Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-jwnkl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-09T04:33:06.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Labor History and the New Migration History: A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Michael P. Hanagan
Michael P. Hanagan
Affiliation:
New School for Social Research
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Debates over the significance of immigration and demands for its restriction in industrialized nations have been a major feature of political life in the 1980s and 1990s. There are several reasons for this heightened concern. In Western Europe, the 1990s have been a decade of slower growth, particularly compared with the halcyon decades of the 1950s and 1960s when mass migration, severely restricted during the interwar years, again became a routine aspect of European life.Even more persistent and troubling has been the declining position of less skilled workers in the economies of industrial nations. The International Monetary Fund notes that, beginning in the 1970s or the early 1980s, “labor markets in the advanced economies have been characterized by marked increases in wage inequality in some countries between the more skilled and less skilled, and in other countriesby rises in unemployment among the less skilled.” Many less skilled workers believe that migrants are responsible for their declining wages and unemployment.

Type
Migration, Labor Movements, and the Working Class
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 54 , Fall 1998 , pp. 57 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, May 1997 (Washington, DC, 1997), 53.Google Scholar

2. See Hatton, Timothy J. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar, and Wood, Adrian, North-South Trade Employment and Inequality: Changing Fortunes in a Skill-Driven World (Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar

3. Weiner, Myron, “The Global Migration Crisis,” in Global History and Migrations, ed. Gungwu, Wang (Boulder, CO, 1997), 95–116.Google Scholar

4. For an overview, see Castles, Stephen and Miler, Mark J., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

5. Pioneering works in this perspective are Moch, Leslie Page, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, IN, 1992);Google ScholarLucassen, Jan, Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea (London, 1987).Google Scholar

6. Granovetter, Marc, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985):481–510.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Cited in Dublin, Thomas, Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America, 1753–1986 (Urbana, IL, 1993), 1.Google Scholar

8. Eriksson, Ingrid and Rogers, John, “Mobility in an Agrarian Community: Practical and Methodological Considerations,” in Aristocrats, Farmers, Proletarians: Essays in Swedish Demographic History, ed. Ågren, Kurt et al. (Uppsala, 1973), 60–87.Google Scholar

9. On some of these same themes, see the essays in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Hoerder, Dirk and Moch, Leslie Page (Boston, 1996).Google Scholar

10. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1989).Google Scholar

11. See Representing Convicts: New Perspectives on Convict Forced Labour Migration, ed. Duffield, Ian and Bradley, James (London, 1997).Google Scholar

12. Diner, Hasia R., Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1983);Google ScholarGabaccia, Donna, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the US, 1820–1990 (Bloomington, IN, 1994).Google Scholar

13. Knothe, Maria Anna, “Land and Loyalties: Contours of Polish Women's Lives,” in Peasant Maids, City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America, ed. Harzig, Christiane (Ithaca, 1997), 150.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., 177.

15. Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigration in Urban America (Bloomington, IN, 1985);Google ScholarBodnar, John, Simon, Roger, and Weber, Michael P., Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Pittsburgh, 1982).Google Scholar

16. Blaschke, Monika, “No Way but Out: German Women in Mecklenburg,” in Peasant Maids, ed. Harzig, , 55.Google Scholar

17. Mageean, Deirdre, “To Be Matched or to Move: Irish Women's Prospects in Munster,” in Peasant Maids, ed. Harzig, , 84.Google Scholar

18. Matovic, Margareta, “Maids in Motion: Swedish Women in Dalsland,” in Peasant Maids, ed. Harzig, , 115.Google Scholar

19. Knothe, “Land and Loyalties,” 178.

20. The classic statement of the theory is by Stouffer, Samuel, “Intervening Opportunities: A Theory Relating Mobility and Distance,” American Sociological Review 6 (1940):845–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a modified contemporary application see Borjas, Georges J., Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the US Economy (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

21. Cited in Tilly, Chris and Tilly, Charles, Work under Capitalism (Boulder, CO, 1998), 191.Google Scholar

22. Wyman, Mark, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993).Google Scholar

23. Walaszek, Adam, “Preserving or Transforming Role? Migrants and Polish Territories in the Era of Mass Migration,” in People in Transit: German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1930, ed. Hoerder, Dirk and Nagler, Jörg (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 104.Google Scholar

24. Portes, Alejandro, “Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Immigration: A Conceptual Overview,” in The Economic Sociology of Immigration: Essays in Networks, Ethnicity, and Entrepreneurship, ed. Portes, Alejandro (New York, 1995), 23–24.Google Scholar

25. See the essays in Ethnic Los Angeles, ed. Waldinger, Roger and Bozorgmehr, Mehdi (New York, 1996).Google Scholar

26. Sassen, Saskia, “Immigration and Local Labor Markets,” in Economic Sociology of Immigration, ed. Portes, , 90.Google Scholar

27. Sassen, “Immigration and Local Labor Markets,” 104–105.

28. Morawska, Ewa, Insecure Prosperity: Small Town Jews in Urban America, 1890–1940 (Princeton, 1996), 22.Google Scholar

29. Morawska, Ewa, For Bread and Butter: Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Cambridge, MA, 1985).Google Scholar

30. Morawska, Insecure Prosperity, 220.

31. ibid., 157–61.

32. Emmons, David M., The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875–1925 (Urbana, IL, 1989);Google ScholarDebouzy, Marianne, In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers and Citizens, 1880–1920 (Urbana, IL, 1992).Google Scholar

33. See, for example, James, Winston, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in America, 1900–1932 (London, 1997).Google Scholar

34. See Noiriel, Gérard, Longwy, immigrés etprolétaires, 1880–1980 (Paris, 1985);Google ScholarWihton de Wenden, Catherine, Les immigrés et Ia politique, cent cinquante ans d'évolution (Paris, 1988);Google ScholarMacMaster, Neil, Colonial Migrants and Racism: Algerians in France, 1900–1962 (New York, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35. Basch, Linda, Schiller, Nina Glick, and Szanton-Blanc, Cristina, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Luxembourg, 1994);Google ScholarSchiller, Nina Glick, Basch, Linda, and Szanton-Blanc, Cristina, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992).Google Scholar

36. Smith, Robert C., “Transnational Migration, Assimilation, and Political Community,” in The City and the World: New York City in Global Context, ed. Crahan, Margaret E. and Vourvoulias-Bush, Alberto (New York, forthcoming).Google Scholar

37. Dusenbery, Verne A., “A Sikh Diaspora? Contextual Identities and Constructed Realities” in Nations and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, ed. van der Veer, Peter (Philadelphia, 1995), 17–42,Google Scholar 31–34.

38. See William, Hewat McLeod, Who is a Sikh? The Problem of Sikh Identity (Oxford, 1989).Google Scholar For a different but highly interesting perspective, see Singh, I.J., Sikhs and Sikhism (Columbia, MO, 1995).Google Scholar

39. Dusenbery, “A Sikh Diaspora?,” 28.

40. On the reconstruction of ethnic identity in the diaspora, see Danforth, Loring M., The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World (Princeton, 1995).Google Scholar

41. See particularly Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983),Google Scholar chap. 7.

42. Sassen, “Immigration and Local Labor Markets,” 90; and Basch, Schiller, and Blanc, Nations Unbound, 23.

43. On post-World War Two migration, see Ueda, Reed, Postwar Immigrant America: A Social History (Boston, 1994).Google Scholar

44. For interesting US parallels in earlier migration, see the essays by White, Michael J., Dymowski, Robert F., and Wang, Shilian, and Jacobs, Jerry A. and Greene, Margaret E. in After Ellis Island: Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census, ed. Watkins, Susan Cotts (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

45. See House, Jim, “Muslim Communities in France,” in Muslim Communities in the New Europe, ed. Nonneman, Gerd, Niblock, Tim, and Szajowski, Bogdan (Reading, PA, 1996), 219–40;Google ScholarSoysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu, “Changing Citizenship in Europe: Remarks on Postnational Membership and the National State,” in Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, ed. Cesarni, David and Fuibrook, Mary (London, 1996), 17–29.Google Scholar

46. See Harris, Nigel, The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker (New York, 1995), 176–83.Google Scholar

47. Gabaccia, From the Other Side.