In this empirical and theoretical study of nationalism, ethnicity, and immigration, the author compares the reception of large numbers of immigrants in Catalonia, the Basque country, Latvia, and Estonia--developed regions that possess distinct cultures and nationalist movements.
Immigration is shaking up electoral politics around the world. Anti-immigration and ultranationalistic politics are rising in Europe, the United States, and countries across Asia and Africa. What is causing this nativist fervor? Are immigrants the cause or merely a common scapegoat? In Blaming Immigrants, economist Neeraj Kaushal investigates the rising anxiety in host countries and tests common complaints against immigration. Do immigrants replace host country workers or create new jobs? Are they a net gain or a net drag on host countries? She finds that immigration, on balance, is beneficial to host countries. It is neither the volume nor pace of immigration but the willingness of nations to accept, absorb, and manage new flows of immigration that is fueling this disaffection. Kaushal delves into the demographics of immigrants worldwide, the economic tides that carry them, and the policies that shape where they make their new homes. She demystifies common misconceptions about immigration, showing that today’s global mobility is historically typical; that most immigration occurs through legal frameworks; that the U.S. system, far from being broken, works quite well most of the time and its features are replicated by many countries; and that proposed anti-immigrant measures are likely to cause suffering without deterring potential migrants. Featuring accessible and in-depth analysis of the economics of immigration in worldwide perspective, Blaming Immigrants is an informative and timely introduction to a critical global issue.
“Dirtier than the dogs of Constantinople.” “Waves of human scum thrown upon our beaches by other countries.” Such was the vitriolic abuse directed against immigrant groups in Chile and Argentina early in the twentieth century. Yet only twenty-five years earlier, immigrants had encountered a warm welcome. This dramatic change in attitudes during the quarter century preceding World War I is the subject of Carl Solberg’s study. He examines in detail the responses of native-born writers and politicians to immigration, pointing out both the similarities and the significant differences between the situations in Argentina and Chile. As attitudes toward immigration became increasingly nationalistic, the European was no longer pictured as a thrifty, industrious farmer or as an intellectual of superior taste and learning. Instead, the newcomer commonly was regarded as a subversive element, out to destroy traditional creole social and cultural values. Cultural phenomena as diverse as the emergence of the tango and the supposed corruption of the Spanish language were attributed to the demoralizing effects of immigration. Drawing his material primarily from writers of the pre–World War I period, Solberg documents the rise of certain forms of nationalism in Argentina and Chile by examining the contemporary press, journals, literature, and drama. The conclusions that emerge from this study also have obvious application to the situation in other countries struggling with the problems of assimilating minority groups.
This anthology contributes to the still emerging theoretical debates in political theory and philosophy about multiculturalism, nationalism and immigration. It focuses on multiculturalism and nationalism as factual consequences of, and normative responses to, immigration and on the normative significance (or lack thereof) of the notion of culture.
This book engages with politics and political discourse that relate to and qualify immigration in Europe. It brings together empirical analysis of immigration both topically and contextually, and interprets such empirical evidence with the use of policy and discursive analyses as methodological tools. Thematically, this volume focuses on how discourse and politics operate in issue areas as varied as immigrant integration and multilevel governance, Roma immigration and their respective securitization, the uses of language in determination of asylum applications, gendered immigrants in informal economy, perceptions of integration by the migrants, economic interests and economic nationalism stimulating immigration choices, ideology and entry policies, and asylum processes and the institutional evolution of immigration systems. These issues are analyzed with empirical evidence investigating the discursive formulation of immigration systems in political contexts such as the Netherlands, France, United Kingdom, Turkey, Switzerland, Scandinavian states, and Finland.
As the distinction between domestic and international is increasingly blurred along with the line between internal and external borders, migrants—particularly people of color—have become emblematic of the hybrid threat both to national security and sovereignty and to safety and order inside the state. From building walls and fences, overcrowding detention facilities, and beefing up border policing and border controls, a new narrative has arrived that has migrants assume the risk for government-sponsored degradation, misery, and death. Crimmigrant Nations examines the parallel rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing populism in both the United States and Europe to offer an unprecedented look at this issue on an international level. Beginning with the fears and concerns of immigration that predate the election of Trump, the Brexit vote, and the signing and implementation of the Schengen Agreement, Crimmigrant Nations critically analyzes nationalist state policies in countries that have criminalized migrants and categorized them as threats to national security. Highlighting a pressing and perplexing problem facing the Western world in 2020 and beyond, this collection of essays illustrates not only how anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalist discourse are on the rise in various Western liberal democracies, but also how these sentiments are being translated into punitive and cruel policies and practices that contribute to a merger of crime control and migration control with devastating effects for those falling under its reach. Mapping out how these measures are taken, the rationale behind these policies, and who is subjected to exclusion as a result of these measures, Crimmigrant Nations looks beyond the level of the local or the national to the relational dynamics between different actors on different levels and among different institutions.
"Essential reading." -- E.J. Dionne,The American Prospect Why Has Nationalism Come Roaring Back? Trump in America, Brexit in the U.K., anti-EU parties in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, and nativist or authoritarian leaders in Turkey, Russia, India, and China -- Why has nationalism suddenly returned with a vengeance? Is the world headed back to the fractious conflicts between nations that led to world wars and depression in the early 20th Century? Why are nationalists so angry about free trade and immigration? Why has globalization become a dirty word? Based on travels in America, Europe, and Asia, veteran political analyst John B. Judis found that almost all people share nationalist sentiments that can be the basis of vibrant democracies as well as repressive dictatorships. Today's outbreak of toxic "us vs. them" nationalism is an extreme reaction to utopian cosmopolitanism, which advocates open borders, free trade, rampant outsourcing, and has branded nationalist sentiments as bigotry. Can a new international order be created that doesn't dismiss what is constructive about nationalism? As he did for populism inThe Populist Explosion, a runaway success after the 2016 election, Judis looks at nationalism from its modern origins in the 1800s to today to find answers.
In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere. A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.
In this book, Richard S. Kim examines the central role played by immigrants in the independence movement that sought to liberate Korea from Japanese colonization. Regarding Japanese rule as illegitimate, Koreans in and out of the Korean peninsula viewed themselves as a stateless people. Their independence activities had to be carried out from abroad, creating conditions for the emergence of a diasporic nationalism. Using English and Korean language sources, Kim traces how Koreans in the United States articulated visions of national sovereignty, drawing particularly on American political rhetoric and symbolism, and increasingly relied on U.S. state power to mobilize international support for their cause. Their efforts to establish an independent homeland necessitated their participation in civic and political activities in the United States, engaging in organizational activity that led to the development of an ethnic consciousness and paradoxically established them as an American ethnic group. Ultimately, Kim argues, homeland nationalism was central to the assimilation of Korean immigrants as American ethnics, even as they were denied U.S. citizenship.