Search Results

This chapter examines EU policies concerning social exclusion, migrant integration, labour migration, and asylum in the early 21st century. A two-pronged approach analyzes EU efforts in the realm of migrant integration together with its interventions in the area of immigration and asylum. A new anti-discrimination orientation is being turned into mandatory EU directives and EU-sponsored transnational development programmes, but this reorientation towards diversity, social inclusion, and equal opportunity is part of a new European Social Model, which is conditioned by a neo-liberal policy dynamic. The contours of the EU’s modernized Social Model are those of a post-national workfare regime. This has critical implications for the transformation of the frameworks of citizenship marking the post-war European welfare states in general, and the incorporation of immigrants and ethnic minorities in European societies in particular. The first part of the chapter explores the changing conditionality posed by the neo-liberal turn and changing frameworks of citizenship with regard to the inclusion of resident denizens and citizens with migrant background. That is, it focuses on the actual condition of being a citizen. The second half of the chapter discusses the changing conditions for becoming (or not becoming) a citizen, framed by a newly emerging supranational political economy of border control, migration management, and asylum.

This chapter shows the powerful role of international labor market competition in narrowing differences in labor conditions between countries that remain open to migration flows. International migration produced a large convergence in real wages between Europe and the New World during the transatlantic migrations of the late 19th century. Concerns about the impact of immigration on workers in destination countries resulted in policies that significantly limited international migration during much of the 20th century and gave rise to significant illegal immigration. Dropping these policy barriers would increase world output and significantly reduce inequality between the richest and poorest nations of the world. The chapter also considers whether the emigration of skilled workers (brain drain) harms poor countries, weighing the loss of skills against remittances and other offsetting factors.

This chapter outlines illegal immigration in India, Malaysia, and Pakistan, demonstrating the magnitude, strength, and pervasive nature of illegal-immigrant networks. It begins by analyzing the neglect of illegal immigration within developing countries, pointing out the troubled relationship between the state and data generation. These methodological challenges explain why illegal immigration is rendered invisible. Then, it lifts the veil on illegal immigration in some countries, establishing the large and expanding number of illegal immigrants in India, Malaysia, and Pakistan. Particular focus is placed on the illegal Bangladeshis settled in Assam, Northeast India. Next, it describes the invisible flows of Filipinos and Indonesians to Malaysia, paying particular attention to their pervasive networks in Sabah, East Malaysia. Data showed that large illegal immigrant flows into India, Malaysia, and Pakistan are being silently absorbed into the host states.

One of the most curious aspects of anti-Chinese policies was officials’ practice of hiring immigrant Chinese interpreters, thus foiling exclusionary laws. The clash of two titans, Yip On and David Lew, shows how political alliances across racial lines compromised enforcement of anti-Chinese immigration policies. The study of interpreters and the politics through which they won, held, and lost their posts reveals a new understanding of how immigration policy was made. As an ethnic collaborator, the interpreter engaged in policy-making from a distinctive position. He had a duty to carry out the mandates of Parliament, but he gained political leadership from supporters who viewed anti-Chinese laws as illegitimate.

It has been observed that illegal immigrants are living comfortably as citizens. This book attempts to follow the innovative though illegal paths that immigrants have devised. They pose an important puzzle by subverting legal immigration procedures and overturning the standard concepts of citizenship. The subject of citizenship: the citizen, is discussed. The infrastructure of citizenship is focused on distinguishing between citizens and immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. This introduction identifies some of the theoretical misconceptions that plague the understanding of illegal-immigrant citizenship in developing states. Part I of this book introduces a theory of illegal-immigrant citizenship, and part II strives to prove it empirically, using cases of illegal immigration to India, Malaysia, and Pakistan. It provides a considerably different view than the one inherited from the developed Western states.

This chapter illustrates that illegal immigrants in India, Malaysia, and Pakistan are traveling abroad under their assumed identities. It poses a direct challenge to sovereignty and global security. Specifically, some of the ways that documented illegal immigrants in India, Malaysia, and Pakistan threaten the security of these states are reported. The processes arising from the civil society, such as illegal immigration and documentary citizenship, have undermined states' sovereignty. Confronting the challenges of illegal immigration to sovereignty and security involves a large global enterprise. It also requires the centralization and standardization of entire civil registration systems so that identity and membership are no longer blurred in the developing states which send illegal immigrants to Western states. Moreover, it involves the monitoring and surveillance of already existing ethnic immigrant communities so that ethnic-kinship networks do not trump receiving states' control by providing instant membership through documentation. Finally, it entails eliminating all corruption, bribery, and political or ethnic sympathy as a result of which complicity may happen within states.

This chapter looks at the fears that many Arizonans feel concerning illegal immigration, as well as the logic behind current anti-illegal immigration sentiment. It discusses the rise of Civil Patrol groups in southern Arizona and addresses the rationale of Border Patrol strategies to gain and maintain control of the border. It discusses the ways in which illegal immigration is having a detrimental effect on local ranchers, and addresses the criminal threats, domestic threats, and cultural threats that many anti-illegal immigration activists fear, not just in Arizona but across the nation. This chapter serves as a juxtaposition to the first half of the book, providing a stage for the voices of people who stress the need for law, order, and security at the border.

This chapter explores how established Jewish organizations confronted the legal conundrums the quota laws posed. It examines Jewish leaders’ responses to the illegal immigration of Jews over the Mexico-Texas border and to the plight of Jews stranded in Europe with U.S visas rendered defunct by the Immigration Act of 1924. The quota laws posed new dilemmas for American Jewish leaders, pitting their desire to operate in solidarity with Jewish migrants against their need to be regarded as law-abiding Americans. Moreover, there were a number of gray areas that remained in the laws themselves. Jewish leaders exploited this lack of clarity in their efforts to shape the regime of U.S. immigration law as best they could. Whenever possible, they sought to engage in a strategic balancing act, trying to argue the cases of Jewish migrants without seeming to encourage or condone any law-breaking on the part of those migrants.

The Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel, the Cold War, postwar American prosperity and the American civil rights movement all recast debates about race, immigration, and law. Chapter Six traces how these forces, along with ongoing American Jewish activism, helped redefine the relationship between Jews and U.S. immigration law, and complete the process of severing the association between Jews and illegal immigration. The new language of “refugees” helped to validate the claims that European migrants had on the nation. So did the 1965 abolition of the quota system, which had come to be seen as an embarrassing legacy of a racist past. During this same period, illegal immigration increasingly came to be defined as nearly synonymous with Mexican immigration, a racialized equation which, in turn, helped erase the history of the illegal European incursions of the prewar period.

This chapter reveals the intimate and early relationship between illegal immigration and authorized guestworker programs, a relationship that continues to this day. Guestworker programs had persisted in the postwar period because they appeared to offer a manageable alternative to unregulated migration. However, to the extent that this was managed migration, it was managed to benefit the nation's largest farm employers, not the farmworkers. Managed migration was a success from the growers' perspective, precisely because the Caribbean and Mexican guestworker programs kept wages low and labor plentiful. From the policy makers' perspective, the guestworker programs seemed like sensible and legitimate ways to keep the border open. Temporary worker contracts and guestworkers' deportability added a patina of legality to what was, in essence, a grower-dominated labor recruitment scheme.

Chapter Four examines Jewish migrants’ experiences with illegal immigration in the years following the quota laws, experiences that show the extent to which illegal immigration to the United States was embedded in a complicated set of interactions between individuals and the newly established international regime of national borders and identity documents. Looking at individuals’ migration stories broadens the frame of reference beyond U.S. law, and beyond the moment in which migrants entered the United States illegally. This approach also demonstrates how unclear the boundaries between legal and illegal migration could be from the point of view of individuals struggling to make the best choices amidst the chaos and danger of post-World War I Europe. This chapter also examines the underworld of temporary “passing” in which illegal immigrants participated when they were smuggled into the country. Such masquerade challenged the fundamental categories of the quota laws even as it relied on them.

This chapter considers the implications of documentary citizenship for the understanding of immigration and citizenship in the developing world. It also analyzes its full impact on nations. By allowing illegal immigrants access to national suffrage and other political rights, documentary citizenship is a response from civil society to citizenship from above. After this discussion, it examines documentary citizenship as a central attribute of globalization, further demonstrating its common occurrence in developing countries. Finally, it looks at the tension between embracing documentary citizenship as an addition to the diversity of a state and viewing it as a threat with potentially serious implications for national sovereignty.

This chapter examines the relationship between immigration and collective ownership of the earth, and whether the physical aspect of immigration provides constraints on immigration policy. The fact that the earth is originally collectively owned must affect how communities can regulate access to what they occupy. The chapter first considers an account of relative over- and underuse of original resources before discussing illegal immigration in the United States, using a parallel to the civil law notion of “adverse possession” to argue that, under certain conditions, illegal immigration is morally unobjectionable. It then formulates conditions under which it would be reasonable for co-owners to refrain from entering certain regions, even though they would violate no duties of justice by doing so. This proposal is part of the overall approach to global justice that pluralist internationalism develops.

Western European governments face a dilemma. On the one hand, their immigrant population is growing. On the other hand, the public opposes large-scale immigration and wants to restrict immigrants’ access to social benefits. We argue that in ‘reluctant countries of immigration’ such as France, Germany, and Great Britain, this tension is attenuated by reforms of social and migration policies. Firstly, migration policies are changed to encourage the arrival of ‘desired’ workers, while barriers to entry for ‘undesired’ immigrants are erected. Secondly, immigrant-specific social security schemes are reformed in order to reduce the incentive for immigrants to come in the first place. Finally, immigrants are disproportionately affected by the cutbacks in social security programs since the 1990s. These reforms contribute to the persistence of socio-economic differences between immigrants and citizens despite considerable efforts aimed at integrating the immigrants into their host societies.

A number of scholars have argued that illegal immigration should not be understood as a problem that can be rectified by better state policies or international governance: rather, it is an unavoidable structural feature of contemporary liberal democratic states. This chapter discusses three different routes for theorizing illegal migration as a structural phenomenon: the liberal constraint, political economy, and social systems accounts. After setting out each of these accounts, the chapter goes on to explore their plausibility, drawing on examples of how European states and the European Union (EU) have attempted to prevent or control irregular migration. The chapter aims to answer the question: if illegal immigration is indeed a structural feature of liberal states, what are the prospects for managing it?

This chapter explains how legal and institutional developments in immigration enforcement coincided with the dramatic acceleration of illegal immigration during the final third of the twentieth century. Together, these legal and demographic phenomena gave rise to a massive shadow immigration system that today operates alongside the formal immigration regime. This shadow system has rendered Congress’s intricate, detailed code of immigration rules increasingly less central to defining the content and character of the immigrant population. Instead, the Executive’s enforcement judgments—decisions about whom to target from the pool of deportable immigrants—have taken center stage. Indeed, the rise of the shadow system has effectively delegated vast screening authority to the President and other executive branch officials—authority that has culminated in events as dramatic as President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). The large number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States today amplifies the role of enforcement discretion and further entrenches the shadow immigration system.

Despite racial bars to the legal profession, Chinese immigrants often made the law their instrument through interpreters who acted as informal legal brokers. They were paralegals who served Chinese clients and sometimes other non-white groups. The brokerage relations of these “Chinese lawyers” also illuminate another less visible aspect of legal history, the profoundly integrated nature of Canadian justice. Ethnic dispute resolution processes continually interacted with the formal justice system. David Lew’s murder mystery shows how these legal negotiations helped make the Canadian state a central institution in British Columbia’s early twentieth-century Chinese Diaspora.

This chapter explores the social and political forces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that produced the quotas. During this era of national anxiety over the inferiority of the “new immigrants,” the federal government took stronger measures to control immigration. The era’s race science, which declared southern and eastern Europeans, along with Asians, unassimilable foreigners, combined with the nationalism of World War I and widespread anti-immigrant sentiment to set the stage for new forms of immigration restriction and control. But it is wrong to take at face value the laws’ seemingly precise formula for controlling immigration. Indeed, the laws reflected confusion rather than certainty about classifying groups of people from around the globe. Such confusion, in turn, made it possible for illegal immigration to flourish. The laws were predicated on the idea that there were sharp divisions among races and peoples, but in practice it was hard for officials to make such distinctions.