Labor Migration

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

This paper critically reviews the current status of the concept of distance in human geography in order to argue that recent experimentally-driven work in construal-level theory offers ample opportunities for recasting distance as a key geographical trope. After analysing the four entangled dimensions of distance revealed by construal-level theory (spatial distance; temporal distance; social distance; and hypothetical distance), the paper articulates this research program from experimental psychology with geographical work on non-representational theory, geographical imaginations/imaginative geographies, learning as a geographical process, TimeSpace theorizing, and ontogenetic understandings of space. It is argued that the subjective understanding of distance afforded by construal-level theory can rescue distance from its entrenched association with positivistic geography and spatial analysis. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.018

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles.

The twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant. At the turn of the twenty-first century, there were more migrants than ever before in recorded history. Today there are over 1 billion migrants. Each decade, the percentage of migrants as a share of total population continues to rise, and in the next twenty-five years, the rate of migration is predicted to be higher than in the last twenty-five. More than ever, it is becoming necessary for people to migrate due to environ- mental, economic, and political instability. In particular, climate change may even double international migration over the next forty years. What is more, the percentage of total migrants who are non-status or undocumented is also increasing, thus posing a serious challenge to democracy and political representation.

Wisdom is at once one of the most elusive and most valued kinds of knowledge. Empirical research shows that, indeed, across cultures, people hope that life experience will eventually make them wiser. The problem is that, to date, the academic study of wisdom and of the processes by which it can be learned has been dominated by psychologists. The first part of the article reviews the state-of-the-art psychological scholarship on wisdom to show how that conceptualization lacks geographical sensitivity and therefore misses some of the crucial geographical mechanisms by which people become wiser. The second part of the article singles out and focuses on one such mechanism, namely, the learning of wisdom through geographical dislocations. By drawing on insights from the study of international migration, exile, and transculturation in postcolonial contexts, the final part of the article suggests specific learning processes that might strengthen the hypothesis that geographical dislocations and the attendant cross-cultural experiences they generate are often conducive to wisdom. La sabiduría es a la vez uno de los tipos de conocimiento más esquivos y más valorados. La investigací on empírica en verdad muestra que en todas las culturas la gente espera que la experiencia de la vida eventualmente los haga más sabios. El problema es que hasta ahora el estudio académico sobre la sabiduría y sobre los procesos por medio de los cualesésta puede alcanzarse ha estado dominado por los psicólogos. La primera parte del artículo revisa el estado del arte de la erudicí on psicoí ogica sobre este particular, para mostrar c ´ omo esa conceptualizací on carece de sensibilidad geográfica y en consecuencia deja de considerar algunos de los mecanismos geográficos cruciales mediante los cuales la gente se hace más sabia. La segunda parte del artículo escoge y se concentra en uno de tales mecanismos, o sea, el aprendizaje de la sabiduría por medio de las dislocaciones geográficas. A partir de la perspicacia del estudio de la migrací on internacional, el exilio y la transculturací on en contextos poscoloniales, la parte final del artículo sugiere procesos de aprendizaje específicos, que podrían fortalecer la hipótesis de que las dislocaciones geográficas y las experiencias culturales de vasto espectro generadas por aquellas a menudo llevan a la sabiduría. Palabras clave: distancia, dislocaciones geográficas, migrací on internacional, aprendizaje visceral, sabiduría.

"While scholarship concerning the large transnational migrant workforce in the Gulf States remains in its nascent stages, over the last two decades a small but substantial collection of studies have examined the lived experiences of migrants in the GCC States. Much of this work is ethnographic in nature, and while these works collectively explore a diversity of themes, much of the work focused on unskilled and semi-skilled migrants congeals around an explication of the difficult and often exploitative conditions endured during the migrants’ time in the GCC States. These conditions and the relations that underpin them are a product of a complex migration system that includes labor brokers in the sending states, manpower agencies in the receiving states, the policies and procedures collectively referred to as the sponsorship system, and a set of enduring social and cultural practices that normalize these relations. In that complex system, the relatively substantial sums invested by migrants and their families is often at risk, and for some unskilled migrants, the Gulf sojourn leads not to economic security, but instead carries them and their families into a financial cataclysm. The scale of this problem remains unknown, but ethnographic work in the region posits this outcome as a recurring and widespread phenomenon.

This study presented in this chapter is grounded in a two-year ethnographic project conducted in Qatar, and it begins with these premises. From that beginning point, the chapter addresses a single fundamental question: if these outcomes are widespread, why do low-skill migrants continue to flow to the region? The answer to that question is presented in three sections.

First, there is no doubt that the wages for low-skilled positions remain competitive when compared with the regions from which most unskilled migrants come (typically South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa), and, furthermore, that the wages contractually promised to the potential migrant play a prominent role in the decision to migrate. At the same time, however, the ethnographic framework of this study provided an opportunity to deeply explore these decisions and their context, and these ethnographic data reveal a more complex and nuanced reality behind seemingly straightforward economic decisions. For example, many migrants’ decisions to migrate are connected to political and structural violence in their home countries -- the recent ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, for example, pushed many Tamil men and women out of Sri Lanka to the Gulf, and the ongoing strife in Nepal is oftentimes a central factor in the decisions that lead Nepalese men from their homes to the Gulf. In essence, the economic variables of migration often coexist with a constellation of other factors of a decidedly non-economic nature. Moreover, the interviews at the foundation of this project also revealed that the decision to migrate is often a product of the family (and, in the South Asian context, the extended family). The migrant is often an emissary of a household livelihood strategy, and more to the point, may have only a cursory understanding of the calculations, arrangements, and vulnerabilities he or she potentially faces when entering this migration system. To answer the question at the center of this chapter, then, many men and women migrate because their parents direct them to do so, and that decision often involves a constellation of extra-economic considerations.

Second, the flow of migrants to the Gulf is buoyed by disinformation and misinformation that inaccurately portrays the Gulf experience to potential migrants. The production of both misinformation and disinformation is distributed throughout this migration system. Labor brokers in the sending states often have poor information about the positions they purvey and the conditions unskilled laborers face in the Gulf. Even when they have good information, it is in their interest to elide, disguise, or direct attention away from the common challenges and difficulties low skill migrants face in the region. Manpower agencies based in the Gulf, in conjunction with the local sponsors of migrant labor, often collude in this systemic deception: men and women arrive in the Gulf to find themselves working in different positions and for lower wages than they were originally promised. While it is impossible to pin this deception on any particular junction in this migration system, it is nonetheless true that from the perspective of the population of migrants, part of the reason they keep coming to the Gulf is that they are working with imperfect information about the conditions of work and the vulnerability they face in the sponsorship system.

The final analytic section of this chapter explores the role that migrants themselves play in maintaining the image of the Gulf as a land of extraordinary possibility. Migrants in low skill positions often hide their circumstances from family and friends. The photographs they send home are of the iconic Gulf spaces, the green parks, and the waterfront promenades of the Gulf cities, as opposed to the overcrowded and often squalid conditions of the labor camps. Or, when companies cease to pay the labor migrants, migrants mask their situation by maintaining a steady flow of remittances, often by borrowing substantial sums from other migrants. And migrants often lie about their vocations while abroad, the conditions they face at the workplace, and other significant factors about their employment. The reasons for this deception are entirely understandable, for labor migrants often seek to insulate worried families and friends from concern and stress. Nonetheless, with hundreds of thousands of unskilled labor migrants actively engaged in the production of a sanitized and unrealistic image of labor in the Gulf, the role that their collective elision plays in the reproduction of this migration flow is undeniable.

Altogether, then, these arguments provide a provisional answer to the question posed at the beginning of the chapter: in spite of the difficult circumstances many migrants face in Qatar and the other Gulf States, they continue to flow to the region in part because of the imperfect information that flows back to the sending countries.
"

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coexistence and intertwinement of at least three distinct types of power at work there: the sovereign exclusion of illegal life, the disciplinary detention of surveilled life, and the biopolitical circulation of migratory life. By doing so this paper offers an original contribution to two major areas of study: in Foucault studies this paper expands the existing literature on Foucault by analyzing the crossroads of power particular to the US/Mexico border wall, which has not yet been done, and in border studies this Foucauldian approach offers a unique political analysis that goes beyond the critique of sovereignty and toward an analysis of coexisting strategies of power.

This chapter explains why a growing number of people across the globe experience precarious citizenship--they cannot gain access to secure and permanent legal statuses for protracted periods. Ambiguous and temporary legal statuses are spreading because they represent a strategic government response to avoid resolving dilemmas about citizenship (especially questions about the incorporation of minorities, refugees, or labor migrants) by postponing those decisions, perhaps indefinitely. Moreover, the very processes of boundary-enforcement (biometric IDs and deportations) have pulled more people into the documentary power of the state without providing them a secure place within it. Four categories are discussed: 1) individuals who cannot obtain national identity documents and become stateless; 2) individuals who may have identity documents but lack residency authorization and become ‘illegal’; and a spectrum of groups with temporary statuses that are neither stateless nor fully unauthorized, including (3) temporary humanitarian protection or (4) temporary labor statuses.

The 20th Century revolved politically around competing interpretations of Capitalism, Communism, Socialism and Fascism. These are all ways to organize the lives of people on a large scale. Are real alternatives or new interpretations likely to emerge in the challenging years ahead? What might they look like?

This article concerns the extent to which corrupt behavior is dependent on the organizational power structure and the resources available for illegal exchange. This qualitative study is based on 42 in-depth interviews with organizational actors in different organizations in Hungary. Four core themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (a) isolated corruption at the bottom, (b) the middle level’s own corruption, (c) “technicization” when middle-level professionals and expert groups are used to legalize the corruption of the dominant coalition, and (d) “turning-off controls” when organizational elites intentionally deactivate internal and external controls to avoid detection.

In this introduction to the Focus Section “Learning as a Geographical Process,” I provide a context for the four articles that follow, by means of (1) making explicit the threefold rationale for this initiative; (2) relating this initiative with previous geographical scholarship on the problematic of learning; (3) highlighting the significance of the self-referential character of our work; (4) providing a brief outline of the articles that follow; and (5) pointing out the important fact that both “learning” and “geographical process” constitute semantically rich categories and that relating the two involves a many-to-many type of logical mapping.

Abstract Migration has no respect for either borders or boundaries. Although the title of this volume is ‘International Migration in Southeast Asia,’ the movements of people have occurred and continue to be within the region, between regions in Asia, and across the North-South divide. The region is home to some of the largest labor surplus countries, namely the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Myanmar. Research on contemporary migration in Asia are dominated by the view that migration is an economically driven phenomenon; hence, the overwhelming interest in labor migration. However, if migration is regarded as more than an economic phenomenon, then we can appreciate how incredibly diverse it is as a human and social experience. When we do capture the diversity of such migration trajectories within the interstices of conventional flows of people recognized by the state and mainstream scholarship, we can see how the experience of migration can be treated in a novel way.

In the current political climate between Russia and the United States it is difficult to find analyses on Russian politics not reflective of the larger disillusionment and semi-animosity pervading the overall relationship dynamic. Thus, when an American 'Russian expert' is asked about recent conversations in Moscow about controlling illegal or undocumented migration into and across Russia, more likely than not a lecture will ensue about violations of human rights, the inexorable rise of Russian nationalism and xenophobia, and, of course, the increasing desire of President Putin to bring more authoritarianism to the Russian Federation. Unfortunately, while aspects of all three of these issues can be force-fed into the migration/immigration topic, this would actually be doing a disservice to a more subtle understanding of the concerns not only facing the Russian Federation but the wider global community, especially the European Union.

The "Greek crisis" was officially inaugurated on May 2010 with the loan the Greek government took from the IMF-European Union-European Central Bank troika, the largest a country had ever taken (€110 bn). Since then, the social implications of this crisis have been dramatic. The form and the scale of social phenomena observed today in Greece and particularly in Athens--e.g., extreme poverty and inequality, profound police violence, organized racist violence--are unprecedented for the country. Nevertheless, a diachronic examination of some socio-spatial aspects of Athens reveals that the social character of the current crisis has been taking shape for some time. This article aims shed light on the social shape of the crisis by outlining three such socio-spatial dimensions as they materialized in the case of Athens during 1990s and 2000s: first, the emergence of new forms of social exclusion and inequality; second, the vast project of urban (re)development and the new spatialities it produced, and third the emergence of novel forms of political and xenophobic violence.

Migratory context and drivers:
◾Until the early 1990s, Ethiopia was one of the largest sources of refugees and migrants in Africa; since then it has become the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa.
◾Compared with many other countries in Africa, Ethiopia has a relatively low international migration rate. Analysis anticipates Ethiopia may experience rising outward migration rates in the next few decades as it develops and, as a result, continuing migratory pressures.
◾Most migration from Ethiopia is driven by lack of livelihood opportunities – especially for the young.
◾Oppressive political context and insecurity are cited as the second most important migration drivers.
◾Specific groups face migratory pressures from political and economic exclusion and marginalisation.

Outward migration:
◾The few legal options lead to irregular migration – in particular to the Middle East.
◾While the profile of migrants from Ethiopia varies by destination, in general migrants are young and single, increasingly female, and many are Oromo and Amhara people. The majority of legal Ethiopian migrants that go to the Middle East are young women.
◾Many migrants are victims of fraud, forced labour, and physical, sexual, and psychological abuse by employers or traffickers.
◾Secondary outward migration by refugees in Ethiopia (especially Eritreans) to Europe occurs as a result of their frustrations over their lack of opportunities in Ethiopia.

Inward migration:
◾Ethiopia hosts large numbers of refugees – most of whom are women and children – from conflict-affected parts of South Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea. Most refugees are prevented from working, with the exception of some Eritreans who can undertake informal employment.
◾There are also returning migrants, many of whom intend to migrate again.

Internal migration:
◾Migration within Ethiopia is thought to be larger than external flows. Rural-urban migration to improve livelihoods is a low but growing trend, in particular for young people, and can be a first step towards international migration.
◾Other internal displacement has been driven by drought, war, political conflicts, resettlements, villagisation policies and poverty.

Migrant journeys:
◾There are three main irregular routes migrants and refugees take out of Ethiopia:
– Eastern irregular route: desert and sea route from Afar, Dire Dawa, Jijiga, through Djibouti or Somalia, to Yemen and onwards.
– Southern irregular route: overland route from Moyale to Kenya and on to South Africa.
– Northern/western irregular route: overland route from Metema/Wollega province through Sudan and on towards Libya and Europe (by sea).
◾Taking an irregular route means that Ethiopian migrants and refugees are smuggled or trafficked during their journey.
◾The government response has been to legislate against smugglers and traffickers (conflating the two) and to impose a temporary ban on migration to the Middle East between 2013 and 2015. However, there have been few prosecutions and people have taken other illegal routes instead. This may change with the introduction of new legislation.

Development impacts of migration:
◾Remittances, from those abroad and in country, have had a positive effect on households and the country’s development, although some migrants struggle to send them. Officially remittances are worth USD 3-3.5 billion (2014/2015) (the true figure is likely to be higher). Declining international support for assistance to refugees in Ethiopia and the inability of most refugees to engage in livelihood opportunities are contributing to negative development impacts of refugees for Ethiopia.
◾Foreign aid has been credited with contributing to Ethiopia’s development, although it has also been criticised for supporting programmes that are claimed to have contributed to displacement. The effectiveness of donor support in helping to meet development challenges will depend on the Ethiopian government improving governance, empowering local authorities, and becoming more accountable to its citizens.

Coordinadores: Rodolfo Cruz, Ivy Rieger y Martha Judith Sánchez


El ser humano siempre ha sido un ser migratorio, traspasando diferentes fronteras geográficas, sociales, políticas y simbólicas desde tiempos inmemoriales. La migración, como concepto, forma una parte importante de la historia de la humanidad y ha influido directamente en la formación de una naturaleza multifacética de nuestras sociedades que vivimos hoy en día. Actualmente la región norte y mesoamericana, México en particular, está experimentado importantes cambios en sus procesos migratorios...

In Part 1 of this volume, James Carrier argues that anthropology finds itself in the midst of two crises. The first is internal, emerging from concerns over the future of our field and the role anthropology can play beyond the academy. The second is external, emerging from the economic crisis that began in 2008 (and which, though officially over, continues to challenge populations around the world). Although they have very different origins, Carrier says that both are reflections of neoliberal ideology and policy. The discipline's external crisis was brought about by the failure of neoliberal economic policy; the internal crisis reflects the influence in the discipline of a world view that echoes the neoliberal approach to people defined as independent actors who should be free of social constraints that can limit their ability to act as they wish. Echoing the tenets of neoliberal ideology, the proponents of neoliberal reform argue that they seek to promote individual freedom at the local and the national level, by removing the constraint of government control of economy and society. This not only promotes that freedom, they argue, it also facilitates economic growth. Those proponents recognise that there may be societal losses, and that impoverished, rural communities may be particularly at risk, but they argue that this is a small price to pay for the greater freedom and prosperity that will come to urban populations and to the country more generally (see the discussion in Huber and Solt 2003). Neoliberal ideologies and their emphasis on the individual as a decision-maker tend to limit the strength and logic of anthropological investigations that focus on individuals as members of social groups. One aspect of this is the neoliberal argument that the community is coercive and limits the individual, which leaves little space for the anthropological study of society and the contests that surround social belonging. Another aspect is the way that neoliberal ideologies construe people as economic beings, rational decision-makers who are motivated by the drive for personal gain and success rather than shared values and practices, which can only hinder their efforts to achieve that success. In this chapter, we examine the rise of neoliberal ideology and the growth of neoliberal reforms as they relate to the study and practice of migration. We argue that migration neither can nor should be reduced to the decision of an individual mover or migrant. Instead, we argue that it should be approached as a

""This article is an ethnographic study of a 29-kilometer stretch of cross-border highway located in South Albania and linking the city of Gjirokaster with the main checkpoint on the Albanian–Greek border. The road, its politics, and its poetics
constitute an ideal point of entry for an anthropological analysis of contemporary South Albania. The physical and social construction, uses, and perceptions of this road uniquely encapsulate three phenomena that dominate social life in postsocialist South Albania: the transition to a market economy, new nationalisms, and massive emigration (mainly to Greece). Taking this cross-border road section as my main ethnographic
point of reference, I suggest the fruitfulness of further discussion of the relationship between roads, narratives, and anthropology.

[roads, globalization, transnationalism, development, postsocialism, materiality, Albania]""

This chapter focuses on the policies and politics of Arab migration to the
Gulf States in the post-Arab uprisings’ period. It explores the following question: how do political and economic factors interplay in the policymaking by Arab sending states? The chapter puts forward the argument that, despite the common assumption that migration to the Gulf States is chiefly driven by economics, politics plays a major role in Arab migration patterns and policies, at the domestic, regional, and bilateral levels.(...)

This book addresses the challenges that the current migration and refugee crisis poses to the traditional integration mechanisms and processes employed by European countries. These challenges arise from the unprecedented number of migrants and refugees that have recently entered Europe; the mostly unregulated and uncontrolled nature of this new immigration; the burden that this puts on those European countries that have previously had very little experience with immigration and integration; the desire of immigrants and refugees to settle in specific countries; the security concerns that have arisen in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. The book explores the medium and long-term impact of these and other challenges on the debate and measurement of the success of immigrant integration. It covers four aspects of integration: (I) citizenship and legal statuses, (II) education, (III) labor market integration, (IV) cultural integration.

For many decades the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have served as primary migratory destinations for tens of millions of individuals from South Asia, West Asia, and other points in the Indian Ocean world.  While both historic and substantial in scale, these migration flows remain some of the most understudied movements in the contemporary world.  This paper begins with an overview of the current state of scholarship concerned with Gulf migration.  The remainder of the paper frames Gulf migration through the lens of family.  The paper first considers the impact of Gulf migration upon the families and households that remain in the sending countries.  Next, the paper explores the particular dilemmas faced by those migrants whose families accompany them to the Gulf States.  Finally, the paper concludes with an analysis of the impact of these migration flows upon local families in the Gulf States.

This essay, or rather collection of essays, draws together three distinct streams of thought, time and space into a single river of understanding concerning labor, leisure, human-nature relations, city and town planning and human evolution at both the individual and collective levels. From Daoist tales of effortless leisure under 'useless trees' to Pieper's eulogy of leisure in the Modernist world(view) of total work and onto the planning theory and practice of Sir. Patrick Geddes, this ambling and nomadic stream seeks to problematize hegemonic contemporary conceptions of evolution, order, labor, leisure, nature and human-nature relations and to plant the seeds of a new principle, a new mythos, to which human evolution and being can be oriented in ashes of the charred edifice of Modernity. Can we transcend the materially rationalist, labor centric conceptions of humanity that reign in contemporary hegemonic culture for a more holistic perspective in which the infinite and finite aspects of human being can co-exist without either one interfering with the other? Can human-nature relations, especially as cultivated through city and town planning, transcend the present order of hierarchical domination, objectification and callous consumption of nature for an order of relations in which nature acts upon us as a teacher and we consume nature in harmony with its own natural order rather than through creation of an artificial order?

Wars, revolutions, and natural disasters will inevitably lead to the emergence of
refugees and IDPs. During critical situations, their numbers are fluctuating from the
millions to tens of millions of people (as it happened during years of the First and Second
World Wars). 
Nowadays, globalization has allowed a large number of refugees, and IDPs to
move over long distances with the use of modern means of transports. Among other things,
it had just transferred problems of third world countries to the developed countries, where
the legal standards do not allow adequate ways of dealing with them.
Current UN statistics, are significantly underestimated, according to competent
experts, determines the number of refugees and IDPs is about 22 million. And this number
is growing, and in the long-term trend, it is clearly negative.
The unsafe situation in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern states forces local people
to migrate to better places of living. The majority of these refugees are Syrian asylum
seekers who escaped from the Civil war in Syria. Syrian refugees mostly choose to migrate
to states like Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Germany, etc. However, such refugee flow
doesn’t have the same impact in the host countries equally, it differs depending on
development, demographic situation, and a list of other factors of the state. Therefore, the
chosen case of differentials of refugee flow impacts in German, and Turkish socio-cultural
values, and labor markets is very interesting. 
Germany has hosted 484,000 asylum seekers, whereas as a frontline state in Turkey
this number is fluctuating around 2,620,553. Although, the refugee flows have different
impacts on these countries.

Este estudio surge de una investigación en proceso que se denomina Prácticas educativas con hijos e hijas de familias de jornaleros agrícolas migrantes. Inicialmente se presenta información recuperada del reporte de indicadores del Sistema Educativo Nacional (Panorama educativo 2015), que anualmente da a conocer el Instituto Nacional para la  Evaluación de la Educación (INEE). En este documento se muestra que en México aún no se logra cobertura universal en educación básica.
En otro apartado se identifica a la niñez migrante como una de las ocho subpoblaciones del país, que en su mayoría no asisten a la escuela (Galeana, 2016). Posteriormente se describe la atención educativa que se presenta en el estado de Chihuahua a dicha subpoblación. Al revisar los datos estadísticos se detecta que al aumentar los ciclos escolares, disminuye la matrícula. A partir de lo anterior se derivan los propósitos del estudio: conocer que características tienen y cuáles son las
expectativas de vida de alumnos de centros escolares para migrantes que cursan el tercer ciclo de educación primaria y educación secundaria. Lo primero, para identificar qué aspectos les han ayudado a permanecer y avanzar en el sistema educativo, a pesar de constituir un grupo en situación de alta vulnerabilidad y con grandes obstáculos para acceder a la educación. En relación a sus expectativas de vida, se considera necesario identificarlas, para analizar si el sistema educativo
puede darles respuesta. La información se obtuvo a partir de grupos de enfoque y entrevistas. Los resultados pueden contribuir a la reflexión en torno a la educación para la niñez migrante en la entidad.

Based on the authors’ long-term field research on low-skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article establishes that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated. Migration infrastructure – the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility – serves as a concept to unpack the process of mediation. Migration can be more clearly
conceptualized through a focus on infrastructure rather than on state policies, the labor market, or migrant social networks alone. The article also points to a trend of “infrastructural involution,” in which the interplay between different dimensions of migration infrastructure make it self-perpetuating and self-serving, and impedes rather than enhances people’s migratory capability. This explains why labor migration has become both more accessible and more cumbersome in many parts of Asia since the late 1990s. The notion of migration infrastructure calls for research that is less fixated on migration as behavior or migrants as the primary subject, and more concerned with
broader societal transformations.

It is well understood by most governments today, whatever their nominal ideology, that encouraging the private ownership of residential property is one of the most effective ways of ensuring social stability. A simple Australian example would be that after World War II, very large numbers of footloose demobilized soldiers could have been a distinct threat to the established order. It made very good political sense to direct them as soon as possible into stable employment, and into household ownership. Amongst the first acts of states which give up the lunacy of total centrally planned economic control is to move rapidly to create a residential owning middle class. As Russia formally abandoned communism in the early 1990s it did just that, allowing citizens to purchase their accommodation at very low cost. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, China moved in exactly the same direction, even while maintaining a facade of communist ideology. The communist state of Vietnam has acted in exactly the same way. When you have a home and a mortgage, you are probably reluctant to start a revolution, and the political elites have a significant hold on your behaviour.

Combining historiography, sociology of labor, migration, and urban studies, Antonella Ceccagno provides readers with a unique perspective on the dense fabric of global links within which the Chinese-run fast fashion industry is enmeshed. At the same time, she effectively demonstrates the role of migration and migrants’ entrepreneurial activities in processes of ‘rescaling’ of the city, analyzing the “ethnicization” of the workforce within this framework. This is a book that makes crucial contributionS to the understanding of migration, transnationalism, and labor regimes well beyond the case of Prato.
—Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna, Italy; Co-author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor with Brett Neilson


Based on in-depth field research, this book reveals how Chinese migration to Prato and Chinese businesses are integral parts of broader global changes. Apart from being a major contribution to scholarly research on migration, globalization, and urban studies, this book makes urgently needed interventions in public debates on social integration.
—Biao Xiang, Oxford University, UK; Author of Global Bodyshopping

The major purpose of the research is to examine gender differences in patterns of labor market activity, economic behavior and economic outcomes among labor migrants. While focusing on Filipina and Filipino overseas workers, the article addresses the following questions: whether and to what extent earnings and remittances of overseas workers differ by gender; and whether and to what extent the gender of overseas workers differentially affects household income in the Philippines. Data for the analysis were obtained from the Survey of Households and Children of Overseas Workers (a representative sample of households drawn in 1999–2000 from four major “labor sending” areas in the Philippines). The analysis focuses on 1,128 households with overseas workers. The findings reveal that men and women are likely to take different jobs and to migrate to different destinations. The analysis also reveals that many more women were unemployed prior to migration and that the earnings of women are, on average, lower than those of men, even after controlling for variations in occupational distributions, country of destination, and sociodemographic attributes. Contrary to popular belief, men send more money back home than do women, even when taking into consideration earnings differentials between the genders. Further analysis demonstrates that income of households with men working overseas is significantly higher than income of households with women working overseas and that this difference can be fully attributed to the earnings disparities and to differences in amount of remittances sent home by overseas workers. The results suggest that gender inequal-

The paper analyses migration flows from the Philippines in two gendered occupations: domestic helpers and computer programmers. The international division of labour theory claims that foreign investment determines migration from developing countries, especially of women, towards low-skilled gendered occupations in developed countries. This paper shows that the division of labour is neither gendered nor international in the predicted sense. For instance, data from Philippines Overseas Employment Agency shows that the theory is Eurocentric as Northern America and Europe are destinations for only 3 per cent of domestic workers’ flows. The paper argues that neo-Marxism creates bias in gender and migration research and hinders understanding of important gendered effects concerning migrants. Two examples of such gendered effects are highlighted here: the higher vulnerability to legislative change of migrant men employed as domestic workers in Italy and the higher penetration of women into computer programming in the migrant flows to the U.S.