Suchergebnisse

The nationalistic and xenophobic movement Operation Dudula has been leading demonstrations throughout South Africa claiming that foreigners are taking South African jobs and that there are 'no wars in Africa' to warrant African immigrants' special treatment. This xenophobic movement blames immigrants (an umbrella term for immigrants, cross-border migrants, economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees) for societal collapse and challenges the legality of their border crossings. The movement calls the immigrants 'criminals' and pressures domestic government officials to deny them the right to work. The conflation of economic migrants with asylum seekers continues in the South African landscape, confusing employers, the general public, and officials at the Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The notion that 'no foreigner must be employed ahead of a South African' is at the crux of the debates about immigrants' right to employment. Yet, there is not a clear demarcation between asylum seekers' right to work versus the economic migrants' privilege to work. This confusion of legal categories has led to apples and oranges debates in immigration law domestically and internationally. Through interviews with non-governmental (non-profit) organisations (NGOs/NPOs), employers, industry associations, government officials, and immigration attorneys, and an examination of international and domestic laws and norms, this paper suggests a reframing of how the right to work is analysed and how the employers respond.

Many Arab immigrants came to the Americas—the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina (to name only a few countries)—primarily with the intent to make money quickly and return home. Their enduring presence, however, is marked by ambiguous categorizations of Arabs in the United States and Mexico that relate to confusions of place, people, and history. The article is divided into six sections. In the first section, I describe the complex categories of personhood for those who migrated from the Middle East. The second section provides a broad Arab demographic profile in the United States and Mexico and leads to the third section, where I address the conflation of Arabs and Muslims with ethnographic detail. The fourth section offers a comparative analysis of selected immigration laws in Mexico and the United States that have shaped the Arab diasporas in each country. In the fifth section, a brief description of how some Arab elites in Mexico have drawn on their foreignness to assert a Lebanese identity illustrates the complexity of describing Arab diasporas in the Americas and anticipates the sixth section, which concerns the reception of Arab immigrants in the United States. The article aims both to engage scholars studying Arab diasporas for points of comparisons and to problematize the homogenous use of terms such as Arab in mainstream Mexican and American discourses.

This paper presents a comparative case analysis arguing that undocumented immigrants in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and in South Africa become criminalised by navigating host and recipient country legal protocols and norms. The immigrants (often bonafide asylum seekers and refugees) live in host countries without the necessary legal immigrant papers and therefore lack legal status. Illegality attaches to this status and creates economic demands satisfied by those who produce unauthorised (or authorised) immigrant papers. At times, government functionaries participate in these extralegal economies, adding to the robustness of the illicit economies and further harming this vulnerable population of immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants. (For this paper, the term immigrants is an umbrella term for all the migrants.) The criminalisation of immigrants is rooted in the actions or inactions of government actors in the Global North and Global South who deny immigrants legal standing in the host country or in transit. These government functionaries and their smuggler counterparts, in turn, create an extralegal demand for papers and profit from restrictive immigration protocols.

Migración y ciudadanía: construyendo naciones en América del Norte: a manera de introducción -- Nación y ciudadanía: las bases de la pertenencia: las ventajas de mirar desde fuera / Erika Pani -- Ley, gobierno y migración: la construcción del estado-nación en América del Norte durante el siglo XIX / Julián duranzo-Herrman y Erika Pani -- Hacer propio lo que es ajeno: leyes y políticas de naturalización en América del Norte: Estados Unidos y México, siglo XIX / Erika Pani -- Cuando los extranjeros perniciosos se convierten en ciudadanos: procesos de naturalización en México a principios del siglo XX / Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp -- Extranjeros buenos y malos: migración, clase y exclusión en Estados Unidos durante el siglo XX / Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp -- Canadá y sus inmigrantes: políticas migratorias y construcción nacional a partir de los debates parlamentarios, 1869-2015 / Catherine Vézina -- Epílogo / Erika Pani y Catherine Vézina

This collection presents eleven original essays by historians whose own ethnic backgrounds shaped the choices they have made about their research and writing as scholars. These authors, historians of American immigration and ethnicity, revisited family and personal experiences and reflect on how their lives helped shape their later scholarly pursuits. They address issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and assimilation in academia, in the discipline of history, and in society at large.