Paradigms in migration research: exploring "moorings" as a schema

"When considering where migration research interests may proceed, this article suggests much could be gained by considering theories of human motivation which, in the field of social psychology, represents a theoretical progression from the behavioural and cognitive approaches. The article suggests that combining theories of human motivation with the developing understanding of cultural influences may provide linkages between, on the one hand, the personal realm of migration and, on the other, the regional institutional framework of politicoeconomic structure within which people make their decisions.... The focus is on the migrant who remains within the same broad cultural context (such as within the same nation or ethnic group), but travels away from the confines of the general area in which he or she previously resided. Thus a person undertaking intraurban relocation is not regarded here as a 'migrant', and the schema proposed will probably not apply to international migration."     

"The perfect business": human trafficking and Lao-Thai cross-border migration

Over the past few years some governments and development organizations have increasingly articulated cross-border mobility as "trafficking in persons". The notion of a market where traffickers prey on the "supply" of migrants that flows across international borders to meet the "demand" for labour has become a central trope among anti-trafficking development organizations. This article problematizes such economism by drawing attention to the oscillating cross-border migration of Lao sex workers within a border zone between Laos and Thailand. It illuminates the incongruity between the recruitment of women into the sex industry along the Lao-Thai border and the market models that are employed by the anti-trafficking sector. It discusses the ways in which these cross-border markets are conceived in a context where aid programming is taking on an increasingly important role in the politics of borders. The author concludes that allusions to ideal forms of knowledge (in the guise of classic economic theory) and an emphasis on borders become necessary for anti-trafficking programmes in order to make their object of intervention legible as well as providing post-hoc rationalizations for their continuing operation.     

The Politics of Disciplining Water Rights

This article examines how the legal systems of Andean countries have dealt with the region's huge plurality of local water rights, and how official policies to ‘recognize’ local rights and identities harbour increasingly subtle politics of codification, confinement and disciplining. The autonomy and diversity of local water rights are a major hindrance for water companies, elites and formal rule‐enforcers, since State and market institutions require a predictable, uniform playing field. Complex local rights orders are seen as irrational, ill‐defined and disordered. Officialdom cannot simply ignore or oppress the ‘unruliness and disobedience’ of local rights systems: rather it ‘incorporates’ local normative orders that have the capacity to adequately respond to context‐based needs. This article examines a number of evolving, overlapping legal domination strategies, such as the ‘marrying’ of local and official legal systems in ways that do not challenge the legal and power hierarchy; and reviews the ways in which official regulation and legal strategies deny or take into consideration local water rights repertoires, and the politics of recognition that these entail. Post‐colonial recognition policies are not simply responses to demands by subjugated groups for greater autonomy. Rather, they facilitate the water bureaucracy's political control and help neoliberal sectors to incorporate local water users’ rights and organizations into the market system — even though many communities refuse to accept these policies of recognition and politics of containment.     

History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness

There has been a widespread recovery of public memory of the events of the Second World War since the end of the 1980s, with war crimes trials, restitution actions, monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism appearing in many countries. This has inevitably involved historians being called upon to act as expert witnesses in legal actions, yet there has been little discussion of the problems that this poses for them. The French historian Henry Rousso has argued that this confuses memory with history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, judicial investigations unearthed a mass of historical documentation. Historians used this, and further researches, from the 1960s onwards to develop their own ideas and interpretations. But since the early 1990s there has been a judicialization of history, in which historians and their work have been forced into the service of moral and legal forms of judgment which are alien to the historical enterprise and do violence to the subleties and nuances of the historian's search for truth. This reflects Rousso's perhaps rather simplistically scientistic view of the historian's enterprise; yet his arguments are powerful and should be taken seriously by any historian considering involvement in a law case; they also have a wider implication for the moralization of the history of the Second World War, which is now dominated by categories such as "perpetrator,""victim," and "bystander" that are legal rather than historical in origin. The article concludes by suggesting that while historians who testify in war crimes trials should confine themselves to elucidating the historical context, and not become involved in judging whether an individual was guilty or otherwise of a crime, it remains legitimate to offer expert opinion, as the author of the article has done, in a legal action that turns on the research and writing of history itself.     

城镇化的新形式与中国的人口城镇化政策

本文从三个方面讨论了发展中国家城镇化进程不同于发达国家相应发展阶段的特点及由此产生的新的城镇化形式对我国城镇化政策的影响,分析了上述城镇化的新特点和新形式在我国人口迁移和城镇化政策上的意义,认为相关研究和方针、政策的制定必须对上述新特点和新形式予以更多的关注。     

Trafficked Enough? Missing Bodies,Migrant Labour Exploitation,and the Classification of Trafficking Victims in Singapore

Critical geographical research has recently drawn attention to representations of vulnerable or exploited groups that articulate racist or neo‐colonial imaginations, including where these geographical imaginations are implicated in the classification and characterisation of groups for legal purposes. In the case of vulnerable groups of migrants such practices can be invoked to create distinctions that justify the socio‐spatial exclusion or containment, thus oftentimes having profound implications for real people who must manoeuvre the consequences of classification. The paper builds on this strand of inquiry by exploring the imaginaries surrounding trafficking victimhood and the implications of classification for temporary labour migrants in Singapore into “trafficked” and “non‐trafficked” categories. I argue that in the Singaporean context government interest in maintaining the current labour/migration regime is equally as significant as racist and neo‐colonial imaginations and intersect with the latter in productive ways to sort vulnerable migrants into categories of trafficked and non‐trafficked.     

"Sound law and undoubtedly good policy": Roe v. Wade in comparative perspective

This article traces the abortion reform processes in the US, the UK, and Australia to reveal the underlying rhetoric and policy rationales which served to fuel abortion reform. The early abortion legislation in Great Britain, Australia, and Texas is described to lay the groundwork for a discussion on the widespread modification the laws were subject to through medical practice and judicial interpretation. In 1938, a trial judge in Britain carved out a legal loophole to sway a jury to acquit a physician who openly performed an abortion on a 14-year-old rape victim. The judge found that the law neither prohibited abortion absolutely nor permitted unrestricted medical discretion, but rather lay within the two extremes. Before the 1960s, psychiatric subterfuges were used by physicians as justification for performing abortions for "social" reasons, but reform was spearheaded by concerns about rape, incest, and fetal damage (especially after exposure to rubella or thalidomide). Reformers also argued that abortion would reduce poverty, and it soon became clear that all but the poor could obtain safe abortions. Claims were also made that abortion had historically been allowed before quickening. A new consensus grew and was encouraged by physicians who accepted abortion because it furthered social justice. The law struggled to keep up. In Britain a major reform bill was enacted by Parliament. In Australia, the police gave up trying to prosecute doctors as judges interpreted the law in such a way as to render the doctors innocent of wrongdoing, and, in the US, some states adopted liberal laws. The Roe vs. Wade decision in the US, therefore, may have made abortion a constitutional issue through use of the doctrine of privacy, but the other elements of the decision reflected the situation in the UK and Australia. For example, the Row decision relies on the physician-patient relationship to regulate abortion on demand. Also, the decision acknowledges that conflicting rights exist which allow the law to neither prohibit abortion nor leave it entirely unrestricted. In each country, the legislation is centered on the professional competence of the practitioner and on the provision of abortion before quickening. This reliance on a medical decision imbues the abortion debate with a certain ambiguity which is shared by all three countries.     

Discourse on migration and ethnic identity: interviews with professionals in Hong Kong

"This paper has revealed a complex set of relationships between migration, place and ethnic identity [in Hong Kong]. On the one hand, ethnic identity is shaped by the places where people have lived, particularly the places where they have spent the early years of their life; on the other [hand], places--being the context for socialization--provide the milieux where people learn who and what they are and how to act...." The authors note that "while legislation clearly regulates levels of immigration, international migration is also self-regulated by potential migrants in relation to interpretations of their ethnic identities and their perceptions of 'other' places."     

A disobedient gaze: strategic interventions in the knowledge(s) of maritime borders

Abstract

This article reflects critically on how forms of militant research that produce knowledge about the border can produce effects in the politics of migration themselves. It does so by looking at Forensic Oceanography, a collaborative research project that we have been conducting since the summer of 2011. We first locate this research among a broader ‘ecology of knowledges’ that are generated at the border and that directly affect way the border regime actually operates, underlining their ‘aesthetic’ dimension. Secondly, we problematise more specifically the knowledge produced by activists who fight against the border regime and attempt to think how these need to position themselves strategically in relation to existing knowledge practices so as to avoid complicity with the same power structures they are seeking to challenge. Finally, since our knowledge production has amongst others been geared towards the legal sphere, we sketch out a critical reflection on the reliance on legal strategy to forward progressive changes within the politics of migration.     

The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act

The article examines the enactment of the British NationalityAct, 1948. The legislation created a legal status—Citizenshipof the UK and Colonies—that included Britons and ‘colonial’British subjects under a single definition of British citizenship,and entrenched their right to enter the UK. Between 1948 and1962, some 500, 000 non-white British subjects entered underthe legislation, despite documented evidence of elite suspicionof non-white Commonwealth migration. The article argues thatthis apparent contradiction can only be understood by examiningthe legislation in the context of past migration patterns andBritain's international position in 1948. The legislation wasonly marginally related to migration; it was rather an attemptto maintain a uniform definition of subjecthood in the faceof Canada's unilateral introduction of its own citizenship,and it was an affirmation of Britain's place as head of a Commonwealthstructure founded on the relationship between the UK and theOld Dominions. ^* For comments on earlier drafts, I owe my thanks to John Dorwin,Katie Goebs, Iain McLean, and Desmond King.     

职务过失犯罪处罚原则的理性思考

职务过失犯罪是业务过失犯罪中的一类。由于职务过失犯罪的行为人在从事公职的过程中亵渎自己的工作职责,严重侵犯国家机关及其他国有单位的正常活动,侵犯公共财产、国家和人民群众利益,故学界普遍主张对职务过失犯罪应从严惩处。为了加强对职务过失犯罪的处罚力度,从刑法理论的角度分析刑法处罚职务过失犯罪的现状、进行中外刑事立法的比较研究、论证从严惩治的法理、提出完善刑事立法的建议是十分必要的。     

Racial Purity or Legal Clarity? The Status of Black Residents in Eighteenth-Century France

This article surveys the legislation concerning the residence of colonial slaves and nonwhites in general in eighteenth-century France. On the one hand, it shows an increasing concern with race on the part of the elite, heavily influenced by colonial attitudes, leading to laws increasingly reminiscent of apartheid; on the other hand, it reveals the state's inability to enforce its own regulations in the context of privilege, resulting in a legal confusion typical of late ancien-ŕegime law.     

浅论国际社会如何应对非法移民问题

近年来,非法移民问题日趋严重,已成为当今国际社会面临的一大难题。非法移民给许多国家带来了严重后果,止非法移民是国际社会的当务之急。非法移民是一个综合性的难题,必须运用经济、政治、法律、外交等多种手段,诸如加强出入管理,加强打击非法移民的立法,加强国际合作,缩小南北差距等。     

Human rights,domestic politics,and informal agreements: parliamentary challenges to international cooperation on migration management

ABSTRACT

Developed and developing countries are increasingly cooperating on migration management, and human rights NGOs have harshly criticised these instruments for cooperation. This article asks how and to what extent parliaments are challenging policies for international cooperation on migration management. On the one hand parliaments have traditionally been described as ‘moral tribunes’ in international relations, due to their principled support for human rights. On the other hand, parliaments are increasingly operating in political systems marked by anti-immigrant sentiment and increased support for right-wing populist parties. How do parliaments navigate between these two poles when it comes to international cooperation on migration management? Based on examples from Australia, the EU and Israel, this article shows that the use of non-legally binding instruments for cooperation limits the formal role of parliaments, but also and more importantly that there is a lack of political will to scrutinise these instruments and hold executives to account (notwithstanding attempts by some members of parliament or some political groupings to challenge policies through informal means). The lack of political contestation implies that, as far as migration management is concerned, ‘politics stop at the water's edge’.     

五代时期的“中国”观

在五代十国时期,北方五朝相继,都以继承唐朝而自居于正统、代表中国,对其他各国都作现况的承认,但态度并不一致,视局势的不同而有所调整,或认为天下分裂,各有其国,或认为地方政权应在臣属的地位。而其他各国有的承认北方五代为正统,屈从于臣属地位,也有认为天下分裂,北方并不能是中国的必然代表,即各有其国,各有合法的地位。"中国"代表北方中原的朝代还是代表"天下"?在表述中并不一致,当时的情形是各自的认知并不一致之故,亦即没有共识的基础。     

The migration response to the Legal Arizona Workers Act

The 2008 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) requires all public and private employers to authenticate the legal status of their workers using the federal employment verification system known as E-Verify. With LAWA, Arizona became the first state to have a universal mandate for employment verification. While LAWA targets unauthorized workers, most of whom are Latino immigrants, other groups could experience LAWA's effects, such as those who share households with undocumented workers. In addition, employers may seek to minimize their risk of LAWA penalties by not hiring those who appear to them as more likely to be unauthorized, such as naturalized Latino immigrants and US-born Latinos. Existing research has found a reduction in foreign-born Latino employment and population in response to LAWA. This paper asks a different question: have groups that are most likely to be affected by the law migrated to other states? We find a significant and sustained increase in the internal outmigration rate from Arizona of foreign-born, noncitizen Latinos – the group most likely to include the unauthorized – after the passage of LAWA. There was no significant LAWA internal migration response by foreign-born Latino citizens. US-born Latinos showed some signs of a LAWA-induced internal migration response after the law went into effect, but it is not sustained. The results indicate that local and state immigration policy can alter the settlement geography of the foreign born. This leads us to speculate about how immigrant settlement may adjust in the coming years to the intersecting geographies of post-recession economic opportunity and tiered immigration policies.     

全球化中的中华移民与华侨华人研究

论文从移民的背景、动机与动向等方面比较了近代与当代新老中华移民的异同;阐述了全球化背景中的中华移民在加拿大、美国、新西兰、澳洲与新加坡等"移民国家"与东南亚"原住民国家"的不同情况及其对于这些国家的影响和对当地华社的冲击;探讨了新移民研究的现状及其对当代华侨华人研究的启示。     

Regulating Meaning, Appropriating Nature: The Codification of California Organic Agriculture

In California, conventional agro-food firms are beginning to appropriate the most lucrative aspects of organic food provision and to abandon the agronomic and marketing practices associated with organic agriculture's oppositional origins. Echoing the uneasy and complex dialectic between nature and capital in the American West, organic farming is becoming more akin to farming off of nature's image, as the idiom of a "purer" nature is deployed to sell what is increasingly commodified nature. The direction of organic agriculture in California can be understood as reflecting global trends in agro-food provision and regulation, but it is also uniquely grounded in the context of California's regional history: on the one hand, a product of the counterculture, bolstered by a strong climate of environmental regulation; on the other hand, a legacy of California's exceptional agriculture, characterized in part by the dominance of growers' organizations and a focus on high-value specialty crops. This paper also discusses three ways in which the political construction of the meaning of "organic" and its institutionalization in regulatory agencies such as private certification organizations have facilitated both the proliferation of agribusiness entrants and their adoption of questionably sustainable practices: first, certification agencies have their own institutional logic and are most beholden to their client-growers; second, regulation requires the definition of enforceable standards out of complicated ecological, economic, and even sociocultural concerns; third, the certification process, by conferring a legal right to market food as organic, has created distinct incentives that shape participation in the sector.     

Workfare–Warfare: Neoliberalism, "Active" Welfare and the New American Way of War

Abstract:  In recent decades, welfare reform in the USA has increasingly been based on a political imperative to reduce the number of people on welfare. This has in large part taken place through the establishment of a "workfare" state, in which the receipt of state benefits requires a paid labor input. Designed to reduce expenditure on civil social services, welfare-to-work programs have been introduced. At the same time, the restructuring of US defense provision has seen the "military–industrial complex" emerge as a key beneficiary of state expenditure. Both of these trends can be characterized, this paper argues, as manifestations of neoliberal thinking—whether in the form of the "workfarism" that is undertaken to bolster the US economy, or the "defense transformation" that has been intended to enhance US war-making capacity. While these two aspects have been analyzed in detail independently, the aim of this paper is to probe the similarities, connections and overlaps between the workfare state and the recent American emphasis on high-technology warfare—the so-called "Revolution in Military Affairs"—and "defense transformation". There are, the paper argues, strong homologies to be drawn between the restructuring of the American defense and welfare infrastructures. Furthermore there are also instances where warfare and welfare are being melded together into a hybrid form "workfare–warfare", in which military service is increasingly positioned as a means of gaining welfare and, conversely, traditionally military industries are becoming involved in the area of welfare provision. The result, it is argued, is an emergent form of workfare–warfare state in the USA.     

Urban governance of liminal legality comparing the incorporation of migrant children in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem

Increasing numbers of migrant children worldwide grow up with fragmentary and revocable legal statuses that perpetuate their liminal legality as socially present yet legally non-existent. Scholars of migration have mainly explored macro drivers and micro-level effects of liminal legality paying less attention to the role of urban governance and actors in shaping migrant children's pathways of incorporation amidst broader processes of local rescaling. Taking into consideration that neoliberal rescaling is anchored in the uneven institutional landscapes in which it unfolds, this comparative research shows how different trajectories of urban rescaling result in two modes of governance: centralized–segregated in Tel-Aviv, and particularistic–integrative in Jerusalem. Grounded on 101 in-depth interviews with local agents and surveys of municipal policies and NGO reports, we show that in cosmopolitan-oriented yet relatively less ethno-nationally heterogeneous Tel-Aviv, actors maneuver institutional ambivalence by emphasizing liberal status-blind principles in the provision of segregated services. Conversely, in ethno-religious oriented yet ethno-nationally heterogeneous Jerusalem, migrant children are incorporated in integrative frameworks that recognize their particularity. Drawing on an inter-city comparison, we argue that local actors both reflect and mobilize inherited institutional landscapes and legacies of sensemaking of “otherness” as they negotiate similar national restrictive migration policies. Integrating critical scholarship on urban rescaling, attentive to structures of social provision and policy paradigms, and local actors' sensemaking, we foreground the centrality of cities in forging liminal legality as a multidimensional space where policies, institutional contexts, and agency work together in emplacing migrant children, suspended between legal categories, as urban subjects.