David Kyle

Global migrants, global refugees : problems and solutions

Aristide R. Zolberg Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity, and Citizenship at the Graduate Faculty, New School University, New York. Peter M. Benda is Associate Director of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Program on International Policy Attitudes, Washington D.C.

Imagining mobility: the prospective cognition question in migration research

ABSTRACT Most migration research is focused on migrant experiences after mobility and settlement. We argue that empirical researchers would benefit from studying how cognitive migration, the narrative imagining of oneself inhabiting a foreign destination prior to the actual physical move, influences migration behaviour. This article notes a gap in our current understanding of the process by which individuals decide to cross international borders and offers an agenda for remedying this. The interdisciplinarity of migration research has not fully extended to social psychology or cognitive social sciences, where a dynamic research agenda has examined human decision-making processes, including prospection and the connections between culture and cognition. The study of socio-cognitive processes in migration decision-making has been largely overlooked because of the after-the-fact nature of data collection and analysis rather than an aversion to these approaches per se. We highlight a number of strategic findings from this diverse field, provide examples of migration scholarship that has benefited from these insights, and raise questions about the sides of migration process that have received insufficient attention. A more nuanced understanding of prospective thinking—imagining potential futures—can shed light on the classic puzzle of why some people move while others in comparable situations do not.

Smart Humanitarianism: Re-imagining Human Rights in the Age of Enterprise

A paradigmatic shift around the central role of ‘social entrepreneurs’ is captivating a broad, diverse range of social actors refashioning the institutional landscape of human rights and humanitarian practices. For this special issue dedicated to ‘Re-imagining Human Rights’, we explore some of the implications of these revolutionary changes in human rights practices, and their consequences for sociological study and political critique in the 21st century. Following a discussion of the state of the sociology of human rights practices, we describe the remaking of the human rights arena into a site of technocratic organizations with an emphasis on the ‘triple bottom line’ (financial, social and environmental sustainability). This market-led rights paradigm also promotes a new kind of empathy required for social problem-solving and humanitarian action – one less sentimental, much more technocratic and managerial. We offer some critical observations on this ‘smart humanitarianism’, which emphasizes the human-machine partnership via online technologies, apps, and expert systems management strategies; they redistribute the cognitive responsibilities of determining and delivering goods for greatest measurable impact with a quid-pro-quo of reframing inequality. We introduce the other contributing articles, signposting notable elements and the implications for wider socio-political critique, especially regarding ‘smart humanitarianism’.

Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants

world co-evolve as one civil society and nature give way to a new civil society with an alternative practice toward the natural environment. To analytically examine this transformative process, he uses an analytic framework comprised of four components around which frontier conflicts coalesce: (1) changes in migration and settlement patterns; (2) shifts in resource use; (3) creation of new social institutions; and (4) economic globalization pressure. Based on his extensive field research, he provides us with examples of frontier transitions from a wide range of locations and time periods, such as the shift away from common-pool resource management in the Spanish Pyrenees, and the development of ecotourism in the Mexican Caribbean coast. At the core of his analysis is that frontiers can be seen as places where there is a “renegotiation between the increasing penetrative power of the market and the establishment, or defense, of cultural identity” (p. ix). In all of the cases studied, he shows how the penetration of global economic forces collided with, and ultimately transformed, both the nature of the civil society and the treatment of nature in each location. The use of frontiers as the site for this analysis is a unique and original contribution to the study of the interactions between society and nature. One can easily see how frontier conflicts over what society would be dominant in an area also involve what practices will be followed in the interaction with nature. Additionally, his close attention to historical analysis leaves one firmly convinced that his portrayal of events is well founded. Throughout his analysis, Redclift refers to the dialectical process that occurs between the development of civil society and the natural world. Yet, how this dialectical process of mutual influence works is never clearly delineated. Rather, one must infer this from the narrative analyses. As a result, a causal analysis of mutual causality between social structures and nature cannot be analytically distilled from this work. Additionally, there has been a great deal of work done by human ecologists (such as Bonnie McCay, Tom Rudel, or Thomas Dietz) attempting to develop causal models of the process linking social processes to natural processes. Yet nowhere in this work do we see any reference or connection to this work. So while Redclift has made a contribution to the work on understanding society/environment relations, its overall potential contribution to the literature remains unrealized. Overall, I feel that Redclift has produced an important and strong addition to our understanding of the interaction between society and nature. By examining the frontier and how this physical place embodies conflicts over both civil society and our treatment of the natural world, Redclift has moved beyond the stale debate over social constructionist vs. realist notions of nature, and successfully unites them both in the study of society/nature interactions. This is an important contribution that deserves a wide readership.

Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern EuropeImmigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe, by CalavitaKitty. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 278 pp.

Italy is one of the iconic migrant-sending countries to North America and the rest of Europe; Spanish immigrants also fanned out across the Americas and Europe. For over a century, marginalized Southern Europeans took the jobs others were unable or unwilling to take. Yet, these former countries of mass emigration have, in a couple of short decades, become gateways for hundreds of thousands of mostly African and Latin American immigrants to other European Union destinations and, increasingly, the final destination. In the context of a declining native birthrate, this has largely been engineered by countries that, in spite of high unemployment, have critical shortages in some work sectors. Yet, it’s very similar of Aristide Zolberg’s famous observation that “immigrant workers are wanted, but not welcome.” The challenge for Italy and Spain, like nearly all countries with high levels of low-skilled immigrant labor, is to simultaneously keep the employers supplied with cheap labor (through highly selective law enforcement and policy loopholes) while attempting to dampen the inevitable backlash against foreign immigrant workers. But what if the very policies—inscribed in law—that attract them virtually ensure their continued marginalization and even criminalization? This is Kitty Calavita’s forceful central argument as she examines a paradox: Italy and Spain’s efforts at immigrant integration are not simply lip service, even pursued by some otherwise anti-immigration politicians, and yet these efforts are doomed to failure due to the “economics of [othering].”