International Population Movements Research Articles

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: The Chemical Scythe: Lessons of 2,4,5‐T and Dioxin by Alistair Hay. Shelter: Need and Response. Housing, Land and Settlement Policies in Seventeen Third World Nations by Jorge E. Hardoy and David Satterthwaite. Global Trends in Migration: Theory and Research on International Population Movements Edited by Mary M. Kritz, Charles B. Keely, Silvano M. Tomasi.WHO Expert Committee on Biological Standardization. Thirty First Report.

Global Trends in Migration: Theory and Research on International Population Movements.

This book contains revised versions of papers originally presented at a conference on international migration that was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and held in Bellagio Italy in June 1979. conference was organized to review the state of the art in the field of international migration evaluate current migration trends and assess the implications for research and policy. The papers are arranged in three sections. In Part 1 concerned with theoretical issues the authors examine how political economic and social structures both at the national and international level shape current international migration patterns and policies. Part 2 focuses on international migration trends and policies in six geographic regions including Western Europe Australasia and the South Pacific Canada and the United States the Caribbean the Southern Cone of Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa. In Part 3 the incorporation of migrants into host societies is considered and return migration policies are discussed. A general bibliography is also included. (EXCERPT)

International Migration and Economic Growth: The Swedish Experience

The interest of economists in the nature and causes of economic growth has focused attention on demographic phenomena. For the economic historian, this has meant a reexamination of the historically unprecedented international population movements of the nineteenth century and their relationship to the process of economic growth.

International Population Movements as Aids to Communicable Disease Control

POPULATION movements have always been viewed as a real or potential hazard in the spread of communicable disease. In the Crusades, the internecine conflicts of the Renaissance, and the conquests which brought the Americas into the orbit of European culture, disease was always one of the horsemen riding side by side with the soldier, the merchant, and the priest. The traveler's course might be traced by the implantation of disease as well as by the growing weeds whose seeds had dropped from his saddlebags. It is only in recent years, and even then with little real appreciation of its inherent logic and potential strength, that public health workers have taken advantage of population movements and used them as a positive force for health by combining a few simple ingredients of border inspection, quarantilne, treatment, and control epidemiology. While several rudimentary examples of this approach in regard to mobile populations have emerged from the operation of the venereal disease control program of the United States, nio example existed prior to 1956 in which use was made of an international population movement that would apply all of the basic elements of venereal disease control for the benefit of two countries. It was therefore a program of new stature which the national health agencies of Mexico and the United States undertook in 1956 when they decided to weld together the elements of a complete international control program and apply it to Mexican migrant laborers coming into the United States during the growing and harvesting season. It should be clearly understood that such synthesis cannot be affected at will. It is based on mutual respect and understanding between the two nations as well as upon a number of preconditions, including facility and speed in diagnosis and treatment, the existence of a contacteliciting and contact-tracing mechanism, and the availability of forces which can be mobilized to accomplish diagnosis, treatment, and contact investigation. Even in 1956 when jet planes hurtled through the air at speeds far exceeding sound and the mysteries of orbital space had become the commonplace of newspaper headlines, these factors were not entirely adequate to cope with all aspects of the combined programs; they were present in sufficient degree, nevertheless, to merit the sizable demonstration test which we describe. More than 400,000 Mexican agricultural workers enter the United States each year to work in our fields at the times when there is an urgent seasonal demand for labor. Physical examinations are given these workers by the Public Health Service Division of Foreign Quarantine, both at the recruitment centers in The authors are all with the Public Health Service. Dr. Smith serves as deputy chief of the Communicable Disease Center, Dr. Stuart, public health advisor in the Office of the Surgeon General, and Mr. Watson, public health advisor in the Venereal Disease Branch of the Center. By special arrangement, the article appears simultaneously, in substantially the same form, in the Boletin de la Oficina Sanitaria Panamericana.

New Approaches to Population

SINCE the beginning of this century economists have discussed business cycle and foreign trade, money and banking policy a great deal, but the centre of the social sciences, as Sir William Beveridge reminds us, is going to be the problem of population. There are three aspects of population theory which should be clearly distinguished. The first is the bioecological aspect which deals with the regional distribution and capacity of population in different countries and in larger areas; it also investigates the essential man-land balance which sets the limits of growth, permanence, and welfare of the population. The demographic aspect is concerned with the structure and variation of population; with age and sex composition; and with birth, marriage, and death rates, as well as differential trends in social classes and occupations and their effects on the numbers and quality of the population. The socio-economic aspects deal with the effects of social and economic factors and institutions, of custom, law, and political and social attitudes and sentiments on the trend of population and vice versa; with the relations between variations in population and standards of living and welfare; and with the measures of policy for regulation of the trend of population by each nation and of international population movements in the interests of world peace and progress. The above aspects have not been all fully explored nor has there been any appreciable effort to coordinate the divergent lines of inquiry. The lack of such coordination which is responsible for much barrenness of population analysis is promoted not only by inadequate development and dearth of data in scientific, vital, and social statistics but also by the watertight division of the sciences-ecology, biology, genetics, geography, economics, politics, and sociology-which ought to focus their separate and collective attention on the regional, the economic, the political, and the institutional complex within which the population movement occurs. Without an integration of the different fields of research a conmprehensive and well-rounded theory of population cannot be fashioned. Indeed, this can develop mainly through the analysis of the interrelations between ecologic, economic, political, and institutional or social-psychological factors and movements implicated in the equilibrium of population on its three levels, biological, economic, and ethical. At the bio-ecologic level the elements of the population movement which human