Diaspora Diplomats: Harnessing Indian and Turkish Youth Activism

With the US elections coming to a close, revolutions propping up in various international regions, and other election cycles running their courses around the globe, it’s safe to say that the youth of the world has never been more politically active. From social media trends to on the ground activism, young people are actively shaping, […]

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Assimilation and Belonging: Identity in Migrant Accounts

In our very first class, we discussed why migration tends to elicit such big emotions. Why is the topic of migration, for example, such an emotive political issue in the United States? De Haas says that migration is contentious and emotive because it conjures up themes of belonging and identity, both of which are very […]

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The question: to migrate or to not migrate? Both exude agency, both are controlled by structures.

Gender is an important dimension of migration. Female migration workers in the past have been dismissed and defined through the patriarchal structures of society as wife, mother, and dependent on the male breadwinner. Through different aspects of international migration, however, these structures and prescribed gender roles have been slowly challenged through traditional family models, and […]

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Do Economies Have to Boom for Migration to Happen?

Once countries started recovering from the devastation of WWII, economies needed to be rebuilt. The USSR had built its command economy around the idea of high levels of extensive growth achieved by a division of labor between countries in Eastern Europe (Comecon) and industrialization. This depended on large amounts of labor as extensive growth meant […]

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Turkish Migration to Germany & the Netherlands

I read Rinus Penninx’s A Critical Review of Theory and Practice: The Case of Turkey with interest, as I have heard quite a lot about Turkish migration to Germany and the Netherlands in recent years, but knew very little about its origins. I am particularly interested in the social and political aspects of migration, but […]

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Overview: German Policy for Migrants and Families in 20th century Europe

This is commenting on “Family Policy and Labor Migration in East and West Germany” by Paul Adams in 1989. After World War II there was a great influx of migration in Europe and the Soviet Union. This was particularly concentrated in Germany, which was split between the democratic west (Federal Republic of Germany), and the […]

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