Four overarching themes underscore the essays in this book. These are the creation of African diaspora community and institutional structures; the structured and shared relationships among African immigrants, host, and homeland societies; the construction and negotiation of diaspora spaces, and domains (racial, ethnic, class consciousness, including identity politics; and finally African migrant economic integration, occupational, and labor force roles and statuses and impact on host societies. Each of the thematic themes has been chosen with one specific goal in mind: to depict and represent the critical components in the reconstitution of the African diaspora in international migration. We contextualized the themes in the African diaspora as a dynamic process involving what Paul Zeleza called the "diasporization" of African immigrant settlement communities in global transnational spaces. These themes also reflect the diversities inherent in the diaspora communities and call attention to the fluid and dynamic boundaries within which Africans create, diffuse, and engage host and home societies. In this context, the themes outlined in this book embody the diaspora tapestries woven by the immigrants to center African social and cultural forms in their host societies and communities. Collectively, the themes represent pathways for the elucidation of understanding African immigrant territorialization. Our purpose is to map out and identify the sources and sites for the contestations of the myriad of cultural manifestations of the new African diaspora and its depictions within the totality of the shared meanings and appropriations of the essences of African-ness or African blackness. The vulnerabilities, struggles, threats (internal or external to the immigrant community), and opportunities emanating from the diasporic relationships that these immigrants create are accentuated within the nexus of African global migrations. We view the African diaspora in terms of spatial and geographic constructions and propagations of African cultural identities and institutional forms in global domains whose boundaries are not static but rather dynamic, complex, and multidimensional. Simply stated, we approach the African diaspora from a perspective that incorporates the historical, as well as contemporary postmodern constructions of the Africa's dispersed communities and their associated transnational identity forms.

This timely book examines the global phenomenon of migration in all of its dimensions within, to, and from Africa. It also addresses the very important 21st-century political issue of migration management in regional perspectives and considers the crucial issue of the brain drain along with the roles of the diaspora and remittances.

International Migration: Prospects and Policies offers a comprehensive, up-to-date survey of global patterns of international migration and the policies employed to manage the flows. It shows that international migration is not rooted in poverty or rapid population growth, but in the expansion and consolidation of global markets. As nations are structurally transformed by their incorporation into global markets, people are displaced from traditional livelihoods and become international migrants. In seeking to work abroad, they do not necessarily move to the closest or richest destination, but to places already connected to their countries of origin socially, economically, and politically. When they move, migrants rely heavily on social networks created by earlier waves of immigrants, and, in recent years, professional migration brokers have become increasingly common. Developing countries generally benefit from international migration because migrant savings and remittances provide foreign earnings to finance balance of payments deficits and make productive investments. Some developing nations have gone so far as to establish programs or ministries dedicated to the export of workers. Developed nations, in contrast, focus more on the social and economic costs of immigrants and seek to reduce their numbers, regulate their characteristics, and limit their access to social services. Over time, receiving nations have gravitated toward a similar set of restrictive policies, yielding undocumented migration as a worldwide phenomenon. Globalization also creates infrastructures of transportation, communication, and social networks to put developed societies within reach. In the latter, ageing populations and segmenting markets create a persistent demand for immigrant workers. All these trends are likely to intensify in the coming years to make immigration policy a key political issue in the twenty-first century.

The dawn of neoliberal rationality in Africa in the 1980s coincided with a massive exodus of skilled Africans to the global North. Moving beyond the 'push and pull' framework that has dominated studies of this phenomenon, this collection instead looks at African transnational migrations against the backdrop of rapid and intensifying globalization.

The first text that specifically links both international and internal migration with development at a global level. The world is divided into a series of functionally integrated development zones which are identified, not simply on the basis of their level of development, but also through their spatial patterns and historical experience of migration. Migration and Development stresses the importance of migration in discussing regional, rather than simply country, differences. These variations in mobility are placed within the context of a global hierarchy, although regional, national and local cultural and social conditions are certainly not ignored in this wide-ranging work.

Highlights global asymmetries by interfacing the notion of 'one world' or 'flat world' with the challenges thrown up by transnational migration, brain drain, citizenship, identity, multiculturalism, religion and ethnicity. This book covers movement of refugees, xenophobia, and transition from economic migration to citizenship.