Introduction

With the movement to the European Union of increasing numbers of migrants and refugees originating from outside Europe, ‘migrant families (and their composition, their way of life) have become a true obsession for migration policies and public opinion’ (Balibar 2004: 123). Traditional migration models (first came men, then families) are rightly criticised for omitting economically active, independent females, and representing women as ‘passive followers’ (Kofman 1999: 273). Yet although many migrants (women and men) have indeed been ‘single’, coming from Africa or Latin America, and more recently Eastern Europe, and eventually returning to countries of origin, many others, unintentionally or perforce, have become settlers, bringing or sending for partners and children or establishing new families in situ. The population of migrant or refugee origin is thus now substantially a family population, with implications for housing, health and educational systems in receiving countries which in varying degrees are implementing neoliberal economic and social agendas, running down provision for welfare.

Although many so-called migrants are long-term settlers, or have been born and brought up in receiving countries, relationships with sending countries have not diminished. As a huge literature has shown, information and communication technologies, and cheap air travel, enable many to maintain significant transnational social, economic and cultural ties with countries of origin, and with fellow migrants elsewhere. Their transnationalism, especially after 9/11, fed an increasingly influential view, apparent by the beginning of the new millennium, that immigration had led to an ‘excess of alterity’ (Sartori 2002), with European countries becoming ‘too diverse’ (Goodhart 2004), and migrant ‘communities’ (quotes hereafter understood) with values at odds with those of Western secular society threatening social cohesion. At the same time, rapid changes in morality and in the structure and form of cohabitation, have led, across Europe, to a more general uncertainty about the family, the nexus of relations of kinship (understood biologically and/or socially), and affinity (relations through spouses or partners). In this context, the immigrant or minority ethnic family is at issue in several senses.