Dirk Hoerder

Cultures in Contact

In 2002, Dirk Hoerder published his magnum opus, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC, 2002). In this book, Hoerder describes and analyses, with an unusual breadth of scope, the origins, causes, and extent of human migration around the globe from the eleventh century onward to the present day, paying particular attention to the impact migrations have had in the receiving countries and the cultural interactions they have triggered. At the 28th Annual Meeting of the American Social Science History Association, organized in November 2003 in Baltimore, Dirk Hoerders book was the winner of the Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for the best book in social science history. In this review symposium, seven migration scholars from differing national and cultural backgrounds give their comments on Hoerders book, with a concluding response by Dirk Hoerder.

Struggle a Hard Battle: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants.

In this interesting and well-written book, Lenkowsky traces the political rise and fall of welfare reform proposals based on the negative income tax (NIT) principle, in both Britain and the United States. The attractiveness of NIT lay in its use of incentives to move people from welfare dependency to work. This aspect of NIT appealed not only to conservatives but, as Lenkowsky carefully notes, some liberals too (witness the unfortunate candidacy of McGovern); other liberal and left forces were opposed. The authors two-country comparison focuses on the Nixon administrations Family Assistance Plan (FAP) and the Heath governments Family Income Supplement (FIS) (along with the never-legislated Tax Credit proposal). This treatment may make more of FIS than it deserves. In my opinion, FIS was never much more than a low-wage supplement, heavily used by unsupported mothers who preferred work to Supplementary Benefits (welfare). In importance, it lies closer to the U.S. Earned Income Credit than to FAP. Although political eaders in both countries were intrigued by NIT, neither country enacted a thorough-going welfare reform based on it (or on anything else). Although Lenkowsky places part of the blame for this failure on the fact that NIT was complicated and hard to understand, I suspect that much opposition from mainstream politicians stemmed from the simple arithmetic of NIT: it adds to the pool of recipients, and is either expensive or pointless. Once this fact sank in, political enthusiasm for the idea cooled-indeed, it became frigid. The book is important reading for historians and other students of social policy who want to know how a major reform proposal like FAP (or Tax Credits in Britain) can create much excitement, come close to enactment, and then sink without a trace.

Britain to America : mid-nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States

From 1820 to 1860, the United States and Great Britain were the two most closely interconnected countries in the world in terms of culture and economic growth. In an important addition to immigration history, William Van Vugt explores who came to America from Great Britain during this period and why. Disruptions and economic hardships, such as the repeal of Britains protective Corn Laws, the potato famine, and technological displacement, do not account for the great mid-century surge of British migration to America. Rather than desperation and impoverishment, Van Vugt finds that immigrants were motivated by energy, tenacity, and ambition to improve their lives by taking advantage of opportunities in America. Drawing on county histories, passenger lists of immigrant ships, census data, and manuscript collections in Great Britain and the United States, Van Vugt sketches the lives and fortunes of dozens of immigrant farmers, miners, artisans, skilled and unskilled laborers, professionals, and religious nonconformists.

Importing foreign workers : a comparison of German and American policy

Contents: Alien labor, employment, immigration and emigration - US and West Germany, government and politics in West Germany and the US, public policy, political authority, administration, bureaucracy, interest groups.

Segmented Macrosystems, Networking Individuals, Cultural Change: Balancing Processes and Interactive Change in Migration

Until a decade ago, scholarship has dealt with migration in terms of disruption (Vecoli 1964). Under present-day immigration pressures on countries in the Atlantic economies, politicians and conservative voters demand restrictionist policies. Continuities of culture and migration flows, however, characterize intra-European migrations as Moch (1992) has emphasized and Nugent (1992) has pointed to the continuity in the demographic transition.

Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations

Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations connects the 19th- proletarian and the 20th-and 21st-century domestics and caregiver labor migrations and migration systems in global transcultural perspective. It integrates male and female migrations and employs a systems approach with human agency perspectives.

Separation or Permeability? Bordered States, Transnational Relations, Transcultural Lives

The authors argue that states were historically less bordered and self-contained than public opinion and the scholarship oriented around the nation-state have assumed. First, the authors address the permeability of borders in the period of mass migration at the turn to the 20th century, taking as examples migrants to Canada from Europe, China, and elsewhere. Second, they discuss the period of the 1880s to 1940s, during which the emergence of the working classes in the Atlantic world and “pauperism” prompted the emergence of transatlantic social thought. By mid-twentieth century, social citizenship arose as a corollary to political citizenship. Third, they discern a new stage of political interaction from the founding of the United Nations to the turn of the 21st century, in which democracies have become highly sensitive to developments beyond their borders and have become linked into a comprehensive multilateral system of organizations and legal rules. While noting that Canada’s record in protecting the rights of non-citizens within its borders earns it deserved praise, the authors argue that Canada simultaneously expends great effort on policing and preventing initial border crossings by those claiming human rights protection. While Canada has a relatively strong culture of rights protection and a famously weak conception of national identity, it also has an underestimated system of border control. The authors finally describe three liminal figures whose experiences illustrate the paradoxical interactions between rights and borders in Canada: the citizen abroad, the foreigner within, and the would-be asylum seeker.

Migration and Cultural Contact in the Emergence of Rus’-land, Sixth to Nineteenth Centuries

Migrations in the intercontinental macro-region have been studied as proto-Slavic early settlement; as transit zone for Varangian-Arab trade and Byzantine-Kiev interactions; as space of Mongolian intrusion and as a territorially integrated Muscovite state with rural populations immobilised as serfs. This article integrates migrations from and to the neighbouring Scandinavian, East Roman, and Steppe macro-regions up to the fifteenth century and, more briefly, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In these poly-ethnic worlds, resident and in-migrant cultural groups adapted in frames of intercultural contact, migration, hierarchies, processes of power imposition and of exchange. An important facet is the ‘small numbers-large impact’ character of many migrations before the advance of Mongol/Tatar armies. From the fifteenth century, elites of the new Muscovite state such as traders and colonisers moved east into Siberia’s societies and attracted technical and administrative personnel from German-language societies. The traditional historiographical narrative, centred on an east-west perspective, is expanded to include the north-south axes of migration and cultural contact.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Migrations in Slavic, Tsarist Russian and Soviet History

Migration in Rus’-land, Tsarist Russia and Soviet history received little attention before 1986. Since the 2000s interest has intensified. This issue of the Journal of Migration History provides a synopsis of the continuity as well as multiplicity of migrations from the sixth to the nineteenth century and case studies of different migrations from the late nineteenth century to the 1990s. Migration of state-backed Slavic-speaking peasants in the late nineteenth century into Kazakhs’ grazing lands disrupted the way-of-life of the herders and acerbated class relations between increasingly wealthy and increasingly poor herders. In Tsarist society as a whole, the regime deprived dissidents of ways of expression and encouraged pogroms against Jewish families and communities. Many of those who fled made their way to London and other safe havens. In Parliament, and among the British public in general, a sometimes acrimonious debate about immigration restrictions began. A 1905 anti-alien law kept the door open for political refugees but closed it to impoverished migrants. In wartime after 1914 and far more so after 1941 the state evacuated people before advancing armies and deported others, perceived to be disloyal. In this respect, the change from Tsarist to Bolshevik rule in its Stalinist version was no break – but the much larger quantity of people being moved around led to a new quality: authorities lost sight or interest in distinguishing evacuees from deportees. When, in the late 1950s, control relaxed, young people began to migrate on their own for a limited period of time. The limichiki faced exploitative hiring factories but often supportive state authorities. When glasnost changed the labour regime under neo-liberalist policies, the status of the temporary workers declined. The Tsarist-Soviet/Stalinist-post-1986 sequence of regimes encouraged, hindered or prohibited, and organised a vast variety of free, unfree, and forced labour migrations that were, in part at least, ways of life.

Makrosoziologische Ansätze in der Bevölkerungssoziologie: Migration

Einleitend wird ein konzeptioneller Rahmen fur Zuordnungen und Systematisierung der vielfaltigen Migrationen mit unterschiedlichen Intentionen, variabler Dauer und unter spezifischen Machtverhaltnissen erlautert. Unter Migrationssystemen mikro-, meso- oder makroregionaler Reichweite konnen vielfaltige aber doch ahnliche Migrationen zusammengefasst werden. Dabei sind Informationsflusse und Transportverbindungen sowie individuelle und familiare Entscheidungen und staatliche oder uberstaatliche Regelungen einzubeziehen. Migrationsregimes reichen von dem Zwangssystem der Sklaverei uber Kontraktarbeit oder rigoros selektierende Zuwanderungskriterien bis zu zwischenstaatlich geregelten Arbeitswanderungen, darunter die gegenwartigen Migrationen im Hausarbeits-, Kinderbetreuungs- und Pflegesektor. Forschungsstrategisch sind Abwanderungsrahmen in Ausgangsgesellschaften, der Prozess der Bewegung zum Ziel oder einer Sequenz von Zielen, und die Zugangsregelungen und Eingliederungsmoglichkeiten umfassend und aufeinander bezogen zu untersuchen. Akkulturation an die Zielgesellschaft oder Begrenzung auf eine okonomische Nische lasst sich mit einem Konzept von Transkulturalitat besser als mit transnationalen Ansatzen analysieren. Menschen investieren ihr mittransportiertes Humankapital – Fahigkeiten, Emotionalitat, Glaubensvorstellungen – in lokalen und regionalen Varianten einer Gesellschaft. Dies wird erfasst durch den umfassenden Ansatz der Transkulturellen Gesellschaftsstudien, der von lateinamerikanischen und kanadischen Entwicklungen der 1930–50er-Jahre beeinflusst ist.