Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors PDF Author: Douglas S. Massey
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610443829
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Migration between Mexico and the United States is part of a historical process of increasing North American integration. This process acquired new momentum with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which lowered barriers to the movement of goods, capital, services, and information. But rather than include labor in this new regime, the United States continues to resist the integration of the labor markets of the two countries. Instead of easing restrictions on Mexican labor, the United States has militarized its border and adopted restrictive new policies of immigrant disenfranchisement. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors examines the devastating impact of these immigration policies on the social and economic fabric of the Mexico and the United States, and calls for a sweeping reform of the current system. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors shows how U.S. immigration policies enacted between 1986–1996—largely for symbolic domestic political purposes—harm the interests of Mexico, the United States, and the people who migrate between them. The costs have been high. The book documents how the massive expansion of border enforcement has wasted billions of dollars and hundreds of lives, yet has not deterred increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from heading north. The authors also show how the new policies unleashed a host of unintended consequences: a shift away from seasonal, circular migration toward permanent settlement; the creation of a black market for Mexican labor; the transformation of Mexican immigration from a regional phenomenon into a broad social movement touching every region of the country; and even the lowering of wages for legal U.S. residents. What had been a relatively open and benign labor process before 1986 was transformed into an exploitative underground system of labor coercion, one that lowered wages and working conditions of undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and American citizens alike. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors offers specific proposals for repairing the damage. Rather than denying the reality of labor migration, the authors recommend regularizing it and working to manage it so as to promote economic development in Mexico, minimize costs and disruptions for the United States, and maximize benefits for all concerned. This book provides an essential "user's manual" for readers seeking a historical, theoretical, and substantive understanding of how U.S. policy on Mexican immigration evolved to its current dysfunctional state, as well as how it might be fixed.

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors

Beyond Smoke and Mirrors PDF Author: Douglas S. Massey
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610443829
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Migration between Mexico and the United States is part of a historical process of increasing North American integration. This process acquired new momentum with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which lowered barriers to the movement of goods, capital, services, and information. But rather than include labor in this new regime, the United States continues to resist the integration of the labor markets of the two countries. Instead of easing restrictions on Mexican labor, the United States has militarized its border and adopted restrictive new policies of immigrant disenfranchisement. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors examines the devastating impact of these immigration policies on the social and economic fabric of the Mexico and the United States, and calls for a sweeping reform of the current system. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors shows how U.S. immigration policies enacted between 1986–1996—largely for symbolic domestic political purposes—harm the interests of Mexico, the United States, and the people who migrate between them. The costs have been high. The book documents how the massive expansion of border enforcement has wasted billions of dollars and hundreds of lives, yet has not deterred increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants from heading north. The authors also show how the new policies unleashed a host of unintended consequences: a shift away from seasonal, circular migration toward permanent settlement; the creation of a black market for Mexican labor; the transformation of Mexican immigration from a regional phenomenon into a broad social movement touching every region of the country; and even the lowering of wages for legal U.S. residents. What had been a relatively open and benign labor process before 1986 was transformed into an exploitative underground system of labor coercion, one that lowered wages and working conditions of undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and American citizens alike. Beyond Smoke and Mirrors offers specific proposals for repairing the damage. Rather than denying the reality of labor migration, the authors recommend regularizing it and working to manage it so as to promote economic development in Mexico, minimize costs and disruptions for the United States, and maximize benefits for all concerned. This book provides an essential "user's manual" for readers seeking a historical, theoretical, and substantive understanding of how U.S. policy on Mexican immigration evolved to its current dysfunctional state, as well as how it might be fixed.

Migration Beyond Capitalism

Migration Beyond Capitalism PDF Author: Hannah Cross
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509535969
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Harshly exploited migrant labour plays a fundamental role in the political economy of contemporary capitalism. The abstract and utopian theorising of many liberals and leftists on the migration question often ignores or downplays patterns of displacement and brutal class dynamics, which divide and weaken working people while empowering the ruling class. In this important new book, Hannah Cross provides a sober analysis of the class antagonisms of migration in the context of the nation, social democracy, and the racialized ordering of the world. Bringing Marxist methodology and strategy to a careful analysis of existing emancipatory movements, she sets out the programmes and approaches that are needed to promote global worker solidarity and create a future in which cheap labour is no longer a mainstay of wealthy economies. This focus on the labouring classes allows her to identify some important new directions for migration in a world beyond capitalism, exploitation and injustice. This book will be essential reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in the politics and political economy of migration in a world unhelpfully caught between racist authoritarian capitalism and the wishful-thinking of contemporary left-liberalism.

Beyond Economic Migration

Beyond Economic Migration PDF Author: Min Zhou
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479818550
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Offers a critique of the economic model of immigration Most understandings of migration to the US focus on two primary factors. Either there was trouble in the home country, such as political unrest or famine, that pushed people out, or there was a general yearning for “a better life” or “more opportunity,” often conceptualized as the American Dream. Although many contemporary migrants in the United States have been driven by economic interests, the processes of immigration and integration are shaped also by the intersection of a range of noneconomic factors in both sending and receiving countries. The contributors to Beyond Economic Migration offer a nuanced look at a range of issues affecting motives to migrate and outcomes of integration, including US immigration policy and the visa system, labor market incorporation, employment precarity, identity and belonging, and transnationalism relating to female migrants, student migrants, and temporary foreign workers. Beyond Economic Migration argues that, for the dream of fair and equitable migration to be realized, analyses of cross-border movements, resettlement, and integration must pay attention to how migrants’ individual attributes interact with institutional mechanisms and social processes.

Global Migration Beyond Limits

Global Migration Beyond Limits PDF Author: Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198867182
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
"Global Migration beyond Limits carefully considers but ultimately rejects the idea that migration is driven by the choices of individual migrants, and instead starts from the idea that institutions shape all forms, forces, and functions of migration. Of these institutions, however, land is central, whether in internal migration, international migration, or global migration. Historically or currently, the evidence also clearly shows that migration and migrants transform both the sites where migrants are resident and the places from which migrants travelled. The change is more transformational than previous accounts have established, sometimes involving turning around dead cities and towns into vibrant local economies and reconstructing food networks for entire regions and nations. This book also raises serious analytical questions about three bodies of literature: mainstream economic accounts of migration, environment, and inequality; mainstream sustainability science and alternatives to it (e.g. ecological economics); and conservative and nativist claims about population problems and alternatives to them centred only on the freedom that a borderless world could create. Obeng-Odoom argues that much of the crisis of migration and sustainability can be understood as a reflection of global long-term inequalities and cumulative stratification, reflected at different scales in the global system, though the form of migration is conditioned by more than economic forces. The so-called migration crisis, therefore, seems quite routine and familiar. It is an outward expression of the political-economic system in which socially created value is privately appropriated as rents by a privileged few who use institutions such land and property rights, race, ethnicity, class, and gender to keep others in their place in the global economic and stratification ladder"--

Migration and Remittances During the Global Financial Crisis and Beyond

Migration and Remittances During the Global Financial Crisis and Beyond PDF Author: Ibrahim Sirkeci
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821388266
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
During the 2008 financial crisis, the possible changes in remittance-sending behavior and potential avenues to alleviate a probable decline in remittance flows became concerns. This book brings together a wide array of studies from around the world focusing on the recent trends in remittance flows. The authors have gathered a select group of researchers from academic, practitioner and policy making bodies. Thus the book can be seen as a conversation between the different stakeholders involved in or affected by remittance flows globally. The book is a first-of-its-kind attempt to analyze the effects of an ongoing crisis on remittance flows globally. Data analyzed by the book reveals three trends. First, The more diversified the destinations and the labour markets for migrants the more resilient are the remittances sent by migrants. Second, the lower the barriers to labor mobility, the stronger the link between remittances and economic cycles in that corridor. And third, as remittances proved to be relatively resilient in comparison to private capital flows, many remittance-dependent countries became even more dependent on remittance inflows for meeting external financing needs. There are several reasons for migration and remittances to be relatively resilient to the crisis. First, remittances are sent by the stock (cumulative flows) of migrants, not only by the recent arrivals (in fact, recent arrivals often do not remit as regularly as they must establish themselves in their new homes). Second, contrary to expectations, return migration did not take place as expected even as the financial crisis reduced employment opportunities in the US and Europe. Third, in addition to the persistence of migrant stocks that lent persistence to remittance flows, existing migrants often absorbed income shocks and continued to send money home. Fourth, if some migrants did return or had the intention to return, they tended to take their savings back to their country of origin. Finally, exchange rate movements during the crisis caused unexpected changes in remittance behavior: as local currencies of many remittance recipient countries depreciated sharply against the US dollar, they produced a “sale” effect on remittance behavior of migrants in the US and other destination countries.

Global Perspectives on Migration and Development

Global Perspectives on Migration and Development PDF Author: Irena Omelaniuk
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400741103
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This volume is the first in a new Springer series to examine one of humanity’s most pressing concerns: global migration and its implications for development. As population mobility grows in an ever more crowded world, the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) has emerged as the most important global mechanism to deal with the urgent challenges it presents. This book explores fresh strategies proposed by the GFMD in its fourth year of operation in Mexico and beyond. Interrogating the relationship between migration and development, the papers advance the Global Forum’s aims of reducing poverty and empowering low-income families everywhere. In 2010, there were 214 million international migrants worldwide, nearly two and a half times the number in 1965. By 2050, international migration is likely to expand sharply in scale, reach and complexity, due to growing demographic disparities, environmental change, shifting global political and economic dynamics, technological innovations and social networks. Migration can bring substantial gains to families in less-developed countries, and mobile labor is an axiomatic feature of the global economy. Yet outward migration of skilled workers can seriously retard development at home, and exert pressure on wages in host nations. Balancing these and other conflicting concerns requires the substantive and expert discourse offered in this book. Contributors discuss, and propose concrete solutions to, vital issues such as the debilitating costs of cross-border labor recruitment and the provision of social and income protection for foreign contract workers. With suggestions on how to facilitate connections between transnational families, and gender- and family-sensitive immigration regimes, this book aims to foster collaborative intergovernmental links as well as partnerships between governments, civil society and international organizations. It shows how the GFMD can positively influence policy and institutional behavior while addressing wider systemic factors in protecting mobile workers.

Beyond Tears and Laughter

Beyond Tears and Laughter PDF Author: Yang Shen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811358176
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book explores the experience of China's migrant labourers in Shanghai from anthropological, and gendered analyses, offering extraordinary insights into the life-world of the marginalized people. China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants coming from the countryside to the big cities in search of fame, fortune, or just a living. The author also examines the gender dynamics at work, in intimacy and leisure of this marginalized, yet huge population. With an in-depth and multidisciplinary examination of the experience of restaurant workers in Shanghai, this book sheds humanising new light on the experience of the megacity from the inside and will be of direct value to policymakers, demographers, feminist scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and responsible citizens.

Beyond Borders

Beyond Borders PDF Author: Timothy J. Henderson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444394959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Beyond Borders: A History of Mexican Migration to the United States details the origins and evolution of the movement of people from Mexico into the United States from the first significant flow across the border at the turn of the twentieth century up to the present day. Considers the issues from the perspectives of both the United States and Mexico Offers a reasoned assessment of the factors that drive Mexican immigration, explains why so many of the policies enacted in Washington have only worsened the problem, and suggests what policy options might prove more effective Argues that the problem of Mexican immigration can only be solved if Mexico and the United States work together to reduce the disequilibrium that propels Mexican immigrants to the United States

Beyond Economic Migration

Beyond Economic Migration PDF Author: Min Zhou
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781479818570
Category : Foreign workers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Migration and Social Protection in Europe and Beyond (Volume 3)

Migration and Social Protection in Europe and Beyond (Volume 3) PDF Author: Jean-Michel Lafleur
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030512371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
This third and last open access volume in the series takes the perspective of non-EU countries on immigrant social protection. By focusing on 12 of the largest sending countries to the EU, the book tackles the issue of the multiple areas of sending state intervention towards migrant populations. Two “mirroring” chapters are dedicated to each of the 12 non-EU states analysed (Argentina, China, Ecuador, India, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey). One chapter focuses on access to social benefits across five core policy areas (health care, unemployment, old-age pensions, family benefits, guaranteed minimum resources) by discussing the social protection policies that non-EU countries offer to national residents, non-national residents, and non-resident nationals. The second chapter examines the role of key actors (consulates, diaspora institutions and home country ministries and agencies) through which non-EU sending countries respond to the needs of nationals abroad. The volume additionally includes two chapters focusing on the peculiar case of the United Kingdom after the Brexit referendum. Overall, this volume contributes to ongoing debates on migration and the welfare state in Europe by showing how non-EU sending states continue to play a role in third country nationals’ ability to deal with social risks. As such this book is a valuable read to researchers, policy makers, government employees and NGO’s.