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A significant effort in theorising and conceptualising the visual has been made within various disciplines. To mention only a few, Howard Becker (Art as collective action. Am Sociol Rev 767–776, 1974) in visual sociology, Lucien Taylor (Visualising theory. Routledge, 1994), Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy ((eds): Rethinking visual anthropology. Yale University Press, London, 1999) and Jay Ruby (Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2000) in visual anthropology, Chris Jenk ((ed): Visual culture. Routledge, 1995) in cultural studies, Gillian Rose (Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual methods. Sage, 2001) in geography and Sarah Pink (Doing visual ethnography. Sage, London, 2001) in visual ethnography, all produced fundamental works focusing on the visual in social sciences. This book, however, without diminishing the disciplinary work within the subject, proposes to approach visual methodologies in the specific context of a field of study, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that brings together geography, sociology, anthropology and communication studies. As Adrian Favell (Rebooting migration theory: interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies. In: Brettell C, Hollifield J (eds) Migration theory: talking across disciplines. Routledge, pp 259–278, 2007, p. 1988) has suggested: “On the face of it, there could hardly be a topic in the contemporary social sciences more naturally ripe for interdisciplinary thinking than migration studies.” In this piece we will attempt to explain why the adoption of visual methodologies in the field of migration studies is of particular interest.

Israel’s immigration policy, the Law of Return (1950), provides that Jews can immigrate to Israel and immediately obtain citizenship. The Law of Return therefore establishes an ‘ethno-nationalist citizenship’ which includes all Jews in the world but is restricted to Jews only. Yet, the immigration of Jews to Israel was never fully inclusive: Israel has often restricted the immigration of Jewish members of the diaspora who were considered to be socioeconomic burdens. The chapter examines more recent transformations of the Law of Return in a context of liberalisation of the Israeli economy and the devolution of power to local authorities. In fact, new immigrants follow two paths of integration: ‘direct absorption’ – whereby immigrants are granted benefits while being free to settle wherever they wish – and ‘community absorption’ – where immigrants are placed in ‘absorption centres’ and see their entitlements conditioned by residence, religious observance etc. These two paths strongly depend on nationality: Western immigrants, considered as economically useful, benefit from direct absorption and a more pluralist attitude of local governments; whereas immigrants from Africa and Asia are subject to an assimilationist policy. The neoliberalisation of Israel has led to a more restrictive Law of Return, which favours ‘productive’ individuals, thereby excluding not only non-Jews but also Jews who are perceived as less desirable.

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