Migration og etnicitet

Migration and ethnicity are current and connected phenomena, since migration increases the friction between population groups. Ethnicities are shaped as boundaries are drawn between these groups. Contrary to expectations of modernization theories, ethnicity did not evaporate as a traditional or original way of creating belonging; in stead the contemporary emerges as an 'epoch of migration' which also appears as an epoch in which cultural traits, in the shape of ethnicity, constitutes important lines along which groups of people distinguish one another. Both migration and ethnicity brings attention to the nation state, its sovereignty and the capacity of its institutions to regulate movements cross state borders and to define the forms of communities in individual societies. In sociology the effort was primarily to study the processes of migration which occurred in the receiving country, but newer perspectives, such as the concepts of citizenship, transnationalism and diaspora are exponents for, seek beyond the frame of nation states and include the consequences of migration for the sending countries.