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In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, relentlessly caught up in questions of security, humanitarian crisis, and cultural "problems," this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality.
Taking an innovative approach, Mirna Safi offers a fresh perspective on how migration is embedded in the elementary mechanisms that shape the landscape of inequality. She sketches out three distinct channels which lead to unequal outcomes for different migrating and non-migrating groups: the global division of labor; the production of legal and administrative categories; and the reconfiguration of symbolic ethnoracial groups. Respectively, these channels categorize migrants as "type of workers," "type of citizens," and "type of humans." Examining this intersection across the U.S. and Europe, she shows how studying international migration together with inequality can challenge nationally established paradigms of social justice.
This timely book will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in the sociology and politics of migration, ethnic and racial studies, and social inequality and stratification.
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 From National to Migration Societies
Chapter 2 - Migration and Elementary Mechanisms of Social Inequality: a conceptual framework
Chapter 3 The Economic Channel: Migrant Workers in the Global Division of Labor
Chapter 4 The Legal Channel: Immigration Law, Administrative Management of Migrants and Civic stratification
Chapter 5 The Ethnoracial Channel: Migration, Group Boundary-Making and Ethnoracial Classification
Struggles
Conclusion: Migration, an Issue of Social Justice
About the author
Mirna Safi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po.
Summary
In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, relentlessly caught up in questions of security, humanitarian crisis, and cultural "problems," this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality.
Taking an innovative approach, Mirna Safi offers a fresh perspective on how migration is embedded in the elementary mechanisms that shape the landscape of inequality. She sketches out three distinct channels which lead to unequal outcomes for different migrating and non-migrating groups: the global division of labor; the production of legal and administrative categories; and the reconfiguration of symbolic ethnoracial groups. Respectively, these channels categorize migrants as "type of workers," "type of citizens," and "type of humans." Examining this intersection across the U.S. and Europe, she shows how studying international migration together with inequality can challenge nationally established paradigms of social justice.
This timely book will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in the sociology and politics of migration, ethnic and racial studies, and social inequality and stratification.
Report
"Migration and inequality are the twin challenges facing the developed world, with leaders and people deeply divided and uncertain how to respond. For readers in search of insight, Safi's book is an essential source. Drawing on a vast multidisciplinary literature, Safi provides the crucial tools needed to understand today's bewilderingly unequal and diverse world."
Roger Waldinger, UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration
"Migration and Inequality is a book of impressive originality. Safi opens new paths in the sociology of ethno-racial formation by connecting distributional, legal and symbolic processes of inequality, and also skillfully captures national, transnational and global pathways at work. Her book should be widely read and discussed by social scientists across the disciplines."
Michèle Lamont, Coauthor of Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel
"Mirna Safi brilliantly marries the theoretical movement toward relational approaches to stratification and the fate of migrant populations. We learn that the elementary process of social stratification --cultural and cognitive categorization married to the distributional mechanisms of exclusion and exploitation - create migrants as social categories and steer their destination cultural, political and economic reception. This book will be read widely and referred to often."
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
