Le laboratoire d’analyse en communication politique et opinion publique vous invite à participer à l’atelier “Internal Migration and Nativism: designing a survey experiment”, avec la participation de Catherine Xhardez, directrice de l’ERIQA (UdeM), Isabelle Côté (Memorial University of Newfoundland) et Matthew Mitchell (Université de Saskatchewan).

L’atelier se tiendra en anglais. Pour vous inscrire, veuillez confirmer votre présence par courriel à lacpop@uqam.ca.

Considering the ubiquity of internal migration, backlashes against domestic population movements often come as a surprise. Yet they are not new. There is a longstanding and global history of opposition to domestic population movements across political systems. Internal migration has contributed to fueling riots, xenophobia and violence in India and Nigeria. In Canada, Québécois have long criticized the migration of English-speaking elites to the province. Switzerland has a high level of internal migration, with cyclical waves of rural or urban exodus and an acute (political) contrast between town and countryside, and visible (anti-) migration attitudes. Meanwhile, flashes of opposition to internal migration have also been reported in Belgium, Ethiopia, the United States and Malaysia. This opposition to internal migration has arguably been heightened globally since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, as local populations perceived migrants as potential carriers of the virus and a threat to their communities.

These examples highlight the tensions and potential conflict within countries linked to internal migration. Despite the salience of this phenomenon, there is a dearth of scholarship on attitudes towards internal migration, as this issue has been overshadowed by the extensive literature on international migration. Why are some individuals opposed to the internal relocation of fellow citizens to their home regions? Under what conditions can internal migration fuel intergroup conflict? These questions remain largely unanswered, as research on attitudes and policy responses towards internal migration has been overshadowed by work on international migration. This SSHRC-funded project aims to problematize the analytical distinctions between insider vs. outsider, internal vs. international, inward vs. outward, urban vs. rural, desirable vs. undesirable types of internal migrants. In so doing, the project explores the contentious politics around internal migration in four states across the federal spectrum: Canada, India, Nigeria and Switzerland. This workshop, specifically, intends to discuss the preliminary steps for designing survey experiments across these diverse case studies.

Presenters

Isabelle Côté is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Her work examines nativism in federal states, as well as the role of population movements on intrastate conflict and contentious politics in Asia and beyond. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) in Leiden, Netherlands, and held various guest researcher positions in China, Indonesia, Denmark and Sweden.

Matthew I. Mitchell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Prior to this appointment, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on African politics, global indigenous politics, land politics, internal migration, peacebuilding and political violence. He holds a PhD in Political Studies from Queen’s University.

Catherine Xhardez is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on immigration, public policy, and federalism. She holds a PhD in political science from Université Saint‐Louis—Bruxelles and Sciences Po Paris. She is the director of the Équipe de Recherche sur l’Immigration au Québec et Ailleurs (ÉRIQA), and is affiliated with the CRIDAQ, the Jean Monnet Centre Montreal and the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (CÉRIUM).