In the past decade, China’s investment in Africa increased from about $77 million to a staggering $2.9 billion.1 Also, China-Africa trade has surged to about $160 billion per year, a twenty-fold increase from what it was ten years ago.2 It is not surprising that the first-ever overseas trip of Chinese leader Xi Jinping was to Africa.3 Today, more than a million Chinese migrants call Africa home, most of them laborers who first arrived in Africa to work on large, Chinese-backed construction projects.4 Many of these Chinese companies employ far more of their own citizens to work in these laborious…
Few would argue that suffering and death in hostile border regions, underequipped detention facilities, or unsafe working and living conditions are anything other than tragic consequences of failing immigration systems around the world. But, as Julien Jeandesboz argues in The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe, exploitation, abuse, and even death of undocumented immigrants can be convincingly described as inherent features of systematic domination rather than a failure of order in Europe’s immigration system1. The Irregularization of Migration in Contemporary Europe is…
Recent debates on immigration, both in the United States and abroad, have become increasingly controversial and politically charged. In the wake of President Obama’s November 2014 executive action to grant approximately 5 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States protection from deportation, Congress remains deadlocked on the immigration issue, as Republicans threaten to reverse the president’s actions by withholding funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In Europe, anti-immigration sentiment appears to be on the rise, as evidenced by the relative success…
Sarah Lynn Lopez’s The Remittance Landscape: Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA deftly carves out a largely unexplored space in the migration conversation—one that encompasses the duality of migration and the effects of this demographic flow on rural and urban physical spaces to track social change. These shifts that result from migration are part of what Lopez terms the “remittance landscape.” The remittance landscape serves as a nuanced canvas on which the dynamics of migration are displayed through the development of built environment supported by remittances from migrants…
Pinay on the Prairies: Filipino Women and Transnational Identities by gender and migration scholar Glenda Tibe Bonifacio offers an intimate, detailed picture of the lives and identities of the Filipino migrant women in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan; told using a feminist approach uniquely attributed to the Filipino women, or what Bonifacio calls “Pinayism.” In her book, Bonifacio attempts to shatter the stereotypical and racialized image of Filipino migrant women, presenting these women to be more than just “nannies” or “domestic workers,” but…
Recent debates on societal transitions to democracy have focused their attention on the notion of “civil society,” putting great hope in its democratizing effects. This essay reexamines the notion’s utility in the context of the post-2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. It argues that at least in its conceptualization along the lines of the “transition paradigm,” the civil society framework is unable to capture the complex catalysts of the non-teleological, open-ended uprisings in North Africa. Not only does it largely ignore the importance of socioeconomic forces as well…
