EDITORIAL Guy Brett /// Migrant Biographies

At the beginning of 2005, according to the International Organisation for Migration, there were 185 million people in the world who were defined as international migrants. There were 19 million people defined as refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. Of course these statistics of movement conceal an enormous range of human experience, from utter wretchedness to something akin to pleasurable tourism, but this only adds to the difficulty of comprehending such a vast process in which so many forces are at work. In his excellent book The Turbulence of Migration, Nikos Paperstergiadis tells us that, today, “the patterns of migration are… so multiple and of such a complex nature that that it is now impossible either to generalise about the logic which determines its causes, or to map its flows according to the binary co-ordinates of departure and destination”. Papastergiadis questions whether, as usually believed, economic survival is at the centre of migration, or if in fact the journey is “the first step in the pursuit of a personal dream of cultural progress”. A current map of global migration, he concludes one of his chapters, “would have to be as complex as all the migrant biographies”