Migrant Citizens Research Articles

Review: Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico, by Deborah Cohen

Review: <i>Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico</i>, by Deborah Cohen

Deborah Cohen . Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. 2011. Pp. 328. $39.95.

Deborah Cohen . Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University. 2011. Pp. 328. $39.95.

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico

Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact

Testing Citizenship, Regulating History: The Fatal Impact

Braceros: migrant citizens and transnational subjects in the postwar United States and Mexico

At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros , historian Deborah Cohen asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen reveals the fashioning of a U.S.-Mexican transnational world, a world created through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of the program's principal protagonists including Mexican and U.S. state actors, labor activists, growers, and bracero migrants. Cohen argues that braceros became racialized foreigners, Mexican citizens, workers, and transnational subjects as they moved between U.S. and Mexican national spaces. Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies. |At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. In Braceros , historian Deborah Cohen asks why these migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. Cohen creatively links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.

Excerpt from &lt;em&gt;Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico&lt;/em&gt;

Excerpt from &lt;em&gt;Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico&lt;/em&gt;

The End of EU Citizenship and the Means of Non-Discrimination

This contribution discusses the limits of the use of the principle of non-discrimination as an instrument for the development of the concept of Union citizenship. It argues that, particularly in relation to social rights, which are sustained by bounded notions of diffuse solidarity and generalized reciprocity, Union citizenship cannot be understood in isolation from the national citizenships upon which it is parasitic. In developing the social rights attached to the status of Union citizenship, the Court should therefore take careful account of how migrant citizens relate to nationals of the host state.

Documenting Three Gorges Migrants: Gendered Voices of (Dis)placement and Citizenship in Rediscovering the Yangtze River and Bingai

Documenting Three Gorges Migrants: Gendered Voices of (Dis)placement and Citizenship in Rediscovering the Yangtze River and Bingai Daisy Yan Du (bio) What is displaced—dispersed, deferred, repressed, pushed aside—is, significantly, still there: Displaced but not replaced, it remains a source of trouble, the shifting ground of signification that makes meanings tremble. —Angelika Bammer, introduction to Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question First envisioned by Sun Zhongshan in 1919 and later supported by Jiang Jieshi and Mao Zedong, the Three Gorges Dam—dubbed “the Great Wall across the Yangtze River”—has always been a controversial project among Chinese citizens. After the 1989 Tiananmen demonstration, Li Peng, the hardliner who quelled that movement, also stifled the dam’s opponents and finally managed to get the project approved by the National People’s Congress in 1992. The construction of the dam began in 1994 and was fully completed by 2009. It is the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, serving the functions of electricity generation, flood control, and navigation control. As a megadam, it has provoked criticism worldwide. Besides its environmental costs, the dam’s most controversial consequence is the resettlement of more than two million citizens displaced from their hometowns along the six-hundred-kilometer reservoir area in Hubei Province and Chongqing Municipality (formerly in Sichuan Province). There are essentially three ways these citizens can be relocated: through vertical migration up the mountain slope above the submersion line, through migration to nearby villages, or through distant migration to other counties or provinces along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. While Hubei Province has adopted a policy of intraprovincial resettlement, Chongqing has opted [End Page 27] for interprovincial resettlement, because of its already large population (Padovani 2006, 101–2). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. The Yangtze River and the Three Gorges Dam site. Courtesy of Alex Jianzhong Chen. Numerous studies have charted the Three Gorges Dam resettlement, but most of them were conducted from a social science perspective, which centered primarily on macrosocioeconomic factors. In contrast, in this essay I pay particular attention to aesthetic representations of the dam and resettlement, focusing on two documentary accounts of the dam’s impact on rural migrant citizens. Rediscovering the Yangtze River (CCTV 2006) is a state-sponsored documentary produced by China Central Television (CCTV), and Bingai (Yan Feng 2007) is an “underground/independent” documentary film (Pickowicz 2006).1 Because the documentary is a unique artistic form that oscillates “between the recognition of historical reality and the recognition of a representation about it” (Nichols 2001, 39), I firmly locate my analysis of these representations in their larger sociohistorical context, which includes the dam’s distinct repercussions for female citizens and the very concept of citizenship in China. Citizenship, which is [End Page 28] materialized in identity cards and passports, is usually understood in legal, political, and social terms according to the politics of inclusion and exclusion. In contrast to this traditional understanding of citizenship as a fixed identity status in relation to the state, my study approaches citizenship as a fluid identification. A citizen may or may not fully identify with the state and feel like a citizen despite his or her legal citizenship. Thus I emphasize the cultural, symbolic, emotional, and psychological dimension of citizenship, based on the politics of recognition and belonging. The issue of citizenship becomes especially contested when it intersects with migration, because “migration and especially forced migration, is a conceptual disruption of citizenship in the historical nation-state system” (Dobrowolsky and Tastsoglou 2006, 23). Forced migration not only affects the legal citizenship of migrants, but also has a tremendous impact on the cultural and psychological dimension of citizenship as a result of migrants’ experience of dislocation. My discussion of the disruption of citizenship caused by the Three Gorges Dam resettlement revolves around the key word “(dis)placement,” which refers not only to physical deterritorialization, but also to migrants’ sense of placement or displacement in relation to the state. Because gender plays a significant role in how one experiences (dis) placement, in this essay I seek to unravel the intertwined relationship between gender, the cultural and psychological dimension of citizenship, and resettlement as represented in the two...

The Rule of Reason in European Citizenship

Abstract: This article reviews the European Court of Justice's case‐law on European citizenship in the light of aspects of the rights theories of Ronald Dworkin and Robert Alexy. More specifically, the free movement right in Article 18(1) EC is conceptualised as a Dworkinian principle and as a prima‐facie right or ‘optimisation precept’ in Alexy's sense. Against this backdrop the article argues that Article 18(1) can best be interpreted by drawing an analogy with the economic free movement provisions. The central argument is that the rule of reason also applies to European citizenship, or that there is a rule of reason in European citizenship. The analogy encompasses both the definition of the scope of Article 18(1) and its limitations. With regard to the latter, it is contended that there is no conceptual distinction between the ‘limitations’ and ‘conditions’ referred to in that provision. Particular emphasis is placed on the recent case‐law concerning the question of access to welfare benefits. In this regard it is suggested that the notion of a ‘structural link’ constitutes both a threshold criterion to trigger the prima‐facie right in Article 18(1) as well as a benchmark for assessing the degree of solidarity owed to the migrant citizen. The rule of reason approach leads to the stipulation of a thin, juridical conception of European citizenship that does not rely in any way on thick, essentialist properties.

Seeing the Wood Despite the Trees? On the Scope of Union Citizenship and its Constitutional Effects

The article looks at the impact of the introduction of Union citizenship on the scope of application of the Treaty. In particular it considers how the citizenship provisions have affected the personal and the material scope of the Treaty. By virtue of Article 17 EC the personal scope of the Treaty is expanded so that any Union citizen, and not only the migrant citizen, now falls within the personal scope of the Treaty. The significance of this finding then depends on the definition of the material scope of the Treaty, i.e. on the identification of the rights that Union citizens can claim qua citizens. In this respect, it is clear that Union citizens have a right to move; and a right to reside in any of the Member States (subject to limitations and conditions). Union citizens have also a right to equal treatment deriving from Article 12 EC. In this respect, the article argues that such a right to equal treatment is not merely an ancillary right which is conditional upon migration; rather, Article 12 EC is a self-standing right pertaining to all those who fall within the personal scope of the Treaty. As a result, Article 12 EC is capable of being invoked by static union citizens to challenge reverse discrimination.

Integration Policies in Migration Between Nationalising States and Transnational Citizenship, with Reference to the Slovenian Case

The article explores issues related to integration in migration management as it is understood in Slovenia as an EU member-state since 2004. The Slovene situation is used as empirical background for debating integration, which is promoted as an inclusive response in migration policies, and also as a restriction on migrant citizens. The article proceeds from discussing a situation in a specific nation-state to considering integration as a mechanism of nationalising states, as an institution for grounding what Balibar calls ‘fictive ethnicity’. The argument is provided for why nationalising states with naturalisation policies equate citizenship with nationality. Integration is foregrounded as a human rights paradox that keeps migrants in a position of non-nationals. An attempt is made to develop a frame for possible thinking of migration in a transnational citizenship perspective, i.e. beyond the borders of nation-states.

Remitting subjects: migrants, money and states

Scholars’ and policy-makers’ interest in the remittances that migrants send home to relatives has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Focusing on remittances from the United States to El Salvador, we examine how academic studies, public discourse, and state accounting practices simultaneously produce and reveal the nature of this phenomenon. By treating the money that migrants send home as both national resource and foreign currency, central banks and international financial institutions define remittances as a ‘cost-free’ source of national income. Further, debates about remittances’ social and economic impact focus on whether remitting promotes or undermines particular values associated with neoliberalism, such as self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship and empowerment. Our analysis thus sheds light on new configurations through which money, states and migrant citizens are linked.

Proyecto de investigación de la formación de dialectos (FORDIAL)

The research project on Dialect Formation (DIALFOR) focuses on dialect contact between southern varieties of Spanish in urban contexts boosted by migration from the rural Hinterland in Andalusia in the course of the last thirty years. Either loyalty to rural vernacular varieties or convergence towards regional and national standard is constrained by the speakers' degree of integration into the large (urban) speech community. The analysis of the social networks where ordinary people live and communicate allows us to explain the speakers' choices. To carry out this research, two sample surveys (Granada and Malaga) using the same fieldwork methodology and theoretical background have been prepared, where commuters and migrant citizens are separated. A third control group of speakers is studied in each rural community where migrants come from. Theoretical foundations and empirical bases are taken from contemporary trends of European social dialectology research on dialect convergence and divergence (Auer/ Hinskens, 1996a; Mattheier, 2000), with special reference to studies on dialect formation in new towns (Kerswill, 1994a, 2002). Long term network research carried out on Malaga and Granada speech communities are taken as a point of depart (Villena, 1994, 2001; Moya, 1997, 1998).