Arrival Cities and The Figure of the Migrant Discussion Points

Arrival City

• The author claims that “arrival cities” are “places where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur”. (3) These two potential situations are very different from each other, conflict versus cultural and economic advancement, but I want to know this author’s perspective on whether or not this difference between these hypothetical situations is one small event, or if it differs by a series of key events.
• Loïc Wacquant argues that neighborhoods of relegation are “anti-ghettos” because they are so multicultural, which is problematic. Wacquant says the “advanced marginality” of these neighborhoods prevents the people there from forming a community. By extension, it seems to me, they may not be able to form a community identity. My question in this context is the following: how many points of connection between people are needed to form a community? Is it a questions of quantity, or is it something different? Can we artificially induce community formation in these places of “advanced marginality”?
• The discussion of the Turkish community in Kreuzberg being a “grotesque caricature of their home country’s life” is fascinating and unsettling. Is the fact that Turks are essentially forming “urban villages” in Berlin and that “Turks in Germany [are] 20 years behind those in Istanbul” an over-correction for the erasure of community and culture that may happen in a very multicultural area? 

The Future of the Migrant

• Nail points out that not all migrants are affected the same by their movement; he says every migrant lands somewhere on the spectrum between “inconvenienced” and “incapacitation”. I really appreciate this acknowledgement that the migration experience differs greatly from person to person, and that difference arises from various factors like class, race, gender, profession, etc. I’d like to think and investigate more about what combinations of factors lead to which position on the spectrum of migration effects, and what can be done with policy to shift people away from being “incapacitated” by migration. 
• One point that I found interesting is Nail’s claim that, because we define all other individuals’ existences with words of stasis, whereas migrants are characterized by movement, migrants are (in the public sphere and by academics) seen as “failed citizens”. I would agree that this is an accurate assessment of the implication of the word “migrant”, but that is just based on my personal observations and opinion. So, does this implication hold up to other theories of migration? And, if everyone is becoming a migrant in one way or another, as Nail says at the start of the introduction, should we not redefine the word “citizen” to account for increased migration of everyone?
• One part of Dr. Georgi’s lecture last week that I found fascinating was the comparison between recent increased nationalism and a new movement that suggests we can move past nations, to a post-national form of world organization in the wake of globalization. This connects, in my opinion, to the second problem Nail highlights: that migrants have been primarily understood from the perspectives of states, when migrant history is often overshadowed by the state, or the state selects the history it wishes to remember. It seems that the nation state system itself creates challenges for the success of migrants and migrating communities in today’s world. So, hypothetically, what would the consequences of a post-national world be for migration? Would migration as we understand it today even be relevant, or would migrating between what used to be separate countries be as easy as moving to a new neighborhood in the same city?