Layers of Rights, Channels of Access

Abstract

Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants' Rights. By Lydia Morris. London: Routledge, 2002. 192 pp., $95.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-415-16706-X), $25.95 paper(ISBN: 0-415-16707-8). Students of international migration have long been interested in the formal and informal processes of inclusion and exclusion created by Westphalian notions that states have the right to control access to a given territory (Hollifield 1992; Weiner 1995; Castles and Miller 1998; Geddes 2000). Yet, the issues surrounding these processes of inclusion and exclusion have come into sharper focus in recent years as the migrant-receiving liberal democracies of the North have sought to balance their emerging labor needs with the demands of migrants for political, social, and economic rights and protections. Managing Migration: Civic Stratification and Migrants' Rights is situated at the heart of this complicated and often contentious terrain. In the book, sociologist Lydia Morris explores the levels of differentiation among aliens in terms of their rights and their access to social services. She focuses her attention on three countries that have had somewhat different experiences with migration during the last few decades: Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Morris' work is rooted theoretically in the contributions that sociology has made to our understanding of the conditions for obtaining membership in the receiving community. T. H. Marshall's (1950) oft-cited work characterizes membership and inclusion as a sequential process, and it hails citizenship as the ultimate key to a level of membership that opens doors for unconditional access to the labor market, available social services, and full political participation. Nonetheless, a review of the rights accorded to migrants and aliens (third country nationals) in the European Union (EU) suggests that aliens—especially those who are long-term residents—can successfully lay claim to certain provisions by the welfare state even without citizenship (Brubaker 1989; Hammar 1990; Soysal 1994). The significance of Morris' book lies in her …