Experience Of Emigration Research Articles

Parallelisms and Distinctions: Chicago Jewry Once a Shadow of New York Jews

For centuries, Jews have lived in cities throughout Europe underneath the oppressive rule of tyrants, separatist and religious purist that have commonly shared and expressed an anti-Semitic antipathy for the Jewish community at large. The fact that Jews knew this to be their history is confirmed by the German writer L. Kompert in his essay “Off to America” written in 1848. Kompert writes, “Our history has been nothing but a silent acceptance of every torture, agony and restriction they have chosen to impose on us!” As a result of this European attitude, Kompert offers to his audience, the idea of emigration to America as an alternative solution to their perennial problems. Given this historical backdrop, this investigation will explore the emigration experience as it affected German and Eastern European Jewish emigrants that settled in the American cities of Chicago and New York. By examining many similarities and a few of the distinctions found between these two cities, it is hoped that this analysis will provide a more balanced view of the important Jewish developments that made Chicago’s contributions to the American Jewish heritage equal to New York’s contributions.

Migração Internacional e Desenvolvimento Econômico: Algumas Considerações em Relação À Economia Brasileira (International Migration and Economic Development: Some Theoretical Considerations in Relation to the Brazilian Economy)

Brazil is a country of a long immigration history, however its emigration experience is a recent issue. The migration transition started in the 1980s, when the first wave of migration was initiated. This process is continued in the next decades: therefore, the traditional nation of immigration was transformed in the nation of emigration. Brazilian Diaspora is now estimated at 3.7 million and constitutes an important area of interest for the scholars and policy-makers interested in development policy. This article focuses on the relationship between migration and development from the perspective of the sending country. The author argues that in the Brazilian case, the impact of migration on the national economy should be beneficial, especially when analyzing the effects of remittances on the mezzo (i.e. regional) level.

Architectures of exile: confinement, insularity, and escape in William Trevor's Felicia's journey

Drawing on readings of ‘home’ in cultural and literary criticism, as well as on historical and social scientific analyses of the experiences of Irish women in England, this article will examine how William Trevor's novel, Felicia's journey, uses space to explore the marginalisation of the Irish woman within Irish and English society. It will begin by examining the ways in which domestic interiors complement the narrative of entrapment and escape central to the novel, before going on to look at how Trevor engages with the social and cultural conditions that circumscribed the lives of Irish women in the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, it will examine how Trevor's representation of the Irish emigrant experience foregrounds the historical dilemmas encountered by Irish women in England, specifically in the context of the ‘abortion trail’ of the 1980s and 1990s and in relation to how Irish women have been imagined in English culture.

Exclusión social en el mercado laboral chileno. Elementos para analizar el caso de los profesionales altamente calificados

The article presents an interpretative model of the phenomenon of the emigration of highly qualified human resources from Latin American countries. In addition it gathers the findings around the Chilean experience of emigration to highly qualified human resources.

Exclusión social en el mercado laboral chileno. Elementos para analizar el caso de los profesionales altamente calificados

The article presents an interpretative model of the phenomenon of the emigration of highly qualified human resources from Latin American countries. In addition it gathers the findings around the Chilean experience of emigration to highly qualified human resources.

Dalla "piccola patria" all'Internazionale: friulani nelle reti del movimento operaio

The article proposes a hypothesis of reading of the international worker’s movement nets, reconstructed through the survey of the experience of emigration from Friuli, a territory that in the years between XIX and XX century has reached the peak among the migratory rates of Italian regions. Migratory experience has marked the story of the working class of Friuli, both in point of the acquisition of professional ability, and in regard of the construction of a political identity, thanks to the worker’s movements of the countries of emigration. At the same time, Friuli has given a lot of his trade-union representatives to the international movement. Therefore, the history of the working class breaks, through the migratory experience, the schematism of national worker’s movements historiography.

Double Time: Facing The Future in Migration’s Past

Interpretations of Italian films about migration tend to refer to the historical experience of emigration or of colonialism as the historical coordinates through which these films are best understood. This article looks at four recent films featuring migrants in prominent roles that appear to elide such an interpretive framework. While the past and its intrusive effects do feature strongly in these films, it is difficult to produce a predictable linear and causal narrative that would link past, present, and future in predictable ways. Stylistically, the four films also represent a notable move away from the realist political agenda and aesthetic that has tended to dominate Italian film production on the topic of migration. This article argues that their adoption of the features that recall those of film noir (in its Italian manifestation) suggests a new range of thematic and social concerns that refer as much to possible futures as well as known pasts. There is a particular focus on the topic of bodily reproduction which is no longer limited to the sphere of the sexual. The opportunities offered by technology for the body to reproduce in new ways alters the parameters of how the nation might be imagined.

The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 (review)

Reviewed by: The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001 José Lanters (bio) Liam Harte, ed. The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725–2001. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. xl + 301 pp. ISBN 978-1403949875, £55 / $US75. Liam Harte recounts in the introduction to this fascinating anthology that his own father, like his father before him, worked for many seasons in Britain as a “July barber,” departing every summer from his native County Mayo to work as a migratory harvester in northern England. Harte himself left Ireland to further his education in Britain, and now teaches at the University of Man-chester. The editor of a previous collection of essays about the Irish autobiographical tradition (Modern Irish Autobiography, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Harte has here put together an anthology of sixty-three excerpts from life writings by authors of Irish birth or background who lived and worked in Britain between the first quarter of the eighteenth century and the present day, ranging from unskilled laborers and domestic servants to canonical authors like W. B. Yeats and John B. Keane. The collection represents considerable research since many of the texts are out of print, difficult to access, or exist only in manuscript. As the author states in his theoretically informed introduction, the anthology cannot claim to be definitive or comprehensive about the experience of being Irish in Britain, as much material may have been lost, and the majority of emigrants did not have the inclination, ability, or opportunity to express their thoughts on paper. Harte sees the fact that certain categories of emigrants are under-represented in the collection—especially women, and particularly nurses and domestic servants—as silent evidence of the material impediments created by such occupations, which often claimed all of the person’s waking hours, as opposed to the types of labor performed by men. Harte’s stated purpose is to make visible, through these firsthand accounts, what is often rendered absent about the experience of emigration. He aims to give nuance to generalizations that Irish writers tended to focus on nostalgic memories of the land they had left behind rather than on their lived experience in their new environment; and to dispel the myth that “the [End Page 866] Irish in Britain” were a homogeneous group in a homogeneous place. Rather, their experiences varied widely, depending on gender, geography—London, northern England, Scotland, Wales—religion, education, occupation, social class, and political outlook, although stories of bad housing, poor nutrition, and hard drinking are much in evidence. Among these tales of hardship, Walter Hampson’s account of his 1870s childhood as an assistant chimney sweep or “climbing boy” (a practice that had been made illegal in 1840) stands out as a particularly harrowing example. Francis Fahy, on the other hand, writes of a thriving and civilized culture of Irish revivalism in 1890s Southwark, where he organized language classes and lectures on Irish literary topics by such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, Katharine Tynan, and Justin MacCarthy—whose lecture was attended by Oscar Wilde, another Irish expatriot then at the height of his fame. Nevertheless, all the writers in the collection shared the experience of displacement, even if their responses to that condition varied, and many reflect on the psychology of leaving and returning, and the anguish and camaraderie felt among the often reluctant emigrants they encountered on boats and trains. Aware of the friction between seeing these texts as “reflecting” lived history, and seeing all knowledge of the past as being discursively mediated, Harte sets out to read the texts as both social history and cultural products. If Yeats’s self-portrait as an unhappy, dislocated Victorian child in Hammersmith is to be read as “a complex amalgam of memory and imagination, forged by an inveterate self-mythologiser” (80), the same is true, to some degree at least, of all self-constructions in this anthology. Harte’s introductions to each excerpt provide background, context, and insight, and manage to be both complex and concise. The passages chosen in each case register or reflect upon aspects of the experience of being Irish in Britain; we therefore frequently see the authors in situations where...

Rationalizing Human Organization in an Uncertain World: Jacob Marschak, from Ukrainian Prisons to Behavioral Science Laboratories

Jacob Marschak (1898–1977) had an enormous impact on the development of postwar economics, both as an intellectual mentor of Nobel Prize winners such as Kenneth Arrow and Franco Modigliani and as forerunner and institutional organizer of several research programs, most famously at the Cowles Commission. Nevertheless, he remains understudied by historians. This article uncovers the salient characteristics of his scientific vision in the forties and fifties, at the apex of his influence on the profession: his definition of economics as the science of rational choice; his emphasis on mathematization, experimentation, and interdisciplinarity as the proper methodology; his view of uncertainty as the main characteristic of the social environment; and his claim that economists should be “social engineers.” The development of such a vision is studied against the background of Marschak's biography and of his understanding of the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, in particular his socialist beliefs and his repeated experience of emigration.

Charlotte Wolff and Lesbian History: Reconfiguring Liminality in Exile

This article considers the “liminality” of the psychologist Charlotte Wolff, MD (1897–1986). Always living openly as a lesbian since her school days in Danzig, Wolff trained as a doctor—also pursuing a parallel interest in poetry and in philosophy. As a Jewish person, she was forced to leave the Berlin Health Service and flee Germany when the Nazi regime came to power. Having moved to Great Britain in 1936 after three years in France, Wolff reconfigured “exile” beyond the literal experience of emigration and immigration, as a form of “marginality” or “liminality” always involved in artistic and scientific endeavors. In her life and work she negotiated several liminal areas—from her gender presentation to her standing in the academic and scientific community (she was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, to which she bequeathed her papers and the copyright to her work, but at the same time she was not an eminent psychologist), to her membership of sexual minority organizations (she conducted pioneering research on lesbianism and bisexuality, but some resented her connection with the psy-professions). In the spirit of Wolff's “liminality” as a strategy and creative zone, and along the lines indicated by Morawski (1994) as regards the transformative possibilities of feminist psychology as a liminal science, we argue for a reappraisal of Wolff's life and work that, in negotiating the borderlands between lesbian history and history of psychology, could enrich both disciplines.

Out of the Frying Pan

This article had its genesis in a family photograph of my paternal grandmother's parents, Rowland and Rebecca Walton (see Figure 1). I knew little about them apart from their English origins, but their appearance was intriguing: definitely stalwart pioneers, but what kind ofpioneers? Popular cultural knowledge in Australia provides one central image of the pioneer, summed up concisely by Katharine Susannah Prichard: 'It will be a nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness.' Prichard's notion was directly inspired by a painting, The Pioneer (1904) by Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917), described by Tim Bonyhady as 'one ofthe most influential paintings of the emigrant experience in Australia'. Utilising a triptych fonnat, it recounts (in the words of a contemporary reviewer) 'its own legend of the useful toil, the homely joys, and destiny obscure of the pioneer, who does not live, as the rude cross in the third panel indicates, to see the growth or share in the prosperity of the fine city seen in the background of the panel'.

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Anthony Di Mascio Errington, Elizabeth Jane — Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. Pp. 244. In Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities: Migration to Upper Canada in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth Jane Errington takes the reader on a transatlantic journey from various corners of the British Isles to Upper Canada. In doing so, she reminds us that the resettlement of Upper Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century was undertaken by individual men and women with complex lives and varieties of motivations for leaving home and starting anew. As one of Canada's leading scholars on the social history and development of Upper Canada, Errington opens a fresh window into the personal world of emigration through a meticulous reading of the writings of emigrants and their families and an empathetic analysis of their emotional voyage. Emigrant Worlds reverses the usual lens for research on migration to North America. Typical studies of migration "look 'out' from North America to try to understand how particular cultural practices and political propensities persisted and shaped New World societies" (p. 169). By contrast, Errington's study looks toward North America to understand what factors drove emigrants to leave home and abandon their familiar cultural practices and political propensities. She finds transatlantic communities in which familial networks were instrumental in establishing a new and broad sense of identity and home. Kinship ties and networks with friends and families who had gone before were often instrumental in forging connections and communities that made the emigrant's world navigable. Within this context, personal reasons for emigrating were often more pivotal than wide-scale socio-economic conditions. Decisions were very much shaped by the experiences of individual emigrants and the particular circumstances in their local communities and within their transatlantic interpersonal relationships. Errington uses letters, diaries, and journals to examine the variety of reasons that convinced emigrants to go to British North America. She paints a vivid portrait of the physical and emotional stress that preparing to leave home brought upon emigrants, the peculiar culture and surreal experiences that connected emigrants aboard passenger ships on the Atlantic, and both the euphoric and disappointing emotions that welcomed emigrants into the "strange land." Emigrant [End Page 259] writings certainly demonstrate that many "remained emotionally rooted more than three thousand miles away" (p. 137). In turn, for those who remained behind, the bonds were equally as strong. Through transatlantic webs of kin and community facilitated by letter-writing, the availability of newspapers, and, for those with the means, the occasional return visit home, the old world remained a part of the emigrants' new world. The author furthermore broadens our historical imagination through an innovative reading of often overlooked information such as wanted notices printed in colonial newspapers. In doing so, she successfully teases out information about who the emigrants were, where they were from, for whom they were looking (or who was looking for them), and how emigration was a "family affair." Throughout the book, Errington takes the reader beyond a practical description of emigration and into poignant accounts of the joys and pains of leaving home. Departure, she argues, separated the emigrant from friends and family who were staying behind not only physically, but also emotionally. As emigrants negotiated the intricacies of arranging passage to the New World, sold their farms, possessions, and family heirlooms to raise funds for and lighten the load of travel, and found lodging while waiting to board the ship, the world of emigration "was now very real. It was a world with its own rules and customs, and for those in transit it was often bewildering and sometimes overwhelming" (p. 59). While reading this book, with its descriptive and telling accounts of the trials and tribulations of emigration, I could not help but imagine the harsh emotional journey of my own family who travelled across the Atlantic from Italy to Canada in the 1960s. Indeed, one of the striking features of emigrant writings...

Exilic Symptoms in the Wolf-Man's Memoirs

Some aspects of the identity construction in the autobiography of one of Freud's most famous patients are analysed through a close reading of the text, with an emphasis on the first sentence and the three characteristics he chose to apply to himself. I suggest that his experience as an exile was formative in his perception of himself. What interests me here is neither the experience of emigration nor that of neurosis per se, but rather, how the two merge together and make the Wolf-Man into the kind of person who wrote, at the very end of his turbulent life, ‘The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man’. Julia Kristeva's idea of ‘abjection’ helps me explore the construction of a personalized narrative and the institution of a framework of relations between a self and the world. It is my contention that the notion of ‘abjection’ can explain those aspects of the Wolf-Man's multi-layered identity that concern the man's experience of exile, and which were practically neglected by his analysts—Freud and Ruth Mack Brunswick, who obsessively focused on the Wolf-Man's alleged early childhood sexual experience.

Migration and development: perspectives from the South

The relationship between migration and development is a key topic for research and policy. Earlier pessimistic perspectives focused on the threat to development of poorer countries through the loss of human resources. Recently, a more optimistic view has been advanced by northern governments and international agencies. This is based on the idea that remittance flows and transfers of know-how by migrants can actually reinvigorate development. But what do people in the South think about international migration? How do the migrants themselves experience international migration, and how do they understand development? These questions are rarely asked. This book attempts to redress the balance by initiating a South-South dialogue. It is the result of discussions among researchers, government officials and migrant activists from five major emigration countries: India, Mexico, Morocco, the Philippines and Turkey. The five country case studies present experiences of emigration over the past 50 years and analyse the consequences for economy, society and politics.

Living in a maze: Health, well-being and coping in young non-western men in Scandinavia experiencing substance abuse and suicidal behaviour

The aim of the study was to illuminate and interpret the lived experiences of emigration, substance abuse and suicidal behaviour in young non-western men in Scandinavia. The research questions were formulated as: (1) How is meaning constructed in the narratives? (2) What impact do these experiences have on health, well-being and coping? Data were collected using open-ended in-depth interviews. A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, inspired by the philosophy of Ricoeur, was used to analyse the data. The na?¨ve reading involved awareness of the participants' perceived sense of insecurity in life. The structural analysis identified three themes: (1) the meaning of getting in a tight spot, (2) the meaning of being in a fog and (3) the meaning of the burning bed. A comprehensive understanding of the data was formulated as "living in a maze". Ill health involved having a sense of liminality, which impaired one's possibilities to define and re-define goals. Substance abuse and suicidal behaviour were explicit expressions of not being well, when living in a maze that was perceived as closed. Both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping were used by the participants. These provided the motivation for substance abuse and suicidal behaviour. Key words: Public health, emigration, substance abuse, suicidal behaviour, hermeneutics, men

Análisis regional de las remesas y sus perceptores en México, 2000 y 2005

Este trabajo analiza la estructura de los perfiles que mantienen los perceptores de las remesas en México. Se realiza un estudio micro–econométrico de los factores individuales que nos permiten comprender la conducta y el perfil de los perceptores de la remesas en los hogares y en las regiones de México. Para ello, utilizamos la Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares (enigh) de los años 2000 y 2005. La hipótesis central de este trabajo es que la experiencia y las habilidades de los migrantes con el capital social de su entorno presentan comportamientos diferenciados entre los perceptores de remesas ubicados en distintas regiones mexicanas.

Living in a maze: Health, well-being and coping in young non-western men in Scandinavia experiencing substance abuse and suicidal behaviour

The aim of the study was to illuminate and interpret the lived experiences of emigration, substance abuse and suicidal behaviour in young non-western men in Scandinavia. The research questions were formulated as: (1) How is meaning constructed in the narratives? (2) What impact do these experiences have on health, well-being and coping? Data were collected using open-ended in-depth interviews. A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, inspired by the philosophy of Ricoeur, was used to analyse the data. The naïve reading involved awareness of the participants’ perceived sense of insecurity in life. The structural analysis identified three themes: (1) the meaning of getting in a tight spot, (2) the meaning of being in a fog and (3) the meaning of the burning bed. A comprehensive understanding of the data was formulated as “living in a maze”. Ill health involved having a sense of liminality, which impaired one's possibilities to define and re-define goals. Substance abuse and suicidal behaviour were explicit expressions of not being well, when living in a maze that was perceived as closed. Both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping were used by the participants. These provided the motivation for substance abuse and suicidal behaviour.

The Emotional Function of the Migrant's “Birthplace” in Transnational Belonging: Thomas Mellon (1813–1908) and Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)

Two migrant autobiographies (Mellon and Carnegie) are selected for comparison of their detailed descriptions of return to the birthplace. It is of added interest that both birthplaces are now public museums. The narratives are analysed in terms of the sevenfold typology of Booker (2004). Consideration is then given to a theory about the significance of the migrant's birthplace advanced in a third migrant narrative by Edna O'Brien. Finally, it is suggested that return to the birthplace has a therapeutic function, especially in the case of those like Mellon and Carnegie whose experience of emigration as children was traumatic. Their returns are found to complete their migration narratives, in a circular rather than linear way, with a kind of “rebirth” after which they experience a new, harmonious sense of transnational belonging. “Roots tourists” who visit the birthplace of an emigrant ancestor or, as a surrogate, an emigrant birthplace museum, may experience similar emotion and, as a result, a similar enhanced and liberating sense of transnational belonging.

Becoming Irlandés: Private Narratives of the Irish Emigration to Argentina (1844 – 1912)

Rich troves of personal letters and memoirs related to four families who resided in Argentina during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide the substance of this book, whose objective, according to the author, is to “observe in detail the network of experiences of a few Irish emigrants to Argentina and their families within the totality of their relations” (p. 5). Lest it be merely a compilation of transcribed letters, as informative as they may be, Murray offers a historical and analytical context for the primary materials, reviewing relevant literature, citing a variety of statistics (county of origin in Ireland, age upon arrival in Buenos Aires and at marriage and death, place of residence in the Province of Buenos Aires, and occupation), and assessing motivations for the significant emigration of Irish to Argentina. These two parts are complemented by an epilogue; numerous appendixes, including a chronology; a genealogical guide to individuals mentioned in the letters and memoirs; a glossary; and a currency conversion. Finally, copious and lengthy notes and a selected bibliography complete the book.The Irish were not the largest immigrant group to Argentina, nor was South America a major destination of the Irish diaspora. Yet the Irish left an indelible mark on Argentine culture, particularly in the province of Buenos Aires, where many achieved status and wealth through their holdings of land and livestock. Becoming Irlandés takes us deeply into the everyday lives of Edward Robbins, Martin Murphy, John James Pettit, and Tom Garrahan and their families and friends. Acknowledging that these were not well-to-do or well-known people, Murray invites them to tell their own stories and thus to illustrate some of the ways in which Ireland and Argentina were connected on a human and very personal level. As Murry indicates in his epilogue, there is much still to study among Irish-Argentines, just as there is among other immigrant groups in Argentina.This unusual book is really several books in one. Because of the distinct sections, it does not read smoothly. This is further complicated by the extensive notes, which prove to be disruptive to the text of both the theoretical introduction and the primary source chapters. As the author points out (p. 27), the book may be read in three ways, in addition to straight through from start to finish. The reader may focus on the letters and memoirs, themselves minutely detailed descriptions of the trials and celebrations of daily life and of individuals’ motivations and decisions, social relationships, and inter actions with their old and new homes. One may choose to “read the notes without relation to the text.” Indeed, the notes provide so much information and even analysis, rather than simply clarification or elaboration of points made in the text, that they could be viewed as an independent source. And finally, he suggests that the introduction, epilogue, and appendixes can be read as enrichment to the stories found in the letters and memoirs.Becoming Irlandés has applicability to general immigration studies, but the book will most interest scholars and students of Irish emigration to Argentina, as well as genealogists. It gathers in one place, from multiple sources, an abundance of biographical information and details of the daily lives of individuals, their communities, and small towns in “the camp” of the Province of Buenos Aires. The author has succeeded at bringing the reader up close to the quotidian concerns of those whose memoirs and letters he has compiled. The book suggests further study of numerous aspects of the history of the Irish in Argentina, the connections between Ireland and Latin America, and the comparative experiences of the Irish in other parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The politics of population in a nation-building process: emigration of non-Muslims from Turkey

Within the politics of nationalism and nation-building, the emigration of ethnic and religious minorities, whether voluntary or involuntary, appears to be a commonly occurring practice. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, modern Turkey still carried the legacy of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious diversity in which its Armenian, Greek and Jewish communities had official minority status based upon the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. However, throughout the twentieth century, Turkey's non-Muslim minority populations have undergone a mass emigration experience in which thousands of their numbers have migrated to various countries around the globe. While in the 1920s the population of non-Muslims in the country was close to 3 per cent of the total, today it has dropped to less than two per thousand. This article analyses the emigration of non-Muslim people from Turkey and relates this movement to the wider context of nation-building in the country.