New and old routes of portuguese emigration : uncertain futures at the periphery of Europe

Abstract

Although Portugal is a small nation at the edge of Europe, it has played a major and significant role in world history. This is largely because of its relationship to the sea, a point recently noted in a book by historian Malyn Newitt titled Emigration and the Sea: An Alternative History of Portugal and the Portuguese (Oxford University Press, 2015). The history of Portugal is a history of emigration and hence of deep involvement in processes of globalization and interconnectivity that have been in place since at least the fifteenth century. Despite this history, Portugal is rarely the first European country that the general public thinks about when it considers the movement of people across oceans. Further, although Portugal became a country of immigration during the latter decades of the twentieth century, its citizens are still emigrating, not only, as this volume notes, along old routes, but also along new ones. Yet, these more recent emigrants have been overlooked as scholarly attention was redirected toward the African, Asian, and Eastern Europeans who have moved to and settled in Portugal. Additionally, the new Portuguese flows of emigration are overshadowed by the refugee crisis on the European continent. As someone who began her academic career many decades ago by studying Portuguese immigrants in the United States, Canada, and France, I am delighted to see a renewed and fresh focus on this topic. This book approaches the “fourth wave” of Portuguese emigration with an interdisciplinary analytical framework, drawing together the work of economists, demographers, political scientists, geographers, sociologists and anthropologists. The contributing authors offer both top-down and bottom-up approaches, and draw variously on both qualitative and quantitative data. More importantly, as a collection, the chapters in this book address a range of significant and current questions in the study of migration, but through a Portuguese lens and a twenty-first-century lens. As a result, the Portuguese experience is brought into and engages with a broader comparative migration experience.