“Capital is moved to where low-wage labour is available, and migrants move – often in large numbers – to where investments and/or wealth accumulated due to specific historic factors create a demand for labour”. This volume explores this idea and contributes to the fields of global labour, working-class, and migration history by illuminating the lives of working people over the 19th and 20th centuries. The book's twenty authors discuss a wide range of topics, from capital investments in terms of the availability of low-wage labour and forced mobilization to gender discrimination. Contributors are: Selda Altan, Beate Althammer, Nina Trige Andersen, Cecilia Bruzelius, Geoffrey Ewen, Katharine Frederick, Veronika Helfert, Dirk Hoerder, Ritesh Kumar Jaiswal, Dácil Juif, Radhika Kanchana, Leslie Page Moch, Lukas Neissl, Christof Parnreiter, Lucas Poy, Richard Saich, Mahua Sarkar, Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Yukari Takai, and Aliki Vaxevanoglou.

This book draws attention to the various factors that characterize migrant flows and mobilities, calling into question familiar concepts such as push and pull, migration as a life project and sociocultural integration. It highlights processes such as fl exible migrant routes, temporary and return migration, mental aspects of migration processes and transnationalism, which are organised around the themes of shaping trajectories, frictions in space, and the migrant mental framework. It brings together work from scholars from Europe and beyond, with the contributions collected emphasizing the social and mental processes that underpin the migratory process, which can be seen as the ‘soft side’ of migration. Too often, this side is neglected when the governance of migration is discussed. The novel ideas expressed here also help to overcome the mechanistic view of migration as a push-pull event. Thus, the book suggests a different understanding of migration and mobility as relational, non-linear and fluid social processes, characterized by instability in migrant life trajectories. Emphasizing the fl exibility of migrants and migration and advocating the importance of emotionally charged, individual perceptions as central to migrant decision-making, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, politics and geography with interests in migration and diaspora studies.

Migrants, both spatially and mentally, no longer settle in only one national territory but interact or move across borders regularly, profoundly challenging the nation-state and the image of society as a container. This volume explores the ways in which migrants, activists and professionals connect social worlds across national boundaries through a variety of social practices. The contributions from various disciplines - anthropology, economics, political and social sciences, educational studies and social work - illuminate the meaning of agency in situations where the capabilities of transnational actors are constrained by nation-states, their borders and social institutions. Based on a relational understanding of transnational agency which builds upon new insights and developments within transnational studies and network theory, this compilation of chapters presents transnational processes and developments in and across various regions of the globe - in East Asia, the Americas, the EU, Southeast Asia, Africa and Australia, in the borderlands of Mexico and the US, in the transatlantic space of the 19th-century fin de siècle world - in order to demonstrate the importance of gaining, assisting and expanding agency in transnational contexts.

Unlike many other trans-boundary policy areas, international migration lacks coherent global governance. There is no UN migration organization and states have signed relatively few multilateral treaties on migration. Instead sovereign states generally decide their own immigration policies. However, given the growing politicisation of migration and the recognition that states cannot always address migration in isolation from one another, a debate has emerged about what type of international institutions and cooperation are required to meet the challenges of international migration. Until now, though, that emerging debate on global migration governance has lacked a clear analytical understanding of what global migration governance actually is, the politics underlying it, and the basis on which we can make claims about what 'better' migration governance might look like. In order to address this gap, the book brings together a group of the world's leading experts on migration to consider the global governance of different aspects of migration. The chapters offer an accessible introduction to the global governance of low-skilled labour migration, high-skilled labour migration, irregular migration, lifestyle migration, international travel, refugees, internally displaced persons, human trafficking and smuggling, diaspora, remittances, and root causes. Each of the chapters explores the three same broad questions: What, institutionally, is the global governance of migration in that area? Why, politically, does that type of governance exist? How, normatively, can we ground claims about the type of global governance that should exist in that area? Collectively, the chapters enhance our understanding of the international politics of migration and set out a vision for international cooperation on migration.

Recent studies on migration have been given a new focus and theoretical framework. The so-called “political dimension” of Diasporas, and their action at the international level as agents of para-diplomacy, as well as the introduction of analysis of the trans-national character of the migratory phenomenon, allow us to dig deeply into the field of our investigations, taking us out of the narrow frame of the Nation State.

This three-volume work exposes myths and debunks misinformation about global migration, an issue generating emotional debate from the highest levels of power to kitchen tables across the United States, Europe, and worldwide. Many don't realize that migration has been a central element of global social change since the 15th century. Unfortunately, misconceptions about the 3 percent of world citizens who do choose to migrate can be destructive. In 2008, riots broke out in South Africa over workers from neighboring countries. Today's rising tensions along the U.S.-Mexican border are inciting political, social, and economic upheaval. In the EU, political fortunes rise and fall on positions regarding the future of multiculturalism in Europe. Relying on fact, not rhetoric, this three-volume book seeks to inform readers, allay fears, and advance solutions. While other reference works tend to limit their scope to one country or one dimension of this hot-button issue, this book looks at the topic through a wide and interdisciplinary lens. Truly global in scope, this collection explores issues on all five continents, discussing examples from more than 50 countries through analysis by 40 top scholars across 8 disciplines. By exploring the past, present, and future of measures that have been implemented in an attempt to deal with migration—ranging from regularization procedures to criminalization—readers will be able to understand this worldwide phenomenon. Both the expert and the general reader will find a wealth of information free of the unsustainable claims and polarized opinions usually presented in the media. To view the introductory chapter of this book, visit http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2604184

In this book Robin Cohen shows how the preferences, interests and actions of the three major social actors in international migration policy OCo global capital, migrant labour and national politicians OCo intersect and often contradict each other. Cohen addresses these vital questions in a wide-ranging, lucid and accessible account of the historical origins and contemporary dynamics of global migration."