Immigration in Bulgaria: Theoretical and political challenges
- When?
- Monday 4 February 2008, 17:00 to 18:30
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Dr Anna Krasteva
Dr Anna Krasteva, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
The conception of biopolitics, developed by Michel Foucault, shows the key importance of population control for any modern state. This control is even more valid for former Communist societies. As a typical Communist country, Bulgaria used to be a very closed society. The state strictly controlled movement in and out of the country, and this prevented emigration being a top priority. The few exceptions concerned three types of people: waves of Bulgarian citizens of Turkish origin emigrating to Turkey, left-wing intellectuals seeking asylum, mainly from Greece and Turkey, and students from the Third world. Their common feature was that they were all politically inspired, with the exception of Vietnamese in the '80s, who were invited because of labour shortages in the construction industry – the only case of "gastarbeiter".The collapse of Communism changed the nature of migration: labour migration (both in and out) became "the main game in town". The mass migration of ethnic Turks to Turkey illustrates this transition from political to economic agendas. People have an ambivalent attitude towards migration now. On the one hand, it is seen as one of the new freedoms which Bulgarian citizens enjoy; on the other, it inevitably means the arrival of new immigrant groups. The lecture will discuss only immigration through four different sections:
- The general context of migration in the Balkans emphasising the particularities of the Bulgarian case.
- The passage from biopolitics and the strict regulation of mobility by the Communist authorities to an increased freedom and diversity of flows – the focus of a more liberal post-Communist migration policy. Here three groups are compared – Chinese, Lebanese, Africans – with the aim of building up a picture of recent Bulgarian immigration.
- A paradoxical institutionalisation process: the small number of refugees and a highly developed set of governmental and non-governmental organisations; the growing number of immigrants and the slow process of creating an adequate institutional structure.
- The political instrumentalisation of migration.