“Back There We Had Nothing to Eat”: The Case of Transnational Food Insecurity

This article discusses migrant food insecurity in the United States from the perspective of Mexican and Central American migrant women. Many describe migrating because they had nothing to eat in their countries of origin. Migration is thus framed as a necessary strategy for overcoming food insecurity. I argue that these women's perspectives are unique in the migration literature because food security comprises a gendered labour from which men are frequently spared. Unfortunately, food insecurity still prevails in these women's households in the US. Assuming a “double‐duty” workday of earning wages and overseeing care within households, these women experience the added burden of ensuring food security of households “back there.” Thus, I argue that the food practices of Mexican and Central American migrant women provide a unique lens through which to understand the increased feminization of transnational migration from Latin America to other regions of the world.     

Living with uncertainty: disappearing modernities and polluted urbanity in post‐2000 Harare,Zimbabwe

Most studies of Zimbabwean migration and the country’s politico‐economic crisis focus on the material aspects of these two issues. In this article, through dual‐sited ethnographic work, I illustrate the symbolisms and meanings that are entangled within political and economic decline in urban Zimbabwe. Using data from fieldwork in Zimbabwe and South Africa, I argue that ‘crisis’ has carried with it a re‐configuration of the meanings associated with urbanity. This leads to a contradiction between how the state and citizens view ‘proper’ modernity. In combination with political factors, the state’s attempts to maintain modernity have led to a paradigm of pollution being associated with poor urbanites. This symbolism and its correspondent reality were found to have influenced the migration of informants in South Africa. It is thus not only economic and political relations that are at stake in present‐day Zimbabwe.     

On “Methodological Monism” in Rural Sociology1

Abstract This paper is a brief outline of the history of methods in rural sociology which suggests that the dominant methodological practice results from institutional arrangements and the traditions of the academic culture, as well as commitment to a scientific sociology. I note oft-stated critiques of the positivist model relevant to rural sociology's “methodological monism,” including imprecise measurement, low levels of predictability, and a social psychological orientation. I suggest, in addition, that methodological homogeneity in rural sociology presents social life as social facts rather than social process, leads to a simplistic understanding of the interview, and separates the researcher from the experience of research. A wider methodological orientation would, I suggest, encourage the examination of a wider range of issues and encourage wider participation in a subdiscipline which, because of its particular history, has developed in isolation from mainstream sociology.     

South African Indian migration in the twenty-first century: towards a theory of ‘triple identity’

This paper is inspired by three issues, namely ongoing research on South Africans of Indian origin, the anecdotal evidence that accumulates through ongoing discussions on a casual level with such people and the increasing interest among researchers about how globalization and transnational movements are impacting upon identity formation among minorities who are seeking employment or a new life in the developed economies of the ‘big five’ English-speaking countries, i.e. the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It is in countries such as these that a third identity emerges and develops to instill a sense of triple identity. The information here suggests that, when people of Indian origin migrate to one of these countries, they continue to cling to South Africa because it is their country of birth, as well as to India, more for sentimental rather than practical reasons. The topic of this paper reflects a contemporary phenomenon not just among the Indians in South Africa, but also among other diasporas such as Chinese in Latin America, whose new and final emigration destination always seems to be the US. In addition, people of Chinese origin in the countries of Indochina, such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, experienced similar patterns of becoming diasporas in Europe, North America and Oceania in the 1970s. However, migration implores them to renegotiate their identities in order to adapt and settle in accordance with their newly adopted host territories. This gives rise to an identity that straddles three countries, which induces the need to examine new ways of identity building in a global transnational economy.     

‘Skeptics’ and ‘believers’: anti-trafficking,sex work,and migrant rights activism in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Very little is known about activism, as it relates to the issue of migration in South Africa. Yet, migration policy and migration governance are increasingly becoming important to states like South Africa, which, 22 years into democracy, finds itself being home to the second highest number of migrants in Africa. This paper fills this gap by exploring multi-level policies and advocacy experiences of activists working on migration in a post-colonial context of South Africa through the lens of key contestations around the trafficking discourse in South Africa from 2005 to 2018.     

Physician Migration in the Global South between Cuba and South Africa

Transnational physician migration has concerned states' health and migration policies for many years. Recent developments have increased attention to the outcomes of these flows in the global south, where physician emigration is undermining public health policies. Cuba's exporting of medical professionals presents an alternative dynamic, based upon both an ideology of humanitarian solidarity and a need to secure hard currency earnings. The benefits and challenges arising from a bilateral agreement between Cuba and South Africa to supply Cuban doctors to South Africa and training at the Latin American Medical School (ELAM) for South African medical students are addressed. The benefits of skills enhancement and professional development are noted, as well as the economic benefits for both the Cuban government and individual doctors, while concerns with the appropriateness of the medical training provided at ELAM for the South African health context and the sustainability of the current policy are discussed.

Policy Implications

• Strategic bi‐lateral agreements offer a productive route towards more sustainable management of skilled migration.
• When migration agreements include skills training, attention is needed to ensure the training provided is appropriate to the destination context: attention needs to be paid to the appropriateness of the medical training afforded to South African medical students in Cuba for health requirements in South Africa.
• International migration agreements can form part of a broader policy suite aimed at realizing public health and other development priorities. However, attention must be paid to the suitability and sustainability of the outcomes of these practices.

     

The “Hamburger Connection” as Ecologically Unequal Exchange: A Cross‐National Investigation of Beef Exports and Deforestation in Less‐Developed Countries

This study explores Norman Myers's concept of the “hamburger connection” as a form of ecologically unequal exchange, where more‐developed nations are able to transfer the environmental costs of beef consumption to less‐developed nations. I used ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to test whether deforestation in less‐developed nations is associated with the vertical flow of beef exports to more‐developed nations. An interaction term also examines whether this relationship is more pronounced in Latin American nations, as posited by Myers. The sample includes all nondesert, less‐developed nations for which there are available data across all indicators (N= 48). Overall, the results confirm the tested hypotheses. The findings also provide unique contextual support for ecologically unequal exchange theory by demonstrating that unequal trade relationships can operate at the level of a single commodity type.     

Double‐mouthed discourse: Interpreting,framing, and participant roles1

In this article I examine multilingual displays in a Congolese Pentecostal church in Cape Town, South Africa. I focus on the simultaneous interpreting of the pastor's French sermon into English. I argue that the interpreting activity performed at church is used as a powerful interactional device to dramatize and shape the pastor's sermon. A close examination of participant roles shows that although these may appear to be predetermined by the interpretee‐interpreter format of the sermon, speaking roles are actually fluid and negotiated. I submit that an important role of the church interpreter is to convey the pastor's inspiration from the Holy Spirit and reach out to the potential audience absent from the here and now of the service. His high emotional engagement helps convey this inspiration prospectively to the audience and retroactively to the pastor himself.     

“You Know,Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant”: Religion and Transnational Migration

The purpose of this article is to summarize what we know about the role that religion plays in transnational migration and to outline a strategy for further research in this area. While migration scholars now generally acknowledge the salience of migrants' economic, social, and political transnational activities, we have largely overlooked the ways in which religious identities and practices also enable migrants to sustain memberships in multiple locations. My goals in this article are threefold. First, I provide a brief overview of related bodies of work on global, diasporic and immigrant religion and differentiate them from studies of migrants' transnational religious practices. Second, I selectively summarize what we have learned about the role of religion in transnational migration from prior research. Finally, I propose an approach to future research on these questions.¹     

“Don't Cry,You're Not a Baby!”: Emotion,Role and Hierarchy in Korean Language Socialisation Practice

I examine how South Korean children learn culturally specific emotional knowledge, especially affective hierarchy and the association between emotional displays and social roles, through participation in peer talk. An analysis of children's and teachers’ everyday emotional discourses shows that children, rather than passively adopting adult emotional discourses, creatively employ a range of linguistic and communicative features regarding emotions to construct their own culture‐laden emotional world. Findings articulate the role children's peer talk has in cultural reproduction and dynamic aspects of the language socialisation processes.     

Italy is not a good place for men: narratives of places,marriage and masculinity among Malayali migrants

Abstract Immigration from South Asia to Italy is a recent phenomenon and novel in that the pioneer migrants are often married or single women rather than men. In this article I explore the relationship between a ‘feminization of migration’ and the construction of masculine identities among Malayali migrants from Kerala, South India, who experience migration directly or indirectly through marriages with Malayali women living and working in Rome. The interest in focusing on the relation between women's pioneer role as migrants and their husbands' experiences of migration is to show how men's identity is represented through their conjugal bond with migrant women working in the domestic sector and to understand how masculinity is constructed and contested within and with reference to different places.     

The balance of care: Trends in the wages and employment of immigrant nurses in the US between 1990 and 2000

Abstract

Recently, the transnational migration of nurses from developing countries to developed countries has received heightened attention from policymakers, health-care practitioners, and the media. In this article, the 1990 and 2000 Census Public Use Micro Survey (PUMS) data files are used to address the issue of nurse migration. I examine changes in the number, location, wages, countries of origin, and other economic and demographic variables for foreign-born nurses and nurses' aides and US born nurses and nurses' aides over the time period 1990 to 2000. I find that foreign-born nurses and nurses' aides increasingly come from developing countries and, specifically, from Africa. This raises important ethical issues, as Africa faces a severe shortage of nurses in the context of the AIDS crisis. Foreign-born nurses are shown to have higher levels of education and higher levels of labor force attachment than US-born nurses.     

“Reconsidering the Study of International Migration: A Way Forward for Macrostructural Migration Research”

The “globalization of migration” has raised new and important questions about the macrostructural or global determinants of international population movements ( Castles and Miller, 2003 ). Yet there remains a dearth of cross‐national, empirical research in this area ( Portes, 1997 ). In one of the earliest attempts to empirically identify macrostructural determinants of migration, Amankwaa makes an important contribution to the literature (1995). There are, however, some conceptual, analytical, and methodological shortcomings in Amankwaa’s analysis of migration. These deficiencies merit comment because Amankwaa’s paper could become an increasingly important source of information for public policies and analytical research efforts, particularly as international migration continues to garner increased attention from public policy practitioners and academic researchers. I address key deficiencies in Amankwaa’s study and describe a more robust analytical framework and more rigorous methodological techniques for future research inquiries into the relationship between globalization and international migration.     

“Transnational” Socio‐Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research: Views from an Extended Field Site

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants' attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation‐states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants' extra‐local socio‐cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.     

“Those who come to do harm”: The Framings of Immigration Problems in Costa Rican Immigration Law

This article examines the political rationales at work behind the particularly repressive 2006 Costa Rican immigration law and subsequent immigration reform process and resulting 2010 law through an analysis of two rival framings of immigration in Costa Rica. First, I examine how the rushed nature of the 2006 law constructed a crisis in which migrants, particularly Nicaraguans, represented urgent threats to national security. Next, I examine the 2010 law that emerged from the reform process and the alternative framings of immigration as an issue of human rights and integration that migration advocates contributed to the new law. I argue that the juxtaposition of integration and security frameworks in the new law reinforces the law's most repressive measures, contributing to an overall project of securitization and marginalization of immigrants.     

‘Give me my pathway!‘: multinational migration,transnational skills regimes and migrant subjectification

In this article, I address the interplay between migration regimes and migrant subjectivities in stepwise multinational migration through a comparative analysis of biographical interviews with migrants in the healthcare and dairy farm work sectors in New Zealand. In both sectors, migrants' trajectories involve movements from Asia to locations in the Middle East, North Africa or Japan before arrival in New Zealand, and in some cases plans for onward migration. The analysis of these migration patterns and the narratives of migrants, reveal an emergent transnational skills regime that involves connected but uncoordinated systems of skills recognition; negotiating this regime occurs through increased attunement to migration on the part of multinational migrants, as well as adaptation to the expectations of authorities and employers. I conclude the article by suggesting that while multinational migration involves new opportunities for people on the move it also entails greater entanglement in the unequal conditioning of transnational migration.     

Learning to “Deal” and “De‐escalate”: How Men in Nursing Manage Self and Patient Emotions

While prior research has explored how gender frames emotion management processes, little work has specifically examined the links between men's emotion management in a caring profession and theory on masculine emotionality. Stereotyped as less sensitive to their own and others' emotions, male nurses confront unique challenges in navigating the profession's emotional demands. Drawing on men's diaries and interviews, I examine emergent emotion‐based processes that characterize men's emotional labor—the strategies men use to manage their own and patient emotions on the job. In managing their own emotion, men's narratives reveal three distinct strategies: reframing the nurse role, distancing, and relinquishing situational control. In managing patient emotions, they frame control over their own emotions as a means for managing others and emphasize knowledge/education as a strategy for managing patient stress and anxiety. While both male and female nurses may engage these strategies, men's emotion management implicates the simultaneous reproduction and disruption of hegemonic masculinity and the reason/emotion dualisms that undergird the current gender system. Implications for masculinity and emotion management theory, as well as recruiting, training, and retaining male nurses are explored.     

Troubling Whiteness: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article focuses on Harris's (this issue) understanding of racialized subjectivity as a socially constructed phenomenon where fantasies about race are transmitted intergenerationally. I was raised as a “white” South African and I had two vivid associations to Harris's proposal that a “psychose blanche,” an invisible repository of unsignified, racially inflected thoughts, feelings, and selves exists at the heart of “whiteness.” In both cases I recalled a scene from my youth where I was taught that whites in apartheid South Africa deserved punishment and would receive this “come the revolution.” These lessons were crucial building blocks in the formation of my racialized subjectivity, and I describe and interrogate them in an attempt to add further variety and color to the landscape that Harris so deftly draws as she resignifies her “whiteness.”     

Return Migrations of African‐Americans to the South: Reclaiming a Land of Promise,Going Home,or Both?*

Abstract Using samples of census data from the University of Minnesota Population Center's “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series” (IPUMS), we describe trends in African‐American migration to the South across recent decades, and explore the applicability of the concept of “return migration” to various demographic patterns. Our findings suggest that the return movement contains multiple migration streams involving African‐Americans of higher socio‐economic status (compared with both origin and destination populations) moving to both urban and rural destinations. These patterns represent clear differences from the earlier 20^th century's “Great Migration” of African‐Americans from South to North. The recent return migration streams suggest that the South may be replacing the North as a “land of promise” for some upwardly mobile African‐Americans, and may also reflect what Carol Stack (1996) has termed a “call to home” as a motivating factor shaping recent African‐American migration to the rural South.     

“Mad Money” madness: Jim Cramer's image restoration effort

The following is an evaluation of “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer's image restoration attempts during his March 2009 week-long media battle with Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show.” Using Benoit's (1995) image restoration theory as a conceptual framework, it is apparent that Cramer failed in restoring his reputation because he frequently coupled incongruent strategies and was unable to grasp the dynamic nature of communicative image restoration.