“I am a dissident at heart.” – Tolkachev to his CIA handler on New Year’s Day 1979
Prospects for meaningful immigration reform grow ever more remote on the agenda of the U.S. Congress. $46 billion was earmarked in 2013 for border security, a wastefully ineffectual increase of U.S. national debt.1 Public interest in prioritizing educated tech workers or job-creating investors remains a footnote to an afterthought.2 America: built on freedom of migration? A narrative’s power does not necessarily depend on its truth. What if the problem lies within its relativity and had at its core not the migration of foreigners, but the immobility and inadaptability of its …
Jie Lu’s new book is a landmark work of political science that lucidly draws on the diverse fields of history, anthropology, and migration studies in elucidating divergent modalities of local village governance in China. Drawing on an impressive number of statistical analyses, rich case studies, and his own fieldwork in rural China, Lu strongly makes the case that the effectiveness of local governing institutions in rural China is dependent on the social environment, community networks, and rates of out-migration. Through exploring local governance in Chinese villages, Lu sheds important insight…
The central thesis of Child Migration & Human Rights in a Global Age argues an interesting position. Rather than treating children as subservient dependents of adult migrants, Jacqueline Bhabha makes a compelling case for examining them individually. In many cases, their needs differ starkly from their parents’, and they are especially susceptible to an entirely different collection of dangers. The text is skillfully layered with a legal history of the field, and to maintain its accessibility, the author takes pains to include anecdotes that illustrate…
As a migrant worker in Singapore, Saddam remembers 20 December 2010 as the day when a workplace accident washed all his dreams away. The Bangladeshi national, who was working in construction at the time, fell from a wall into a drain, fracturing two bones below the left knee. Shortly after the incident, he fled his dormitory to escape the clutches of “a team of gangsters” hired by his employer to send him back to Bangladesh after the employer had refused to buy state-mandated insurance for Saddam’s accident or pay him medical leave wages. Still nursing his injury and already in…