Transnational Labour Migration

The number of forcibly-displaced people in the world now exceed 65 million, due primarily to violent conflict, persecution, and natural disasters. This course examines the hardships most refugees face during their journeys, in the process of resettlement and integration, and after return. It introduces students to the policies that govern the protection of and assistance to refugees, and the humanitarian responses by international organizations, nation-states, local governments, NGOs, and others in an effort to alleviate their suffering. The course also discusses the future challenges, such as climate-induced displacement.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Many qiaoxiang in southern Fujian and Guangdong appear derelict, but from documenting the material heritage and interviewing people about its social significance, another image surfaces. The homeland of Overseas Chinese was not only found to be significant to the diaspora, but serve as an enduring reminder of a grassroots-based modernity in rural China. The qiaoxiang effectively became a transnational legacy of migration from southern China that has undergone the following stages of transformation: exodus-led emergence of a remittance landscape, sudden abandonment, and sometimes revival. Today, it has become a “repository” or “living museum” where tourists and scholars alike can visit and ponder about how humans adapted to post-rural life.

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

A temporary migrant worker programme (TMWP) is a collection of laws, regulations and policies through which a receiving state regulates the entry, stay and treatment of low-wage temporary migrant workers. Workers in such programmes are generally undertaking ‘temporary migration projects’, that is, they are working abroad for a finite period of time in order to improve their status and welfare at home. The availability of low-cost labour generally entrenches demand for such workers in the receiving state’s labour market and therefore the receiving state has an interest in continuing to attract them. In order to do so, workers must be able to successfully complete their temporary migration projects. However, TMWP policies often create opportunities for exploitation and disempowerment related to low-wage temporary migrant workers’ precarious residence status, weak financial position and dependence on their employers, that jeopardise the normative defensibility and sustainability of such programmes. This paper argues that conventional labour law remedies are not sufficient to enable workers to successfully complete their temporary migration projects. The underlying purpose of labour law and the limitations of its application to this group of workers is considered along with the sources of their vulnerability in order to assess appropriate policy reforms. This paper concludes that in order to make TMWPs more sustainable and normatively justifiable, receiving states should address the root causes of low-wage temporary migrant workers’ vulnerability when formulating TMWP laws and policies.

Although much literature on human trafficking focuses on sex trafficking, a great deal of human trafficking results from migrant workers, compelled - by economic deprivation in their home countries - to seek better life opportunities abroad, especially in agriculture, construction and domestic work. Such labour migration is sometimes legal and well managed, but sometimes not so – with migrant workers frequently threatened or coerced into entering debt bondage arrangements and ending up working in forced labour situations producing goods for illicit markets. This book fills a substantial gap in the existing literature given that labour trafficking is a much more subtle form of exploitation than sex trafficking. It discusses how far large multinational corporations are involved, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in human trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation. They explore how far corporations are driven to seek cheap labour by the need to remain commercially competitive and examine how the problem often lies with corporations’ subcontractors, who are not as well controlled as they might be. The essays in the volume also outline and assess measures being taken by governments and international agencies to eradicate the problem.

Europe's Transforming Identity. Part 1 of the book Islam and Tolerance in Wider Europe (ed. Pamela Kilpadi) including the articles:
* 'What Values for Europe?' by Michael Emerson
* 'The Role of Islam in Europe: Multiple Crises?' by Amel Boubekeur and Samir Amghar
* 'The Southern Gate to Fortress Europe' by Rutvica Andrijasevic

Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Gulf that investigated immobilities and mobilities as well as familial love in the lives of migrant workers. Although her data concentrate mainly on Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), her arguments are relevant to other countries in the area with a signifi- cant presence of domestic workers. The book offers a deeply original reading of migration and intimacy.

Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans recreate the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.

Despite the implementation of stabilization measures during the present recession in Nigeria, unemployment has assumed an alarming dimension and a crisis proportion with millions of able-bodied persons who are to accept jobs at the prevailing wage rate but are unable to find placements. Unemployment can be reduced in developing countries through developmental projects but this can be achieved due to lack of finance. Sequel to that, remittance inflow serves as finance for investment purposes. This study focuses on the impact of international migrant remittances on unemployment rate in Nigeria bearing in mind that reducing the rate of unemployment is one of the macroeconomic objectives of every country. An unemployment rate model was formulated and the unit root test was first applied to the data set. The time series were stationary and the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method was used to identify the impact of remittances on unemployment rate in Nigeria. Findings reveal that international remittances affect unemployment negatively and there exists a unidirectional causality between international migrant remittances and unemployment without feedback. The study recommends that the government and other stakeholder should map out programmes that will sensitize majority of the Nigerian populace on the benefit of investing remittance money so as to become entrepreneurs, create job opportunities and become employers of labour.

This is an unusual book. Combining social science fiction, utopianism, pragmatism, sober analysis, and innovative social theory, the authors address one of the biggest dilemmas of our age – how to solve the problems arising from mass displacement. As early versions of the solution proposed by Robin Cohen and Nicholas Van Hear filtered out, their vision of a new, networked, transnational archipelago, called Refugia, was immediately denounced or met with scepticism by established refugee scholars. Others were more intrigued, more open-minded, or perhaps just holding their fire until this book was finally published. As it at least has the virtue of originality, why not judge the proposal for yourself? Read it and craft your own critique. The authors have initiated an openly pro-refugee vision that all can help to shape. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to scholars, students and practitioners, as well as to an informed public ready to engage with this pressing issue.

Many of the studies on Palestinian Diaspora are connected to the Nakbah and to the refugee question. The fact that Christmas Lutheran Church is located in Bethlehem, and thus in the 1967 occupied Palestinian Land, gives us a different angle on the issue of Palestinian Diaspora. What this study shows is that the Migration of Palestinians in general and the Palestinian Christian in particular is connected to recurring empires and powers controlling and occupying Palestine and had mainly political reasons: Drafting of Christians to the military by the young Turks; The Nakbah and the loss of land and livelihood, the de-development of the West Bank under Jordanian rule, and the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank.  While economic factors played an important drive for immigration, they were often a result of the political developments.  Devastating is the fact that Palestinian migration is not a onetime thing but an ongoing open wound that is still bleeding with no end in sight. Thus, this study shows that Christmas Lutheran Church provides a microcosm of Palestinian society and a mirror of the Palestinian history in the last 150 years. And last but not least this research shows that the diasporic experience of the Palestinian Christians is part and parcel of the larger Palestinian diasporic experience though there is uniqueness to the Christian experience.

Die jüdische Wohlfahrtspflege in der Weimarer Republik entwickelte sich in besonderem Maße wegen der Fürsorgefragen von osteuropäischen jüdischen Migranten und Flüchtlingen von einer traditionellen sozialen Fürsorgearbeit, die auf „schnelle Hilfe“ und die zügige Wiederherstellung der Eigenverantwortlichkeit von Personen abzielte, auch zu einer Sozialpolitik, die sich gegen die antisemitische Migrationspolitik der Reichs- und Landesregierungen stellte. Eine erfolgreiche Politik der Produktivierung, der Integration möglichst vieler jüdischer Arbeiter und Migranten war das wichtigste Ziel der jüdischen Sozialpolitik zu Beginn der 20er Jahre in Deutschland.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Australians were possessed by two obsessions – the fear of the ›yellow peril‹ and the desire for a white society. The fear of the ›yellow peril‹ found expression in science and politics as well as in innumerable invasion novels which depicted the swamping of the European outpost in the Pacific by Asiatic hordes. The programme of a white society was reasoned scientifically and found political supporters not least in the labour movement. Moreover, it found expression in a medium which was even more popular than pulp fiction: consumer racism which propagated the consumption of ›white sugar‹. ›White sugar‹ was a very special commodity: refined white and produced white, it comprised white labourers, dearer sweetness, protection from the world market, and gaining of intra-continental acceptance through subsidies. Certainly there were countless points of contact between colour discrimination and thinking in terms of whiteness. In the context of the European diggers’ rebellions on the goldfields, the workers’ strikes against the replacement of white with Chinese labour and clashes with Aborigines on the colonial frontier, the whites’ anger was given vent to. But these were largely isolated incidents involving concrete problems and select societal groups. Invasion novels and sugar consumption, on the other hand, aimed at the whole society. The problem to turn the empty north, considered ›terra nullius‹, into a breeding ground for whiteness and, thus, into a bulwark against the ›yellow peril‹ was considered problematic, however. This was due to the utilization interest of the agrarian capital as well as the phantasies of degeneration of race sciences. While the latter were not sure whether whites would altogether proof to be able to successfully settle in the tropics, the former were mainly interested in the exploitation of cheap labour. This paper will look into the ways in which the campaigns to consume white-produced Australian sugar and the genre of invasion novels accomplished to subsume lobbies of adverse interests in the joint pursuit of white Australia.

The paper focuses on the (re)emergence in the late twentieth century of a specific form of cross-border labour migration--viz. guest-work or circular/managed migration--that is designed to keep migrants from settling in receiving countries. The paper is part of a larger project that situates this form of transnational work-mobility regimes within the larger historical debates over the slippery line between free labour and forced labour. Specifically, it traces the genealogy of guest-work, and makes some preliminary observations about the specificity of contemporary circular / managed migration as it becomes incrementally normalized as a desirable policy tool across the world.

Italy, differently from other EU countries, does not have a specific “residency by investment program”. The only visa available for an individual who is seeking permanent residency in the country without need to work  is the “elective residence visa”

India was one of the leading countries to implement the initial lockdown to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, but still, the lockdown failed and within a few months, India joined the list of countries most affected by the coronavirus epidemic. Why did this transpire? What were the reasons abaft this? Where did the Indian government miss? This manuscript endeavors to study the lacunae in the lockdown plans of the Indian Government and highlights the mistakes committed by the Government which caused the lockdown in India to fail and further exposed the domestic migrant laborers to unbearable difficulties. The manuscript argues that the fundamental and economic rights bestowed upon the domestic migrant workers and other laborers under labor laws and the Indian constitution were breached extensively during the lockdown and that the state's policies during the lockdown worsened the condition of the domestic migrant workers.

Second-generation immigrants are often imagined by social scientists, their receiving communities, their parents, and sometimes also by themselves, as those who should close the cycle of immigration that their parents have opened. Inasmuch as Italy is a contender in the international competition for the most ‘Mediterranean’ of countries, those youths are expected either to become Italian, fail to do so, or ascend to the globalized sphere of multiple participation, belonging and citizenship. Based on a reconstruction of several realms of action and meaning that constitute second-generation Tunisian immigrant youths' lives in Mazara del Vallo – from education, the annual voyage to Tunisia and self-identification, to kinship strategies, labor and municipal elections – I show how children of Tunisian immigrants practice a kind of personhood that receives its form and flexibility from their entrapped position in the current situation of the Mediterranean constellation in the Sicilian Channel.

This case study analyzes the demographic shifts that resulted from the development of uranium and hydrocarbon extraction industries in Western Kazakhstan in the 1960s–1980s and the serious social tensions that ensued. Contrary to the promise of national emancipation of the local population (Kazakhs) through economic development as the pinnacle of Soviet nationality policy, the economic authorities in Moscow continued to prioritize industrialization over indigenization. They opted to import a large labor force from the Slavic and Caucasian republics of the USSR rather than training an indigenous proletariat. This policy escalated socioeconomic frustrations of the Kazakh population that eventually erupted in interethnic strife amid the general rise of nationalism in 1989. Violent labor conflicts persist in the region, now much more ethnically homogeneous, up to the present, which demonstrates that the Soviet-era conflict was a result not just of interethnic animosity but the contradictory nature of the Soviet project in general.

"Although much literature on human trafficking focuses on sex trafficking, a great deal of human trafficking results from migrant workers, compelled - by economic deprivation in their home countries - to seek better life opportunities abroad, especially in agriculture, construction and domestic work. Such labour migration is sometimes legal and well managed, but sometimes not so – with migrant workers frequently threatened or coerced into entering debt bondage arrangements and ending up working in forced labour situations producing goods for illicit markets. This book fills a substantial gap in the existing literature given that labour trafficking is a much more subtle form of exploitation than sex trafficking. It discusses how far large multinational corporations are involved, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in human trafficking for the purposes of labour exploitation. They explore how far corporations are driven to seek cheap labour by the need to remain commercially competitive and examine how the problem often lies with corporations’ subcontractors, who are not as well controlled as they might be. The essays in the volume also outline and assess measures being taken by governments and international agencies to eradicate the problem.

Table of contents
Introduction - Antonela Arhin and Ato Quayson
Foreword: Corporate Liability for Violations of International Human Rights Law - Mohamed Y. Mattar
1. Trafficking for Labour Exploitation: Getting the Responses Right - Roger Plant
2. The Commodification of Human Smuggling and Trafficking - Louise Shelley
3. Child Labour Migrants or Victims of Labour Trafficking: A Segmental Approach - Antonela Arhin
4. Displacing Childhood: Labour Exploitation and Child Trafficking in Sport - Darragh McGee
5. Labor Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations within the ECOWAS Region: challenges and opportunities - Ndioro Ndiaye
6. Adults or Children? The Case of Trafficking of Children for Purposes of Exploitative Labour in the Fishing Industry in Ghana - Daniel Kweku Sam
7. Doing Canada's Dirty Work: A Critical Analysis of Law and Policy to Address Labour Exploitation Trafficking - Bethany Hastie
8. Minimum Wage --An Ally in the Fight Against Human Trafficking for Labour Exploitation? - Anne Pawletta and Philipp Schwertmann
9. Responding to Labour Trafficking: Suggestions from Experiences of Local Service Providers - Amy Stevens, Romesh Hettiarachchi and Sung Hyun Yun
10. The Programmatic Approach to combating Trafficking in Human Beings - Ruud Hilgers""

O trabalho a distância, remoto é, portanto, uma realidade, seja ele no formato de teletrabalho, em home-office, este popularizado no período de pandemia, plataformizado ou mesmo através de contratações temporárias de nômades digitais em qualquer lugar do planeta. Isso gera um novo desafio ao pensador do Direito do Trabalho.
Essas novas formas de trabalho transacionais, demandam a formação de uma teoria que permita a utilização segura de um tecido normativo apto a regular essas relações independente do lugar onde o contrato seja cumprido, tornando previsíveis as obrigações para os que empregam e seguro para os que trabalham.

Remote work is, a reality, whether in the form of telework, the home-office work popularized during the pandemic period, platforms, crowdsourcing or even through temporary hiring of digital nomads anywhere on the planet. This creates a new challenge for the Labour Law.
These new forms of transactional work demand the criation of a theory that allows the safe use of a normative set capable of regulating these relationships regardless of the place where the contract is fulfilled, making the obligations predictable for those who employ and safe for those who work.

This article investigates how colonial attitudes towards race operate alongside official multiculturalism in Canada to justify the legally exceptional exclusion of migrant farm workers from Canada’s socio-political framework. The Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is presented in this article as a relic of Canada’s racist and colonial past, one that continues uninterrupted in the present age of statist multiculturalism. The legal continuation and growth in the use of non-citizens to conduct labour distasteful to Canadian nationals has provided an effective means for the Canadian state to regulate the ongoing flow of non-preferred races on the margins while promoting a pluralist and ethnically diverse political image at home and abroad.

In the face of a labour shortage constructed as a political crisis of considerable urgency, the Canadian state has continued to admit non-immigrants into the country to perform labour deemed unattractive yet necessary for the well-being of Canadian citizens while simultaneously suspending the citizenship and individual rights of those same individual migrant workers. By legislating the restriction of rights and freedoms to a permanently revolving door of temporary non-citizens through the mechanism of a guest worker programme, the Canadian state is participating in the bio-political regulation of foreign nationals.

The paper proposes a critical understanding of contemporary " low-skilled, " trans-national contract work/circular migration as a guest-worker regime. Rather than approach circular migration as an instrument of development, or a human rights problem, this paper situates it within the larger, historical debates over the status of labour that emphasise questions of surplus extraction. Drawing on ethnographic research among Bangladeshi male migrants in Singapore and return workers in Bangladesh, the paper explores two crucial moments in the life of migrants—of choosing overseas contract work, and of leaving. In each moment, it highlights certain mechanisms that push migrants along the porous line between free and un-free work, incrementally toward the latter.

En Ecuador, confusiones sobre la etnicidad y lugar de pertenencia hicieron que se utilice “árabe” como un denominador común para todo aquél, que asimile el estereotipo de un hombre ‘orientalizado’, este el caso de los afganos. Esta investigación busca evidenciar, sin embargo, que si bien los estereotipos pueden funcionar como factores de marginalización, dicha confusión puede suponer una estrategia de supervivencia e inserción socio-económica a través de la negociación con respecto a la propia identidad. Los migrantes afganos para lograr su objetivo deben asumir el imaginario de árabes a pesar de no serlo y esto se materializa en sus negocios, como ha sido su apuesta por los locales de shawarma.

AbstractIn Ecuador, confusions about ethnicity and place of origin led to the use of ‘Arab’ as a common denominator for all those who assimilate the stereotype of an ‘Orientalized’ man, this is the case of Afghans. This paper seeks to show that, although stereotypes can function as factors of marginalization, this confusion can also suppose a strategy of survival and socio-economic insertion through negotiation with respect to one’s own identity. In this case, Afghan migrants, despite not being, must assume the imaginary of Arabs which is materialized in their business, committing to selling shawarma, in order to achieve their objective of a successful socio-economic insertion. For this, this paper develops a qualitative methodology, since it is intended to understand reality as an  articulation  between  the  subject  and  its  environment.  The  ethnographic  method  was used as a way of approaching the object of study, by conducting nine semi-guided interviews that allowed to better investigate the migratory process.

What moral claims do undocumented immigrants have to membership? Joseph Carens has argued that illegal migrants with long-term residence have a claim to national membership because they already are de facto members of local communities. This article builds on the linkage between illegality, residence, and rights, but shifts the focus from the migrant to the state, and from membership-based arguments to the rule of law. I argue that the rule of law, as expressed in the principle of legal certainty, provides us with an alternative justification for the regularization of resident undocumented migrants. The principle of legal certainty recognizes the right of individuals to make long-term plans for their lives by requiring that state action be reasonably predictable and non-arbitrary. Thus, as an expression of legal certainty, both civil and criminal codes have statutes of limitation that place a time limit beyond which most crimes and misdemeanours can no longer be prosecuted, and individuals can move on with their lives. Not only do these statutes recognize the individual’s right to make long-term plans for their lives, but, I argue, they demand that the state cut its losses and accept the consequences of its failure to act in a timely manner. I contend that, in the absence of a statute of limitation on illegal entry, the deportation of settled migrants constitutes an arbitrary act of state power. The article explores a number of judicial rulings to illustrate the argument’s normative logic.

The aim of the paper is to highlight the variables that determine the propensity to receive remittances and the amount of remittances by households in rural Bangladesh. The empirical model incorporated the determinants of remittances in terms of observed migrant and household characteristics that are assumed to capture the underlying motives of remitting suggested by existing theories of remittances. This paper explores the motives that account for the receipt of remittances across rural households in Bangladesh who have migrants in Italy. Unlike most of the existing literature, the research question from the perspective of the recipient household and use it to interpret the determinants/motivations of remittances. The results show that a combination of household and migrant characteristics and some community level variables are the key elements in explaining the remittance behaviour in Bangladesh. Drawing from these estimates, this study conclude that altruism investment and kinship are the three main motives behind remittance flows to Bangladesh and both community variables (NELM and presence of networks in the host country) are strong determinants of the likelihood of receiving remittances by households.

Localized debates about who unauthorized migrants are and what they do, or do not, deserve unfold in a culturally specific register that is deeply charged with emotion and moral valuation. Structuring such debates are vernacular discursive frames that emerge from, and reflect, a common “local moral economy.” Taking Israel as case study, this article examines six elements of the country's local moral economy – biopolitical logic, historical memory, political emotion, popularized religion, an ideology of “fruitful multiplication,” and hasbara (“public diplomacy”/propaganda) – and explores their impact on public debates about unauthorized and irregular forms of migration. Here, as elsewhere, conventionalized distinctions that frame much migration scholarship – e.g. “economic” vs. “political” migrants, “migrant workers” vs. “refugees,” even the terms “authorized” and “unauthorized” themselves – bear but limited salience. Migration researchers who hope to influence local policy debates must recognize the weight and influence of local moral economies, and the chasms that divide vernacular from conventionalized frames. Achieving this sort of nuanced understanding is, at root, an ethnographic challenge.

ACME, Vol 2, No 2 (2003)

Table of Contents

Themed Sections: (1) Borders and Immigration (2) Critical Forum on Empire | Various Articles

Equality, Justice and the Problem of International Borders: The Case of Canadian Immigration Regulation
Harald Bauder, 167-182

Gender, Inequality and Borders
Valerie Preston, 183-187

A Borderless World: Dream or Nightmare?
Daniel Hiebert, 188-193

The EU and the Utopia and Anti-utopia of Migration: A Response to Harald Bauder
Ulrich Best, 194-200

Some Reasons and Conditions for a World Without Immigration Restrictions
Franck Düvell, 201-209

Immigration and the Spectre of Hobbes: Some Comments for the Quixotic Dr. Bauder
Michael Samers, 210-217

The Last Word … ?
Harald Bauder, 218-220

Research

Hardt and Negri's Empire and Real Empire: The Terrors of 9-11 and After
David Moore, 112-131

Negotiations and Fieldworkings: Friendship and Feminist Research
Kath Browne, 132-146

Between Being and Looking Queer Tourism Promotion and Lesbian Social Space in Greater Philadelphia
Marie Cieri, 147-166

Forum

Introduction: Critical Forum on Empire
Scott Kirsch, 221-226

Empire Goes to War, or, The Ontological Shift in the Transatlantic Divide
Claudio Minca, 227-235

Globalización o Imperio: ¿Nuevas Tendencias Del Capitalismo Contemporáneo?
Blanca Ramírez, 236-241

Globalization or Empire: New Tendencies in Contemporary Capitalism?
Blanca Ramírez, 242-247

Empire and Citizenship
Joe Painter, 248-253

MIGRATION covers many types of migrants including explorers, slaves, pilgrims, mineworkers, labourers, exiles, refugees, sex workers, students, tourists, retirees and expatriates. The text is supplemented by a series of vivid maps, evocative photographs and powerful graphics. Robin Cohen explores a long span of time and many regions and themes in migration.

"The Criminalization of Immigration: Contexts and Consequences explores these competing narratives and the consequences of criminalizing immigration in the United States and abroad. It examines the impact of national, state, and local legislation on the psychosocial well being of immigrants. The book explores key ways in which immigration is criminalized, and examines how the problematization of immigration becomes a political tool. The first chapters of the book explore the criminalization of immigration through the lens of pacification and the theater of cruelty. In both chapters, the authors seek to understand the process of “othering” members of the immigrant population to exact social control and to mollify the public. These front chapters set the tone for remainder of the book. They provide the impetus for why states have enacted, or have attempted to enact state level immigration laws that make it nearly impossible for the undocumented to live within the boundaries of these states. In section two, three U.S. states are highlighted: Arizona, Alabama, and Indiana. While the chapters on Arizona and Alabama summarize key aspects of state laws, author Sujey Vega highlights the life of one undocumented immigrant as she navigates life in the Heartland.

The book then turns its focus to the criminalization of immigration in a socio-political context. Here, four chapters provide explorations of the criminalization of immigration on labor standards enforcement, immigrant detention, the right wing perspective in the United States and in Europe, and white supremacy. Labor standards impact the rate by which undocumented immigrants are paid, which in turn impacts their health and safety within and outside the workplace, protections from workplace discrimination, and collective activity protections. The criminalization of immigration erodes many of the workplace and labor protections that we have come to view as essential. Similarly, the privatization of corrections has influenced the incarceration and detention of many undocumented immigrants and has even influenced the very laws described in section two of this book. If not for the possibility of profiting off of the detention of the undocumented, many of immigration related laws would not have come to fruition.

The next section of the book provides a transnational and international context to the criminalization of immigration. With chapters focusing on human rights violations, the transnational dimensions of Mexican migration, the making of the Maras, and the criminalization of immigration in the United Kingdom, these chapters ask the reader to examine the criminalization of immigration from a broader perspective. The reader learns how national issues become international and, likewise how international immigration issues influence national policy.

The final chapters of the book put the human face on the criminalization of immigration. Each chapter represents a case study of a specific aspect of the criminalization of immigration. They approach the issue from the viewpoint of a day laborer, an undocumented woman who has become a victim of domestic violence, a child whose parents are undocumented, and a detention officer who wrestles with his decisions to continue his job. Regardless of which chapters one reads, the raw emotion felt by placing oneself in each context is overwhelming.

Overall, The Criminalization of Immigration: Contexts and Consequences provides a complete examination of an issue that cuts through emotional value conflicts. It provides the facts and knowledge essential for a fair and balanced debate"