This book represents the product of a two-year research project and a four-year personal journey to explore the relationship between migration and economic development in the Caribbean area. Does Caribbean immigration to the United States assist or impede the economic development of the Caribbean? Would the curtailment of immigration affect the stability of the Caribbean? Can a certain mix of development strategies significantly reduce the pressures for migration? What can the United States and the Caribbean countries do separately and together to improve the prospects for economic development while permitting migration at manageable levels? This book begins with these questions and ends with some answers.
This ground-breaking book is one of the first to analyse the important phenomenon of South-South educational migration for refugees. It focuses particularly on South-South scholarship programmes in Cuba and Libya, which have granted free education to children, adolescents and young adults from two of the world’s most protracted refugee situations: Sahrawis and Palestinians. Through in-depth multi-sited fieldwork conducted with and about Sahrawi and Palestinian refugee students in Cuba and Libya, and following their return to the desert-based Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and the urban Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, this highly pertinent study brings refugees’ views and voices to the forefront and sheds a unique light on their understandings of self-sufficiency, humanitarianism and hospitality. It critically assesses the impact of diverse policies designed to maximise self-sufficiency and to reduce both brain drain and ongoing dependency upon Northern aid providers, exploring the extent to which South-South scholarship systems have challenged the power imbalances that typically characterise North to South development models. Finally, this very timely study discusses the impact of the Arab Spring on Libya’s support mechanisms for Sahrawi and Palestinian refugees, and considers the changing nature of Cuba’s educational model in light of major ongoing political, ideological and economic shifts in the island state, asking whether there is a future for such alternative programmes and initiatives. This book will be a valuable resource for students, researchers and practitioners in the areas of migration studies, refugee studies, comparative education, development and humanitarian studies, international relations, and regional studies (Latin America, Middle East, and North Africa).
This book offers a theoretical and substantive analysis of intra-Caribbean migration, perception of regionalism, and the construction of identities among Caribbean nationals. Through a multi-methods study in the 15 member countries of the Caribbean community, Oral Robinson explores how intra-Caribbean migrants experience living within different member countries, and how these experiences and perceptions influence ideas about citizenship, belonging, and identity. Responding directly to the lack of scholarship on how Caribbean nationals feel about integration and/or free movement within their own countries and other Caribbean countries, this volume attempts to understand Caribbean societies historically, theoretically, and methodologically; proposes bases of social identities in the Caribbean; and examines how intra-Caribbean migrants negotiate their identities and narrate their lived experiences as intra-Caribbean migrants. The book offers policy solutions based upon its findings, reconciling practice, theory, and migration policies in the Caribbean.
Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ in ways that are still largely unknown. This book helps fill the gap by exploring, in the specific context of Latin America and Caribbean countries, some of the main questions faced by policymakers when trying to respond to increasing remittances flows. The book relies on cross-country panel data and household surveys for 11 Latin American countries to explore the development impact of remittance flows along several dimensions: growth, poverty, inequality, schooling, health, labor supply, financial development, and real exchange rates.
In response to the shocking events of the recent migrant crisis in Europe, this Atlas sets out a revised critical geography of European migration policies, aiming to change our perceptions of borders, to map security controls across the continent, and above all to give a voice to the migrant.
Originally published in 1992, this text considers out-migration from the Caribbean in an analytical manner. Its comparative approach, involving three islands (Jamaica, Barbados and St Vincent) and the range of micro-environments within those islands, is based on data from extensive surveys and in-depth interviews. Analysis of the migration process reflects the perspective of Caribbean potential migrants themselves.
Examines the role of money transferred by migrant workers to their home country. Focuses on how the remittances meet the basic needs of family members there, whilst also generating opportunities for local communities and national economies. Considers the impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Asia.
Caribbean Journeys is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural meaning of migration and home in three families of West Indian background that are now dispersed throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain. Moving migration studies beyond its current focus on sending and receiving societies, Karen Fog Olwig makes migratory family networks the locus of her analysis. For the people whose lives she traces, being “Caribbean” is not necessarily rooted in ongoing visits to their countries of origin, or in ethnic communities in the receiving countries, but rather in family narratives and the maintenance of family networks across vast geographical expanses. The migratory journeys of the families in this study began more than sixty years ago, when individuals in the three families left home in a British colonial town in Jamaica, a French Creole rural community in Dominica, and an African-Caribbean village of small farmers on Nevis. Olwig follows the three family networks forward in time, interviewing family members living under highly varied social and economic circumstances in locations ranging from California to Barbados, Nova Scotia to Florida, and New Jersey to England. Through her conversations with several generations of these far-flung families, she gives insight into each family’s educational, occupational, and socioeconomic trajectories. Olwig contends that terms such as “Caribbean diaspora” wrongly assume a culturally homogeneous homeland. As she demonstrates in Caribbean Journeys, anthropologists who want a nuanced understanding of how migrants and their descendants perceive their origins and identities must focus on interpersonal relations and intimate spheres as well as on collectivities and public expressions of belonging.
This anthology represents important and original directions in the study of Caribbean migration. It takes a comparative perspective on the Caribbean people's migratory experiences to North America, Europe, and within the Caribbean. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, the book discusses: * the causes of migration * the experiences of migrants * the historical, cultural and political processes * issues of gender and imperialism * the methodology of migration studies, including oral history.
