Understanding Global Migration offers scholars a groundbreaking account of emerging migration states around the globe, especially in the Global South.
Leading scholars of migration have collaborated to provide a birds-eye view of migration interdependence. Understanding Global Migration proposes a new typology of migration states, identifying multiple ideal types beyond the classical liberal type. Much of the world's migration has been to countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. The authors assembled here account for diverse histories of colonialism, development, and identity in shaping migration policy.
This book provides a truly global look at the dilemmas of migration governance: Will migration be destabilizing, or will it lead to greater openness and human development? The answer depends on the capacity of states to manage migration, especially their willingness to respect the rights of the ever-growing portion of the world's population that is on the move.
Autorentext
James F. Hollifield is Ora Nixon Arnold Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the Tower Center at SMU. His other books include Controlling Immigration (Stanford, 4th edition forthcoming). Neil Foley is Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Chair of History at SMU, where he is the Associate Director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies. He is the author of Mexicans in the Making of America (2017), among others.
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South Africa fits within three migration subsystems: Anglosphere, Indian Ocean, and Southern Africa. These patterns of population flows challenge conventional dichotomous labels of North/South divides, developed/developing countries, or receiving/sending states. Stressing legacies of colonialism, Audie Klotz traces the emergence and then evolution of the South African migration state. Prior to apartheid, segregation developed primarily as a reaction to Asians and Africans moving to cities and towns. During apartheid, increasingly draconian enforcement of segregated mobility sought to reconfigure patterns of urbanization. Even with the demise of official apartheid and a plethora of efforts to remedy its pernicious long-term effects, municipalities remain on the front lines, trying to cope with administrative, financial, and political pressures that result from ever-changing migration patterns and persistent antiforeigner protests. These long-standing and overlapping subsystems call into question how to demarcate "Africa" within the global migration system.
Thiollet offers an overview of Gulf migration systems from the early 20th century to today. Mobility- motivated by trade, labor, politics, or religious devotion-is central to the region's history. Thiollet describes the changing geographies of immigration to the Gulf through three historical sequences. Gulf migration systems evolved from imperial geographies of colonial migration within the British Empire (1930s-1950s) to Arab regional integration during and after the oil-boom era (1960s-1991). Afterward, diplomatic interdependence with the Asian global South unfolded in the context of the diversification of Gulf economies, and the "second migration boom" of the 2000s took place. Thiollet then focuses on the contemporary era and unpacks the dynamics of migration governance in Gulf countries today. She describes the role of states, markets, brokers, and migrants in migration governance and illustrates the emergence of illiberal migration states, as a countermodel to liberal migration states in Western contexts.
How does the "migration state" concept travel across the global South and, in particular, in the Middle East and North Africa region? Gerasimos Tsourapas has two aims: first, he introduces the reader to the history and politics of migration into, out of, and across the contemporary Middle East. The chapter's second part demonstrates how a closer examination of Middle East migratory processes and distinct migration corridors sheds light on existing debates within the field. It identifies the emergence of an illiberal paradox across Middle Eastern states' migration policy-making-namely, the contrast between the socioeconomic need to allow mass emigration and the urge to maintain control over political dissent. Tsourapas draws on a range of case studies from across North Africa and the Middle East in order to detail how governments' attempts to resolve this illiberal paradox have arguably shaped the politics of migration in the Middle East.
This chapter focuses on labor migration and development in North and West Africa. Yves Charbit shows how demographic dynamics enhance and hinder development. Migration plays the role of an adjustment variable, as emigration is the simplest and most immediate response in states faced with chronic poverty and political and economic crises, often linked to climate change. Charbit seeks to disentangle the impact of migration on development from those of the other aspects of demographic change, births and deaths. He examines the consequences of three major economic and demographic developments. First is the demographic context as a driver of migration. Second are the remittances of migrants to their home countries. Third is the extent to which migration and remittances enhance human and economic development in the European Union-Africa corridor.
Chung extends Hollifield's migration state framework to Northeast Asian democracies, highlighting its limits and generalizability. Despite labor shortages from the 1980s and demographic crises, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have maintained closed migrant labor policies. Yet immigration to East Asia has soared over the past few decades; East Asian democracies have become known as "latecomers" to immigration. Among the largest non-Western economies that send and host substantial migrant populations, East Asia does not fit easily into binary categories such as global South/North, developing/developed societies, and countries of emigration/immigration. Neither do they adhere to the liberal/illiberal migration regime framework. Rather than convergence toward a singular liberal migration state, the East Asian cases suggest the emergence of a "developmental migration state" characterized by partially open borders and discrete institutionalized rights for specific subcategories of migrants.
Charles Hirschman explores long-distance migration, particularly from China and India, a characteristic feature of Southeast Asian history in the precolonial and colonial eras. Migration flows slowed to a trickle during the turbulence of the mid-20th century and were at a low ebb in the nation-building decades of the newly independent Southeast Asian countries from the 1940s to the early 1970s. The late twentieth and early twenty-first century, however, witnessed a resumption of long-distance migration within and between Southeast Asian countries. Uneven economic development, political upheavals, and demographic dynamics contributed to major flows of international migrants to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore within the region and also to significant emigration of Southeast Asians to the Middle East, Australia, North America, and Europe.