Labour Migration Policy in Russia: Considerations on Governmentality

The authors argue that Russian migration policy reflects the functioning of contemporary Russia's entire bureaucratic machine. The bureaucracy's Soviet‐era governance techniques on the one hand and the material interests of particular pressure groups on the other, shape the manipulation of immigration regulation that has occurred since the early 2000s. Therefore, attempts to liberalize migration regulation, i.e., to simplify the legalization of foreign workers, have always been incoherent, accompanied by reservations and limitations. Additionally, Russian actions are riddled with conflict between ‘geopolitical’ and domestic policy rationales. The authorities’ occasional attempts to use immigration regulation as a foreign policy tool acquire primarily symbolic value in the ‘domestic political market’ rather than serving any instrumental purpose. The effort to enhance Russian influence in the post‐Soviet space through the ‘reintegration project’ (Eurasian Economic Union) collides with the goal of national labour market protection, since integration entails the removal of barriers to labour movement.     

Labour segmentation and outmigration in Japan: Evidence using firm–worker matching data

Determinants of foreigner outmigration from host countries have attracted considerable attention. However, minimal research examines the influence of firms’ working environments. Although the third largest economy, Japan's inability to attract skilled foreign labour remains a concern. This study is the first to investigate the effect of Japanese firms’ labour segmentation practices on foreign workers’ outmigration intentions. Segmentation refers to firms’ concentration on foreigner-specific skills, regarding foreign labour as complementary to local workers. This is widely practised because of immigration policy's avoidance of substituting Japanese labour or causing unemployment. The findings suggest that although foreigner-specific skills are highly valued in Japan, segmentation could significantly increase foreign workers’ outmigration intention. The lifetime employment system in Japan, job satisfaction and original migration motivations also affect outmigration. The results indicate that Japanese policies encouraging firms to employ foreign workers as complementary may harm its attractiveness to skilled foreign labour.     

The ethnosurvey in theory and practice

This article describes a research approach designed to overcome the limitations of federal immigration statistics and to illuminate the social processes underlying aggregate patterns of migration. The principal weaknesses of existing data sources are that they underenumerate and imperfectly measure undocumented migration; they do not reflect the widespread circularity of modern international movements; they omit variables central to the immigration process; and their cross-sectional collection and tabulation precludes the analysis of immigration as a dynamic process. The ethnosurvey is a research design that ameliorates these problems through 5 specific design features: multimethod data collection, representative multisite sampling, multilevel data compilation, life history collection, and parallel sampling. The ethnosurvey design is illustrated by its recent application to study Mexican migration to the US, and empirical evidence is presented to show how it corrects the limitations of federal data on immigration. In spite of its advantages, the ethnosurvey does have several drawbacks. It is costly and requires a substantial investment of professional time. Rather than emphasizing breadth of information, as does a representative sample survey, the ethnosurvey attempts to gather detailed information through intensive analysis of particular communities. The ethnosurvey, because of its costs and professional demands, is hard to implement within a representative sampling framework. For these reasons, the ethnosurvey is best seen as a supplement to other sources of immigration data, providing specialized information on the social processes that underlie the aggregate patterns revealed in national statistics. However, promising results obtained in applying the ethnosurvey to study immigration suggest that it may profitably be applied to investigate other longitudinal social processes as well, such as status attainment, occupational mobility, and residential mobility.     

A cultural economy perspective on service sector migration in the global city: the case of Hong Kong

This article argues that in order to fully understand the geography of labour migration to global cities, it is necessary to consider economic forces in conjunction with mediating socio-cultural influences. Support for this argument is based on an examination of the pattern of migration to Hong Kong, a city which plays a significant role in the world economy.
Reported here are the results of an analysis of recently released 1996 by-census data, and the authors' interviews with foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. These findings have shown that highly skilled immigrant workers were drawn largely from developed countries, the main sources of inward investment in this city, while less skilled immigrants were drawn from less developed neighbouring labour markets.
While the geographical pattern of immigration followed broadly that predicted from Hong Kong's position in the world economy, the results have revealed that cultural influences such as language and social networks are also important in shaping the economic roles of migrant workers.     

Policy Streams and Immigration to Russia: Competing and Complementary Interests at the Federal and Local Levels

This article uses Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework to explain forms of national‐ and region‐level governance used in the Russian Federation to manage unprecedented levels of international immigration. First, we identify the ways that the Russian federal government has legislated and governed international migration from 1991 through 2010. We then compare the federal level to the case of the Krasnodar region, an ethnically diverse region in the North Caucasus. We find that that migration policy adoption in Russia at the federal level is relatively immune to economic trends or labour needs but more sensitive to foreign and domestic political objectives. At the regional level, local socio‐political and economic concerns predominate and political objectives are secondary. Finally, we argue that migration policy changes or adopted policy at the regional level may be explained by an interaction effect between changes in political leadership, federal level policy adoption, and regional level context.     

Gender,Migration, and Law: Crossing Borders and Bridging Disciplines

The gendered nature of the immigration experience is shaped and reinforced by law, legal consciousness, and the normative understandings they help constitute. This article provides an overview of the role of gender in migration processes from a law and society perspective, and includes an empirical focus on the new immigration to Italy and Spain as an illustration of the utility of such an approach. Beginning with a brief summary of the literatures of feminist jurisprudence and law and migration, respectively, the small body of scholarship at the intersection of these fields is reviewed. The author then examines the new immigration to Italy and Spain and argues that this immigration and the policies that shape it highlight the role of the state in gendering immigrant labor and offer new angles from which to consider the interplay of gender, race, migration status, and marginality. In concluding, the author proposes that such exploration of immigrants’ experiences in southern Europe reveals the surprising complexity of immigrants’ multiple marginalities, and exposes the powerful contingencies of economic context, prevailing stereotypes, the particulars of state policy, and the agentive power of people struggling to survive.     

Immigration,segregation and social cohesion: is the ‘German model’ fraying at the edges?

In this article, we analyse immigrant integration against the background of German society’s social cohesion. First, we examine the integration process and policies with regard to the integration of first-generation labour migrants into the German ‘national society’ since the 1960s. Even though these ‘guest workers’ were confronted to ethnic and political exclusion owing to the so-called German integration model, they experienced socio-economic integration and, at the local level, some form of political participation. Secondly, we analyse the policies and the integration process of immigrant youth, specifically those of Turkish descent, into contemporary German society, the social cohesion of which is impeded by social exclusion and urban segregation. Our hypothesis is that – in spite of a long-standing refusal to recognise itself as an immigration country – Germany has to some extent incorporated its migrants and achieved an integration consensus, while paradoxically, national integration models in several other Western European countries are currently going through a deep crisis.     

‘Escaping’ managed labour migration: worker exit as precarious migrant agency

ABSTRACT

This article narrows in on the mundane yet extraordinary events surrounding migrant farm workers’ decisions to leave their state-approved employment and to seek a better life in Canada outside of state-managed circulatory labour migration. In so doing, this research contributes to conceptualisations of precarity, and of precarious status in particular, that are beginning to recognise its effects not only on workers’ economic survival, but also the more ordinary daily conditions surrounding workers’ sense belonging and personal autonomy. In their refusal to accept the terms of their contractual circulatory labour migration agreements through what is conceptualised here as an act of ‘escape’, workers claim a space of belonging that contradicts the precarity of their formal citizenship status. In carving out a space in which they may perform autonomy and self-determination in daily life, however, this rejection of contingent citizenship status intensifies the precarious material conditions governing workers’ relationship to the state.     

Adult vocational training for migrants in North‐East Italy

This article contributes to the study of policies for the integration of immigrants into the labour markets of European immigration countries by focusing on the specific issue of vocational training for immigrant workers in Italy. Vocational training has a central role in the European employment strategy. Moreover, with regard to migrants, it is also relevant to the topical issue of the governance of international labour migration. The article analyses both the demand and the supply of vocational training in north‐east Italy, generally regarded as the rich and industrialised heart of the country. It draws on 30 interviews conducted with key informants and experts from local and regional governmental bodies, trade unions, employment offices, and private educational agencies in the main towns of the Veneto region. Various types of vocational training for immigrant workers are considered, from traditional full‐time courses financed by the European Social Fund to new projects for the selection and pre‐training of immigrants in their countries of origin. The extent to which these policy tools are able to meet the actual needs of immigrant workers and of the local business sector is investigated, as well as their problematic interaction with the national regulatory framework for immigration control.     

Migrants' regular army of labour: gender dimensions of the impact of the global economic crisis on migrant labor in Western Europe

The purpose of this article is to remedy the lack of explanatory endeavours concerning the positive performance of female migrant workers during the recent economic crisis in Western Europe. This phenomenon both interrogates the established association between economic downturns and their negative impact on migrant labour in low‐skilled jobs and enriches the theory of the reserve army of labour, which has been applied to understanding the fragile status of migrant workers in Western economies. Secondary analysis of Labor Force Survey (LFS) and OECD data concerning the impact of the crisis on migrant labour shows that women employed in the care‐domestic sector have been affected significantly less than men employed in manufacture and constructions. To explain this evidence, the article proposes a theoretical framework that draws on key concepts and debates in different strands of sociology: the increasing demand for paid care‐domestic work due to the ageing population and the growth of native‐born women's rates of activity; the commodification of care and the state management of migration; the affectivity and spatial fixity of care‐domestic labour. All these factors contribute to configure female migrant labour, mostly employed in the reproductive sector, as a ‘regular’ rather than a reserve army of labour.     

Does Circular Migration Lead to “Guest Worker” Outcomes?

At first at the level of the European Commission, and increasingly also in the European Union’s member states, it is being recognized that past labour migration management tools have more or less serious drawbacks in that they produce undesired outcomes and do not sufficiently attain the objectives for which they were designed. The welfare states of north‐western Europe are discovering that their desire of the past three decades to restrict labour immigration as much as possible is no longer “in sync” with changing labour market demands, which are growing both for the highly skilled and the unskilled. In order to satisfy the demand for unskilled labour, schemes are being proposed that would allow for circular migration. The European Commission is a forceful promoter of these schemes. Member states such as the Netherlands, which we take as a case in point, are also considering modes by which to allow temporary unskilled labour migration, but seem intent on employing regulatory tools that are not very different from those used in the “guest worker” era, which brought about large‐scale settlement. Up to the present time, the resulting ethnic minority groups are the subject of large integration efforts on the part of the receiving states. This begs the question of the extent to which “circular migration” would be different from “guest worker” schemes, in its management and its outcomes.     

Migration at a Time of Global Economic Crisis: The Situation in Spain

In this paper, we offer an initial assessment of the impact of the economic crisis on Spain's migration flows. After a period of intensive economic growth and the ensuing immigratory appeal (1995–2007), Spain has been hit hard by the recession. This has modified the trends that had so far characterized foreign immigration in Spain. The impact of the economic recession has been particularly severe in the case of immigrant workers and, consequently, from an institutional point of view, the Spanish government has adopted various measures to restrict the arrival of new immigrants: it has reduced work permit quotas and it has modified the Foreign Residents Law, toughening residence permit requirements. It has also tried to encourage voluntary returns with a programme devised to provide assistance to immigrants originating from countries with which Spain has social security agreements. The response to this programme has, however, been very limited. Immigration flows have continued and rates of return have stayed low, although new trends are also detectable, such as a decrease in the number of irregular arrivals and a rise in informal employment, as well as differences in the impact of unemployment according to nationality and gender. This reveals the complexity of migration processes beyond the supply and demand of labour and the political will to regulate human mobility. Consequently, immigration patterns in Spain reveal the degree of complexity reached by human mobility, which has increased beyond the logic of the labour market and the government's attempts at regulating migration flows by means of institutional measures. The immigrants' hope of raising their standard of living and the socio‐economic differences between source and receiving countries, even at a time of severe economic crisis, do still serve as explanations for current migration networks, one of the key points in the current debate on international migration.     

Factoring Turbulence Out: Diaspora Regulatory Mechanism and Migration Development Bank

The ongoing economic crisis has shifted much of the policy debate to problems of financial sector regulation, productive capacity collapse, among others. However, this leaves unattended the real situation with labour migration, which directly impacts social and economic inner components of being of millions of individual families across the world. The somewhat ad hoc nature of the process poses several policy issues for the home and host economies alike. Immediate concerns relate to streamlining migrants and remittances flows. This involves sensitive aspects of inequality in migrant workers’ labour efforts vis‐à‐vis domestic workers; migrants’ social and legal status; and less obvious, but still profound, unproductive misallocation of labour resources. Derived from this premise and recognizing the need for an institutional approach, this paper offers alternative policy solutions to temporary labour migration regulation. This research’s original propositions include a Diaspora Regulatory Mechanism and a Migration Development Bank, both operating within a state‐managed temporary labour migration regime. Fiscal action, including multilateral agreements, is crucial. The functionality of these mechanisms will directly impact infrastructure, human capital and entrepreneurial projects development in both home and host economies. Discussion is inspired by the analysis of actual circumstances in the economies of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where migration is a social, economic, and increasingly political issue. In the interlinked world, diasporas become dominant actors across all society strata. The development plateau of the post‐socialist states offers a rich economic and social soil to conduct responsible policy with future outlook. Moreover, conditions of ongoing economic crisis offer a unique opportunity for daring research to propose and for a motivated decisionmaker to implement original, proactive, and beneficial policy solutions aimed at streamlining the (temporary) labour migration process. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on topics of diaspora, labour migration, and remittance flows.     

Chinese Labor Migration to Europe, 2008-16. Implications for China-EU Mobility in the Post-crisis Context

The article examines the evolution of Chinese labour migration to the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Italy in order to elucidate how the flows and stocks of Chinese workers have evolved since the Global Economic Crisis, and what implications this has have for Sino-European mobility partnerships in the post-crisis context. It explains: (1) What comparative data are available on Chinese labour migration to the six principal countries of destination in Europe; (2) How have Chinese labour migration flows and stocks evolved since the GEC; (3) How may the new Chinese workers’ mobility to Europe affect their rights?     

Best Practices to Reduce Migration Pressures

Are there best practices to foster economic development, reduce population growth, and protect the environment in source countries of unauthorized migration, in a manner that reduces emigration pressures and redirects migration towards legal channels? This paper outlines cooperative actions that can be undertaken by both source and receiving countries to better manage the movements of people over national borders. There are two broad approaches to foster wanted migration and to reduce unwanted migration. First, maximize migration’s payoffs by ensuring that the 3 Rs of recruitment, remittances, and returns foster economic and job growth in emigration areas. Second, make emigration unnecessary by adapting trade, investment and aid policies, and programmes that accelerate economic development and thus make it unnecessary for people to emigrate for jobs and wages. Most of the changes needed for stay–at–home development must occur in emigration areas, but immigration areas can cooperate in the management of immigration, guest workers, and students, as well as in promoting freer trade and investment, and in targeting aid funds. In a globalizing world, selective immigration policies may have important development impacts, as with immigration country policies toward students, and workers in particular occupations, such as nurses and computer programmers, as well as with mutual recognition of occupational licenses and professional credentials. Trade policies affecting migration are also important, such as trade in services and laws regulating contracts between firms in different countries that allow the entry of lower wage workers as part of the contract. opening channels for legal migration can deter irregular migration.     

The Revolving Door to Gold Mountain: How Chinese Immigrants Got Around U.S. Exclusion and Replenished the Chinese American Labor Pool, 1900–19101

This study provides a quantitative perspective on the Chinese American migratory system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the magnitude of various means for evading the U.S. embargo on Chinese immigration. Three sources are explored, including federal immigration summaries, census microdata, and a sample of person‐voyage records for steamship arrivals at the port of San Francisco (n = 5,707). Whereas parameter estimates vary among the sources from nearly twofold (gross migration) up to fourfold (net migration), all results are consistent with a revolving‐door system in which young male workers arrived as replacements for departing older male workers.     

Best Practice Options: Turkey

At the ninth Migration Dialogue seminar, held 29–31 March 2001 in Istanbul, Turkey, opinion leaders discussed the major immigration and integration issues facing emigration, transit, and immigration countries. Several major issues regarding Turkey were discussed. 1 This report was prepared after the seminar for participants and others interested in migration and development issues. It has not been approved by participants, and thus should not be considered a consensus document.
First, the effect of the Turkish Government’s modernization effort, which began in the 1920s. In the 1960s the government began to promote the export of surplus labour, with the hope that sending workers abroad from less– developed parts of the country would bring remittances and returned workers with skills needed for modernization. Among the governments of labour–exporting countries, Turkey’s has been unique in its high hopes for recruitment, remittances, and returns. They were expected to bring about a transformation of the country. These high expectations help explain the widespread frustration with migration’s actual effects. Second, the Turkish Government’s current goal of gaining full membership in the European Union (EU). Ankara stresses that the EU should embrace full Turkish membership for a variety of reasons, including the country’s strategic position between Europe and Asia, and to send a signal to other Muslim societies, such as those of North Africa, that the EU will include Muslim societies that are secular and democratic. Third, Turkey’s fear that EU membership would lead to another wave of migration. Many Europeans fear that Turkish EU membership would lead to another wave of migration. Turkey hopes that admission to the EU will bring EU assistance and foreign direct investment (FDI) that creates jobs and pushes up wages, thus making migration insignificant. Finally, Turkey’s position as an emigration, transit, and immigration country. There are 3 to 4 million Turks abroad, 3 to 4 million foreigners living in Turkey (perhaps half Iranians), and tens of thousands who move through Turkey to Europe. Turkey is revising its asylum law in a manner that will allow persons fleeing persecution outside Europe to be considered refugees in Turkey, to establish for the first time a support system for refugees.     

Navigating Globalization: Immigration Policy in Canada and Australia, 1945–20071

Scholarship on immigration and globalization has failed to adequately analyze the nation‐state’s regulatory capacities, insisting instead that contemporary patterns of migration jeopardize national sovereignty and territoriality. While recognized that states possess the legitimate authority to control their territorial and membership boundaries, recent transformations of these capacities remain largely unanalyzed. This article’s historical analysis of Australia and Canada’s postwar immigration policies demonstrates that the contours of state regulation are intimately connected to the exigencies of state administration and nation building and—in contrast to the expectations of dominant theories—have intensified and expanded within the globalization context. The literature’s inattention to the fundamentally political nature of immigration has obscured the critical effects of national policies within both the migratory and globalization process. Australia’s and Canada’s contemporary policies constitute a unique model of migration control and reflect attempts by both countries to strategically position their societies within the global system and resolve a number of economic, political, cultural, and demographic transitions associated with globalization.     

Immigration and cultural policies: a bone of contention between the Province of Quebec and the Canadian federal government

"This article addresses the way in which the Province of Quebec has obtained increasing power in the area of immigration.... Data from interviews with key members of [the Ministry of Immigration] and from selected documents are drawn on to illustrate Quebec's cultural politics. The Quebec position on the question of immigration as it has evolved in the context of immigration policies defined by the federal government in Ottawa is examined.... In particular, the present article considers how attempts to construct a cultural identity and a nation-state in Quebec have had important consequences for immigration policy and for attitudes and policies concerning Quebec's cultural minorities. The emergence of the notion of 'cultural communities' as a result of the constitutional rivalry and the on-going struggle for legitimacy between Quebec and Ottawa is also explored."