Social Forces’ Century-Long Contributions to the Field of International Migration (original) (raw)
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International migration is a highly complex and global phenomenon, an ideologically charged and polarizing topic of enormous symbolic and political relevance, a phenomenon that requires an interdisciplinary approach from both a descriptive as well as normative perspective. Migratory flows have increased and are incrementally caused by armed conflicts or climate change, as well as by acute global inequalities. Given that the causes and implications of migration exceeds state limits a comprehensive study needs to abandon “methodological nationalism”. The economic and social integration of the migrant population is a complex challenge, but the opportunities it opens up are also manifold: migration drives economic growth, connects different cultures, and contributes to international development.
RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2017
In the second half of the XX century, the humankind witnessed the insurmountable and irreversible power of globalization processes, which influence all spheres of social life and establish a global system of interdependency between countries and nations. Globalization within impetuous changes in global political, social and economic systems has determined dramatic shifts in the international migration processes that lead to the new stage of migration history. In nowadays globalized world, international migration has become a reality for almost all corners of the globe. The author considers features of the recent trends of international migration: the unprecedented growth of the international migration flows; the widening geography of international migration that involves nearly all countries of the world; qualitative changes in the structure of international migration flows; the key role of economic migration; the permanent growth and structural intricateness of irregular migration; the increasing scale and geographical widening of forced migration; the growing importance of international migration for the demographic development of the world, countries of both origin and destination. All these trends combined prove that the international migration patterns have become more complex. The author analyzes the legal framework of the international migration processes, and gives recommendations on the ways to improve the control and regulation of migration processes. Specific issues related to the social challenges of international migration are also discussed in the article. International migration has accelerated over the last fifty years. Globalization processes have set in motion vast and often uncontrolled international migration flows and, thus, turned the international migration into the most important global phenomena, which influences the world economy and international security. Today, more people live outside their countries of origin than ever before, and international migration has become much more diverse in terms of origins and destinations of migrants.
The Sociology of International Migration: Where We Have Been; Where Do We Go from Here?1
Sociological Forum, 2012
Controversies about international migration expose the changing structure of and underlying assumptions about societal membership in many nations. The sociology of international migration has emerged as an increasingly important subfield over the past decade in large part because it has tended to move beyond more narrow economic and demographic problems and has begun to address this fundamentally sociological issue. In the future it will be particularly important that sociologists pay attention to how demographically changing societies define who is and is not a member. As such, legal status and the role of the state has become critically important.
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Panorama Internacional FEE brings to the debate, in its third edition, the issue of international migration. The phenomenon of human migration has been recurrent in the evolutionary process of societies. Its dimensions, its causes and its effects lie in the fields of politics, economics, religion, the history of climate change, etc. The complexity of the issue is extremely important for the understanding of other historical, political, economic and social phenomena. How can one understand, for example, the formation of national states and their political and economic systems throughout history without taking into account the role of migration flows in the context of all these processes? Given the complexity inherent to the dynamics of migration movements, assigning Global migrations: a constant challenge for the international community |
The Political Sociology of International Migration: Borders, boundaries, rights, and politics
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Politics is an underdeveloped topic in migration studies, a lacuna that derives from prevailing intellectual biases, whether having to do with those that focus on individual action or those that emphasize social processes. This paper identifies the central issues entailed in the study of migrant politics, whether having to do with receiving society immigrant politics or sending society emigrant politics, reviewing and assessing the ways in which scholars have tackled this problem.
Servitude, brain drain and human trafficking are some of the outcomes of human migration in the 20th century. After slavery and slave trade were abolished in the 19th century, forced labour and servitude evolved. In the 20th century started modern servitude, like the ‘guest workers’ in Europe and ‘force labour’ in Africa. Brain-drain and human trafficking followed from the middle of the 20th century. This paper focuses on the influence of immigration policies by examining some ideologies, such as: ‘diversity, selective, restrictive, exclusionary and closed doors policies’. It argues that immigration policies are designed to perpetuate the structure of inequality established through the institutions of slavery and colonialism. It discusses analytically the effect of western immigration policies on the composition and volume of migrant workers in destination countries of America, Europe and Asia. This paper further discusses the politics of global migration, employing the neo-Marxist historical structural model. It elicits the significance of immigration policies to the capitalist economies as its grand design to sustain economic inequality and the dependency of the periphery on the core. Thus, immigration policies in the advanced capitalist economies were used in the 20th century, as slavery was used in the past, to exploit Africa’s viable human resources.
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Reflections on the role of foreigners in contemporary society have played a central role in the development and institutionalisation of sociology. A century after Georg Simmel's founding text, 'The Stranger', 1 immigration has begun to attract renewed interest among scholars working in the social sciences. Recent works in history, sociology, anthropology and political science invite an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. As the eleven contributors to the collection edited by Michael Bommes and Ewa Morawska show, immigration can be a valuable analytical key to understanding contemporary societies. Unlike the sociologists of the Chicago school, who focused their attention on immigrant communities and their social networks in urban settings, these researchers are instead interested in the influence of immigration on host countries-on domestic policy and interstate relations. In this respect, the process of European integration offers privileged ground for study and has already given rise to several works in political science.
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The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migration studies has emerged as an inherently interdisciplinary field, made up of scholars around the world, seeking to describe and analyze these dynamics and invent new methodological tools with which to do so. In this review, we offer a short history of theoretical developments, outlining the different ways in which scholars have defined and approached transnational migration. We then summarize what is known about migrant transnationalism in different arenas—economics, politics, the social, the cultural, and the religious. Finally, we discuss...