Fred A. Lazin, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Introduction: This paper studies the housing and educational absorption policies of the Israeli government for the Ethiopian Jews who have immigrated since the early 1980s. It documents actual policies and explains why particular policies were adopted and why the Ethiopians were treated so differently. While official policy called for housing Ethiopian immigrants in communities with strong infrastructures in central Israel, most would be directed to permanent housing in spatially segregated clusters in specific neighborhoods and municipalities, often in Israel’s periphery. In education political decisions at the highest level segregated Ethiopian immigrant children …

Wayne A. Cornelius, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
Working Paper #27»

Casey Walsh, New School University
Introduction: During the summer of 1939 hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from Houston, Austin and a number of smaller towns in Texas packed their belongings, climbed aboard buses and trucks, and headed south to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, across the Rio Bravo from Brownsville, Texas. They had been planning for this move since the Spring, when Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas sent Ramón Beteta and Manuel Gamio to their towns to offer them free land if they were willing to dedicate themselves to the hard work of clearing it and farming cotton on it. The colonists were met …

Cecilia Menjívar, University of Arizona
Summary: In this paper I seek to examine the place of religious institutions in the lives of Salvadoran immigrants, particularly how these immigrants view their links with and participation in the church in light of the conditions in which they live. Religious rituals infuse with transcendental meaning important events in the immigrants’ lives, but religious institutions also respond in practical terms to the immigrants’ needs and afflictions. This observation is not exceptional in the cases I present in this piece, however, relative to the importance of religion in the immigrants’ lives, contemporary immigration scholars have not …

Francisco Oda-Ángel, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid
Abstract: When we refer to Border we are not solely referring to the demarcating line or to the imaginary limit drawn and arisen from diplomatic negotiations or as a result of wars. In addition to including this bordering area, borders have their own characteristics which determine and give sense to the day to day life of those societies which are at one side and at the other side. Border societies and border people share features which make the border a movable and flexible concept or category of thought, involving a great diversity of hybrid …

Abel Valenzuela, Jr., University of California – Los Angeles
Summary: This article presents for the first time findings from the Day Labor Survey. Drawing upon 481 randomly surveyed immigrant day workers at 87 hiring sites throughout Southern California, I examine key demographic, social, and labor market characteristics of this burgeoning informal market. The findings suggest that not all day laborers are desperate, bottom of the barrel, recently arrived job seekers. Day laborers are diverse in family structure, recency of arrival, tenure in day work, and human capital. Earnings among day laborers are mixed; hourly rates are higher than federal or state …

Takeyuki Tsuda, University of California – San Diego
Summary: Despite their socioeconomic and cultural integration in mainstream Brazilian society, however, the Japanese-Brazilians continue to assert a rather prominent “Japanese” ethnic minority identity, which remains considerably stronger than their identification with majority Brazilians or the Brazilian nation (cf. Maeyama 1996:398). Because of a strong consciousness of their distinctive ethnic attributes that constitute their “Japaneseness” in Brazil, the Japanese-Brazilians continue to emphasize their minority identities despite a growing realization that they have become considerably Brazilianized. Many of my nikkeijin informants privileged the Japanese side of their dual ethnic identity, claiming that they feel …

Mahmood Iqbal, The Conference Board of Canada
Summary: This paper (primarily based on the Conference Board study) is a comprehensive examination of brain drain. First, it provides the significance of the issue from Canadian perspective. Then it provides an historical view of overall migration between Canada and the United States. It also provides data on immigrants in Canada from other parts of the world. It then looks at the recent trend in emigration (both permanent and non-permanent or temporary) of highly educated and skilled Canadians to the United States and examines its significance in a broader economic context. Using national data, …

Paula Chakravartty, University of California – San Diego
Summary: This paper does not directly address the role of the Indian government in enabling the practice of “bodyshopping”, precisely because the process is more complex and dynamic than such a causal approach would assume. Instead, I examine the social context within which Indian flexible citizens, often the financiers and brokers of the practice of bodyshopping as well as longer term emigration as well as return emigration, influence domestic economic policy. In other words, I examine the changing symbolic and institutional role of the flexible citizen in relation to the Indian postcolonial state …

A. Aneesh, Rutgers University
Summary: This paper compares practices of on-line and on-site labor (body shopping) in terms of their similarity or difference. It also identifies certain core aspects of on-line, offshore labor, which is a relatively newer phenomenon with little research expended on it, and clarifies how on-line programming works. Rather than limiting the inquiry to the question “what” is achieved and accomplished through the new labor practice, or what the content of work is, or what competitive advantages corporations gain by hiring on-line labor, I begin by asking the question: “how” does this form of labor work? This question …