Migrants make up a greater proportion of the workforce in the Arabian peninsula than perhaps in any other region of the world. Migration politics, however, has been either understudied – in comparative politics and conventional economics – or treated by authors influenced by modernization theory and Marxism alike in a deterministic manner. Using Antonio Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony, historic bloc and alternative hegemony, this paper aims to analyse the significance of migration for the changing fate of monarchy in the region since 1945. On the basis of primary and secondary sources in Arabic and English I argue that migration has played two different roles in the region. In the 1950s and 1960s, it formed a part of an oppositional bloc challenging monarchy. From the 1970s to the 2000s, however, the oppositional bloc dissolved and migration became an adjunct rather than a challenge to the ruling order.

This paper asks whether immigration to Britain has had any impact on average wages. There seems to be a broad consensus among academics that the share of immigrants in the workforce has little or no effect on the pay rates of the indigenous population. But the studies in the literature have typically not refined their analysis by breaking it down into different occupational groups. In this paper we find that once the occupational breakdown is incorporated into a regional analysis of immigration in Britain, the immigrant-native ratio has a significant, small, negative impact on average wages. Closer examination reveals that the biggest impact is in the semi/unskilled services sector. This finding accords well with intuition and anecdote, but does not seem to have been recorded previously in the empirical literature.

British cities are becoming more culturally diverse, with migration a main driver. Is this growing diversity good for urban economies? This paper explores, using a new 16-year panel of UK cities. Over time, net migration affects both local labour markets and the wider economy. Average labour market impacts appear neutral. Dynamic effects may be positive on UK-born workers’ productivity and wages (via production complementarities for higher skill workers) or negative on employment (if migrants progressively displace lower-skill natives from specific sectors). The results, which survive causality checks, suggest both processes are operating in British cities. Long-term industrial decline and casualisation of entry-level jobs help explain the employment findings.

This paper explores the impact of immigrants on the imports, exports and productivity of serviceproducing firms in the U.K. Immigrants may substitute for imported intermediate inputs (offshore production) and they may impact the productivity of the firm as well as its export behavior. The first effect can be understood as the re-assignment of offshore productive tasks to immigrant workers. The second can be seen as a productivity or cost cutting effect due to immigration, and the third as the effect of immigrants on specific bilateral trade costs. We test the predictions of our model using differences in immigrant inflows across U.K. labor markets, instrumented with an enclave-based instrument that distinguishes between aggregate and bilateral immigration, as well as immigrant diversity. We find that immigrants increase overall productivity in service-producing firms, revealing a cost cutting impact on these firms. Immigrants also reduce the extent of country-specific offshoring, consistent with a reallocation of tasks and, finally, they increase country-specific exports, implying an important role in reducing communication and trade costs for services.

In light of the escalation of the Mediterranean migrants and refugee crisis, human rights activists have once again severely criticized the approach of the U.S. and Europe to managing irregular migration. South America, in contrast, has become much more accommodating to irregular migrants over the past 15 years. Luisa Feline Freier and Diego Acosta Arcarazo write that, despite persisting inconsistencies, this philosophical paradigm shift in South American immigration policies – which has culminated in the granting of a universal right to migrate in some countries – challenges the fatal criminalization of irregular migrants in Europe and North America.

In the past decade, the massive increase in the number of migrant workers coming to Canada has forced the country’s trade unions to rethink their traditional approaches towards representation. Jason Foster and Alison Taylor write that trade unions had little precedent of how to respond to the large upswing in migrant numbers, and that their responses have ranged from those who help employers take advantage of migrant workers to those who defend their rights and help them to gain language and other skills.

The past 13 years have seen a massive increase in immigration enforcement at the state and local level aimed at reducing undocumented immigration. In new research, Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Mary J. Lopez find that this increased enforcement has adversely impacted the children of unauthorized migrants. They find that increased enforcement has the largest impact on children aged 6 to 13, raising their likelihood of repeating a grade or dropping out of school.

Existing refugees in a destination country from the same source country reduce the uncertainty faced by subsequent asylum migrants since existing refugees can provide information and assistance. We argue that such network effects extend beyond the borders of specific source countries. Potential asylum migrants might also be able to draw on networks from geographically proximate as well as linguistically similar countries and from countries having previously been colonized by the same destination country, thus creating spatial dependence in asylum migration among source countries. Many destination countries meanwhile aspire to reduce the inflow of migrants by tightening their asylum policies. Target countries which restrict their policies relatively more than other destinations deflect some asylum migrants to geographically proximate destination countries, thus creating spatial dependence among target countries. We find evidence for both types of spatial dependence in our global analysis of asylum migration. However, while statistically significant, the degree of spatial dependence among target countries is modest. On the source side, there is evidence for modest spatial dependence among linguistically similar countries and no evidence for spatial dependence among countries which were previously colonized by the same destination country. By contrast...

The past thirty years have seen a dramatic rise in income inequality in the US. While many economists have pointed to the rise of low-skilled immigration as a contributor to income inequality in developed countries, there has been little evidence from the US. In new research, Ping Xu, James C. Garand, Ling Zhu, find that the low-skilled immigration in the US does increase income inequality due to the downward pressure it puts on wages, and immigrants’ lack of access to federal welfare benefits. They write that to reduce inequality, US immigration policy should shift towards admitting more high-skilled immigrants or incorporating existing immigrants into the social welfare system.

What influences asylum decision making and why is there such variation in the US context? In Immigration Judges and U.S. Asylum Policy, Banks Miller, Linda Camp Keith and Jennifer S. Holmes enhance understanding of how US immigration judges make decisions on asylum applications and the factors that can lead to such disparate outcomes. Anna Matczak welcomes the scholarship as evidencing how asylum decisions are less shaped by human rights commitments than by overarching policy concerns.

The collection Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and its Human Impact, edited by Amy Nethery and Stephanie J. Silverman, gives an overview of the practice and human impact of detention as an integral part of immigration management and control through a series of country case studies. While Gayle Munro would have welcomed more direct engagement with individual detainee experiences and voices, this book gives comprehensive and relevant insight into detention policies and practices at a time when Europe is grappling with how to respond to pressure on its borders.

Growth of 'global cities' in the 1980s was supposed to have involved an occupational polarisation, including growth of low paid service jobs. Though held to be untrue for European cities, at the time, some such growth did emerge in London a decade later than first reported for New York. The question is whether there was simply a delay before London conformed to the global city model, or whether another distinct cause was at work in both cases. This paper proposes that the critical factor in both cases was actually an upsurge of immigration from poor countries providing an elastic supply of cheap labour. This hypothesis and its counterpart based on growth in elite jobs are tested econometrically for the British case with regional data spanning 1975-2008, finding some support for both effects, but with immigration from poor countries as the crucial influence in late 1990s London.

Despite periodic media scandals, remarkably little has been written about the everyday workings of the grassroots immigration system, or about the people charged with enacting immigration policy at local levels. Detention, particularly, is a hidden side of border politics, despite its growing international importance as a tool of control and security. Lucy Mayblin found this ensuing volume hugely impressive, both in terms of theoretical exploration and empirical exposition.

The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, and social networking sites. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between migrant mothers and their children who remain in the Philippines, this book discusses the impact of new media on the nature of mediated relationships. It brings together the perspectives of both the mothers and children and seeks to show how the very nature of family relationships is changing. Nicole Shephard recommends Migration and New Media to academic audiences concerned with issues as diverse as migration, motherhood, and technology.

This paper explores the connections between independence from Spain and Portugal and economic backwardness in Latin America. The release of the fiscal burden was offset by higher costs of self-government, while opening up to the international economy represented a handmaiden of growth. Independence had a very different impact across regions and widened regional disparities. The commitment to the colonial mercantilism conditioned the new republics’ performance but, on the whole, GDP per head increased in the half a century after emancipation. It appears that inherited Iberian institutions cannot be blamed for Latin America’s poor performance relative to the US, especially if the scope is widened to include the post-independence performance of former European colonies in Africa and Asia. It is suggested that before jumping to the usual negative assessment of nineteenth century Latin America, a comparison of post-independence performance in other world regions will be required.

This paper investigates the impact of immigration on the probability of being in social housing in the UK. In recent years immigrant households are slightly more likely than natives to be in social housing but once one controls for relevant household characteristics immigrants are significantly less likely to be in social housing than natives. However, there has been change over time – the immigrant penalty has fallen over time probably because of changes in allocation rules. Overall we find that the rising number of immigrants and the change in the allocation rules can explain about one-third of the fall in the probability of being in social housing with two-thirds being the result of the fall in the social housing stock.

With a wide-range of competing immigration reform bills being debated in a gridlocked U.S. congress, the question remains: can a compromise bill ever emerge and what is the optimal form it should take? Surprisingly, there is little evidence on the immigration reform attributes most valued by the group who will be most affected: illegal immigrants themselves. Grace Melo, Gregory Colson, and Octavio Ramirez examine the tradeoff and dollar value Hispanic immigrants place on different attributes of competing U.S. Senate and House immigration reform bills. They find that illegal immigrants place a substantial value on long-term work visas, a path to citizenship, and the ability for family members to be eligible for visitation rights. Notably, a green card is valued approximately the same as a ten year work visa. Access to government safety nets including medical care and social security are valued to a lesser extent.

Although crime rates in the U.S. have decreased at the same time that the foreign-born population has doubled, many believe increased immigration is linked with more crime. Using migration triggered by extreme weather to simulate random immigration, Aaron Chalfin tests this hypothesis and finds little connection between Mexican immigration and crime in U.S. cities.

This thesis examines the relationship between British colonial legacies and a culture of migration amongst mobile Malaysians (tertiary-educated Malaysians with transnational migration experience). Drawing from Bourdieu’s “habitus”, I propose the concept of “citizenship habitus” – a set of inherited dispositions about the meanings and significance of citizenship – to understand how and why mobile Malaysians carry out certain citizenship and migration practices. These practices include: firstly, interpreting and practising Malaysian citizenship as a de-politicised and primordial (ethno)national belonging to “Malaysia” that is conflated with national loyalty; and secondly, migration (especially for overseas education) as a way of life (i.e. a culture of migration) that may not be recognised as a means of circumventing pro-Bumiputera (lit. “sons of soil”) structural constraints. Methodologically, I draw from my reflexive reading of archival documents and interview-conversations with 67 mobile Malaysians: 16 in London/UK, 27 in Singapore, six in other global locations, and 18 returnees. I argue that mobile Malaysians’ citizenship and migration practices have been informed by three British colonial legacies: firstly...

Student mobility policies have become a high priority of the European Union since they are expected to result in private and social returns. However, at the same time these policies risk leading to unwanted geographical consequences, particularly brain drain from lagging to core regions, as formerly mobile students may not return on completion of their studies. Accordingly, this thesis focuses on both the private returns to student mobility and the determinants of return migration. It is important to note that, currently, the literature about the mobility of students is scarce and provides mixed evidence regarding both these issues. We contribute to the current academic debate in this field by doing a case study on the Master and Back programme, which was implemented since 2005 by the Italian lagging region of Sardinia. The programme is co-financed by the European Social Fund and consists of providing talented Sardinian students with generous scholarships to pursue Master's and Doctoral degrees in the world's best universities. Concerning the private returns to migration, we evaluate the impact of this scheme on the odds of employment and net monthly income of the recipients. Moreover, we assess whether the scheme has been able to improve their job matching. To perform this analysis we access unique administrative data on the recipients and a suitable control group...