The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and Social Inequalities

Abstract

The social question is back. Yet, today’s social question is not primarily be‐ tween labor and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expres‐ sion in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces; because of the cross‐border diffusion of norms; and because there are implications of migration for social inequalities between North and South, and within national states. In earlier periods, class differences dominated political conflicts, and while class has always been criss‐crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultur‐ al ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogenei‐ ties that have sharpened over the past decades. This contribution thus consti‐ tutes cross‐border migration as a strategic research site for the contemporary social question.