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 […]
Month: September 2020
For Turkmens abroad and at home, the issue isn’t forced migration but forced containment
In the early summer of 2020, Central Asian migrant workers and students in Russia faced a horrifying problem: capital and jobs were running out and a lack of flights home meant an inability to escape their newfound impoverishment. Turkmen international students, however, still stranded in Russia were fighting another fight: the restriction of financial support […]
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 […]
Building an Identity in the Post-Soviet Space
In 1991 Kazakhstan became an independent country for the first time in over two hundred years, and set out to create a homeland for Kazakhs all over the world. In order to achieve this feat, the new government would have to hold a census and ensure that Kazakhs were the majority. However, as history in […]
Guestworkers Needed: A Comparative Look at Post World War II Germans at Home & Abroad
In The Age of Migration, Hein De Haas takes the reader on a journey into the Guestworker Program in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) that arose in the 1950s. This allowed the FRG to recruit millions of foreign workers over two decades to accommodate the labor needed due to industrial expansion and low birth […]
How words matter – from Germany, Kazakhstan, and the US
De Haas emphasized that the way we speak about migration matters, not only to our discourse, but also to the lived experiences of migrants. Using “migrant worker” instead of “expat” indicates a particular idea about the person in question. We perhaps think “unskilled” or it brings up certain ideas of race and ethnicity. De Haas […]
Migration as opportunity
Marianne Kamp Armenia has not been blessed with either prosperity or population growth since it became an independent country with the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This graph shows that at the beginning of independence, Armenia’s population was about 3.5 million, and as of 2020, it is 2.6 million. Many of these migrants have […]