Scientific and expert knowledge on migration is often disregarded in policy making and plays only a minor role in public debates - despite the massive growth and institutionalization of migration research in recent years. This article interrogates the limited impact of migration research(ers) by examining knowledge practices in both policy making and academia. We first look “outwards” at migration policy making. Revisiting and integrating the hitherto separate scholarship on knowledge use and knowledge production, we identify the main mechanisms that characterize knowledge practices of policy actors, such as individual and institutional self-preservation, issue politicization, or unequal power dynamics. We then mobilize these insights to look “inwards” at our own knowledge practices in migration studies, showing that similar mechanisms shape how migration scholars produce and use knowledge. In particular, we identify a fragmentation of migration studies into ever-more fine-grained sub-fields, each with their own knowledge practices and impact strategies - and with little dialogue across them. In fact, rather than acknowledging their complementarity, these sub-fields tend to delegitimize each other's knowledge and efforts to achieve socio-political change. We argue that such “academic tribalism” creates a self-sabotaging dynamic that undermines the field's wider credibility and impact. Ultimately, we hope that this paper empowers migration researchers to act upon this diagnosis and inspires a collective discussion on how to foster more mutually-reinforcing knowledge practices that strengthen the field's role in political debates and public life.

中文翻译：

---

为什么移民研究的影响如此之小？检查移民政策制定和移民研究中的知识实践


尽管近年来移民研究大幅增长并制度化，但有关移民的科学和专家知识在政策制定中常常被忽视，并且在公共辩论中只发挥很小的作用。本文通过考察政策制定和学术界的知识实践来质疑移民研究的有限影响。我们首先“向外”审视移民政策的制定。重新审视和整合迄今为止关于知识使用和知识生产的独立学术，我们确定了表征政策行为者知识实践的主要机制，例如个人和机构的自我保护、问题政治化或不平等的权力动态。然后，我们利用这些见解“向内”审视我们自己在移民研究中的知识实践，表明类似的机制塑造了移民学者如何生产和使用知识。特别是，我们发现移民研究被分割成越来越细粒度的子领域，每个子领域都有自己的知识实践和影响策略，而且它们之间的对话很少。事实上，这些子领域并没有承认它们的互补性，而是倾向于使彼此的知识和实现社会政治变革的努力失去合法性。我们认为，这种“学术部落主义”造成了一种自我破坏的动力，破坏了该领域更广泛的可信度和影响力。最终，我们希望本文能够使移民研究人员能够根据这一诊断采取行动，并激发关于如何培育更多相互强化的知识实践的集体讨论，以加强该领域在政治辩论和公共生活中的作用。