The Cultural Encounter: An Ethical Activity for Intercultural Understanding Abstract

Transcription

1 The Cultural Encounter: An Ethical Activity for Intercultural Understanding Abstract In this paper, the author argues the problem of cultural pluralism is fundamentally a problem of ethical pluralism. Moreover, ethical pluralism, when viewed within the specific framework of interculturalism leads to existential dynamics that have yet to be accounted for. In response, drawing from the work of Maxine Greene, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jonathan Lear, the author develops the concept of the cultural encounter as a cardinal activity for intercultural education. Keywords: interculturalism, intercultural education, existentialism, ethics, pluralism, interpretation The Cultural Encounter: An Ethical Activity in Intercultural Understanding There must be something midway between the inauthentic and homogenizing demand for recognition of equal worth, on the one hand, and the self-immurement within ethnocentric standards, on the other. There are other cultures, and we have to live together more and more, both on a world scale and commingled in each individual society (Taylor 1994, 72). Introduction According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2016), the United States had the highest number of international migrants (47 million), approximately one-fifth the worldwide migrant population, residing within its borders. According to the same report, the number of international migrants worldwide increased 41 per cent since While the United States has grappled with cultural plurality and change, the question is becoming more pressing throughout the world. Nearly 12 million of the worldwide migrant population resided in Germany in 2015 (United Nations 2016); and, in response to the European Union facing the most serious refugee crises since World War II, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, and Norway imposed border 1

2 controls (Kanter 2016). Even prior to the refuge crises, the question of cultural plurality was a subject of study and public policy for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which published a white paper on the importance of intercultural dialogue as a priority for public policy (UNESCO 2011). The analysis I offer in what follows is grounded in the particulars of American pluralism and educational theory, yet I expect the questions it attempts to answer are of wider global concern. Central to the question of cultural plurality is what Michael S. Merry (2012) has called the problem of pluralism: how to create a common moral vision through education in a culturally pluralist society. Pluralism in educational theory is not necessarily a problem of cultural plurality. In American educational theory, cultural pluralism generally has been addressed in relation to three approaches: political, cultural, and existential. The political approach views the problem of pluralism as one of balancing individual rights with the public good. This approach emphasizes the rights of a plurality of individual, autonomous persons existing within a larger nation-state, and it emphasizes the state as the larger unifying entity. The cultural approach to pluralism starts from the standpoint of cultures as plural entities existing within the larger shared cultural forms of the nation-state, and it emphasizes the nation as the larger unifying entity. Instead of balancing the rights of the individual with the rights of the society to which the individual belongs, the cultural ways of addressing pluralism do so vis-à-vis forms of expression that together are a shared world of customs and beliefs. Most germane to the specifics of this paper is the approach of interculturalism. Interculturalism sits between what I call ethnocentric multiculturalism and nationalistic multiculturalism. On the former view, ethnic cultures are seen as 2

3 disparate and incommensurable, and any unifying culture as hegemonic. On the latter view, a singular national culture subsumes other ethnic cultures, and the national culture should be shared by all. Interculturalism proposes that cultural groups mutually transform each other instead of remaining separate or succumbing to the dominated-dominator relationship of assimilation. As such interculturalism moves from the maintenance of difference in diversity to the sustained, transformative engagement of pluralism. Whereas the above cultural approaches analyze pluralism at the level of groups and shared worlds, existential approaches do so at the level of the unique individual world that each person inhabits, and the task of education is not to help unify multiple cultures into one overarching culture (or to preserve singular cultural identities), but rather, to help a student unify the sub-universes of meaning, within herself, derived from the different social and cultural groups to which an individual belongs within a pluralist society (Greene 1973, 8). In other words, from the cultural perspective, the problem of pluralism is of unifying (or preserving) different groups, and from the existentialist perspective the problem of pluralism is of unifying the individual, who belongs to many groups. Moreover, existentialists define these cultural groups more broadly than the cultural approach. For example, the nineteen-sixty s counterculture would be considered a cultural group from the existentialist approach (Arcilla 2010). Existentialism, then, subsumes cultural plurality under the plurality of individuals, and the existentialist educator aims, through activities of imagination and dialogue with others, to help the student create an authentic existence from the cultural forms among which the individual lives. 3

4 Existentialist philosophers of education have commented extensively on how new cultural forms, in their strangeness, can help develop the individual further by opening new possibilities and worlds for herself through imagination and dialogue. Yet what has been missed is the recognition that the sub-cultures to which the individual belongs may be continually transmuting under broader cultural demographic shifts, the problem dealt with by cultural pluralists. Moreover, the existentialist view has assumed that the individual may radically choose whether to participate in or appropriate the new cultural form. There are thus two problems I wish to address in this paper. First is a gap in existentialist thinking on the problem of pluralism. More specifically, existentialist educational thought has failed to account for the role of language s ethical intersubjectivity in the construction of an individual s world, and this complicates the notion of radical choice. The second problem is that in the move from multicultural education to that of intercultural education theorists have yet to provide an analysis of the deep existential ramifications demanded by intercultural transformation. This paper aims to address these two problems through the development of the concept of the cultural encounter, which is a specific existential event that accompanies cultural transformation. To be clear, the cultural encounter is not merely the exposure to or learning about cultural difference. In addressing these two problems, I aim to fill gaps in both existentialist and cultural approaches to the problem of pluralism and to underscore the importance of the cultural encounter for intercultural education. The there are three loci around which the analysis and conceptual development will take place: the 4

5 self (and the intelligibility of the self), one s ethical horizon or framework, and one s cultural field. Prejudice and the Limit of Self-transcendence To understand more clearly why ethical intersubjectivity is an important topic of for intercultural education and to illuminate the gap in existentialist thinking on the problem of (cultural) pluralism, I turn to Maxine Greene s (1973) Teacher as Stranger. In it, she writes, [T]here are no predefined values, no moral principles which determine in advance what is good. Alone and condemned to freedom, the individual must choose (p.279) [E]ach student will order his experience in his own fashion; each will transcend himself and appropriate the dimensions of his culture as these dimensions are presented to his consciousness (p. 285). While she acknowledges that students are bound to each other because of the intersubjectivity of language, cumulative meanings, [and] history, she claims they are not bound to each other because of any similar patterns in their lifeworlds (p. 285). Greene believes that language binds us together insofar as any individual life-world will be constituted by the cumulative meanings provided by our shared language, she does not seem to believe that language carries with it any binding power regarding what is good. To Greene, first there is the consciousness of the individual, and then there is her radical choice to determine what is good in the ordering of her experiences. Charles Taylor s description of the relationship between our self-intelligibility and our ethical framework fills out this picture of how the one understands what is good: People may see their identity as defined partly by some moral or spiritual commitment, say as a Catholic, or an anarchist. Or they may define it in part by 5

6 the nation or tradition they belong to... What they are saying by this... is that [such a commitment] provides the frame within which they can determine where they stand on what is good, or worthwhile, or admirable, or of value... [W]ere they to lose this commitment or identification, they would be at sea, as it were It's what we call an 'identity crisis' They lack a frame or horizon within which things can take on a stable significance.... To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what is not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary (Taylor 1989, 27-28). While I agree with Greene and Taylor that see the central role one s self-identity plays in making any kind of judgment I disagree with them on the primacy of selfunderstanding, most easily seen in Taylor s description. To Taylor, the self-identity of the person comes first, and that identity comes as a consciously taken commitment. From that self-identification comes the moral space and horizon of understanding from which one makes ethical judgments. Taylor s description fails to account for the fact that our choice about what is a good or worthy self-identification always already takes places within a horizon that generates and limits the very ethical possibilities and permutations that arise in making categorical self-identification, e.g. choosing being an anarchist. Similarly, I believe Greene is mistaken to think that language can bind individuals together through its intersubjectivity while at the same time denying an equally binding intersubjectivity of the ethical possibilities born out of that same language. My position, drawing from Hans-Georg Gadamer, is that one s ethical horizon does not rest on a prior existing self-identity or consciousness; rather, both arise interdependently and concomitantly within language. To explain this further, there are two points I will make. The first is that the consciousness Greene speaks of is a consciousness conditioned by the world into which it is thrown a world itself is 6

7 wholly constituted by language. The second is that ethical possibilities are always already constituted within the world, and by extension part-and-parcel to one s consciousness one s being prior to any deliberate self-identification. On the first point, I turn to Gadamer s (2004) description of historically-effected consciousness. He writes, History does not belong to us, we belong to it. Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the reality of his being (278). 1 Gadamer s claim that we understand ourselves in a self-evident way prior to selfexamination means that the identity crisis Taylor speaks of is one only within the realm of self-awareness and self-reflection, which takes place apart from the ways in which we already understand ourselves in a self-evident way. Gadamer s concept of prejudice is important here. First, it is important to note that prejudices here do mean something that is bad or problematic, as it commonly does in American English. Rather, the term prejudice simply points to the totality of projections of meanings we place on the world when we operate in it. Our consciousness is conditioned by the world into which we are born and generates the prejudices through which any judgment is made. In other words, the phenomena of understanding, then, shows the universality of human linguisticality as a limitless medium that carries everything within it - not only culture... but absolutely everything--because everything (in the world and out of it) is included in the realm of understandings and understandability in which we move (Gadamer 1976). In other words, our being is constituted by prejudices, and these are carried within the universality of linguisticality; there is no self that is extricable from language. 1 Emphasis original. 7

8 If we take Gadamer s theory seriously then what follows is that while are no a priori moral principles (as Greene claims), there are nonetheless ethical possibilities provided to us in language. In other words, we are always already choosing what is good in a pre-reflective way. To take Gadamer s claim a bit further, we not only understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live, we understand what it means to be a good member of a family, society, or state by virtue of the pre-reflective activities that express our understandings of members of these groups. When we do enter into reflective self-awareness, the possibilities of understanding what might or might not be a right or good the objects of our reflection, are given to us through language before they are given to us through any categorical selfidentification. Thus, Greene s claim that there are no predetermined moral principles to determine what is good must be tempered by the acknowledgement that there is a predetermined limit to the possibilities of choosing what is good, the parameters of which are determined by the finite array of cultural resources (for example, those commitments Taylor uses in his description), which are, in turn, brought into existence by and enveloped within the language(s) available for the chooser. The Ethical Intersubjectivity and the Promise of Intercultural Understanding While Gadamer makes no claims about what is ethical, Gadamer s view on language broadens Greene s claim on the intersubjectivity of language to include ethics, as the universality of linguisticality would include anything ethical, and, moreover, language provides our ethical possibilities. This, of course, does not mean we are doomed to a cage of language and, with it, limited ethical understandings. What I hope to show in 8

9 what follows is that intercultural understanding can liberate us from the constraints of language insofar as newer linguistic possibilities open up. Gadamer (2004) writes that Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. Hence reaching an understanding on the subject matter of a conversation necessarily means that a common language must first be worked out in the conversation in a successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community (371). In other words, when I engage in a conversation I do so on the presumption that I am speaking about the same object as the person with whom I have a conversation. In the words of P. Christopher Smith (1991), there is a running together of my world and [my interlocutor's] in what has become a shared sense of sensus communis. Thus, through the balance between shifts as understanding grows, the familiar and the foreign are always concomitant. Recognition of oneself in an other presupposes the initial otherness of the other. In reaching any understanding, what was foreign to begin with then becomes familiar (64). To engage in a conversation, one starts with the assumption that one can have a conversation about that object, and in order to have a conversation, one must share a language with the conversational partner(s). This claim in itself is probably not shocking to the reader. Nonetheless, it leads to the question of whether the ethical possibilities available within separate tongues can ever be commensurable or even understood. As we will see, the very fact that people can live in two language-worlds shows us that foreign languages are not entirely incommensurable language systems. And if in the extreme case of foreign tongues can be overcome, then language games within any given tongue can be overcome. 9

10 To begin the discussion on the problem of dialogue across languages, Gadamer (2004) makes the distinction between the conscious and technical task of translation and the act of fluent speaking in a foreign language. In the latter case, the foreign language is only foreign insofar as it is not the first language. When one speaks fluently in another language, without thinking or searching for a word any more than she would in her own language, there can be true understanding in the foreign language. Gadamer describes it in this way: For you understand a language by living in it--a statement that is true, as we know, not only of living but dead languages as well. Thus the hermeneutical problem concerns not the correct mastery of language but coming to a proper understanding of the subject matter, which takes place in the medium of language. Every language can be learned so perfectly that using it no longer means translating from or into one's mother tongue, but thinking in the foreign language. Mastering the language is necessary precondition for coming to an understanding in conversation (387). It is with this view that he says, "where there is understanding there is not translation but speech" (386), Yet our problem of understanding across language-worlds is not solved. He later explains, Even in these extreme situations where it is necessary to translate from one language into another, the subject matter can scarcely be separated from the language. Only that translator can truly re-create who brings into language the subject the text points to; but this means finding a language that is not only his but is also proportionate to the original (389). 2 We see two points being made here. The first point is that there are things readily speakable in one language and seemingly ineffable in another--what can be talked about in any given language is tied to the productive and limiting powers of the language itself. What is discussed cannot transcend language; it is in language. Gadamer explains: When a person lives in language, he is filled with the sense of the unsurpassable appropriateness of the words he uses for the subject matter he is 2 Emphasis added. 10

11 talking about. It seems impossible that other words in other languages could name the things equally well The agony of translation consists ultimately in the fact that that the original words seem to be inseparable from the things they refer to, so that to make a text intelligible one often has to give an interpretive paraphrase or it rather than translate it. The more sensitively our historical consciousness reacts, the more it seems aware of the untranslatability of the unfamiliar (403). What Gadamer is saying here is that as objects or understanding exist within the language in which they are described and discussed, there seems to be a gap unmediated by anything short of one being fluent both one s mother tongue and the foreign language. Yet to come to this conclusion is to miss the point of translation. The second point is that the translator finds a language that is his and also that of the text. What is important is not that one agonizes in the act of translation, but that one can learn another language in which to live and through which to understand the objects of that language. That is, at some point, the gap is overcome and the bridge established. It does not happen from the mere technical translation, for example, with a German- English dictionary, but happens through the process of learning the language. This point is counter-intuitive in that the bridge is actually strengthened in the process of growing unfamiliarity across languages. For example, when one first starts learning a language, one looks for one-to-one correspondences between words one knows in one's mother tongue and those words in the foreign tongue. As the learner's understanding grows, especially when the learner becomes accustomed to using foreign idioms well, the differences of one's own language and the foreign language become apparent. The foreign language is first wholly taken as a different articulation of one's own language, then one starts to live in the other language qua other language as the learner understands it as other. What is left when one starts to see the foreignness of 11

12 another language (and not just its words) is not an abyss, but the domain of interpretation and thus of understanding. The work in this domain, Gadamer says, is always meaningful, and the hermeneutical experience is the corrective by means of which the thinking person escapes the prison of language (403). It is precisely the strangeness of the other language, whether our own which is historically distanciated (my attempt to read Old English, for example), or a foreign language, or different languages in our own language the languages of lovers, the languages of religious groups, the languages of youth that always evolve ahead of their elders--that allows us to think anew about our own understandings. When such foreignness is encountered (and in the case of the foreign language, this occurs as one learns the language better), our own understandings start to become foreign to us. If we take the extreme example of foreign languages again to make the point clearer, when we see our own language from the lens of another, we see its own peculiar contours and powers that make objects of understanding visible to us. Ethical Possibilities, Self-intelligibility, and the Threat of Cultural Plurality While the above analysis provides some hope for cross-cultural understanding and of the creation of shared ethical horizons within pluralist society or across societies, the transformation of ethical horizons can nonetheless lead to the very kind of identity crisis Taylor described above. So far, I have aimed to shown the reader that we are always already under the sway of a given array of ethical possibilities, provided through language; and I have shown that it is possible to come to a shared understanding of ethical possibilities across foreign tongues. Finally, in order to show the dynamic 12

13 relationship between one s self, one s ethical possibilities, and one s cultural resources, I turn to Jonathan Lear's (2006) analysis of the destruction of the Crow Nation in Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear describes not only how our selfunderstanding is tied to our ethical horizon, but also how one s self can suddenly become unintelligible a kind of identity crisis when that ethical horizon falls apart. The disintegration of central practices in the culture of the Crow leads members of the Crow to lose the primary sense of who each one is. What Lear s analysis adds to the analysis so far is that through inter-cultural contact the Crow must evolve their sense of ethical possibilities and, with it, a sense of who they are. It is a sentence uttered by Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation that expresses this succinctly: When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened (2). Plenty Coups does not mean that literally the physical world froze when he says that nothing happened, but nothing of significance happened. The disappearance of the Buffalo symbolized the disintegration of the Crow's way of life, and when the Crow could not do what made them distinctly Crow, even mere happenings were meaningless. The buffalo went away because of the encroachment of Whites and their ways upon the Crow ways of life. For example, take the practice of war and of counting coups. In traditional Crow life, war was not the concern of a class nor even of the male sex, but of the whole population... most characteristic was the intertwining of war and religion... war exploits became the chief content of prayer. Training for war began in childhood (12). One of the primary means by which The Crow asserted their existence was in battle through the planting of coups-sticks. The Crow warrior was required to plant coups- 13

14 sticks in the ground to symbolize that the land in which they were planted was Crow land, and the warrior was obligated to defend the coups-sticks with his life. After the battle, it was customary to recount coups; that is, the stories were told of how coup-sticks were planted and defended. Each planting and defense was considered an act of bravery. Interestingly, one of the bravest acts in defending territory--of counting coup--was the act of hitting one s enemy with one s coup-stick prior to inflicting harm in order to demand recognition of the Crow's territory as such from the other side's forces. Through this activity of hitting the enemy with a coup-stick, The Crow affirmed that they existed and that those with whom they battled recognized their existence. This changed when Whites outlawed warring between tribes. What followed was that the acts that depended on warring, like counting coup, could not take place; counting coup became impossible. This had a profound effect on the Crow Nation as a whole, as essential to the Crow's existence was the success or failure of planting coup-sticks. When this was no longer a possibility, the possibility of asserting the existence of The Crow was eliminated, even though they were physically alive. Even central cultural practices that depended on war and remained as a possible activity, like the Sun Dance, a prayer for revenge that was naturally saturated with military episodes, nonetheless lost their meaning (36). That is, even though one might still learn the steps and call it the Sun Dance, the Sun Dance itself in all its richness has gone out of existence. What is left is merely a façade to a vacant structure. The outlawing of war led to what Lear calls a breakdown in the field in which occurrences occur (34). With it, members of the Crow lost the ability to make sense of their own individual lives, as their lives were richly constituted by the cultural practices that they shared as Crow. If central to what it means 14

15 to be a Crow revolves directly or indirectly around warriorship, then to outlaw war is to eliminate the possibility of being a Crow at all. To return to Plenty Coups' statement about nothing happening, the buffalo's disappearance signaled the encroachment of another culture's way of life and with it the demise of their own. With the breakdown of the field in which they made sense of themselves as Crow Nation, their ability to make sense of who they were as a people and as individuals disappeared. What we see in these illuminating examples by Lear is that to reshape cultural symbols, rituals and narratives is to reshape the resources used to make the self intelligible and ultimately to reshape the self itself. To eliminate cultural resources is to eliminate selves by eliminating the field in which selves have any intelligibility. Through legal and military threat, the Crow were forced to change their ways to the point at which their very selves became unintelligible to them, and such acts were done because their way of life was unacceptable to the American government. Self-understanding for the Crow became impossible. What this means is that in our preoccupation in multicultural curricula to educate students to appreciate, recognize, and be open to new cultural forms, we ignore the greatest threats to pluralism: we fail to teach students to cope with the more unpleasant outcomes of encounters with difference: confusion, anxiety, and loss of meaning. As Lear astutely observes: By and large a culture will not teach its young: These are the ways in which you can succeed, and these are the ways in which you will fail these acts are shameful, and these are worthy of honor and, oh yes, one more thing, this entire structure of evaluating the world might cease to make sense (83). In other words, little 15

16 has been said about the fact that impossibilities are also created in encounters with others, and this can potentially lead to the loss of a world, whether shared or uniquely individual. The Cultural Encounter: A Necessary Activity of Intercultural Education The analysis so far leads to two conclusions: the first is that what Murray calls the problem of pluralism might better be called the problem of cultural pluralism. Second, the problem of cultural pluralism is, a fortiori, a problem of ethical pluralism: it is not so much that, for example, another culture s cuisine is threatening to one s culture, it is rather the ethical frameworks which enframe visions of the good life, which, in turn, provide the intelligibility of one s self that threaten a culture. In other words a possible ramification of intercultural exposure is an existential event in which one can lose one s self. To unwilling participants, the spectre of such an event is a threat to their very existence one from which they might rightfully turn away. The educational implication of this is that intercultural education must make central the ethical and existential challenges that arise in transformative engagement with cultural difference. The cultural encounter serves as a conceptual reference for intercultural education that aims to address the challenges underscored in this paper. The cultural encounter has two specific aspects. First is the encounter as understood in existentialist thought: it must provide for a negative experience it provides a negation of what we expect. Deborah Kerdeman (2004) illustrates this well when she describes how through literature one can be "pulled up short", which she describes as the pain when events "we neither want nor foresee and to which we may believe we are immune interrupt our lives and challenge our self-understanding in ways we cannot imagine in advance of living through them" 16

17 (208). Maxine Greene describes the result of an encounter as a sense of being a homecomer, wherein what was once so familiar seems foreign. Second, while encounters can occur across many forms of difference (for example, Kerdeman describes an experience David Denby has with King Lear), the encounter I am speaking arises from intercultural engagement as one that can breach the most basic of ethical and existential assumptions in one s existence. Moving beyond the mere recognition and appreciation of other cultures to one of transformative engagement across cultures requires us to face the threat of selfunintelligibility. Practice confronting this challenge, through planned cultural encounters, can help us prepare for the unplanned ones. The development of a pedagogy capable of addressing the deep existential dimensions of the problem of (ethico-cultural) pluralism is in its early stages, and this paper has aimed to establish such a pedagogy as a necessary activity for intercultural education and to set the cultural encounter as a central concept and cardinal aim in such a pedagogy. References Arcilla, René Vincente Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. Second, Revised ed. New York: Continuum. Greene, Maxine Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age. Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Pub. Co. Kanter, James "E.U. Officials Press Greece to Tighten Its Borders." New York Times, January 28, Kerdeman, Deborah "Pulled Up Short: Challenges for Education." In Philosophy of Education 2003, edited by Kal Alston. Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society. 17

18 Lear, Jonathan Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merry, Michael S "Plural Societies and the Possibility of Shared Citizenship." Educational Theory 62 (4): doi: /j x. Smith, P. Christopher Hermeneutics and Human Finitude: Toward a Theory of Ethical Understanding. New York: Fordham University Press. Taylor, Charles Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles "The Politics of Recognition." In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. UNESCO A New Cultural Policy Agenda for Development and Mutual Understanding: Key Arguments for a Strong Commitment to Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue. edited by Scientific United Nations Educational, and Cultural Organization. Paris, France: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division International Migration Report 2015: Highlights. New York, NY: United Nations. 18