front cover of Accountability Across Borders
Accountability Across Borders
Migrant Rights in North America
Edited by Xóchitl Bada and Shannon Gleeson
University of Texas Press, 2019

Collecting the diverse perspectives of scholars, labor organizers, and human-rights advocates, Accountability across Borders is the first edited collection that connects studies of immigrant integration in host countries to accounts of transnational migrant advocacy efforts, including case studies from the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Covering the role of federal, state, and local governments in both countries of origin and destinations, as well as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these essays range from reflections on labor solidarity among members of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Toronto to explorations of indigenous students from the Maya diaspora living in San Francisco. Case studies in Mexico also discuss the enforcement of the citizenship rights of Mexican American children and the struggle to affirm the human rights of Central American migrants in transit. As policies regarding immigration, citizenship, and enforcement are reaching a flashpoint in North America, this volume provides key insights into the new dynamics of migrant civil society as well as the scope and limitations of directives from governmental agencies.

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After the Nazi Racial State
Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe
Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"After the Nazi Racial State offers a comprehensive, persuasive, and ambitious argument in favor of making 'race' a more central analytical category for the writing of post-1945 history. This is an extremely important project, and the volume indeed has the potential to reshape the field of post-1945 German history."
---Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego

What happened to "race," race thinking, and racial distinctions in Germany, and Europe more broadly, after the demise of the Nazi racial state? This book investigates the afterlife of "race" since 1945 and challenges the long-dominant assumption among historians that it disappeared from public discourse and policy-making with the defeat of the Third Reich and its genocidal European empire. Drawing on case studies of Afro-Germans, Jews, and Turks---arguably the three most important minority communities in postwar Germany---the authors detail continuities and change across the 1945 divide and offer the beginnings of a history of race and racialization after Hitler. A final chapter moves beyond the German context to consider the postwar engagement with "race" in France, Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, where waves of postwar, postcolonial, and labor migration troubled nativist notions of national and European identity.

After the Nazi Racial State poses interpretative questions for the historical understanding of postwar societies and democratic transformation, both in Germany and throughout Europe. It elucidates key analytical categories, historicizes current discourse, and demonstrates how contemporary debates about immigration and integration---and about just how much "difference" a democracy can accommodate---are implicated in a longer history of "race." This book explores why the concept of "race" became taboo as a tool for understanding German society after 1945. Most crucially, it suggests the social and epistemic consequences of this determined retreat from "race" for Germany and Europe as a whole.

Rita Chin is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Heide Fehrenbach is Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan.

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History at Cooper Union.

Cover illustration: Human eye, © Stockexpert.com.

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Ambivalent Journey
U.S. Migration and Economic Mobility in North-Central Mexico
Richard C. Jones
University of Arizona Press, 1995
The changing political and economic relationships between Mexico and the United States, and the concurrent U.S. debate over immigration policy and practice, demand new data on migration and its economic effects. In this innovative study, Richard C. Jones analyzes migration patterns from two subregions of north-central Mexico, Coahuila and Zacatecas, to the United States. He analyzes and contrasts the characteristics of the two migrant populations and interprets the economic impacts of migration upon both home of migration upon both home areas. Jones's findings refute some common assumptions about Mexican migration while providing a strong model for further research.

Jones's study focuses on the ways in which U.S. migration affects the lives of families in these two subregions. Migrants from Zacatecas have traditionally come from rural areas and have gone to California and Illinois. Migrants from Coahuila, on the other hand, usually come from urban areas and have almost exclusively preferred locations in nearby Texas. The different motivations of both groups for migrating, and the different economic and social effects upon their home areas realized by migrating, form the core of this book. The comparison also lends the book its uniqueness, since no other study has made such an in-depth comparison of two areas.

Jones addresses the basic dichotomy of structuralists (who maintain that dependency and disinvestment are the rule for families and communities in sending areas) and functionalists (who believe that autonomy and reinvestment are the case of migrants and their families in home regions). Jones finds that much of the primary literature is based on uneven and largely outdated data that leans heavily on two sending states, Jalisco and Michoacan. His fresh analysis shows that communities and regions of Mexico, rather than families only, account for differing migration patterns and differing social and economic results of these patterns.

Jones's study will be of value not only to scholars and practitioners working in the field of Mexican migration, but also, for its innovative methodology, to anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians whose interests include human migration patterns in any part of the world
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Becoming Transnational Youth Workers
Independent Mexican Teenage Migrants and Pathways of Survival and Social Mobility
Isabel Martinez
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Becoming Transnational Youth Workers contests mainstream notions of adolescence with its study of a previously under-documented cross-section of Mexican immigrant youth. Preceding the latest wave of Central American children and teenagers now fleeing violence in their homelands, Isabel Martinez examines a group of unaccompanied Mexican teenage minors who emigrated to New York City in the early 2000s. As one of the consequences of intractable poverty in their homeland, these emigrant youth exhibit levels of agency and competence not usually assigned to children and teenage minors, and disrupt mainstream notions of what practices are appropriate at their ages. Leaving school and family in Mexico and financially supporting not only themselves through their work in New York City, but also their families back home, these youths are independent teenage migrants who, upon migration, wish to assume or resume autonomy and agency rather than dependence. This book also explores community and family understandings about survival and social mobility in an era of extreme global economic inequality.
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Borderland Dreams
The Transnational Lives of Korean Chinese Workers
June Hee Kwon
Duke University Press, 2023
In Borderland Dreams June Hee Kwon explores the trajectory of the “Korean dream” that has fueled the massive migration of Korean Chinese workers from the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in northeast China to South Korea since the early 1990s. Charting the interplay of bodies, money, and time, the ethnography reveals how these migrant workers, in the course of pursuing their borderland dreams, are transformed into a transnational ethnicized class. Kwon analyzes the persistent desire of Korean Chinese to “leave to live better” at the intersection between the neoliberalizing regimes of post-socialist China and post–Cold War South Korea. Scrutinizing the tensions and affinities among the Korean Chinese, North and South Koreans, and Han Chinese whose lives intertwine in the borderland, Kwon captures the diverse and multifaceted aspirations of Korean Chinese workers caught between the ascendant Chinese dream and the waning Korean dream.
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Breaks in the Chain
What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy
Paul Apostolidis
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In Breaks in the Chain, Paul Apostolidis investigates the personal life stories of a group of Mexican immigrant meatpackers who are at once typical and extraordinary. After crossing the border clandestinely and navigating the treacherous world of the undocumented, they waged a campaign to democratize their union and their workplace in the most hazardous industry in the United States.

Breaks in the Chain shows how immigrant workers-individually and sometimes collectively-both reinforce and contest a tacit but lethal form of biopolitics that differentiates the life chances of racial groups. Examining their personal narratives, Apostolidis recasts our understanding of the ways immigrants construct and transform social power.
Apostolidis uses empirical inquiry to spark new reflections in critical theory as he analyzes how immigrant workers' local practices confront structural power within and beyond America's borders. Linking stories of immigration to stories about working on the meat production line-the chain-he reveals the surprising power of activism by immigrant workers and their allies and demonstrates how it can-and should-promote social and political democracy in America.
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The Changing Face of Inequality
Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920
Olivier Zunz
University of Chicago Press, 1982
Originally published in 1983, The Changing Face of Inequality is the first systematic social history of a major American city undergoing industrialization. Zunz examines Detroit's evolution between 1880 and 1920 and discovers the ways in which ethnic and class relations profoundly altered its urban scene. Stunning in scope, this work makes a major contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century cities.
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Color Lines
Affirmative Action, Immigration, and Civil Rights Options for America
John David Skrentny
University of Chicago Press, 2001
A new ethnic order has emerged in the United States. The growing number of Latinos and Asians has rendered the old black-and-white binary obsolete. And yet, political pundits and commentators on both the left and the right continue to overlook the changing face of discrimination and opportunity in today's new multiethnic, multiracial America. With Color Lines, John David Skrentny brings us a collection of essays that reexamines the role of affirmative action and civil rights in light of this important shift in American demographics. The book explores issues of public policy, equal opportunity, diversity, multiculturalism, pathways to better work and higher learning, and attempts in countries outside the United States to protect minority civil rights. Combining perspectives from specialists in fields as diverse as sociology, history, political science, and law, Color Lines is a balanced and broad-ranging guide for anyone interested in civil rights policy and the future of ethnic relations in America.

Contributors:
Erik Bleich
Lawrence D. Bobo
Frank Dobbin
John Aubrey Douglass
Hugh Davis Graham
Kyra R. Greene
Erin Kelly
George R. La Noue
Jennifer Lee
Michael Lichter
Deborah C. Malamud
Sunita Parikh
John C. Sullivan
Thomas J. Sugrue
Carol M. Swain
Steven M. Teles
Roger Waldinger
Christine Min Wotipka

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A Common Humanity
Ritual, Religion, and Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson, Arizona
Lane Van Ham
University of Arizona Press, 2011
As debate about immigration policy rages from small towns to state capitals, from coffee shops to Congress, would-be immigrants are dying in the desert along the US–Mexico border. Beginning in the 1990s, the US government effectively sealed off the most common border crossing routes. This had the unintended effect of forcing desperate people to seek new paths across open desert. At least 4,000 of them died between 1995 and 2009. While some Americans thought the dead had gotten what they deserved, other Americans organized humanitarian aid groups. A Common Humanity examines some of the most active aid organizations in Tucson, Arizona, which has become a hotbed of advocacy on behalf of undocumented immigrants.

This is the first book to examine immigrant aid groups from the inside. Author Lane Van Ham spent more than three years observing the groups and many hours in discussions and interviews. He is particularly interested in how immigrant advocates both uphold the legitimacy of the United States and maintain a broader view of its social responsibilities. By advocating for immigrants regardless of their documentation status, he suggests, advocates navigate the conflicting pulls of their own nation-state citizenship and broader obligations to their neighbors in a globalizing world. And although the advocacy organizations are not overtly religious, Van Ham finds that they do employ religious symbolism as part of their public rhetoric, arguing that immigrants are entitled to humane treatment based on universal human values.

Beautifully written and immensely engaging, A Common Humanity adds a valuable human dimension to the immigration debate.
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Dahlia's Iris
Secret Autobiography and Fiction
Leslie Scalapino
University of Alabama Press, 2003
Detectives are investigating the death of Dahlia Winter's husband and also looking into the mysterious deaths of young boys who are imported for labor in a future-time San Francisco. Citing the plots of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Terminator 2, and Blade Runner as proof that our sense of inner and outer is tied to rebellion and slavery, the novel appears at first to be a detail of these films all at once, like a colonization of them from the inside. But almost immediately the plot assumes its own life. Based on a conception of the Tibetan written form called Secret Autobiography--which is not the chronological events or actions of a life, but an individual's seeing outside any frames--the novel makes a time-space in which sensation, actions, and thought-memory are occurring alongside our present-day space.
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Daily Labors
Marketing Identity and Bodies on a New York City Street Corner
Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky
Temple University Press, 2019

On street corners throughout the country, men stand or sit together patiently while they wait for someone looking to hire un buen trabajador (a good worker). These day laborers are visible symbols of the changing nature of work—and the demographics of workers—in the United States. 

Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky spent nearly three years visiting with African American men and Latino immigrant men who looked for work as day laborers at a Brooklyn street intersection. Her fascinating ethnography, Daily Labors, considers these immigrants and citizens as active participants in their social and economic life. They not only work for wages but also labor daily to institute change, create knowledge, and contribute new meanings to shape their social world. 

Daily Labors reveals how ideologies about race, gender, nation, and legal status operate on the corner and the vulnerabilities, discrimination, and exploitation workers face in this labor market. Pinedo-Turnovsky shows how workers market themselves to conform to employers’ preconceptions of a “good worker” and how this performance paradoxically leads to a more precarious workplace experience. Ultimately, she sheds light on belonging, community, and what a “good day laborer” for these workers really is.

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front cover of Equal Opportunities and Ethnic Inequality in European Labour Markets
Equal Opportunities and Ethnic Inequality in European Labour Markets
Discrimination, Gender and Policies of Diversity
Edited by Karen Kraal, Judith Roosblad, and John Wrench
Amsterdam University Press, 2009

Despite laws and policy measures being developed at the European, national, and local levels, job-seeking immigrants and ethnic minorities still suffer unequal access and ethnic discrimination. This important volume—divided into sections on discrimination, gender, equity policies, and diversity management—compares several European labor markets, recommends methods for conducting further research, and evaluates the actual effects of discrimination-combating policies.

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Ethics of Citizenship
Immigration and Group Rights in Germany
William A. Barbieri Jr.
Duke University Press, 1998
Who is to be included in a political community and on what terms? William A. Barbieri Jr. seeks answers to these questions in this exploration of the controversial concept of citizenship rights—a concept directly related to the nature of democracy, equality, and cultural identity. Through an examination of the case of Germany’s settled “guestworkers” and their families, Ethics of Citizenship investigates the pressing problem of political membership in a world marked by increased migration, rising nationalist sentiment, and the ongoing reorganization of states through both peaceful and violent means.
Although some of Germany’s foreign workers have gradually attained a degree of social and economic legitimacy, Barbieri explains how they remain effectively excluded from true German citizenship. Describing how this exclusion has occurred and assessing current attitudes toward political membership in Germany, he argues for a just and democratic policy toward the tax-paying, migrant worker minority, one that would combine the extension of the individual rights of citizenship with the establishment of certain group rights. Through a dissection of ongoing public “membership debates” over issues such as suffrage, dual citizenship, and immigration and refugee policy, Barbieri identifies a range of competing responses to the question of who “belongs” in Germany. After critiquing these views, he proposes an alternative ethic of membership rooted in an account of domination and human rights that seeks to balance individual and group rights within the context of a commitment to democracy and equal citizenship.
Indispensable for scholars of German studies, Ethics of Citizenship also raises questions that will attract moral philosophers, constitutional scholars, and those interested in the continuing, global problems associated with migration.
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Global Labor Migration
New Directions
Edited by Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, and Joo-Cheong Tham
University of Illinois Press, 2023
Around the world, hundreds of millions of labor migrants endure exploitation, lack of basic rights, and institutionalized discrimination and marginalization. What dynamics and drivers have created a world in which such a huge--and rapidly growing--group toils as marginalized men and women, existing as a lower caste institutionally and juridically? In what ways did labor migrants shape their living and working conditions in the past, and what opportunities exist for them today?

Global Labor Migration presents new multidisciplinary, transregional perspectives on issues surrounding global labor migration. The essays go beyond disciplinary boundaries, with sociologists, ethnographers, legal scholars, and historians contributing research that extends comparison among and within world regions. Looking at migrant workers from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the contributors illustrate the need for broader perspectives that study labor migration over longer timeframes and from wider geographic areas. The result is a unique, much-needed collection that delves into one of the world’s most pressing issues, generates scholarly dialogue, and proposes cutting-edge research agendas and methods.

Contributors: Bridget Anderson, Rutvica Andrijasevic, Katie Bales, Jenny Chan, Penelope Ciancanelli, Felipe Barradas Correia Castro Bastos, Eileen Boris, Charlie Fanning, Judy Fudge, Jorge L. Giovannetti-Torres, Heidi Gottfried, Julie Greene, Justin Jackson, Radhika Natarajan, Pun Ngai, Bastiaan Nugteren, Nicola Piper, Jessica R. Pliley, Devi Sacchetto, Helen Sampson, Yael Schacher, Joo-Cheong Tham, and Matt Withers

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Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism
Immanuel Ness
University of Illinois Press, 2011

Political scientist Immanuel Ness thoroughly investigates the use of guest workers in the United States, the largest recipient of migrant labor in the world. Ness argues that the use of migrant labor is increasing in importance and represents despotic practices calculated by key U.S. business leaders in the global economy to lower labor costs and expand profits under the guise of filling a shortage of labor for substandard or scarce skilled jobs.

Drawing on ethnographic field research, government data, and other sources, Ness shows how worker migration and guest worker programs weaken the power of labor in both sending and receiving countries. His in-depth case studies of the rapid expansion of technology and industrial workers from India and hospitality workers from Jamaica reveal how these programs expose guest workers to employers' abuses and class tensions in their home countries while decreasing jobs for American workers and undermining U.S. organized labor.

Where other studies of labor migration focus on undocumented immigrant labor and contend immigrants fill jobs that others do not want, this is the first to truly advance understanding of the role of migrant labor in the transformation of the working class in the early twenty-first century. Questioning why global capitalists must rely on migrant workers for economic sustenance, Ness rejects the notion that temporary workers enthusiastically go to the United States for low-paying jobs. Instead, he asserts the motivations for improving living standards in the United States are greatly exaggerated by the media and details the ways organized labor ought to be protecting the interests of American and guest workers in the United States.

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Help or Hindrance?
The Economic Implications of Immigration for African Americans
Daniel S. Hammermesh
Russell Sage Foundation, 1998
With recent immigration at a near record high, many observers fear that African Americans, particularly those in low skill jobs, are increasingly losing out to immigrants in the American labor market. Because today's immigrants are largely non-European and non-white, there is also speculation that their presence will intensify the competition for housing and educational opportunities among minority groups. Help or Hindrance? probes the foundation of these concerns with the first comprehensive investigation into the effects of immigration on African Americans. With detailed economic analysis of African American job prospects, benefits, and working conditions, Help or Hindrance? demonstrates that although immigration does not appear to have affected the actual employment rate of blacks, it has contributed slightly to the widening gap between the annual earnings of black and white males. Those near the lowest skills level appear most affected, suggesting that the most likely losers are workers with abilities similar to those of immigrants. With many employers moving away from cities, access to housing and problems of segregation have also become integral to success in the job market. And within black neighborhoods themselves, the establishment of small immigrant businesses has raised concerns that these may hinder local residents from starting up similar ventures. Help or Hindrance? also examines how immigration has affected the educational attainment of African Americans. Increased competition for college affirmative action and remedial programs has noticeably reduced African Americans' access to college places and scholarships. Help or Hindrance? offers compelling evidence that although immigration has in many ways benefited parts of American society, it has had a cumulatively negative effect on the economic prospects of African Americans. In concluding chapters, this volume provides an overview of possible policy interventions and evaluates them within the current social and political climate. Because the long-term impact of current immigration on social welfare remains unknown solutions are far from clear. Help or Hindrance? provides a valuable benchmark for discussion of immigration and racial equity in a time of rapid population change.
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front cover of High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences
High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences
Edited by Gordon H. Hanson, William R. Kerr, and Sarah Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Immigration policy is one of the most contentious public policy issues in the United States today.  High-skilled immigrants represent an increasing share of the U.S. workforce, particularly in science and engineering fields. These immigrants affect economic growth, patterns of trade, education choices, and the earnings of workers with different types of skills. The chapters in this volume go beyond the traditional question of how the inflow of foreign workers affects native employment and earnings to explore effects on innovation and productivity, wage inequality across skill groups, the behavior of multinational firms, firm-level dynamics of entry and exit, and the nature of comparative advantage across countries.
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Immigrants, Markets, and States
The Political Economy of Postwar Europe
James F. Hollifield
Harvard University Press, 1992

This timely study of the recent migration tides explores the political and economic factors that have influenced the rise of immigration in postwar Europe and the United States. It seeks to explain immigration in terms of the globalization of labor markets and the expansion of civil rights for marginal groups in the liberal democracies.

Immigration raises emotional issues of nationalism and citizenship. Territorial norms of community and nationhood come into conflict with the liberal ideal of free, rational individuals seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Yet immigration has been an essential ingredient in economic growth. How then can liberal states reconcile economic pressures to maintain adequate supplies of labor with political pressures to protect citizenship and safeguard rights that are accorded, in principle, to every member of society?

Three prominent democracies—France, Germany, and the United States—are chosen for study because their experience illustrates the dilemma that liberal states must face when trying to control immigration. The author carefully distinguishes differences in the factors that influence each state’s struggle to resolve the status of the “guest” worker and the “illegal” immigrant. Yet he finds that the accretion of rights for aliens and the globalization of markets have led to a convergence of immigration policies in the industrialized West.

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Immigrants Unions & The New Us Labor Mkt
Immanuel Ness
Temple University Press, 2005
In recent years, New Yorkers have been surprised to see workers they had taken for granted—Mexicans in greengroceries, West African supermarket deliverymen and South Asian limousine drivers—striking, picketing, and seeking support for better working conditions. Suddenly, businesses in New York and the nation had changed and were now dependent upon low-paid immigrants to fill the entry-level jobs that few native-born Americans would take. Immigrants, Unions, and the New U.S. Labor Market tells the story of these workers' struggle for living wages, humane working conditions, and the respect due to all people. It describes how they found the courage to organize labor actions at a time when most laborers have become quiescent and while most labor unions were ignoring them. Showing how unions can learn from the example of these laborers, and demonstrating the importance of solidarity beyond the workplace, Immanuel Ness offers a telling look into the lives of some of America's newest immigrants.
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Immigration and Opportuntity
Race, Ethnicity, and Employment in the United States
Frank D. Bean
Russell Sage Foundation, 1999
The American dream of equal opportunity and social mobility still holds a powerful appeal for the many immigrants who arrive in this country each year. but if immigrant success stories symbolize the fulfillment of the American dream, the persistent inequality suffered by native-born African Americans demonstrates the dream's limits. Although the experience of blacks and immigrants in the United States are not directly comparable, their fates are connected in ways that are seldom recognized. Immigration and Opportunity brings together leading sociologists and demographers to present a systematic account of the many ways in which immigration affects the labor market experiences of native-born African Americans. With the arrival of large numbers of nonwhite immigrants in recent decades, blacks now represent less than 50 percent of the U.S. minority population. Immigration and Opportunity reveals how immigration has transformed relations between minority populations in the United States, creating new forms of labor market competition between native and immigrant minorities. Recent immigrants have concentrated in a handful of port-of-entry cities, breaking up established patterns of residential segregation,and, in some cases, contributing to the migration of native blacks out of these cities. Immigrants have secured many of the occupational niches once dominated by blacks and now pass these jobs on through ethnic hiring networks that exclude natives. At the same time, many native-born blacks find jobs in the public sector, which is closed to those immigrants who lack U.S. citizenship. While recent immigrants have unquestionably brought economic and cultural benefits to U.S. society, this volume makes it clear that the costs of increased immigration falls particularly heavily upon those native-born groups who are already disadvantaged. Even as large-scale immigration transforms the racial and ethnic make-up of U.S. society—forcing us to think about race and ethnicity in new ways—it demands that we pay renewed attention to the entrenched problems of racial disadvantage that still beset native-born African Americans.
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Immigration and the Work Force
Economic Consequences for the United States and Source Areas
Edited by George J. Borjas and Richard B. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Since the 1970s, the striking increase in immigration to the United States has been accompanied by a marked change in the composition of the immigrant community, with a much higher percentage of foreign-born workers coming from Latin America and Asia and a dramatically lower percentage from Europe.

This timely study is unique in presenting new data sets on the labor force, wage rates, and demographic conditions of both the U.S. and source-area economies through the 1980s. The contributors analyze the economic effects of immigration on the United States and selected source areas, with a focus on Puerto Rico and El Salvador. They examine the education and job performance of foreign-born workers; assimilation, fertility, and wage rates; and the impact of remittances by immigrants to family members on the overall gross domestic product of source areas.

A revealing and original examination of a topic of growing importance, this book will stand as a guide for further research on immigration and on the economies of developing countries.
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Immigration, Trade, and the Labor Market
Edited by John M. Abowd and Richard B. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Are immigrants squeezing Americans out of the work force? Or is competition wth foreign products imported by the United States an even greater danger to those employed in some industries? How do wages and unions fare in foreign-owned firms? And are the media's claims about the number of illegal immigrants misleading?

Prompted by the growing internationalization of the U.S. labor market since the 1970s, contributors to Immigration, Trade, and the Labor Market provide an innovative and comprehensive analysis of the labor market impact of the international movements of people, goods, and capital. Their provocative findings are brought into perspective by studies of two other major immigrant-recipient countries, Canada and Australia. The differing experiences of each nation stress the degree to which labor market institutions and economic policies can condition the effect of immigration and trade on economic outcomes
Contributors trace the flow of immigrants by comparing the labor market and migration behavior of individual immigrants, explore the effects of immigration on wages and employment by comparing the composition of the work force in local labor markets, and analyze the impact of trade on labor markets in different industries. A unique data set was developed especially for this study—ranging from an effort to link exports/imports with wages and employment in manufacturing industries, to a survey of illegal Mexican immigrants in the San Diego area—which will prove enormously valuable for future research.
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L.A. Story
Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement
Ruth Milkman
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Sharp decreases in union membership over the last fifty years have caused many to dismiss organized labor as irrelevant in today's labor market. In the private sector, only 8 percent of workers today are union members, down from 24 percent as recently as 1973. Yet developments in Southern California—including the successful Justice for Janitors campaign—suggest that reports of organized labor's demise may have been exaggerated. In L.A. Story, sociologist and labor expert Ruth Milkman explains how Los Angeles, once known as a company town hostile to labor, became a hotbed for unionism, and how immigrant service workers emerged as the unlikely leaders in the battle for workers' rights. L.A. Story shatters many of the myths of modern labor with a close look at workers in four industries in Los Angeles: building maintenance, trucking, construction, and garment production. Though many blame deunionization and deteriorating working conditions on immigrants, Milkman shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Her analysis reveals that worsening work environments preceded the influx of foreign-born workers, who filled the positions only after native-born workers fled these suddenly undesirable jobs. Ironically, L.A. Story shows that immigrant workers, who many union leaders feared were incapable of being organized because of language constraints and fear of deportation, instead proved highly responsive to organizing efforts. As Milkman demonstrates, these mostly Latino workers came to their service jobs in the United States with a more group-oriented mentality than the American workers they replaced. Some also drew on experience in their native countries with labor and political struggles. This stock of fresh minds and new ideas, along with a physical distance from the east-coast centers of labor's old guard, made Los Angeles the center of a burgeoning workers' rights movement. Los Angeles' recent labor history highlights some of the key ingredients of the labor movement's resurgence—new leadership, latitude to experiment with organizing techniques, and a willingness to embrace both top-down and bottom-up strategies. L.A. Story's clear and thorough assessment of these developments points to an alternative, high-road national economic agenda that could provide workers with a way out of poverty and into the middle class.
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Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland
Changing Social Landscapes in Middle America
Edited by Linda Allegro and Andrew Grant Wood
University of Illinois Press, 2019
This collection examines Latina/o immigrants and the movement of the Latin American labor force to the central states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa. Contributors look at outside factors affecting migration, including corporate agriculture, technology, globalization, and government. They also reveal how cultural affinities like religion, strong family ties, farming, and cowboy culture attract these newcomers to the Heartland. Throughout, essayists point to how hostile neoliberal policy reforms have made it difficult for Latin American immigrants to find social and economic stability.

Filled with varied and eye-opening perspectives, Latin American Migrations to the U.S. Heartland reveals how identities, economies, and geographies are changing as Latin Americans adjust to their new homes, jobs, and communities.

Contributors: Linda Allegro, Tisa M. Anders, Scott Carter, Caitlin Didier, Miranda Cady Hallett, Edmund Hamann, Albert Iaroi, Errol D. Jones, Jane Juffer, László J. Kulcsár, Janelle Reeves, Jennifer F. Reynolds, Sandi Smith-Nonini, and Andrew Grant Wood.

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Life Interrupted
Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States
Denise Brennan
Duke University Press, 2014
Life Interrupted introduces us to survivors of human trafficking who are struggling to get by and make homes for themselves in the United States. Having spent nearly a decade following the lives of formerly trafficked men and women, Denise Brennan recounts in close detail their flight from their abusers and their courageous efforts to rebuild their lives. At once scholarly and accessible, her book links these firsthand accounts to global economic inequities and under-regulated and unprotected workplaces that routinely exploit migrant laborers in the United States. Brennan contends that today's punitive immigration policies undermine efforts to fight trafficking. While many believe trafficking happens only in the sex trade, Brennan shows that across low-wage labor sectors—in fields, in factories, and on construction sites—widespread exploitation can lead to and conceal forced labor. Life Interrupted is a riveting account of life in and after trafficking and a forceful call for meaningful immigration and labor reform.

All royalties from this book will be donated to the nonprofit Survivor Leadership Training Fund administered through the Freedom Network.
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Limits of Citizenship
Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe
Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal
University of Chicago Press, 1994
In many Western countries, rights that once belonged solely to citizens are being extended to immigrants, a trend that challenges the nature and basis of citizenship at a time when nation-states are fortifying their boundaries through restirictive border controls and expressions of nationalist ideologies. In this book, Yasemin Soysal compares the different ways European nations incorporate immigrants, how these policies evolved, and how they are influenced by international human rights discourse.

Soysal focuses on postwar international migration, paying particular attention to "guestworkers." Taking an in-depth look at France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, she identifies three major patterns that reflect the varying emphasis particular states place on individual versus corporate groups as the basis for incorporation. She finds that the global expansion and intensification of human rights discourse puts nation-states under increasing outside pressure to extend membership rights to aliens, resulting in an increasingly blurred line between citizen and noncitizen. Finally, she suggests a possible accommodation to these shifts: specifically, a model of post-national membership that derives its legitimacy from universal personhood, rather than national belonging.

This fresh approach to the study of citizenship, rights, and immigration will be invaluable to anyone involved in issues of human rights, international migration, and transnational cultural interactions, as well as to those who study the contemporary transformation of the nation-state, nationalism, and globalization.
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Looking for Loopholes
Processes of Incorporation of Illegal Immigrants in the Netherlands
Joanne van der Leun
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
Looking for Loopholes is a detailed account of how illegal immigrants manage to integrate into Dutch society. Drawing on long-term research in the four largest cities in the Netherlands, van der Leun discusses illegal immigration's relationships with illegal employment and criminal involvement, as well as aspects of education, housing, health care and police surveillance. Throughout, she combines the perspectives of immigrants with that of those who implement policies to discourage them, revealing growing tensions between restrictive rules and day-to-day reality.
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Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women
ITALIAN MIGRANTS IN URBAN AMERICA
Diane C. Vecchio
University of Illinois Press, 2006

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Migrants and Markets
Perspectives from Economics and the Other Social Sciences
Edited by Holger Kolb and Henrik Egbert
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
Over the course of their interaction, economics and migration research have treated each other with mutual indifference. When migration research attempted to overstretch its bounds, economics reduced its analytical scope to those areas that originally seemed to belong to the genuine economic sphere. This volume considers eleven case studies that aim to overcome the artificial barrier between the two disciplines by applying the economic method to migratory phenomena, utilizing economic theories in order to explain migratory patterns, and regarding the structure and development of markets as crucial to the shaping of population stocks and the flow of migrants.
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Migration and Irregular Work in Austria
A Case Study of the Structure and Dynamics of Irregular Foreign Employment in Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century
Michael Jandl, Christina Hollomey, Sandra Gendera, Anna Stepien, and Veronika Bi
Amsterdam University Press, 2008

Migration and Irregular Work in Austria offers a fresh new perspective on irregular migrant work by making use of in-depth interviews with migrants themselves. The authors challenge our ability to divide the world of foreign employment into legal and illegal work, and instead evaluate the new manifestations of “irregular migrant work” that have evolved in the wake of EU expansion. Arguing that this work is based on both supply and demand—and thus deeply ingrained in the structure of our advanced economies—this volume should fill a large gap in migration and labor market research.

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Migration Policymaking in Europe
The Dynamics of Actors and Contexts in Past and Present
Edited by Giovanna Zincone, Rinus Penninx, and Maren Borkert
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
The pieces in this volume offer fresh approaches to a variety of debates over migration policy. The authors of these essays explore migration policymaking in ten European countries, looking at the way social scientists and politicians form and implement these policies. Migration Policymaking in Europe contains original insights and in-depth comparative analyses drawing on a variety of empirical evidence. By placing these policies in the context of historical relationships between nations, the editors of this book have put forth a vital new portrait of the principles guiding migration in Europe.
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Milking in the Shadows
Migrants and Mobility in America’s Dairyland
Keller, Julie C
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Migrant workers live in a transnational world that spans the boundaries of nation-states. Yet for undocumented workers, this world is complicated by inflexible immigration policies and the ever-present threat of enforcement. Workers labeled as “illegals” wrestle with restrictive immigration policies, evading border patrol and local police as they risk their lives to achieve economic stability for their families. For this group of workers, whose lives in the U.S. are largely defined by their tenuous legal status, the sacrifices they make to get ahead entail long periods of waiting, extended separation from family, and above all, tremendous uncertainty around a freedom that many of us take for granted—everyday mobility. In Milking in the Shadows, Julie Keller takes an in-depth look at a population of undocumented migrants working in the American dairy industry to understand the components of this labor system. This book offers a framework for understanding the disjuncture between the labor desired by employers and life as an undocumented worker in America today.
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Mobile Orientations
An Intimate Autoethnography of Migration, Sex Work, and Humanitarian Borders
Nicola Mai
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Despite continued public and legislative concern about sex trafficking across international borders, the actual lives of the individuals involved—and, more importantly, the decisions that led them to sex work—are too often overlooked. With Mobile Orientations, Nicola Mai shows that, far from being victims of a system beyond their control, many contemporary sex workers choose their profession as a means to forge a path toward fulfillment.

Using a bold blend of personal narrative and autoethnography, Mai provides intimate portrayals of sex workers from sites including the Balkans, the Maghreb, and West Africa who decided to sell sex as the means to achieve a better life. Mai explores the contrast between how migrants understand themselves and their work and how humanitarian and governmental agencies conceal their stories, often unwittingly, by addressing them all as helpless victims. The culmination of two decades of research, Mobile Orientations sheds new light on the desires and ambitions of migrant sex workers across the world.
 
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Newcomers In Workplace
Immigrants and the Restructing of the U.S. Economy
edited by Louise Lamphere, Alex Stepick and Guillermo Grenier
Temple University Press, 1994

Newcomers in the Workplace documents and dramatizes the changing face of the American workplace, transformed in the 1980s by immigrant workers in all sectors. This collection of excellent ethnographies captures the stench of meatpacking plants, the clatter of sewing machines, the sweat of construction sites, and the strain of management-employee relations in hotels and grocery stores as immigrant workers carve out crucial roles in a struggling economy.

Case studies focus on three geographical regions—Philadelphia, Miami, and Garden City, Kansas—where the active workforce includes increasing numbers of Cubans, Haitians, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, Laotians, Vietnamese, and other new immigrants. The portraits show these newcomers reaching across ethnic boundaries in their determination to retain individualism and to insure their economic survival.


In the series Labor and Social Change, edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni.

 

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The Roles of Immigrants and Foreign Students in US Science, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship
Edited by Ina Ganguli, Shulamit Kahn, and Megan MacGarvie
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The number of immigrants in the US science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce and among recipients of advanced STEM degrees at US universities has increased in recent decades. In light of the current public debate about immigration, there is a need for evidence on the economic impacts of immigrants on the STEM workforce and on innovation. Using new data and state-of-the-art empirical methods, this volume examines various aspects of the relationships between immigration, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the effects of changes in the number of immigrants and their skill composition on the rate of innovation; the relationship between high-skilled immigration and entrepreneurship; and the differences between immigrant and native entrepreneurs. It presents new evidence on the postgraduation migration patterns of STEM doctoral recipients, in particular the likelihood these graduates will return to their home country. This volume also examines the role of the US higher education system and of US visa policy in attracting foreign students for graduate study and retaining them after graduation.
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Solidarity & Care
Domestic Worker Activism in New York City
Alana Lee Glaser
Temple University Press, 2023
The members of the Domestic Workers United (DWU) organization—immigrant women of color employed as nannies, caregivers, and housekeepers in New York City—formed to fight for dignity and respect and to “bring meaningful change” to their work. Alana Lee Glaser examines the process of how these domestic workers organized against precarity, isolation, and exploitation to help pass the 2010 New York State Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the first labor law in the United States protecting in-home workers.
 
Solidarity & Care examines the political mobilization of diverse care workers who joined together and supported one another through education, protests, lobbying, and storytelling. Domestic work activists used narrative and emotional appeals to build a coalition of religious communities, employers of domestic workers, labor union members, and politicians to first pass and then to enforce the new law.
 
Through oral history interviews, as well as ethnographic observation during DWU meetings and protest actions, Glaser chronicles how these women fought (and continue to fight) to improve working conditions. She also illustrates how they endure racism, punitive immigration laws, on-the-job indignities, and unemployment that can result in eviction and food insecurity.
 
The lessons from Solidarity & Care along with the DWU’s precedent-setting legislative success have applications to workers across industries.
 
All royalties will go directly to the Domestic Workers United
 
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Solidarity and Fragmentation
Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900
Richard Jules Oestreicher
University of Illinois Press, 1985
How did the interplay between class and ethnicity play out within the working class during the Gilded Age? Richard Jules Oestreicher illuminates the immigrant communities, radical politics, worker-employer relationships, and the multiple meanings of workers' affiliations in Detroit at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Suburban Sweatshops
The Fight for Immigrant Rights
Jennifer Gordon
Harvard University Press, 2007

Jorge Bonilla is hospitalized with pneumonia from sleeping at the restaurant where he works, unable to afford rent on wages of thirty cents an hour. Domestic worker Yanira Juarez discovers she has labored for six months with no wages at all; her employer lied about establishing a savings account for her. We live in an era of the sweatshop reborn.

In 1992 Jennifer Gordon founded the Workplace Project to help immigrant workers in the underground suburban economy of Long Island, New York. In a story of gritty determination and surprising hope, she weaves together Latino immigrant life and legal activism to tell the unexpected tale of how the most vulnerable workers in society came together to demand fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect from employers. Immigrant workers--many undocumented--won a series of remarkable victories, including a raise of thirty percent for day laborers and a domestic workers' bill of rights. In the process, they transformed themselves into effective political participants.

Gordon neither ignores the obstacles faced by such grassroots organizations nor underestimates their very real potential for fundamental change. This revelatory work challenges widely held beliefs about the powerlessness of immigrant workers, what a union should be, and what constitutes effective lawyering. It opens up exciting new possibilities for labor organizing, community building, participatory democracy, legal strategies, and social justice.

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Sweated Work, Weak Bodies
Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor
Bender, Daniel E.
Rutgers University Press, 2004

In the early 1900s, thousands of immigrants labored in New Yorks Lower East Side sweatshops, enduring work environments that came to be seen as among the worst examples of Progressive-Era American industrialization. Although reformers agreed that these unsafe workplaces must be abolished, their reasons have seldom been fully examined.

Sweated Work, Weak Bodies is the first book on the origins of sweatshops, exploring how they came to represent the dangers of industrialization and the perils of immigration. It is an innovative study of the language used to define the sweatshop, how these definitions shaped the first anti-sweatshop campaign, and how they continue to influence our current understanding of the sweatshop.

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Tomorrow We're All Going to the Harvest
Temporary Foreign Worker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy
By Leigh Binford
University of Texas Press, 2013

From its inception in 1966, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) has grown to employ approximately 20,000 workers annually, the majority from Mexico. The program has been hailed as a model that alleviates human rights concerns because, under contract, SAWP workers travel legally, receive health benefits, contribute to pensions, are represented by Canadian consular officials, and rate the program favorably. Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest takes us behind the ideology and examines the daily lives of SAWP workers from Tlaxcala, Mexico (one of the leading sending states), observing the great personal and family price paid in order to experience a temporary rise in a standard of living. The book also observes the disparities of a gutted Mexican countryside versus the flourishing agriculture in Canada, where farm labor demand remains high.

Drawn from extensive surveys and nearly two hundred interviews, ethnographic work in Ontario (destination of over 77 percent of migrants in the author’s sample), and quantitative data, this is much more than a case study; it situates the Tlaxcala-Canada exchange within the broader issues of migration, economics, and cultural currents. Bringing to light the historical genesis of “complementary” labor markets and the contradictory positioning of Mexican government representatives, Leigh Binford also explores the language barriers and nonexistent worker networks in Canada, as well as the physical realities of the work itself, making this book a complete portrait of a provocative segment of migrant labor.

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Transit States
Labour, Migration and Citizenship in the Gulf
Omar AlShehabi
Pluto Press, 2014
The states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar) form the largest destination for labour migration in the global South. In all of these states, however, the majority of the working population is composed of temporary, migrant workers with no citizenship rights.

The cheap and transitory labour power these workers provide has created the prodigious and extraordinary development boom across the region, and neighbouring countries are almost fully dependent on the labour markets of the Gulf to employ their working populations. For these reasons, the Gulf takes a central place in contemporary debates around migration and labour in the global economy.

This book attempts to bring together and explore these issues. The relationship between ‘citizen’ and ‘non-citizen’ holds immense significance for understanding the construction of class, gender, city and state in the Gulf, however too often these questions are occluded in too scholarly or overly-popular accounts of the region. Bringing together experts on the Gulf, Transit States confronts the precarious working conditions of migrants in a accessible, yet in-depth manner.
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Unequal Freedom
How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor
Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Harvard University Press, 2004

The inequalities that persist in America have deep historical roots. Evelyn Nakano Glenn untangles this complex history in a unique comparative regional study from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of World War II. During this era the country experienced enormous social and economic changes with the abolition of slavery, rapid territorial expansion, and massive immigration, and struggled over the meaning of free labor and the essence of citizenship as people who previously had been excluded sought the promise of economic freedom and full political rights.

After a lucid overview of the concepts of the free worker and the independent citizen at the national level, Glenn vividly details how race and gender issues framed the struggle over labor and citizenship rights at the local level between blacks and whites in the South, Mexicans and Anglos in the Southwest, and Asians and haoles (the white planter class) in Hawaii. She illuminates the complex interplay of local and national forces in American society and provides a dynamic view of how labor and citizenship were defined, enforced, and contested in a formative era for white-nonwhite relations in America.

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Women Who Stay Behind
Pedagogies of Survival in Rural Transmigrant Mexico
Ruth Trinidad Galván
University of Arizona Press, 2015
Women Who Stay Behind examines the social, educational, and cultural resources rural Mexican women employ to creatively survive the conditions created by the migration of loved ones. Using narrative, research, and theory, Ruth Trinidad Galván presents a hopeful picture of what is traditionally viewed as the abject circumstances of poor and working-class people in Mexico who are forced to migrate to survive. 

The book studies women’s and families’ use of cultural knowledge, community activism, and teaching and learning spaces. Throughout, Trinidad Galván provides answers to these questions: How does the migration of loved ones alter community, familial, and gender dynamics? And what social relations (convivencia), cultural knowledge, and women-centered pedagogies sustain women’s survival (supervivencia)?

Researchers, educators, and students interested in migration studies, gender studies, education, Latin American studies, and Mexican American studies will benefit from the ethnographic approach and theoretical insight of this groundbreaking work.
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