Suzanne M. Hall is our Alvin Ailey of urbanism, and this book is an intricate and fiery choreography of the street as an intersection of edge economies, paradoxical injunctions, moving borders, collective ingenuity, and apparatuses of racial control. Street becomes world becomes street, and these inversions bear down hard on those that embody them but who nonetheless materialize fundamental openings in narrowing nationalisms, making their way toward more judicious and generative forms of belonging.

Suzanne M. Hall's much-anticipated book adopts a wholly original and refreshing perspective on otherwise well-worn topics such as migrant entrepreneurship and ‘ethnic enclave’ economies, repurposing these areas of study into fascinating sites through which to understand momentous global/postcolonial concerns around migration, borders, citizenship, racial capitalism, and the reconfiguration of labor under conditions of postindustrial neoliberal austerity. The Migrant's Paradox radically unsettles the assimilationist complacencies and parochializing conventions that ordinarily surround the customary ways in which migrant entrepreneurs have been studied or conceptualized, and Hall delivers a sensitive ethnographic portrayal in a remarkably eloquent and intelligent voice that makes it a delight to read.

Combining thick ethnographic description and striking visual images, Suzanne M. Hall animates differential public infrastructural investments in local thoroughfares and the rich multicultures and transnational associations that spill out of them.

Through a multi-scalar ethnography, The Migrant’s Paradox explores streets as relational edge territories defined by their creativity and ongoing “durable precarity.” Hall reminds us that entrepreneurs working in these urban margins must absorb ongoing and sustained economic and political violence.

As opposed to the endless extolling of the business ethos of (certain) migrant diasporas—an extolling that helps stage newer iterations of the always tired, but always effective, good/bad migrant dichotomy—Hall captures the more solemn reality that scores the migrant, race and small-business interface. 

The Migrant’s Paradox is an exploration of the interweaving of citizenship, neoliberal capitalism and the day-to-day lives and livelihoods of migration. It examines how the street itself may become a site of subversion and resistance to wider systems of power... Definitions of who a migrant is, particularly the “migrant entrepreneur” are challenged and complicated by this book. It works well at layering the day-to-day with UK policy, and global levels of social change. Importantly, the stories of the streets and those who work there themselves are the heart of this book. This book would be very useful for those interested in areas such as the politics, geography and sociologies of global migration within cities as well as the possibilities of grassroots everyday resistance, migrant solidarities and social change. From a methodological perspective, it is a useful example of creative ethnographies within streets, and presenting multi-layered research.

The author effectively unpacks how the city excludes, pushing edges further outward, creating an insecure life for migrants and producing their own ‘contested urban economy’. This perspective allows us to understand the UK’s colonial history as it intersects with global displacement and creates urban marginalization... Throughout The Migrant’s Paradox, the author ‘writes the street as world’ through walking, looking, listening and talking in the streets of Birmingham, Manchester, London, Bristol and Leicester. Hall invites the reader to enter into the world of migrants and residents of edge territories.

Hall develops a compelling and original methodological framework for exploring life and space available to migrants by writing the street as world. She does this through extensive ethnographic research accompanied by beautiful architectural drawings of five different streets in deindustrialized cities in England (Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London and Manchester)... Hall’s is an eloquently written book that powerfully channels anger at Britain’s hostile environment and its degradation of humanity. Given a tumultuous period over the past six years, it offers a useful, if dismaying, reminder of the political context in Britain – three general elections, the 2008 financial crash and austerity, Brexit, COVID-19... A particular skill in the book is the clear-sighted way in which Hall draws the postcolonial urban politics of the treatment of migrants, such as where the state systematically destroyed documentation that confirmed arrival status of those from former colonies. As Hall argues convincingly, and extending the field in Sociology and Geography, these are racialised politics that mean for some citizenship is always marginal and called into question.

Hall asks us to look ‘both from the outside in and the inside out’, to look again and pay attention to the often ordinary and banal spaces that make up cities. In reading and writing these streets—and the spaces connected to them—Hall draws out the complex layers of dispossession and wide geographies of entanglement that mark and define these edge territories.

Each page of this book resounds with incisive and clearly formulated insights, exemplifying movements across concepts, scales, histories, and geographies that exceed conventional boundaries... In so thoroughly accounting for the ways in which streets as worlds are composed, Hall is able to offer concrete possibilities of incipience, the ways in which these streets offer the basis, the glimmer of new urbanities.

Hall’s excellent book rewires the current and divisive logic around the UK and European migration systems. In a Glissantian sense, Hall proposes us to think of borders not as demarcations of cit-/denizens based on racial discrimination, but as a space of multiplicities marked by shared responsibilities and permissions for different ways of living and working across borders.

A joy to read... Hall combines geography, ethnography, and architectural observations to bring these streets to life and uses powerful illustrations to capture their complexity from the global scale of the journeys that led the shopkeepers to a particular street, to the micro-scale of shop subdivisions that enable the emergence of flexible, low-threshold businesses.

Authoritatively written, strongly engaging with current efforts to ground understandings of everyday urban existence, and situating these within broader political and economic analyses, The Migrant’s Paradox is a compelling read.