To understand border enforcement and the shape it has taken, it is imperative to examine a groundbreaking Border Patrol operation begun in 1993 in El Paso, Texas, “Operation Blockade.” The El Paso ...Border Patrol designed and implemented this radical new strategy, posting 400 agents directly on the banks of the Rio Grande in highly visible positions to deter unauthorized border crossings into the urban areas of El Paso from neighboring Ciudad Juárez—a marked departure from the traditional strategy of apprehending unauthorized crossers after entry. This approach, of “prevention through deterrence,” became the foundation of the 1994 and 2004 National Border Patrol Strategies for the Southern Border. Politically popular overall, it has rendered unauthorized border crossing far less visible in many key urban areas. However, the real effectiveness of the strategy is debatable, at best. Its implementation has also led to a sharp rise in the number of deaths of unauthorized border crossers. Here, Dunn examines the paradigm-changing Operation Blockade and related border enforcement efforts in the El Paso region in great detail, as well as the local social and political situation that spawned the approach and has shaped it since. Dunn particularly spotlights the human rights abuses and enforcement excesses inflicted on local Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants as well as the challenges to those abuses. Throughout the book, Dunn filters his research and fieldwork through two competing lenses, human rights versus the rights of national sovereignty and citizenship.
Few phenomena have been more disruptive to West European politics and society than the accumulative experience of post-WWII immigration. Against this backdrop spring two questions: Why have the ...immigrant-receiving states historically permitted high levels of immigration? To what degree can the social and political fallout precipitated by immigration be politically managed? Utilizing evidence from a variety of sources, this study explores the links between immigration and the surge of popular support for anti-immigrant groups; its implications for state sovereignty; its elevation to the policy agenda of the European Union; and its domestic legacies. It argues that post-WWII migration is primarily an interest-driven phenomenon that has historically served the macroeconomic and political interests of the receiving countries. Moreover, it is the role of politics in adjudicating the claims presented by domestic economic actors, foreign policy commitments, and humanitarian norms that creates a permissive environment for significant migration to Western Europe.
Delegating Responsibility explores the politics of migration in the European Union and explains how the EU responded to the 2015–17 refugee crisis. Based on 86 interviews and fieldwork in Greece and ...Italy, Nicholas R. Micinski proposes a new theory of international cooperation on international migration. States approach migration policies in many ways—such as coordination, collaboration, subcontracting, and unilateralism—but which policy they choose is based on capacity and on credible partners on the ground. Micinski traces the fifty-year evolution of EU migration management, like border security and asylum policies, and shows how EU officials used “crises” as political leverage to further Europeanize migration governance. In two in-depth case studies, he explains how Italy and Greece responded to the most recent refugee crisis. He concludes with a discussion of policy recommendations regarding contemporary as well as long-term aspirations for migration management in the EU.
Mexico and the United States exist in a symbiotic relationship: Mexico frequently provides the United States with cheap labor, illegal goods, and, for criminal offenders, a refuge from the law. In ...turn, the U.S. offers Mexican laborers the American dream: the possibility of a better livelihood through hard work. To supply each other's demands, Americans and Mexicans have to cross their shared border from both sides. Despite this relationship, U.S. immigration reform debates tend to be security-focused and center on the idea of menacing Mexicans heading north to steal abundant American resources. Further, Congress tends to approach reform unilaterally, without engaging with Mexico or other feeder countries, and, disturbingly, without acknowledging problematic southern crossings that Americans routinely make into Mexico. In Run for the Border, Steven W. Bender offers a framework for a more comprehensive border policy through a historical analysis of border crossings, both Mexico to U.S. and U.S. to Mexico. In contrast to recent reform proposals, this book urges reform as the product of negotiation and implementation by cross-border accord; reform that honors the shared economic and cultural legacy of the U.S. and Mexico. Covering everything from the history of Anglo crossings into Mexico to escape law authorities, to vice tourism and retirement in Mexico, to today's focus on Mexican border-crossing immigrants and drug traffickers, Bender takes lessons from the past 150 years to argue for more explicit and compassionate cross-border cooperation. Steeped in several disciplines, Run for the Border is a blend of historical, cultural, and legal perspectives, as well as those from literature and cinema, that reflect Bender's cultural background and legal expertise.
What difference does law make in immigration policymaking? Since the 1970s, networks of progressive attorneys in both the US and France have attempted to use litigation to assert rights for ...non-citizens. Yet judicial engagement - while numerically voluminous - remains doctrinally curtailed. This study offers new insights into the constitutive role of law in immigration policymaking by focusing on the legal frames, narratives, and performances forged through action in court. Challenging the conventional wisdom that 'cause litigation' has little long-term impact on policymaking unless it produces broad rights-protective principles, this book shows that legal contestation can have important radiating effects on policy by reshaping how political actors approach immigration issues. Based on extensive fieldwork in the United States and France, this book explores the paths by which litigation has effected policy change in two paradigmatically different national contexts.
This book, in its second edition, introduces readers to the economics of immigration, which is a booming field within economics. The main themes and objectives of the book are for readers to ...understand the decision to migrate, the impacts of immigration on markets and government budgets and the consequences of immigration policies in a global context. Our goal is for readers to be able to make informed economic arguments about key issues related to immigration around the world.
This book applies economic tools to the topic of immigration to answer questions like whether immigration raises or lowers the standard of living of people in a country. The book examines many other consequences of immigration as well, such as the effect on tax revenues and government expenditures, the effect on how and what firms decide to produce and the effect on income inequality, to name just a few. It also examines questions like what determines whether people choose to move and where they decide to go. It even examines how immigration affects the ethnic diversity of restaurants and financial markets.
Readers will learn how to apply economic tools to the topic of immigration. Immigration is frequently in the news as more people move around the world to work, to study and to join family members. The economics of immigration has important policy implications. Immigration policy is controversial in many countries. This book explains why this is so and equips the reader to understand and contribute to policy debates on this important topic.
In a New Land Foner, Nancy
2005, 2005-08-01, 20050101
eBook
2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title!
According to the 2000 census, more than 10% of U.S. residents were foreign born; together with their American-born children, this group constitutes one fifth ...of the nation's population. What does this mass immigration mean for America? Leading immigration studies scholar, Nancy Foner, answers this question in her study of comparative immigration. Drawing on the rich history of American immigrants and current statistical and ethnographic data, In a New Land compares today’s new immigrants with the past influxes of Europeans to the United States and across cities and regions within the United States. Foner looks at immigration across nation-states, and over different periods of time, offering a comprehensive assessment and analysis.
This original approach to the study of recent U.S. immigration focuses on race and ethnicity, gender, and transnational connections. Centering her analysis on the groups that have come through and significantly shaped New York City, Foner compares today’s Latin American, Asian, and Caribbean newcomers with eastern and southern European immigrants a century ago and with immigrants in other major U.S. cities. Looking beyond the United States, Foner compares West Indian immigrants in New York with those in London. And, more generally, the book views the process of immigrants' integration in New York against other recent immigrant destinations in Europe.
Drawing on a wealth of historical and contemporary research, and written in a clear and lively style, In a New Land provides fresh insights into the dynamics of immigration today and the implications for where we are headed in the future.
Drawing on more than fifteen years of research,Mexican New Yorkoffers an intimate view of globalization as it is lived by Mexican immigrants and their children in New York and in Mexico. Robert ...Courtney Smith's groundbreaking study sheds new light on transnationalism, vividly illustrating how immigrants move back and forth between New York and their home village in Puebla with considerable ease, borrowing from and contributing to both communities as they forge new gender roles; new strategies of social mobility, race, and even adolescence; and new brands of politics and egalitarianism. Smith's deeply informed narrative describes how first-generation men who have lived in New York for decades become important political leaders in their home villages in Mexico. Smith explains how relations between immigrant men and women and their U.S.-born children are renegotiated in the context of migration to New York and temporary return visits to Mexico. He illustrates how U.S.-born youth keep their attachments to Mexico, and how changes in migration and assimilation have combined to transnationalize both U.S.-born adolescents and Mexican gangs between New York and Puebla.Mexican New Yorkprofoundly deepens our knowledge of immigration as a social process, convincingly showing how some immigrants live and function in two worlds at the same time and how transnationalization and assimilation are not opposing, but related, phenomena.