Ethnic return migration and the nation‐state: encouraging the diaspora to return ‘home’

ABSTRACT. Countries of immigration are generally faced with a dilemma: they wish to accept immigrants for economic purposes, but also to restrict immigration for ethnonational reasons. This is especially true in ethnic nation‐states, where immigration is seen as a threat to ethnonational unity more than in civic nation‐states. However, in recent decades, various ethnic nation‐states have adopted immigration policies that have encouraged their diasporic descendants born and raised abroad to return to their ethnic homeland. Ethnic return migration apparently solves the immigration dilemma by providing ethnic nation‐states with a much‐needed unskilled labour force without causing ethnonational disruption because the immigrants are co‐ethnic descendants. After comparing ethnic return migration policies in European and East Asian countries, this article analyses the development of such policies in Japan and their eventual failure to solve the country's immigration dilemma. As a result, Japan (and other ethnic nation‐states) have imposed restrictions on ethnic return migration.     

“Middling” Chinese Returnees or Immigrants from Canada? The Ambiguity of Return Migration and Claims to Modernity

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” returnees who are not privy to the preferential treatment given to highly skilled returnees. They come to be considered as “foreigners” in their homeland because they have naturalised elsewhere. The paper also explores the double diasporic identifications of Mainland Chinese returnees from Canada; it highlights the tensions and fissures manifested in secondary diasporas, particularly in light of China’s growing prominence in international business, foreign diplomacy and cultural exchanges. The paper suggests that social encounters that marginalise such migrants in Canada are reproduced in China. The returnees navigate such encounters by mobilising their transnational affiliations to different national contexts.     

From Yekke to Zionist: Narrative strategies in life stories of Central European Jewish women immigrants to Mandate Palestine

This article examines the life stories of Jewish women who emigrated from Central Europe to Palestine in the 1930s, on the basis of memoirs written, or transmitted orally, many years later. Although the experience of migration could have caused a crisis in self-perception, their memoirs show that they managed to construct their lives (and identities) anew in a coherent way by means of two main narrative axes – continuity and meaning. The axis of continuity served to establish a bridge between the women's lives, before and after emigration, while the axis of meaning, focusing on the Zionist meta-narrative, provided justification for the choices they made. This discussion illuminates how Central European Jewish women coped with the challenges of immigration to Palestine, both those that were unique to the experience of aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and those that were similar to the challenges faced by immigrants in other times and places.     

Knowing “Good Food”: Immigrant Knowledge and the Racial Politics of Farmworker Food Insecurity

Abstract: This article explores the ways that farmworkers, many of whom come from a culture deeply rooted in food and agricultural practices, cope with food insecurity by utilizing their agricultural and nutritional knowledge. Food assistance providers in the USA often treat farmworkers' inability to afford healthy food as a lack of knowledge about healthy eating, reinforcing racialized assumptions that people of color don't know “good” food. I argue that in contrast to food banks and low‐income nutrition programs, home and community gardens provide spaces for retaining and highlighting agricultural, cultural, and dietary practices and knowledge. This paper investigates the linkages between workers' place in the food system as both producers and consumers, simultaneously exploited for their labor, and creating coping strategies utilizing agrarian and culinary knowledge. I argue that food security and healthy eating, rather than being a matter of consumers making healthy “choices”, is a matter of class‐based and racial differences in the food system.     

The representation of non-Irish immigrants in recent Irish films

This paper examines the representation of ethnic and racial minorities in Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger films such as Adam and Paul (2004), Pavee Lackeen (2005), Once (2006), The Front Line (2007), and New Boy (2007). Key areas of analysis include: how is immigration represented on screen? Whose character's point of view predominates? How much space do these ethnic minorities occupy in the shot? In order to answer these research questions, I draw on a plurality of theoretical paradigms currently employed in film theory, mainly narrative theory, critical race theory and feminist theory. As I show, the differences between these films are paramount and will inform the different ways in which recent Irish cinema represents racial and ethnic Otherness. In some films, immigrants appear mainly as decorative props and they largely function as cinematic elements which emphasise the marginalisation of other “inner” Irish outsiders, particularly drug addicts and Travellers. By contrast, other films make serious attempts to see “into” or “through” immigrant characters by fictionalising not only the point of view of natives but also of newcomers themselves.     

20世纪末以来澳大利亚移民政策的转型及其对华人新移民的影响

论文分析了二战后至20世纪90年代特别是20世纪末以来澳洲移民政策的演变,认为澳大利亚移民政策的改革与转型,主要是在经济理性主义的指导下进行的,并逐渐形成以技术移民为核心的移民选择体系。移民政策转型对华人新移民的影响主要表现在华人新移民数量持续稳定增长、地区来源构成发生重大变化、技术移民比重持续走高、女性移民越来越多、华人新移民地区分布趋向多元化、华人新移民回流潮日趋明显等方面。     

美国技术移民政策综述

论文从美国移民政策的历史沿革、机构设置、特点,尤其是以技术移民政策方面美国吸引外国人才的制度优势为着眼点,综合梳理了美国技术移民政策的相关研究成果,包括最新的调查报告及统计数据等。认为美国的移民政策始终基于国家利益和经济发展的需要,经历了自由开放、限制移民和高度选择三个阶段。美国虽然是世界上最大的移民接受国和技术人才引进国,但它的移民构成特点仍以家庭关系移民为主。它通过永久居留类职业签证、临时居留类职业签证、临时居留类的留学生和学者签证等三种签证类型吸引人才,并且建立了劳工证制度、配额制、担保制、优越的科研条件等多制度配合的吸纳人才体系。     

以色列城市化进程中的移民因素

以色列城市化先后经历了自发发展与政府推进两个阶段,在国际移民助推下城市化进程持续推进,城市化水平显著提高,城市布局不断优化。以色列作为世界上典型的移民国家,外来犹太移民不仅是国家建构的基石,也成为以色列城市化持续、快速发展的不竭动力。     

A Review of “The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact,Theory, and Sign of Contradiction”

Abstract

Responding to Samuel Huntington's argument in Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, this article explores the problematic character of American national identity. While Huntington presents himself as trying to conserve a traditional American identity based on both political creed and Anglo-Protestant culture, I contend that America's founding political theory and its philosophic sources are ambiguous on the question of culture and national identity. The Declaration of Independence and the social contract theories that helped inform it seem to invite a kind of cosmopolitan commitment to a creedal identity while at the same time leaving open the possibility of a more exclusive cultural identity. In the end, this ambiguity works to undermine a public sense that the political order should try to conserve a particular culture, a tendency that is furthered by a democratic regime's natural inclinations toward universalism and egalitarianism. It seems, then, that the problem of the preservation of American cultural identity is rooted in the very culture that Huntington wishes to preserve.