Jim Smyth. The Men of No Property. Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century. Gill and Macmillan, Dublin 1992. xi, 251 pp. £12.99 (original) (raw)

Attitudes toward immigrants in European societies

International Journal of Comparative Sociology

Since the middle of the 20th century, immigrants, ex-colonials, labor migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees arrived in European societies in ever-increasing numbers, and the migration flows continue until today. Some even suggest that the flows, especially of refugees from the war zones in the Middle East and Africa, actually intensified dramatically in recent years. Consequently, the social composition and ethnic fabric of many European traditional nation states have changed. Alongside these changes, we find a marked increase in the number of societal actors who address the questions about the terms of inclusion or exclusion of immigrants and the types of immigrants in society. That is, with more immigrants making Europe their permanent home, Europeans citizens and politicians began raising questions about the social, political, economic, and legal rights of the immigrants and especially about the place of immigrants in European societies. They also raise questions about the social, cultural, and economic impact that immigrants exert on host societies. Indeed, the status of immigrants in European societies is now one of the major issues of the public debate in contemporary Europe. The public and political debate regarding immigrants' place in society progressed in recent years from a labor market problem to a social, cultural, and political problem with greater emphasis on the issue of national identity. In this regard, it is important to note that the lion's share of the immigrants in Europe arrived as an initial response to the economic needs of the European countries in the middle of the previous century. Many European countries were (and some still are) in dire need of labor, especially cheap labor, due to a steady decline in the population and lack of native workforce (resulting from declining fertility and aging population). That is, immigrants, labor migrants, and 'guest workers' were invited and recruited to perform jobs that the local populations were unwilling or unable to take (mostly menial, low-skilled low-paying jobs in declining profit industries). Importation of immigrants appeared to be a simple, temporary solution to a domestic problem and market demand in Western European countries. The demand for workforce in Western Europe was met by the readily available supply of workers in poor countries outside Europe (and at times by the readily available supply of workers from poor countries in Eastern or Southern Europe). In other words, immigrants were attracted to Europe (push factors) from countries ravaged by high unemployment, poverty, and political instability and, at times, ravaged by war, to societies (pull factors) characterized by prosperous markets, high salaries, and political stability; to countries that offer a better quality of life and higher standard of living for themselves 732183C OS0010.

Historical Minorities and Migrants : Foes or Allies ?

2004

Immigration is becoming an increasingly important reality of the major cities within the territory of national minorities: Barcelona (Catalonia), Bilbao (Basque Country), Glasgow (Scotland), Brussels (Flanders), Geneva (French- speaking Switzerland), Bolzano/Bozen (South Tyrol), and Montreal (Quebec). Some of these cities have attracted immigrants for decades, while others are only recently seeing significant numbers of immigrants. Generally, claims of migrants and historical minorities have been perceived as challenges to the traditional model of homogeneous 'nation- states' and thus often seen as allies. In fact, they both groups seek to increase the opportunities for the individuals to express their identities and diversities, and so share a commitment to principles of pluralism and the recognition of difference. In reality, the relation between the two groups is more complicated and, historically, it has been marked by tension. Large-scale immigration has indeed typicall...

No more than a keg of beer: the coherence of German immigrant communities

Paths of integration: migrants in Western Europe ( …, 2006

IMISCOE is a European Commission-funded Network of Excellence of more than 350 scientists from various research institutes that specialise in migration and integration issues in Europe. These researchers, who come from all branches of the economic and social sciences, the humanities and law, implement an integrated, multidisciplinary and internationally comparative research programme that focuses on Europe's migration and integration challenges.

Knocking on the Door of Closed Traditions The Overlay of Autochthonous Ethnicization and Migration

Springer eBooks, 2023

The previous youth portraits represent examples of nationally and ethnically founded identity formation. The narratives of the young people, as different as they are, represent processes of identity formation between adaptation and emancipation within the own culture of the majority. Such majority cultures can also develop minorities if they constitute majorities over other minorities. And unfortunately, minorities are not so easily able to learn from their own experiences of suppression when they face other minorities or minorities within minorities as majorities. What applies to South Tyrol, which Italy annexed in 1918/19, is what the feminist theorist Judith Butler in conversation with the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as the perfidy of the nation-state. The nationstate forces the suppressed and/or marginalized minorities into the ethnicization rejected simultaneously through the nationalization of its policies (cf. Butler and Spivak 2007, pp. 30 ff.). The national assimilation pressure with bans on language and culture forces minorities to narrow down their political articulation to national defensive struggles, to constitute themselves as a homogeneous ethnic subject and thereby suppress inner diversity, social, gender, sexual, and/or other differences. The cultural unity thus produced gains the strength of a protective armor over other groups. The attribution of being different due to a few features that are not intended for it, such as language, origin, or religion, leads on the one hand to a discriminatory external ethnicization, which Mecheril (2002, p. 107) tries to grasp with the concept of Migrationsandere (migration-others). The term should express that immigrants are not different per se but made discursively into others through the perception of migration. At the same time, this external ethnicization can interact with practices of self-ethnicization, with which minorities form communities and-both personal and political-attempts to become subject matter. In this

"From immigrant to Muslims: shifting categories of the French Model of Integration" in Abigail Eisenberg and Will Kymlicka 'Identity Politics in the Public Realm' UBC Press - 2011

For several decades European countries have developed public policies that focus on incorporating immigrants into host societies. Governments and bureaucrats have designed specifi c policies to recognize, integrate, and assimilate foreign cultures and ethnic otherness. Since their inception, in most European countries, policies designed to include immigrant minorities have centred on ethnic identities and national origins rather than on religious identities. Th e British Race Relations Act of  provided a legal framework that organized the integration of immigrants from former colonies along racial lines (Favell ; Bleich ). In France, although the civic conception of citizenship meant that all immigrants could become citizens, policy makers based estimations of the likelihood to integrate on immigrants' national origin and, implicitly, ethnic and cultural origins (Hargreaves ; Favell ). For a long time, in Germany, the rule of the jus sanguinis implied that Turkish Gastarbeiter (temporary workers) were not citizens; therefore, citizenship categories also coincided with ethnic boundaries (Brubaker ; Joppke ). Hence, for over three decades, the various politics of inclusion implemented in many European countries primarily used citizenship status (immigrant, alien, or citizens) and ethnic identities as their main policy categories.

Immigration and social change in contemporary society: An assessment of the process of integration and the 'recognition' of ethnic minorities

2009

Contemporary politics has in recent years witnessed an upsurge of interest on the topic of multi-culturalism and the ‘recognition’ of minority groups. As noted by Bacik (2004:182) ‘by comparison with other European states, there was relatively little immigration to Ireland in the twentieth century.’ Ireland is a country whose history was characterised by substantial patterns of emigration. The 1990s however, introduced a ‘new’ Ireland with the expansion of the economy and the years of ‘The Celtic Tiger’. In light of this dramatic change the phenomenon of net immigration to Ireland began. This process of social change took the Irish government by surprise and has led to an abundance of ad-hoc immigration policies and to the lack of a coherent integrative framework for ethnic minorities. The rationale for this research is to contribute to an understanding of the importance of ‘recognition’ of ethnic minorities and how its incorporation into legislation and service provision is crucial...

Appendix to "Cultural Origins and Immigrant Integration in the West"

This is appendix to the book "Cultural Origins and Immigrant Integration in the West Towards Emergence of Ethnically Divided Societies?" available in the public domain. The appendix discusses immigrant integration in the Western countries not directly covered in the book (mostly in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and Sweden) and addresses a few additional integration aspects.