkultur), for example, in Germany. From this perspective, the lived reality of “multicultural” migration societies appears problematic. Furthermore, the Weberian figure of migration and the associated danger of “displacement” can be linked to far-right narratives of “ethnopluralism,” which aim to create culturally homogeneous living spaces, or to the conspiracy-theoretical metanarrative of the “great replacement,” according to which a European native population would be replaced by supposedly culturally “foreign” population groups and the reversal of which would require deportation or “re-migration.” As with Marx, such narratives cannot be causally derived from Weber’s writings, but they do offer points of reference.

The construction of figures of migration is deeply racially coded in Weber’s work, and this is most evident in the text of the inaugural lecture. Whereas the migration of “Germans” is understood positively and appears as an idealistically driven flight and movement toward freedom, as similarly thematized by Marx and Du Bois, the migration of “Poles” is understood negatively, as a natural integration into a lower social position. National affects and different degrees of objectification also play a role here: Whereas Weber has empathy for Germans’ migratory movements, and he attempts to understand their subjective motives, he reacts negatively to the Poles’ movements, viewing them “from above” as a problem, without going into subjective motives. German migrants appear as self-confident, rational subjects, whereas the Poles are described as an indifferent mass, a traditional group, and “troops of nomads” (Weber 1980:433). In a less drastic way, this constitutive demarcation is also evident in Weber’s later writings, when the modernity of the West is delineated Eurocentrically through his studies of the traditionalism of other cultures. The figure of migration (re)constructed in Weber’s writings can thus be seen as characteristic of his approach.

Du Bois: Migration As An Active Figure Of Social Transformation

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Du Bois was writing, migration was seen as a major social problem not only in public debates but also in U.S. sociology, and academic debates were deeply permeated by racist discourses (Bös 2010:43). Migration and racism are also inextricably linked in the United States in the distinction between “good” White migration and “bad” non-White migration; the former was fostered, and the latter was excluded, thwarted, or disenfranchised (Ngai 2004). From the mid-twentieth century onward, not only various European and especially Asian migrant groups but also Black Americans increasingly appeared as an “integration problem” (Bös 2010:41). In this context, the establishment of sociology as a discipline took place via a (migration) sociology oriented toward control politics. Du Bois is situated in this racist context; this is where he positions himself with his sociology.

Du Bois can be seen as a neglected and repressed classic. Indeed, Morris (2015) refers to Du Bois as “the Scholar Denied,” highlighting his fundamental empirical, methodological, theoretical, and political contributions in the early days of U.S. academic sociology. In recent years, however, Morris and other U.S. sociologists have increasingly focused on the work of Du Bois and his Atlanta School (Burawoy 2021; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015). The Atlanta School’s approach differed from that developed two decades later by the Chicago School in that it placed the social actions of individuals and communities in their historical context, emphasizing the structural constraints created by the “color line” but also Black agency (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). A central premise of Du Bois’s sociology is that lived experience cannot be separated from sociological knowledge; rather, lived experience should be understood as the basis for thinking about society (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020:xi).

In his book Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois ([1935] 2012) develops the thesis that migration movements, the flight of enslaved people from the South to the North, were decisive for the outcome of the Civil War in the 1860s (Burawoy 2021; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020:77). He also analyzes the “Great Migration” of Black individuals from the South United States to the North United States in the twentieth century, which he describes as a socially transformative process. In this context, Du Bois presents migration as an active figure of social change. Migration and mobility do not play a marginal or problematic role, as they do for Marx and Weber, but are at the center of his sociological approach. At the same time, a hierarchization of “good” and “bad” migration can be found in his earlier works, which, however, can be criticized via the later Du Bois.

Black Reconstruction

In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois ([1935] 2012) describes migration as a political movement that is organized decentrally and achieves its goals not through violence but through flight. Through an intensive study of Marx, Du Bois ([1935] 2012:635) developed a thesis that was considered provocative in the academic discourse of his time but has since been confirmed: It was not the liberal opponents of slavery and the armies of the northern states that led to the abolition of slavery but largely the enslaved people themselves. It was not only the southern states that defended slavery; the northern states were not primarily interested in abolition. The dominant White society in both parts of the United States was united during the war by a discursively differently articulated yet in many ways common anti-Black racism:

Both sections ignored the Negro. To the Northern masses the Negro was a curiosity, a sub-human minstrel, willingly and naturally a slave, and treated as well as he deserved to be. He had not sense enough to revolt and help Northern armies, even if Northern armies were trying to emancipate him, which they were not. (Du Bois [1935] 2012:50)

Comparable to Weber’s depiction of Polish peasants, the discourse criticized by Du Bois assumes a natural integration into social subordination. However, in the course of the American Civil War, the scattered escapes of enslaved people from southern plantations became a mass movement of over half a million people opposing and undermining the system of slavery. “They wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left the plantations”; a “general strike,” as Du Bois ([1935] 2012:58) wrote,

[t]ransforming itself suddenly from a problem of abandoned plantations and slaves captured while being used by the enemy for military purposes, the movement became a general strike against the slave system on the part of all who could find opportunity. The trickling streams of fugitives swelled to a flood.

Du Bois ([1935] 2012:58) describes this escape movement as a “great unbroken swell of the ocean before it dashes on the reefs,” a movement that grows gradually and in many places at once and then develops into a roaring force without following a centrally determined strategy. Such naturalistic metaphors, widely used in contemporary discourses, are usually problematic in relation to migration insofar as they depict migration as an amorphous and heteronomous mass, but Du Bois uses them in the opposite sense to describe forms of collective practice. What emerges is a decentered form of collective mobility, also described by Du Bois as “swarming”; a migration movement that shakes up an existing social order and triggers social transformation. Flight is thus understood as a political intervention: The mobility of Black workers ultimately decided the war, which the North could only win with the labor power of the formerly enslaved, and set in motion economic and political transformations in the United States and beyond. Du Bois considers the role of the people who freed themselves from slavery to be central, but he also examines how their mobilization interacted with an alliance of the White working class and petty bourgeoisie. Du Bois ([1935] 2012:77, 165) describes this alliance as “abolition-democracy,” opening up a perspective of transversal solidarity. He shows its transnational dimension when he includes, for example, the expressions of solidarity of the English working class co-initiated by Marx (DuBois [1935] 2012:80).

Darkwater

Du Bois describes the precarity of such alliances of transversal solidarity when he examines the situation of Black people in the North after the abolition of slavery and addresses conflicts with the White working class. Du Bois describes the brutal disenfranchisement caused by slavery and the Jim Crow regime in the South, and he also analyzes the differently structured but equally effective racism experienced by Black individuals in the North. He thus analyzes emancipation as an escape from oppressive conditions that leads back to new oppressive conditions.

In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, Du Bois (1920) describes the position and perspective of the White working class using the city of St. Louis as an example. Stagnant wages during World War I had fueled a fear of social decline and blockades to one’s own advancement. When immigration from Europe was increasingly restricted, it was seen as a relief. At the same time, a fearful gaze turned to the South, where nearly 10 million Black workers lived, many hoping to escape the racist regime in the southern states. Northern employers saw this “reserve army” that could satisfy their demand for labor: “The North called to the South. A scream of rage went up from the cotton monopolists and industrial barons of the new South. Who was this who dared to ‘interfere’ with their labor?” (Du Bois 1920:89).

The migration of Black workers, perceived as immigration, was met with rejection and racism by many White workers and union leaders. Union leaders saw them as a scapegoat for the current situation and as a target to channel workers’ racial hatred:

These angers flamed and the union leaders, fearing their fury and knowing their own guilt, . . . leaped quickly toward the gathering thunder from their own heads. The thing they wanted was even at their hands: here were black men, guilty not only of bidding for jobs which white men could have held at war prices, even if they could not fill, but also guilty of being black! (Du Bois 1920:93)

Given the archive of racist knowledge that had built up over decades in white America, it seemed obvious to workers to regard racist riots against Black workers as a solution to their own economic problems (Du Bois 1920:94). What is problematic here, however, is how Du Bois justifies the presence of Black workers with their morality and usefulness, reproducing dominant narratives: “good, honest, hard-working laborers. It was not the criminals” (Du Bois 1920:96). There are parallels here to the dichotomy of “good” and “bad” migration in contemporary discourses in which the emphasis that the “good” are not “criminals” but, rather, hardworking laborers can fuel a pejorative and criminalizing projection of the supposedly “bad.” Nevertheless, such a division can be criticized with Du Bois himself, who in Darkwater continues the analysis of the racist riots in St. Louis with a comprehensive critique of racialized capitalism (Du Bois 1920:99). Du Bois concludes that capitalist exploitation would not end and society could not be democratized without overcoming the marginalization of Black people. Conversely, the liberation of Black individuals was a liberation of America: “The freeing of the black slaves freed America” (Du Bois 1920:100). ⁹ We can learn from Du Bois here how the mobility, struggles, and emancipation of a socially marginalized group simultaneously transforms society as a whole.

The Crisis: “The Migration of Negroes”

Further aspects of Du Bois’s perspective on migration can be seen in his contributions to the journal The Crisis, which he cofounded and edited from 1910 to 1934. His essay “The Migration of Negroes,” published in 1917, aimed to provide the first well-researched and comprehensive overview of the “Great Migration,” which had long remained underexposed in White-dominated sociology (Schwartz 2020). Du Bois identified three causes for the migration of Black Americans from the South to the North: economic hardship in the South, exacerbated by floods; increased demand for labor in the North as a result of more restrictive policies toward European immigration; and racial violence in the southern United States.

Du Bois not only evaluates statistics and media reports, but he also includes the voices of those affected and their political leaders. For example, Du Bois (1917:65) quotes a Black man from Georgia and gives his subjective motivations: “In my opinion the strongest factor in this migration is a desire to escape harsh and unfair treatment, to secure a larger degree of personal liberty, better advantages for children, and a living wage.” Migration appears here as a struggle for “personal liberty,” already mentioned in Weber’s work but one-sidedly attributed by him to the Germans, who were described as racially superior. Moreover, Du Bois sees the movement, which is not organized by established Black leaders and in part runs counter to their interests, as a “mass movement and not a movement of the leaders” (Du Bois 1917:66). Du Bois’s study provides a more complex picture of migration movements, drawing on migrants’ own perspectives and subjectivity rather than presenting these movements merely as an object of push and pull factors, as the limited view of the three causes outlined at the beginning might suggest: Migrating people are not simply understood as pawns but as subjects who develop their migration projects in relation to complex conditions. ¹⁰ In Du Bois’s work, migration appears not only as a mover of social transformation but also as a figure with a socially situated perspective, an epistemic shift that is crucial for a decolonization of (migration) sociology.

Discussion and Discursive References

Du Bois creates a positive but not romanticized image of migration. He describes emancipation through flight from the oppressive conditions of the South, which, however, leads to new oppressive conditions in the North, and he understands migration movements as social movements. Du Bois takes into account macro-sociological studies and at the same time adopts a perspective of migration, especially of Black people in the United States, to understand the desires, practices, and effects associated with migration projects. In doing so, he developed a multifaceted view of migration, which takes on different meanings depending on the context. His Atlanta School thus provides an alternative approach to that of the Chicago School, which is not only at the center of established sociological history but has also shaped migration theory and research with its assimilation paradigm (FitzGerald 2022:160, 181).

Du Bois is thus a pioneer of contemporary approaches that counter the criminalizing and victimizing views on migration by including a perspective of migration: the autonomy of migration approach in critical migration studies (Bojadžijev and Karakayalı 2010; Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2024; Fischer and Bak Jørgensen 2022; Moulier-Boutang 2002), the Black Mediterranean perspective (Proglio et al. 2021), or other works that highlight the lived experiences, epistemological standpoints, and analyses of those affected by processes of migrantization and racialization. On the one hand, Du Bois’s perspective shows how migration movements and struggles of migration transform society, for example, by initiating new neighborhood solidarities, such as the self-organization of Lampedusa in Hamburg in the neighborhood of St. Pauli (Odugbesan and Schwiertz 2018), or by contributing to a democratization of democracy through political engagement, such as grassroots organization by migrant youths with precarious legal status (Schwiertz 2019, 2021). On the other hand, Du Bois encourages us not to see migration—or marginalized groups in general—unilaterally as emancipatory or even revolutionary subjects but, rather, to continue a critique of the conditions that marginalize them, starting from their perspectives but without neglecting other methods of sociological knowledge production to arrive at a comprehensive social analysis (as Du Bois’s research perspective, which combines interviews, surveys, statistics, maps, and other visual data with theoretical work, shows). The figure of migration as presented by Du Bois can be seen as symptomatic of his sociological theory, in which marginalization and empowerment are considered in conjunction and different social positions and the epistemologies associated with them are related to one another.

Genealogies Of Sociological Theory In The Analysis Of Migration

This article started from the thesis that migration is often de-thematized in the tradition of sociological theory, but traces can be found that point to a specific construction of migration. The figures of migration produced in this process tend to emerge at the margins of sociological approaches. Nevertheless, as I have shown, the study of this coproduction of migration is suitable for opening up a critical reflection on current discourses and for reflecting on aspects that are fundamental to the social theories of the respective approaches, which I will now discuss. At the same time, this reembedding in theories prompts us to differentiate the figures again, after I initially presented them in a pointed way for heuristic purposes, and finally to perceive them as divided: in Marx as a dominated but also struggling figure, in Weber as a culturalized but also socially constructed figure, and in Du Bois as a social movement but also a figure of renewed integration into other regimes of marginalization.

In the context of Marx’s writings, the (re)constructed figure of migration illustrates an approach to social theory that, particularly in Capital (Marx 1992), focuses on social structures and leaves little room for political practices that break with them, which can lead to the objectification and victimization of marginalized subjects who appear to be mere victims and pawns of social forces. Although the coercive relations described in Capital affect the entire working class and ultimately all subjects of capitalist societies and Marx describes the power of capitalism in the critical interest of disempowering it, his comments on the reserve army provide grounds for a particular problematization of migration. However, we can also discern a view of migration in Marx that sees it less as determined and problematic and more as part of emancipation processes: first, if we follow Marx’s diagnosis that the emergence of capitalist societies is accompanied not only by upheavals but also by a deeply ambivalent escape and emancipation from feudalist power relations and second, if we understand migration as part of class struggles, although Marx hardly mentions this connection explicitly. Although Marx sees struggles in the factories as central to renegotiating and ultimately overcoming exploitative relations, struggles of migration and mobility are de-thematized.

In this respect, it is instructive to read Moulier-Boutang (2002), who in “No Longer a Reserve Army” (translation by author) decidedly criticizes a figure of migration that is presented as “a mere appendage of capitalist accumulation,” on the basis of which “the image of immigration as the fifth column of globalization” is partly drawn. In contrast, Moulier-Boutang (1998) emphasizes the social and subjective dimensions of migration movements and rewrites the critical theory of capitalism based on the mobility of working classes (see also Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias 2024). In order not to reduce migration to class or to oppose migration and class, we can turn to the post-Marxist theory of Laclau and Mouffe (2001), who examine a heterogeneous field of social struggles, or to the theory of “racial capitalism” by Robinson (2019), who refers significantly to Du Bois.

However, the objectifying images in Marx do not necessarily play into an anti-migrant rearticulation of discourses critical of capitalism. They can, as described earlier, be appropriated by migrant self-organizations and also open up a de-migrantizing perspective in which those affected by capitalist relations—those made into surplus population—are conceived together beyond prevailing demarcations (Rajaram 2018:637). In this sense, Marxist perspectives of international or transversal solidarity can help counter the implicit nationalism and sedentarism of Marxist concepts such as the “reserve army.” Yet, to avoid anti-migrant instrumentalization, it seems crucial that migration not only appears as an instrument of capital in terms of its objectification but also that the political subjectivity of migration is included so that migrant workers appear as part of and potential allies in (class) struggles and not just as competitors in the labor market and their position in relation to border regimes and racism is taken into account.

A critical reflection of the construction of figures of migration in Weber points to a broader critique of the ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism of his approach, which posits a superiority of the West or Germanness and is theoretically contoured by describing others as backward. This is typical for an ethnocentric and Eurocentric tradition of sociological theory that is characterized by colonial narratives of modernization (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021). Thus, Weber’s constructed figures of migration and his concepts of “ethnicity” and “race” are closely linked to his broader conception of the emergence of the modern world in Europe. Weber’s (2016:101) work as a whole is designed to demonstrate the uniqueness of the Occident, which, in contrast to other “cultural areas”—ultimately the “world outside the modern Occident” (p. 113)—is characterized by its rationalism (Weber 2016:110). Weber attests that China, India, and Islamic societies lack the specific “occidental” characteristics that made rational capitalism possible in the West (Boatcă 2013). In this sense, Weber associates German migrants with a modern capitalist subjectivity that strives for freedom and acts rationally in accordance with market logic, whereas Polish and Eastern European migrants appear as traditional subjects who are bound by their nature rather than being value- or purpose-driven rational actors.

However, this figure of migration as cultural otherness could be countered with Weber’s social constructivist view of ethnic groups, which are socially fabricated and negotiated in (locally) intersecting relationships. But this would require not only an anti-racist rereading but also a de-linking of this perspective outlined by Weber, which would amount less to a redemptive critique than to a reference to other approaches that, like Homi Bhabha’s (1994), open up a critical-reflexive view of cultural difference or, like Hall’s (2017), examine the changing identities or identifications in the context of political conjunctures and migration movements.

With Du Bois, the criticisms of both approaches can be taken up. As I wanted to show with the help of the figures of migration, Du Bois develops an approach that addresses societal relations of power and domination without reifying them as determining structures and focuses on the relative autonomy of social struggles, especially those of the marginalized; this approach also forms a different epistemological starting point beyond a Eurocentric theorization. However, aspects of Du Bois’s approach can be problematized in relation to the debate on migration insofar as they evoke a distinction between good and bad migration and are partly associated with elitism. Unlike Weber, Du Bois did not develop a racist or culturalist categorization but, rather, one based on individual achievement and social status. For example, Du Bois’s (2007b:189) earlier works focus on a “Talented Tenth” of Black Americans, a Black elite whose positive description is indirectly accompanied by a devaluation of the other nine-tenths. This reveals a problematic hierarchization of marginalized groups, which results from the elevation of model minorities and reverberates in current binaries of “good” and “bad” migration, which are also reproduced by progressive actors (Gonzales 2014). This idea corresponds with the integration and assimilation paradigms that continue to dominate migration sociology, in which the adaptation of racialized and migrantized groups to a white society, which often remains unnamed and unquestioned, is enforced as the norm (Itzigsohn 2023:877).

Yet Du Bois largely revised such statements, developing approaches for critique that increasingly drew on Marx (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020). In his later work, Du Bois (2007a:69–70) expands his perspective beyond the United States, conceptualizing a global color line as a constitutive element of racial modernity. In contrast to the European model of historical progress developed by Marx or the Eurocentric bifurcation of the “West” and the “rest” in Weber’s approach, Du Bois emphasizes global interdependencies and their attendant inequalities. Du Bois’s transnational perspective is also evident in his understanding of Pan-Africanism, where his initially modernist notion of a Black American avant-garde becomes increasingly decentered and decolonized over the years: “[H]e came to believe that it was the African anticolonial movement that would lead the Africana diaspora” (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020:10). Even on this scale, Du Bois not only theorized racialization and colonialism as global processes but also emphasized “that racialized people had the possibility of agency,” pioneering a perspective on global migration regimes that simultaneously highlights intersecting structures of oppression and affected communities of struggle (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020:14). The decolonization of migration studies can build on this work to overcome the methodological nationalism, metrocentrism, and analytic bifurcation (Go 2016) that I identified, particularly in Weber, and that persists in mainstream migration studies (Itzigsohn 2023:880).

It is not only Du Bois’s descriptions of migration that are relevant to alternative perspectives on the relationship between migration and society but also his impetus to rethink sociology. Following Du Bois, Morris (2022) argues for a sociology that does not take the social order as its epistemological starting point but, rather, a perspective on social movements in a broader sense—which, in turn, opens up a new view on migration societies.

Conclusions

The figures of migration in Marx, Weber, and Du Bois are symptomatic both of these theorists’ approaches and of a broader sociological and sociopolitical discourse. In a rereading informed by discourse theory, I pointed out how migration appears (1) in Marx as a passive figure of forced mobility, (2) in Weber as a threatening figure of otherness, and (3) in Du Bois as an active figure of social transformation. All three figures can be linked to different conceptions of society as determined by dominant structures, as nationally constituted, or as characterized by social movements. By showing how migration is treated in different intellectual projects, I contribute to a critical discussion of classical sociologies and to a genealogy of sociological thought given that the figures outlined still haunt sociology today and shape its approach to migration and related aspects of mobility, diversity, and inequality. Examining the one-sidedness of classical positions—especially their tendencies to passivize (Marx), other (Weber), and hierarchize (Du Bois) migration—I aim to open a critical perspective on current discourses, encourage a revision of sociological theory, and strengthen perspectives beyond methodological nationalism, Eurocentrism, and sedentarism.

With this article, I did not intend to reject sociological theories or establish a new theoretical approach, but the problematization of figurations developed here leads to a critical, reflexive, and decolonial perspective of migration studies that overcomes dominant narratives of rejection and assimilation and an opposition between society and migration. I showed how sociological theory is characterized by canonical “model cases” (Krause 2021) and the absence or reduction of certain topics. While migration appears only marginally in Marx and is understood as a problem in Weber, it appears as a central dynamic of social transformation and emancipation in Du Bois’s analysis. A critical rereading of classical sociology can thus encourage us to give migration greater relevance in social theory and to place it at the center of sociological theory building. Nevertheless, I do not want to argue here for an empiricist theory building in relation to migration but, rather, for a critical rearticulation of sociological theory that refers to existing approaches (Schwiertz 2024a); otherwise, empirical research runs the risk of adopting established categories without reflection and losing sight of social relations that go beyond individual cases. Du Bois’s sociology, including his revision of Marx’s theory, offers a crucial point of reference for a sociological theory and migration studies that combines theoretical and empirical work, analytically links the effects of intersectional power relations and the potential of social struggles, understands local phenomena in the context of global relations, and takes into account the situating of its own knowledge production. In contrast to analyses that take the standpoint of the nation-state (Weber) or start from capitalist centers (Marx), still widespread in migration studies, an alternative view can be developed following Du Bois, starting from social struggles and movements of migration. ¹¹

The heuristic (re)construction of figures of migration opens a perspective on their nexus with sociological theories that could be transferred to contemporary approaches that tend to portray migrants as either heroes or victims: Migrants are depicted as avant-garde, nomadic subjects (Braidotti 1994) or even as a new revolutionary subject (Hardt and Negri 2000), or they appear as the rejected and objects of a fear of the other (Bauman 2016) or as “bare life” (Agamben 1998). Even in contemporary theories that develop critical perspectives on existing social formations and emphasize the conflictual quality of the social, migration is usually understood as an exception: as something marginal, located at the edge or even outside of society, and thus appearing radically excluded or resistant. Yet the three figures of migration contrasted here can also be taken up by contemporary sociological theories, which can facilitate their critical revision and translation into contemporary contexts. ¹² With regard to the figures identified in Weber and Marx, a critical perspective on the constitution of migration and society, drawing on Foucault, allows for an analysis of how migration is both excluded and made useful: how it is constructed as a figure of threat and a figure of enrichment in the context of tensions between the demarcation of a national people and the optimization of the population (Schwiertz 2024b). Du Bois’s construction of migration as a constellation of collective movements that triggers social transformations could be updated and further developed not only in relation to the autonomy of migration approach but also with Hall (1992, 2017). In Hall’s multilayered works on racism, ethnicity, nationalism, and diaspora, however, it is almost impossible to identify a specific figure in which the complexity of migration phenomena could be summarized, which points to the epistemological limits of the concept of social figures. Thus, a reflexive-critical engagement with figures of migration is committed to problematizing certain figurative exclusions. Ultimately, such an engagement aims to undermine and transcend their definitions, to overcome the form of the figure.