Migrant Capital covers a broad range of case studies and, by bringing together leading and emerging researchers, presents state-of-the-art empirical, theoretical and methodological perspectives on migration, networks, social and cultural capital, exploring the ways in which these bodies of literature can inform and strengthen each other.
The first history of London to show how immigrants have built, shaped and made a great success of the capital city London is now a global financial and multicultural hub in which over three hundred languages are spoken. But the history of London has always been a history of immigration. Panikos Panayi explores the rich and vibrant story of London– from its founding two millennia ago by Roman invaders, to Jewish and German immigrants in the Victorian period, to the Windrush generation invited from Caribbean countries in the twentieth century. Panayi shows how migration has been fundamental to London’s economic, social, political and cultural development.“br/> Migrant City sheds light on the various ways in which newcomers have shaped London life, acting as cheap labour, contributing to the success of its financial sector, its curry houses, and its football clubs. London’s economy has long been driven by migrants, from earlier continental financiers and more recent European Union citizens. Without immigration, fueled by globalization, Panayi argues, London would not have become the world city it is today.
Paris’s Gare du Nord is one of the busiest international transit centers in the world. In the past three decades, it has become an important hub for West African migrants—self-fashioned adventurers—navigating life in the city. In this groundbreaking work, Julie Kleinman chronicles how West Africans use the Gare du Nord to create economic opportunities, confront police harassment, and forge connections to people outside of their communities. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, including an internship at the French national railway company, Kleinman reveals how racial inequality is ingrained in the order of Parisian public space. She vividly describes the extraordinary ways that African migrants retool French transit infrastructure to build alternative pathways toward social and economic integration where state institutions have failed. In doing so, these adventurers defy boundaries—between migrant and citizen, center and periphery, neighbor and stranger—that have shaped urban planning and immigration policy. Adventure Capital offers a new understanding of contemporary migration and belonging, capturing the central role that West African migrants play in revitalizing French urban life.
Can politicians effectively control national borders even if they wish to do so? How do politically powerless migrants relate to more privileged migrants and to national citizens? Is it possible for capital to move to labour rather than vice versa? In this book Robin Cohen shows how the preferences, interests and actions of the three major social actors in international migration policy - global capital, migrant labour and national politicians - intersect and often contradict each other. Cohen addresses these vital questions in a wide-ranging, lucid and accessible account of the historical origins and contemporary dynamics of global migration.
"To what extent can different forms of social capital help immigrants make headway on the labour market? An answer to this pressing question begins here. Taking the Netherlands and Germany as case studies, the book identifies two forms of social capital that may work to increase employment, income and occupational status and, conversely, decrease unemployment. New insights into the concepts of bonding and bridging arise through quantitative research methods, using longitudinal and crosssectional data. Referring to a dense network with 'thick' trust, bonding is measured as family ties, co-ethnic ties and trust in the family. Bridging is seen in terms of interethnic ties, thus implying a crosscutting network with 'thin' trust. Immigrant Performance in the Labour Market reveals that although bonding allows immigrants to get by, bridging enables them to get ahead"--Publisher's description.
This book explores the intangible human capital which international migrants bring with them and develop further when working and living abroad, drawing on case studies and original data from Central Europe and Mexico–USA. The book demonstrates that despite the fact that many international migrants might be working in their destination countries at a level below their formal qualifications, or else might be formally unskilled, but with practical non-validated skills, they can still acquire and enhance considerable informal human capital in the form of mind skills, soft skills, maker skills and life skills. The book analyses how migration-impacted informal human capital (MigCap) is acquired and enhanced as a result of international migration and what the opportunity and constraint structures are for their acquisitions and transfers. Adopting a comprehensive perspective, the book investigates how migration-impacted informal human capital is transferred by migrants between localities and areas of human actions and activities. Moving beyond the focus on migration as a source of economic capital, this book demonstrates that learning by observing, communicating and doing with others, embedded in social relations can facilitate the enhancement of intangible human capital among both skilled and unskilled migrants. It will be of interest to researchers of migration, sociology, economics, management and business studies, and other related social science disciplines.
Many nations invite foreigners to work within their borders, but few welcome them. Those countries that do receive a torrent of immigrants create pressures that analysts expect to intensify as population growth and social unrest mount in the less developed countries of the world. Immigration and Entrepreneurship, now in paperback, offers a comparative analysis of worldwide immigration issues while focusing more specifically on the emerging influence of entrepreneurship as a potent factor in the economic and social integration of immigrants.In linking the common immigrant and settler experiences with the upsurge in self-employment, the contributors to this volume use California as their base of comparison. The state has both a huge and varied immigrant population and an entrepreneurial economy that has facilitated the formation of immigrant-owned firms. The Los Angeles riots of the nineties indicated the volatility of the mix. Aided by ethnic and familial networks, such firms have served as a route of economic advancement.Immigration and Entrepreneurship offers a comparative perspective unique in the literature of immigration by broaching the topic from both global and local perspectives. Whereas most studies examine the experience of a single group or groups in a particular destination economy, this volume emphasizes variations in the way different nations receive immigrants as causes of differences in immigrant behavior. Among the innovative themes discussed by a range of international scholars are the entrepreneurial efforts and tensions in the garment industry in Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin; Koreans' enterprise and identities in Los Angeles and Japan; and U.S. immigration policies. The result is a genuinely global methodology.
Migrant City tells the story of contemporary London from the perspective of thirty adult migrants and two sociologists. Connecting migrants’ private struggles to the public issues at stake in the way mobility is regulated, channelled and managed in a globalised world, this volume explores what migration means in a world that is hyper connected – but where we see increasingly mobile, invasive and technologically sophisticated forms of border regulation and control. Migrant City is an innovative collaborative ethnography based on research with migrants from a wide variety of social backgrounds, spanning in some cases a decade. It utilises recollections, photographs, poems, paintings, journals and drawings to explore a wide range of issues. These range from the impact of immigration control and surveillance on everyday life, to the experience of waiting for the Home Office to process their claims and the limits this places on their lives, to the friendships and relationships with neighbours that help to make London a home. This title will appeal to students, scholars, community workers and general readers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, social exclusion, globalisation, urban sociology, and inventive social research methods.
Articles, historical aspects of the urban area working class, partic. Migrant workers and labour policy in Africa - discusses the rise of capitalism and proletarianization, discipline, and forced labour of Black workers under criminal law in South Africa R and Mozambique, scientific management in Ghana gold mines, prostitution in Kenya, the informal sector in Senegal, rural migration in South Africa, etc. Diagrams, maps, references.
In Alien Capital Iyko Day retheorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants to Canada and the United States. Day explores how the historical alignment of Asian bodies and labor with capital's abstract and negative dimensions became one of settler colonialism's foundational and defining features. This alignment allowed white settlers to gloss over and expunge their complicity with capitalist exploitation from their collective memory. Day reveals this process through an analysis of a diverse body of Asian North American literature and visual culture, including depictions of Chinese railroad labor in the 1880s, filmic and literary responses to Japanese internment in the 1940s, and more recent examinations of the relations between free trade, national borders, and migrant labor. In highlighting these artists' reworking and exposing of the economic modalities of Asian racialized labor, Day pushes beyond existing approaches to settler colonialism as a Native/settler binary to formulate it as a dynamic triangulation of Native, settler, and alien populations and positionalities.