It gives me great satisfaction to see a book, in a series such as this, covering adult education with respect to one of the most burning issues in this day and age. Adult Education and Migration is one of the key areas prevalent today. People have been migrating since time immemorial. This is therefore not a new phenomenon. It has probably been a feature of human life since its very inception. Some countries have been built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and on immigration from different parts of the world (English & Mayo, 2019, p. 217). Other nations have been characterised by internal migration (e.g., from Italy’s Mezzogiorno [Southern regions and islands] to its North) or displacement (social engineering such as that involving Kurds in Turkey). What has been significant in more recent times is the exponential rate at which people are relocating to other territories. We speak of mass migration which has implications for learning on both sides of the main global migration divide, primarily the proverbial North-South divide and of course the East-West divide, though we should also note the South-South and North-North migration flows. Coverage of this phenomenon is increasing in the adult education literature, albeit not at the rate one expects. I expect it to grow significantly in the years to come and constitute a feature of the book series I initiated at the end of the first decade of this new Millennium. This is, to date, the first comprehensive book on Migration in the series.

It arose out of frequent gatherings of a group of scholars based in the UK (some with North American experiences of migration and work-skills education), Cyprus, Estonia and Malta, in connection with an Erasmus Mundus International Master programme in Adult Education for Social Change (IMAESC). Many of these are small countries, some with a small landmass, and populations that range from officially a quarter of a million to about two million or thereabouts. Scotland, home of the lead partner in the IMAESC project, is the odd one out in terms of population with the figure traditionally established as around 5 million. Of course, undocumented clandestine immigration makes us tread cautiously when banding about population figures. All of these countries have histories of mass emigration towards other countries with hubs of migrants giving rise to regions, districts and communities branded by names associated with the country of origin. Nova Scotia comes to mind. There are concentrations of ethnic groups in certain districts: e.g. Sunshine in Melbourne, Victoria (for Maltese). London is a traditional hub for Greek-Cypriots and for migrants from most of the countries under review in this book. Great personalities have emerged from the migrant communities involved. We can think of Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and George Michael (Georgios Kyriakos Panayiotou), regarding Greek Cypriots (both sons of Greek-Cypriot restauranteurs) in London, and Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg (Maltese father) and graphic journalist Joe Sacco (Maltese) in the United States. People of Scottish ancestry making their mark abroad are countless. Make no mistake, Greek-Cypriots, Maltese, Scots and Estonians are found everywhere and not just in these visible spots.

Like most countries in the European South or East, many of the countries in question were traditionally centres of emigration in the pre or post World War (First and Second) years. The emergence of service based economies in addition to other forms of economic growth in these countries, besides the location of some of them at the borders between regions of the world, e.g. the central Mediterranean route between Africa and Europe or Middle East and Europe, and therefore the perception of these countries being gateways into the Eldorado that is Europe, have transformed some of these countries from net exporters of labour power into net importers of this same type of power.

Cyprus is an interesting case as it is politically divided with one part recently witnessing migration from Turkey to swell the ranks of one ethnic group in the Northern part. Many people from Greece avail themselves of a stronger economy and per capita income in Cyprus to migrate there, an island which once vociferously called for enosis with the ‘mother country’ (i.e., Greece itself). Nowadays workers from the North, consisting of Turkish-Cypriots, avail themselves of relaxed boundaries to migrate internally and therefore spend working hours in the more affluent Greek populated Southern part of the island. The island has people who were granted refugee status for having been dislocated from their communities north of what became known as the ‘green line’ following the Turkish invasion in 1974. The Cyprus situation is one exceptional case which demonstrates the level of complexity involved when we speak of migration.

The most visible case, however, is that concerning the massive waves of migration from ‘South’ to ‘North’, relative terms as demonstrated by any map dating back to the ‘Golden Years’ of Arab presence in places such as Cordoba and Seville. Arabs are represented as having moved down from North to South rather than vice versa. South-North, Centre etc. are terms that are relative to who wields power, material or symbolic. There is an unequal exchange between today’s perceived geographically global South and North which is at the heart of the major migration flow. People migrate from ‘South’ to ‘North’ (taken globally) for many different reasons.

We are witnessing and shall continue to witness an exponential increase in migration from ‘South’ to ‘North’, and from ‘South’ to ‘South’. Capitalism, via corporations, exacerbates the ‘greenhouse effect’ as individual sustainable living has minimal effects on climate improvement when contrasted with efforts expected of corporations and other similarly powerful entities. It is predicted that climate change will render life unbearable for people in the ‘South’. 2015 was the hottest year to date and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a 1.5 degrees centigrade increase (a conservative estimate with some going so far to envisage a 4.5% rise by the century’s end), with 20–30% of the planet’s species at risk of extinction. During the 2015–2016 summers, the southern parts of Africa faced unprecedented droughts, causing millions to starve. One envisages increase in famine, calamitous weather conditions, heatwaves, spread of malaria hitting regions hitherto untouched, droughts and floods. These will affect millions. Clashes over resources will, in all probability, lead to wars (Empson, 2016, pp. 1–2), fuelled further by a Western-based arms industry. As far as migration attempts go, we ‘ain’t seen nothing yet’. Droughts have, historically, not been assisted by appropriate famine relief from Western powers and corporations owing to potential destabilisation of market prices. This is a scary look into the future for which adult education and other efforts (education does not bring change on its own as it is not an independent variable) must brace themselves.

As I argue in a very recent book (Mayo, 2019, p. 82), many will reach and enter, perhaps clandestinely, ‘Fortress Europe’ and other Western places, while others will be left stranded in transit places such as Libya. Some will try to eke out a living on the margins of the country of disembarkation, without papers (sans papiers) and haunted by the threat of deportation. Others will have drowned in a sea, a raging sea, they would have never witnessed before as they would hail from a landlocked area. Many will have perished in the Sahara Desert, with their bones sending a chilling reminder regarding the fate that can await those who follow them. For many, however, there is no turning back.

Migration’s growth on a massive scale is bound to touch and alter the demographic composition of communities. The survivors will have their own stories to tell, some tragic and others less so. In addition to the scars of missing loved ones, they have stories of day-to-day marginalisation and racism to tell. The hegemonic populist discourses render them scapegoats for most existing ills, as they are perceived as the cause of depressing local wages and diminishing employment prospects for locals, never mind the fact that we live in a capitalist system that causes ‘jobs crises’ that are constantly presented as ‘skills crises’. Migrants are said to be responsible for changing the ‘national’ (read hegemonic) ‘identity’ and ‘ethos’ – monolithically conceived, a blanket construction which smothers any language of social difference that speaks of complex shifting identities.

These stories should be the staple of different forms of dialogical adult education or education in general in encounters which pose the important education-power question: who dialogues with whom and from which position of power or powerlessness? How are people, engaged in the discussion, discursively located materially and symbolically? To what extent do most of the adult education projects looked at in the various chapters go beyond assistencialismo (welfarism) to address these questions? Does adult education present the newcomer as ‘object’ or ‘subject’? No doubt a modicum of learning for survival, in terms of second language acquisition (Jõgi & Karu, Chapter 4, this volume) and skills transmission, is extremely important. A progressive adult education analysis would, in my view, go further and address the power-dynamics involved and address deep epistemological questions.

How and where do established local knowledge, wisdoms and learning traditions meet the new knowledge, wisdoms and learning traditions brought by the newcomers to the locality? How much do members of the autochthonous group appreciate that the newcomers, whose subjectivities extend beyond the economic to include a broader range, have had their own knowledge dismissed colonially through epistemicide or unabashedly stolen and patented from them in a process of cognitive injustice, misappropriation and accumulation? Migration through forced dislocation brings with it trans-mobility and therefore ‘portability of cultures’ and life-worlds in addition to labour power. To appreciate this, we must heed Antonio Gramsci’s advice in various places to gain cognizance of not only the conditions in which newcomers find themselves in the borrowed context but also those prevailing in the context of origin – the conditions that led them to migrate in the first place (Gramsci, 1975, Q. 23 Note 9, pp. 2198–2202). This can guard us against stock generalisations and stereotypical constructions of migrants from various regions or countries. It can help us to understand the people concerned in all their complexities, rather than to regard them as forming part of an undifferentiated mass. Unless adult education, and all education for that matter, deals substantially with this, it remains a faithful servant to an omnivorous capitalism segregating on ethnic and national lines and fails to contribute, with other variables, to change on social justice grounds. Looking comparatively at the situations concerning migrants, their various subjectivities and provision in different contexts, one can provide contrasting pictures of how these issues are tackled or overlooked. The call is for analyses of adult education involving people at the interface between ever changing life-worlds and system-worlds. The data that can trigger these discussions, hopefully leading to action, are here in this most welcome volume.