Peggy Levitt, Wellesley College
Abstract: Many aspects of religious life have long been global. Contemporary migrants extend and deepen these cross-border ties by transnationalizing everyday religious practice. Instead of severing their connections to their homelands, increasing numbers of migrants remain strongly connected to their countries of origin at the same time as they become integrated into the countries that receive them. While some “keep feet in two worlds” by earning their livelihoods or supporting political candidates across borders, other migrants do so by belonging to transnational religious organizations and movements, therefore expanding already global religious institutions and allowing them to belong …

Uwe Hunger, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and University of Muenster – Germany
Introduction: The basic idea of the “brain gain” hypothesis is, that intellectual and technical elites from the Third World who emigrated to an industrialized country represent a potential resource for the socioeconomic development of their home country. To date, development and migration theories state that the emigration of elites from developing countries has almost exclusively negative impacts on the Third World. This loss of important intellectual and technical resources is labeled with the catchword “brain drain”. By modernization theory as well as by dependence theory this “brain drain” …

Fred Krissman, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
Abstract: Empirical studies, theoretical models, and public policies concerning undocumented migration have placed too much emphasis on the “supply-side”. This approach – simultaneously self-serving and self-defeating – emphasizes socioeconomic conditions within Third World countries and immigration enforcement by advanced industrialized nations. Conducting fieldwork in both rural Mexico and the United States, I found that the personnel practices and recruitment activities within three of America’s billion dollar crop industries create and perpetuate unauthorized migrant flows. My study of these rural labor markets contradicts several critical supply-side assumptions, especially pertaining to the origins and composition of …

Christian Joppke, European University Institute, Florence
Zeev Roshenhek, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Abstract: After World War II, Israel and Germany adopted curiously similar policies of ethnic- priority immigration, accepting as immigrants only putative co-ethnics. The first objective of this article is to provide analytical descriptions of an understudied type of immigration, which is entirely a political artefact and also offers a window into the constitution and contestation of the boundaries of the national community. The second objective is to account for the main variation between the two cases, the resilience of Jewish immigration in Israel, and the demise of ethnic-German immigration in Germany. …

Gordon H. Hanson, University of California, San Diego & NEBR
Antonio Spilimbergo, International Monetary Fund
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the correlation between sectoral shocks and border enforcement in the United States. Enforcement of national borders is the main policy instrument the U.S. government uses to combat illegal immigration. We see whether border enforcement falls following positive shocks to sectors that are intensive in the use of undocumented labor, as would be consistent with political economy models of illegal immigration. The main finding is that border enforcement is negatively correlated with lagged relative price changes in the apparel, fruits and vegetables, …

David Kyle, University of California, Davis
Zai Liang, Queens College – CUNY
Abstract: Human smuggling is a phenomenon that further blurs the already fuzzy boundaries between economic migrant and refugee, legal and illegal immigrant. Many state policy-makers and NGOs are concerned that if they admit immigrants or refugees who use human smugglers, this will encourage smugglers to further break immigration laws. This paper questions the assumption that illegal migrants are like any other illegal commodity crossing state borders. Kyle argues that most migrant smugglers are social bandits who may be considered unsavory and even dangerous by their home societies, but not as …

E. Anne Beal, University of Chicago
Abstract: Amid the frenzied consumption of villas, clothing, technology, and services characteristic of up-scale living in Amman, the most conspicuous of the conspicuous consumers are popularly identified as wealthy Palestinians who entered Jordan in the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This presentation will focus on these “returnees” to Jordan – some of whom had never lived in Jordan prior to the invasion – and more specifically, the relationships among their consumption practices, conflicting notions of taste among Amman’s elites, and the emergence of a “Gulfie” Palestinian identity. Despite the global aspects of …

Alan Kessler, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and University of Texas – Austin
Abstract: Are public attitudes toward immigration policy in the United States driven by economic or non-economic concerns? Though systematic analyses are few, a burgeoning literature suggests that cultural norms and enduring values, rather than calculations of self-interest, determine immigration policy preferences. This paper challenges the contention that economic motivations play little or no role in the formation of immigration policy preferences. Drawing on recent work in political economy, I argue that individual preferences over immigration policy reflect economic and non-economic concerns – both broadly rooted in considerations of …

Idean Salehyan, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
Introduction: There are over 14 million refugees and asylum seekers in the world today (Figure 1, U.S. Committee for Refugees 2000). These are people who have crossed national boundaries – not in search of economic opportunities – but because they fear political persecution or violence in their countries of origin. Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and Colombia, among others, have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes in search of safe haven elsewhere (table 1). Receiving countries, for their part, face substantial burdens when large numbers of refugees and …

May Relaño Pastor, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and  Universidad de Granada (Spain)