Urban ethnic enclaves and migration industries: The urban choices of mobile people

When migrants come in large numbers, they tend to segregate in enclaves where they lead a familiar lifestyle alongside people who can provide a support system. But how do these enclaves come about? This paper engages with migration industries literature, saying that it is ‘the labour involved in managing, facilitating and controlling migration’ that makes it an industry. Relying on the case of privileged Jewish migration to Israel, I argue that while the state remains central in facilitating and controlling migration, migration industries and migrants’ social networks dictate in which urban areas privileged migrants settle, creating unequal urban geographies. To illustrate this, I rely on qualitative data gathered in two research projects I completed in Israel over the past decade, in various Israeli cities relating to migrants and second-home owners from Western countries. I look at how and why people decide where to settle upon migrating and the role of various migration industries actors in their choices. I argue that what seems like individual decision-making is in fact a ‘structured agency’, repeating patterns of the imagined urban geographies produced by agents of migration and various urban stakeholders. The result is unequal patterns of location and consumption, where privileged migrants locate in urban enclaves, distancing themselves from other groups and causing gentrification.

‘It’s a Matter of Life or Death’: Jewish Migration and Dispossession of Palestinians in Acre

In this article, we aim to identify the actors and unpack the discourses and administrative practices used to increase current mobilities of people (Jewish immigrants, investors, tourist visitors, and evicted residents) and explore their impact on the continuity of the settler-colonial regime in pre-1948 Palestinian urban spaces which became part of Israel. To render these dynamics visible, we explore the case of Acre—a pre-1948 Palestinian city located in the north-west of Israel which during the last three decades has been receiving about one hundred Jewish immigrant families annually. Our findings reveal a dramatic change in the attempts to judaise the city: Mobility policies through neoliberal means have not only been instrumental in continuing the processes of displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians in this so-called ‘mixed city,’ but have also recruited new actors and created new techniques and opportunities to accelerate the judaisation of the few Palestinian spaces left. Moreover, these new mobility policies normalise judaisation of the city, both academically and practically, through globally trendy paradigms and discourses. Reframing migration-led development processes in cities within a settler-colonialism approach enables us to break free from post-colonial analytical frameworks and re-centre the native-settler relations as well as the immigrants-settlers’ role in territorial control and displacement of the natives in the neoliberal era.

Cradles of Diaspora: Bombay, Aden, and Jewish Migration across the Indian Ocean

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migrant communities of Middle Eastern Jews emerged across the vast space between Shanghai and Port Said. The present article points to two crucial knots in the creation of these far-reaching Jewish diasporas: Bombay and Aden. These rising port cities of the British Raj were first stations in the migration of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews, and they presented immigrants with new commercial, social, cultural and spatial horizons; it was from there that many of them proceeded to settle elsewhere beyond the Indian Ocean. Using the examples of two prominent families, Sassoon in Bombay and Menahem Messa in Aden, the article considers the role of these places as the cradles from which Jewish diasporas emerged.

Monsters in the Capital: Helen Vaughan, Count Dracula and Demographic Fears in fin-de-siècle London

This article examines the confluence of fears of demographic change occasioned by Jewish migration to Britain between 1881 and 1905 with two key gothic texts of the period – Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). The descriptions of the activities of the demonic protagonists Helen Vaughan and Count Dracula in London will be compared with contemporary depictions of Jewish settlement by leading anti-migrant polemicists. Firstly, it will consider the trope of settlement as a preconceived plan being put into effect directed against ‘Anglo-Saxon’ English society. Secondly, it will look at ideas of the contested racial inferiority or superiority of the ‘other’. Thirdly, the article will examine the imputed chameleonic natures of both gothic monsters and Jews rising up the metropolitan social scale. The article will conclude by comparing the way Machen's and Stoker's protagonists deal with their opponents with posited ‘solutions’ for the Eastern European immigration ‘problem’.