Question Of Immigration Research Articles

Unemployment and the Radical Right in Scandinavia: Beneficial or Non-Beneficial for Electoral Support?

A new family of political parties has emerged in Europe, emphasizing the need for a radical change in immigration policy. Their success has been accounted by various hypotheses. One hypothesis is that they appeal to marginalized voters, or more specifically, to unemployed voters, losers of modernization. Joblessness also has a connection to voters’ discontent with immigrants. The argument is that immigrants take jobs from native voters. Altogether, this sways towards the expectation that unemployment is related to the success of these parties. I question if this is the case in Scandinavia. The empirical evidence presented leads to the opposite conclusion. Low unemployment seems to give fertile soil to the growth of the radical right. When high unemployment is removed from the political agenda, a political space can be opened for questions of immigration, or more generally, issues related to the socio-cultural cleavage.

Diasporic Citizenship: Inhabiting Contradictions and Challenging Exclusions

On May Day 2006, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of cities all over the United States in an unprecedented protest against the persecution of illegal immigrants. As spring moved into summer, the immigration debate in the United States increased with the temperatures and remains, not coincidentally, along with the war in Iraq, an unrelenting point of irresolution in contemporary U.S. politics. Across the Atlantic, only a few months earlier, France was rocked by riots and protests stemming from the deaths of two immigrant boys at a power substation. While the banlieues of Paris may have temporarily stopped burning, and while the protesters who shut down Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco may have returned to work, giving the thin illusion of business as usual, it is clear that the issues that gave rise to these protests remain alive and potent. These protests fiercely signal both the failure and the indispensability of contemporary citizenship. They set fire to what has already been smolderingly obvious: huge communities of people continue to be vital to first world economies even as they are continually reminded of their dispensability through the persistent denial of their right to citizenship. Indeed, to pose the question of immigration in the first world is

‘Welcome to Britain’

Questions of asylum and immigration have taken centre stage in national and international debate and figure prominently in the domestic political agendas of wealthy states and nations. In Australia, Europe and the US, harsh and punitive asylum and immigration laws are being enacted incrementally and asylum-seekers are subject increasingly to detention. Through a focus on the detention of asylum-seekers in the UK, this article makes a critical intervention in current theoretical debates around asylum.Focusing on the writing of Giorgio Agamben, this article suggests that within political and cultural theory, there has been a turn to the figure of the asylum-seeker (and the refugee) as a trope for theorizing the political constitution of the present. By opening up a critical dialogue between humanitarian, media studies and abstract theoretical accounts of immigration detention, this article produces a critique of the ways in which theory appropriates the figure of the asylum-seeker.

La pénétration économique en Amérique latine

In 1970, Canada decided to develop its relations with Latin America, especially in the economic sector. Adhesion to the Interamerican Bank of Development and the status of observator in the Organisation of American States was a good institutional basis for increasing these relations. However, the absence of objectives on refugee and immigration questions prevented adoption of a clear policy towards Chilian and Haitian refugees. Generally Canada had met the 1970 objectives. Trade increased substantially, partly as a result of Canadian policies, but also because of the development of the main countries: Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela and the increase in oil prices. It could be more important if vigourous policies were implemented. Canada has important investments in Latin America, especially in Brazil. In percentage of total Canadian aid, aid to Latin America declined from 1970. Relations with Latin America will increase during the 1980's, but they would be more important if Canada adopted a more coherent policy.

Reflexiones acerca de la nueva instrucción "Erga migrantes caritas christi"

This article introduces and analyses the new Instruction approved by the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People in 2004. From the 19th century, the Church considered the question of immigration from the obligation to facilitate pastoral attention to Catholics who emigrated to places where they would find language difficulties, shortage of clergy or problems living the faith in the new society. After the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council the responsibility of the Bishops in this matter became more explicit and new pastoral structures that could help in the attention of the displaced ones were sought. The new Instruction tries to integrate these structures in the ordinary pastoral without the reducing respect for diversity. Similarly a certain institutionalization of this task through different stable positions were set out, considering the specific role of the laity. For this purpose, the document establishes a series of objectives in the process of preparation of the pastoral agents. It is important to emphasize the specific references to Islam, intermarriage, and the danger of relativism that can accompany an erroneous concept of globalization.

Narrative, memory and mapping: Ronnie Govender's "at the edge” and other Cato manor stories

In “At the Edge” and Other Cato Manor Stories, Ronnie Govender offers a series of narratives of life in Cato Manor from the 1940s until its destruction in 1958/9. Against the strict delineation of identity, the control of space, a state narrative of racial separation and displacement, and an official cartography (of race and economics), Govender sets an unofficial cartography of knowing, belonging and growing, a stature in ordinary character, an oral‐influenced mobility of storytelling, a carnivalesque chorus of voices, the ingenuity of tactic – as well as the desolation of suffering and destruction which was to follow the bulldozing of Cato Manor and the forced removal of its residents. While the stories deal specifically with the destruction of Cato Manor, they resonate with larger claims about South African Indian identities, without simply essentialising or valorizing them, and without constructing them as identities of exclusion or glossing over areas of difficulty or prejudice; questions of alienation, belonging, immigration, rootedness, exclusion, exoticism and indigeneity swirl through the narrative landscape of the collection.

Minority Building in the German Diaspora: The Hungarian-Germans

Issues concerning the statusand rights of ethnic minorities in Central and Eastern Europe have become significant in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A focus on co-nations in neighboring states, “others” in so-called nation-states, and questions of immigration dominate the media in many areas in Europe. Even though ethnic minorities and ethnic identity are part of modern conversation, the subject of ethnic minorities needs to receive serious scholarly attention to demonstrate its nuanced sense of meaning. Like nations, ethnic minorities are not static entities; they are not primordial. They are constructed or imagined in the same way nations are, even though there has been little scholarly attention devoted to minority building. In order to understand the complex meaning of an ethnic minority, one needs to view the creation of a minority—minority building—on different levels, and understand it as members of the minority understand it and as others perceive it.

New racism, intercultural romance, and the immigration question in contemporary Spanish cinema

As a response to the dramatic changes in migratory patterns experienced in Spain in the last twenty years, Spanish cultural productions on the topic of current immigration reveal less about the real lives of the newcomers and more about Spain’s anxiety regarding its own liminal location in Europe. This paper analyses how Spanish immigration films, through a narrative plot of a failed intercultural romance, become complicit with the assumptions of differentialist racism, i.e. with the fear of racial/cultural contagion and intermixing, even when striving to show positive images of immigrants. Examples are drawn from the films Las cartas de Alou (Armendáriz, 1990), Bwana (Uribe, 1996), Said (Soler, 1998), Poniente (Gutiérrez, 2002) and especially Tomándote (Gardela, 2000) and Susanna (Chavarrías, 1997).

Health and Hegemony: Preventive Medicine, Immigrants and the Israeli Melting Pot

IN RECENT DECADES MUCH HISTORICAL research has been published on the core role of public health in the formulation of various social practices. Additional research highlights the ongoing process of medicalization of daily life that has been taking place over the past two centuries-a process in which key events in our lives, from birth to death, have become legitimate subjects for discussion by various medical experts: physicians, nurses, psychologists, social workers, dietitians, and others.' One of the outstanding areas in which public health personal have played a significant role in the hegemonic machinery of the state is the formulation of policy vis-a-vis absorption of immigrants.2 Public health personnel stationed at points of immigration entry (such as at Ellis Island in the United States) have become part of a machinery for supervision and classification of immigrants in which preservation of the health policies within the homelands of the immigrants constitutes the guiding principle underlying their work. In recent years, questions of health and immigration have been fueled by accelerating globalization processes. The attitude of health systems workers toward immigration have even been the subject of conferences and countless articles.3 The marking of the immigrant as an Other by veteran populations-as a source of disease, crime, and social ills that contaminates local societies-is a recurrent theme in various host coun-

Sovereignty, Migration and the Rule of Law in Global Times

This article argues that in the present era of globalisation, control over the movement of people has become the last bastion of sovereignty. This is important both to theoretical accounts of globalisation and to policy decisions by governments. Nation states threatened with loss of control in other realms are implementing a variety of ‘crackdown’ measures in questions of immigration. Issues of refugee law, illegal migration and skilled migration each challenge sovereignty in specific ways. While international human rights standards have made few inroads in questions of migration, recent decisions in England and Australia suggest that the rule of law may be emerging as a counter to traditional executive free reign in matters of migration law.

Soberania, direitos humanos e migrações internacionais

O presente artigo discute a relação entre soberania e direitos humanos no contexto da elaboração das políticas migratórias. Trata do papel dos Estados nas migrações internacionais e dos efeitos da construção de um sistema internacional de proteção aos direitos humanos sobre a questão migratória. Por fim, discute a idéia de que o crescimento das migrações internacionais estaria levando o Estado à perda do controle sobre a sua população e seu território, dois elementos centrais do próprio conceito de soberania.

Intercultural Competencies as a Means to Manage Intercultural Interactions in Social Work

In the last century Swedish society has become increasingly globalized and multicultural. Today about 20 per cent of the country’s population of 9 million people is of foreign decent. Recently questions of immigration, integration policies and multiculturalism have received much political attention. This fact, in the unmerciful light of a deconstruction of the welfare state coming to terms with these issues, constitutes an enormous challenge to the public sector as a whole. And for single social workers this requires somewhat new sorts of professional competencies – where intercultural competencies appear among the most important.Drawing from the inherent paradoxes and cultural dimensions of social work, the article singles out and discusses several qualities of intercultural competencies that seem useful for social workers. These are referred to as content-competencies and process-competencies. It is concluded that intercultural competencies are preconditions for successful social work in the future.

The flows and the flood: the public discourse on immigration in Italy, 1969–2001

Since the start of the debate on immigration in Italy there has been considerable interest in analysing the ways in which the public discourse on immigration has changed over time. This article examines the changes that have taken place in the period from 1969 to 2001. It is based on systematic study of the principal weekly news magazines (1969–1981) and on the daily press (1982–2001). It demonstrates significant changes in the ways in which immigrants have been portrayed and in the situations with which they are associated. These changes do not correspond with assumptions that continue to prevail in much of the press coverage. The study indicates that the key interpretative themes in the debate were evident prior to the mid-1970s, but that the politicization of the immigrant question in the period 1989–1990 critically changed the terms of public discourse. While the press is highly selective in the way these issues are presented, this has little to do with the criminalization of the immigrants (a theme on which most of the research on immigration has focused) but is more closely linked with the lack of transparency that continues to surround the participation of foreign workers in the Italian economy.

Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest Dayna Oscherwitz Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Pp 211. Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the role of immigration in French political and cultural life. The 2002 French presidential election and the disturbing success of the extreme right-wing anti-immigrant Front National highlighted to what degree questions of immigration and integration have taken center-stage in France. Typically, academic inquiries into the role of immigration and integration have focused either on the political and legal status of immigrants and the evolution of immigration policies, or on cultural inquiries into the effects of immigration on the identities of immigrants and their children. Mireille Rosello's Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest takes altogether another [End Page 161] approach, exploring instead the cultural interpretations of immigration through the metaphor of the immigrant as guest. Although Rosello's exploration of immigration in contemporary France centers on the representation of immigration as an act of hospitality, her study does not ignore the role of politics. Rather, Rosello reads the political treatment of immigration through the guest/host metaphor. What is more, she analyzes the ways in which both the political and social reality have been affected by this metaphorical rendering of immigration as well as the way in which social and political reality have altered the metaphor itself. In her introduction, Rosello foregrounds the difficulty in reconciling the metaphor of immigration as hospitality with the reality of social and legal practice. Following from writings on hospitality by Derrida and Levinas, Rosello concludes that hospitality in the classic sense of the word is grounded in a selfless act of generosity on the part of the giver, and involves risk on the part of the giver and the receiver. From this definition of hospitality, Rosello argues that the metaphor of hospitality cannot be applied seamlessly to contemporary immigration since "if a nation invites immigrants because they are valuable assets, because it needs them for economic or demographic purposes, that country is not being hospitable" (12). She goes on to note as well that host nations in general have not typically followed their own codes of hospitality in that they do not wish to accept any risk in receiving immigrants, but rather expect the immigrants to undertake any and all risk in the exchange. However, Rosello is also careful to point out that immigrants are not merely defenseless victims in the process of immigration either. She argues, for example, that immigrants are quite often able to reappropriate conventions of hospitality in the host nation in order to renegotiate concepts of both hospitality and immigration. As a case in point she cites the 1996 affair of the sans papiers (undocumented immigrants) of St. Pierre. During the summer of 1996, several hundred undocumented immigrants sought sanctuary in the church of St. Pierre in Paris. They remained there for ten months, staging a hunger strike and attracting a great deal of media attention. The situation ended when the French police stormed the church and apprehended the immigrants. According to Rosello, through their resistance to French laws that sought to expel them, the sans-papiers "created a space of sociological, legal and philosophical debate in the very heart of the French capital: they asked questions about the relationship between the city and the nation, . . . between rights and equity" (5). In so doing, they shifted the balance of power away from the state at a moment when the state seemed to have complete control. As a final note in her introduction, Rosello points to the impossibility of separating the political and the metaphorical in undertaking an analysis of [End Page 162] immigration. However, she affirms clearly that her intention is not to take a position on the ethics of immigration. Rather, she asserts that the goal of her analysis is to interrogate the immigration/hospitality metaphor as it is used in contemporary France in order to point out the tensions that exist between the ideal of hospitality and the practice of immigration and the ways in which this tension have been represented. The five chapters that follow explore the tensions between immigration and...

LA CIUDADANÍA EN CONTEXTOS DE MULTICULTURALIDAD: PROCESOS DE CAMBIOS DE PARADIGMAS

Prácticamente casi todos los temas básicos que conforman la agenda política y social de esta década están relacionados con dos categorías básicas: la ciudadanía y la multiculturalidad. La forma en cómo se gestiona el vínculo de estos dos pilares básicos constituye el principal factor de transformación social, política y cultural de nuestra época. El objetivo de este capítulo es doble: por un lado, y en relación al tema general de este monográf ico, argumentar que el tema de la inmigración forma parte de una dinámica más amplia de discusiones sobre los fundamentos básicos de nuestra época moderna, resultado del doble proceso de State-Building y de Nation-building; por otro lado, subrayar que la primera "víctima" de este proceso de cambio contextual es precisamente el producto de este doble movimiento histórico: la noción tradicional de ciudadanía, que tiene dificultades en encontrar recursos para gestionar los nuevos fenómenos ligados con la multiculturalidad. En este marco, nos plantearemos como pregunta básica: ¿en qué sentido el multiculturalismo plantea problemas a la tradición de la ciudadanía? Partiremos de la situación siguiente: ¿qué ocurre cuando se usa la noción tradicional de la ciudadanía en contextos de multiculturalidad? Estructuré mi argumentación en cinco secciones. En la primera sección, introduciré el marco conceptual dentro del cual se ubican las discusiones actuales, compuesto de tres elementos básicos: el Estado, la Nación y la Ciudadanía. En la segunda sección, entraremos en la discusión sobre el concepto tradicional de la ciudadanía, centrándonos en su base normativa y empírica desde una perspectiva comparativa. En la tercera sección, nos ocuparemos del concepto de multiculturalismo. En la cuarta sección me ocuparé de lo que he titulado como los "contextos de la multiculturalidad", esto es, las diferentes dimensiones que ponen en entredicho el carácter indivisible (y sagrado) del Estado, la Nación y la Ciudadanía. Introduciremos, sucesivamente, el pluralismo de identidades culturales, el pluralismo de identidades nacionales, la inmigración, la construcción política de la Unión Europea y, por último, la globalización. Finalmente, en una quinta y última sección, haremos un balance final dando un sentido histórico a nuestros razonamientos.

National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Labor After World War I

ABSTRACT This article addresses both the specific history and the broader implications of France's expulsion of colonial labor after World War I. The article also considers questions of race, immigration, and exoticist culture during the interwar years, showing that the French fascination with the Other reflected a determination to confirm a national identity as white. The use and expulsion of colonial labor in effect transferred a central colonial focus, racial identity, to the metropole.

Croissance urbaine et immigration: le cas des villes de développement en Israël

Since its creation, Israel has established a strong relation with the immigration question. In terms of security, strategy and 'demographic conquest', the Jewish immigration (aliya) has played a major role in the history of Israel and by extension in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the aims of this article is to focus on the dynamics of the Jewish migrations to Israel and their impact to the demography and the urban geography of the country, and more specially on the impact of the FSU immigrants in the population growth of the Development Localities. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ethnic minorities have found the right to leave the USSR. Today, it is more than 900000 Soviet jews who immigrated to Israel. This movement represents about 85 % of the global immigration. This new Jewish migration constitute a tremendous change in the population growth of Israel characterized by a marginal place of the immigration during the last two decades.

The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924

IN 1876, H. N. CLEMENT, a San Francisco lawyer, stood before a California State Senate Committee and sounded the alarm: Chi nese are upon us. How can we get rid of them? The Chinese are com ing. How can we stop them?1 Clement's panicked cries and portrayals of Chinese immigration as an evil, unarmed invasion were shared by several witnesses before the committee which was charged with investi gating the social, moral, and political effects of Chinese immigration.2 Testimony like Clement's was designed to reach a broad audience, and the committee hearings themselves were part of a calculated political attempt to nationalize the question of Chinese immigration.3 Their ef forts proved successful when the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act on 6 May 1882. This law prohibited the immi gration of Chinese laborers for a period of ten years and barred all Chinese immigrants from naturalized citizenship. Demonstrating the class bias in the law, merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats were exempt from exclusion.4 Historians have often noted that the Chinese Exclusion Act marks a

Manuel Moreno Fraginals: An Appreciation

Manuel Moreno Fraginals: An Appreciation

L'altérité de l'épidémie. Les politiques du sida à l'épreuve de l'immigration

The Diversity of Epidemic. The Politics of Aids and the Experience of Immigration. Didier Fassin. After two decades of silence from the health information system and the inaction of the public health agency, the relation between AIDS and immigration is beginning to emerge from beneath a regime of restrictions. If this is the case, it is because new manners of thinking about this relationship are beginning to see the light of day. Firstly, the themes of risk and of epidemically dangerous populations have been replaced by the problem of inequality and sociologically fragile categories. Secondly, the attention that had formerly been almost exclusively placed on the culture, the representations and the resistances has been enlarged to an examination in terms of social conditions, integrating historical and material dimensions in the double experience of the illness and migration. While at the same time, two new stakes appear. One is the redefinition of the contours of the immigration question under the double effect of its crystallization around foreigners in irregular situations and its dissolution in the original groups of migrants, these two groups are particularly exposed to the material disparities related to health and care. The second stake is the development of legitimacy of the foreigner which is increasingly founded upon the suffering or sick body, which is relevant therefore to bio-politics in which AIDS take a symbolic role.