Migration in the 21st Century

Rights, Outcomes, and Policy

Thomas N. Maloney, Kim Korinek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136924972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In this volume, we examine the challenges and opportunities created by global migration at the start of the 21st century. Our focus extends beyond economic impact to questions of international law, human rights, and social and political incorporation. We examine immigrant outcomes and policy questions at the global, national, and local levels. Our primary purpose is to connect ethical, legal, and social science scholarship from a variety of disciplines in order to raise questions and generate new insights regarding patterns of migration and the design of useful policy.

While the book incorporates studies of the evolution of immigration law globally and over the very long term, as well as considerations of the magnitude and determinants of immigrant flows at the global level, it places particular emphasis on the growth of immigration to the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s and provides new insights on the complex relationships between federal and state politics and regulation, popular misconceptions about the economic and social impacts of immigration, and the status of 'undocumented' immigrants.

1
Introduction

Thomas N. Maloney and Kim Korinek

International migration is a central concern of social science research in the early 21st century. It is a locus of tremendous political challenges, as well as policy innovation. Because immigration is a matter of importance to scholars and policy-makers in a variety of fields, it is important to bridge the gaps between these fields so that innovations in legal, economic, sociological, geographic, and political science research can inform each other. This volume is designed to promote such cross-disciplinary discussion. It examines the challenges and opportunities created by migration at the start of the 21st century. Our focus extends beyond economic impact to questions of international law, human rights, and social and political incorporation. We examine immigrant outcomes and policy questions at the global, national, and local levels. Our primary purpose is to connect ethical, legal, and social science scholarship from a variety of disciplines in order to raise questions and generate new insights regarding patterns of migration and the design of useful policy.

Part I considers migration at the global level, focusing on questions of human rights, the evolution of international law, and the responsibilities of private corporations that employ migrant labor. These questions are in the background of much research on migration, but we make them the explicit context within which we will examine patterns of migration, migrant outcomes, and the impact of migrants on receiving countries and communities.

In Chapter 1, James Bohman considers the problematic status of migrants at a very fundamental level: How should communities treat people who reside among them but who are not citizens or who are present “illegally”? Bohman argues in favor of Arendt’s conception of a fundamental human “right to have rights.” Recognizing such a status will require new institutions, new domestic courts of appeal for such persons as well as transnational institutions in which the rights of migrants are made more concrete.

Tony Anghie and Wayne McCormack then trace the legal history of migrant rights, distinguishing between the “right to enter a place” and “rights of individuals once they have entered” (the latter of which is Bohman’s main concern). Their very long-term analysis allows them to track the switch in the nature of migrants and of receiving countries over the past few centuries: from migrants as citizens of colonial powers entering new lands to migrants as displaced persons, refugees, and laborers entering industrialized nations. It also allows them to identify the evolution of migrant rights from essentially a recognition of the rights of the individual’s home country to, in the 20th century, a recognition of the rights of the individual himself or herself.

Anghie and McCormack illustrate the tight historical entanglement of migration and commerce, as early versions of migrant rights were derived from rights to trade. Ortiz, Agyeman-Budu, and Cheney emphasize that the conditions of migrants are still tied up with the rules governing economic activity, though now the relevant issues have more to do with the rights of workers. They illustrate some particularly challenging aspects of the “transnational regulation” questions raised by Bohman, focusing on the regulation and conduct of private firms operating in multiple countries and employing migrant labor.

With these matters of rights and law as background, Part II turns to investigations of the nature of recent migrant flows, the socioeconomic outcomes of migrants in receiving countries, and their impact on the economies and cultures of those countries. Richard E. Bilsborrow provides a global overview of the size and composition of migrant populations. He emphasizes the fact that migrant flows in any given year are usually small, as a percentage of a sending or receiving country’s total population. This fact creates challenges for researchers who want to study the determinants and effects of migration at the individual level for a narrow time window, as standard data sources (like censuses) will generally contain only small numbers of recent migrants. Researchers often need to gather their own data through surveys, or be creative in their use of statistical sources and techniques. The quantitative investigations in this volume display a variety of these creative methods.

Giovanni Peri’s investigation of the economic market impact of immigrants in the United States is an example of the careful and creative application of statistical methods to existing sources. While Anghie and McCormack emphasize historic ties in the laws governing economic activity and migration, Peri emphasizes the behavioral connections between economic performance and migration patterns, in terms of both “push factors” (home country effects on out-migration rates) and “pull factors” (receiving country effects on immigration rates and areas of settlement). He notes that we must control for variation in the economic conditions that affect both push and pull before we can rigorously identify the impact of migrants on the economies of the countries they move to. Peri also emphasizes that migrants are not monolithic. In particular, they vary in skill and education, which means that they will compete with some native workers but complement others. Again, these relationships must be accounted for in order to identify the economic impact of immigration on the labor market. Peri’s findings, after he creatively controls for these factors, are rather optimistic: immigrants generally do not displace native workers, and they also do not increase income inequality.

While much of the debate about immigration revolves around the economic impacts studied by Peri, there is also controversy about the process of political incorporation of recent migrants. This is the issue addressed by Alejendro Portes, Cristina Escobar, and Renelinda Arana. They are particularly interested in whether recent immigrants to the United States have become less engaged in US civil society due to their maintaining close political and cultural ties with their home country. They overcome the methodological hurdles identified by Bilsborrow by carrying out their own data collection, surveying both individual immigrants and leaders of immigrant political and cultural organizations. Like Peri, they tell a largely optimistic story. Individuals who are involved in organizations with home-country ties tend also to be vigorous participants in US civic life. In addition, allowing for some variation across country of origin, transnational organizations are also heavily involved in developing programs that promote greater engagement in civil society in the US.

The effects of institutional and organizational ties to one’s home country are also at the heart of the study of displaced communities and violence by Judkins and Reynolds, though their methods are quite different. They analyze the impact of transnational or home-country based institutions through a theoretical model of the development of social capital. They argue that the specific form of these institutions may have an important influence on the development of social capital, which facilitates the peaceful incorporation of large communities of migrants. Such resources will develop more fully when there is an entity sufficiently large enough to internalize many of the benefits of institution-building. They then illustrate their model through case studies of the Tibetan and Cambodian diasporas.

Catherine Cooper’s and Rebeca Burciaga’s study of academic achievement among immigrants in the US also emphasizes the role of community resources and social capital. Like Portes et al., their methods incorporate newly collected data (in the form of both surveys and interviews). Like Judkins and Reynolds, they argue that the specific form and function of community institutions is important. They find that resources that help students “bridge” home-country and receiving-country customs are important to the promotion of educational success for immigrant students.

In the final chapter in this part of the book, Patricia Fernández Kelly surveys recent policy controversies related to migration, mainly in the US, reinforcing many of the themes in prior chapters. She argues that the failure to recognize the connections between migration patterns and trade has led to particularly great challenges in the Americas, as the North American Free Trade Agreement makes little provision for addressing the population movements arising from its alteration of international trade. She also emphasizes the detrimental effects of absorbing immigration regulation into security policy, in the reorganization tied to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Having considered questions of migrant rights at the global level, and issues of economic and political incorporation and impact primarily at the national level, we turn in Part III to a case study of several of these phenomena at the state and local levels, focusing on the state of Utah and particularly on the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. While Utah may seem an unusual setting in which to set a case study of immigration, this state has in the past two decades become an increasingly important destination for people immigrating into the US. In this setting, then, we can examine how a community responds to very rapid growth in the economic and political challenges (and opportunities) created by immigration.

As the federal government has largely failed to develop new immigration policy in the face of new challenges, state and local governments have increasingly stepped into this void. Julie Stewart and Ken Jameson examine the politics surrounding one particular policy in the Utah case: that of issuing driver licenses or similar documents to undocumented immigrants. This provides a very specific and concrete example of the problem analyzed by Bohman – how to create a legal context for residents of “irregular” status in order to promote a communal goal; in this case, the goal of monitoring drivers better and promoting the purchase of auto insurance. Stewart and Jameson track changes in these policies in Utah, emphasizing the importance of “causal stories” and “policy entrepreneurs,” as law-makers try to create policy that will catch up to newly emerging challenges in this era of rapid change in migration patterns.

Maloney and Kontuly examine the socioeconomic progress of migrants in Utah, as revealed in their patterns of residence. Their ability to do so arises from the availability of unusual data in Utah, connected to the driver license policies described by Stewart and Jameson. Using records from the state Driver License Division, Maloney and Kontuly can identify the neighborhoods of residence of immigrants in Salt Lake County, Utah, distinguish between legal and undocumented immigrants, compare the socioeconomic conditions in the immigrants’ neighborhoods to conditions in natives’ neighborhoods, and track changes in these neighborhood conditions over time as individuals move. They find that both legal and undocumented immigrants generally experience improving conditions over time relative to natives, though this improvement is more limited for the undocumented.

While Utah has received increasing numbers of immigrants in general in the past two decades, it has also become an important location for refugee resettlement. Macleans Geo-JaJa examines the conditions faced by this population. He emphasizes the need to adapt policy and formal institutions of resettlement to changing realities, particularly changes in the source-country composition of the refugee population. Like many other authors in this volume, he emphasizes the importance of social capital and institutions based within the refugee community in promoting successful resettlement in the long-term.

Each of these individual chapters makes an important contribution to our understanding of immigration in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We think that the whole is somewhat greater than the sum of these parts, though, as a number of common themes emerge here in studies applying the methods and concepts of a variety of disciplines. One such theme is the challenge of designing sound immigration policy due to changes in the nature of migrant flows over time; the complex connections of migration to economic, political, and cultural spheres; and the sometimes distinct goals of the migrants and the receiving communities. The methodological challenges of studying immigration add to the complexity of these questions, in that the research required to inform policy design is expensive and difficult to carry out. Incorrect perceptions of the composition of the immigrant community, its effects on the economy, and the desire of its members for constructive involvement in civic life may therefore persist. The result is sometimes policy which is out of tune with realities in the migrant community. A second theme is the growth of “transnationalism” among migrants. Cheaper transportation and communication allow migrants to maintain stronger ties with their country of origin. This raises concerns about the likely success of political and cultural incorporation of these migrants, though those concerns may be unfounded. Indeed, such ties may promote social capital which will aid the success of migrants in their new home. A third, related theme is the importance of institutions in the immigrant community, of varying degrees of formality, in the development of skills and social capital that will increase the likelihood of such success. These institutions perhaps cannot be created out of whole cloth by policy, but they might be supported by well-designed policy, and local governments might be attuned to cases where such institutions and related social capital are lacking. We comment on these themes and draw out further implications in the concluding chapter.

This volume was inspired by a conference on “Migration, Rights and Identities: Examining the Range of Local and Global Needs,” held at the University of Utah, February 28–29, 2008. The conference was hosted by the Barbara L. and Norman C. Tanner Center for Nonviolent Human Rights Advocacy at the University of Utah. We are grateful to the Tanner family, to the Center’s director, George Cheney, and to the Center’s staff, including Victoria Medina and Aleta Tew, for organizing the conference and inviting us to participate. We also want to thank the organizations in Salt Lake City, including Chamade and the First Unitarian Church, and at the University of Utah, including the Honors College, the Colleges of Humanities, Law, and Social Work, the Departments of Communication, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Psychology, the Institute of Public and International Affairs, the Middle East Center, the Office of the Associate Vice President for Diversity, the Office of International Programs, and the Office of Undergraduate Studies, whose co-sponsorship helped make the conference possible. We are also grateful to Kirsten Swift for help in editing this volume, and to Robert Langham, Thomas Sutton, Simon Holt, and Emily Senior at Routledge for their patience and guidance.

Part I
International law, human rights, and migration in the global context

2
Living with noncitizens

Migration, domination, and human rights

James Bohman

The rule of law is often seen as a necessary condition for legitimate political order of any kind, whether it be in states or in international institutions. To this extent, republican and liberal conceptions of justice share the ideal that institutions beyond the state ought to achieve some version of the rule of law. While they overlap to a significant degree in practice, their underlying conceptions of the rule of law have quite different goals. According to liberals, the rule of law promotes a kind of formal justice, but not in the sense that republicanism requires. Given the familiar constraints of publicity, nonretroactivity, and generality, the rule of law is at best a means to promote justice in the sense of Rawls’ “justice as regularity” (Rawls 1971: 236). By contrast, republicans see the rule of law constitutively, as establishing a “civil condition” in which everyone has at least one fundamental status; the status of being a citizen. And, as Rawls, Hart, and others have pointed out, justice as regularity is consistent with “great iniquity” (Hart 1997: 204) and may even regularize forms of domination. One such iniquity is the existence of a legal order that necessarily leaves many people either without legal status or in the condition of illegality, as mere subjects of legal authority. Although republicans have said little about this problem, such lack of legal status and pervasive illegality should be regarded as the paradigmatic violation of the rule of law.

My purpose here is to explore the contours of a more robust conception of the relationship between citizens and noncitizens and of the rule of law that has both instrumental and constitutive value: an instrumental value in that it is a means to the end of avoiding great evils and ills, and a constitutive value with respect to a distinctive form of freedom, specifically freedom related to the status of persons rather than citizens. Such a conception of the rule of law is republican to the extent that it relies upon the idea of a shared status as a solution to the problem of political domination. This status suggests not only a right to freedom, but also one that is not derived from membership as it is usually understood. However, republicanism can be concerned with such a universal status because it is a deeply cosmopolitan tradition – so much so that the main republican institutional innovations, such as federalism, suggest that modern polities cannot be free as unitary entities with a monopoly of powers, but rather should more closely resemble transnational entities with respect to their size...

Table of contents

• Regions and cities
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I International law, human rights, and migration in the global context
• Part II Migrant impacts and outcomes
• Part III Rights, outcomes, and policy at the state and local level
• Part IV Summary
• Index