One area of migration that I kept coming back to in our discussions of migration theory was the bidirectional labor migration I encountered while living near the Georgian-Turkish border. So many of the theories of migration (like the push-pull model, neoclassical migration theory, human capital theory, etc.) seemed to easily explain migration between high-developed, wealthy […]
Month: October 2020
Neoclassical migration theory, NELM, and migration out of Uzbekistan
I have enjoyed reading about the various theories of labor migration that we’ve looked at over the last few weeks. The application of economic theory to real world labor markets is quite interesting, particularly as we look at labor migration through the lens of neoclassical economic theory to more contemporary sociological frames such as through […]
Racism: Turkish and Mexican
There is an ongoing problem of racism in Germany and the United States. In the early 1990s Germany reunified, but many migrant workers decided to stay, the biggest community being the Turks. The Turks were invited to Germany during the Cold War to work and live, although the plan was not meant to be permanent. […]
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 […]
NELM Can’t Explain Labor Migration from Uzbekistan
The new economics of labor migration (NELM) uses family unit as the unit of analysis. On the surface, it looks like it is a perfect theory that can be used to explain the labor migration situation in Uzbekistan. From Sophie Massot’s article, we learned that the Uzbek society is heavily family-driven, and the decision to […]
The Turkish Experience in the Russian Federation
When we talk about migration to the Russian Federation, the main receiving countries that come to mind are those in Central Asia, but rarely do we think about Russia’s southwestern neighbor, Turkey. Towards the end of the Cold War, Turkey improved their relations with the Soviet Union through trade deals, which allowed Turkish companies to […]
Exodus of Cultural Capital: the Migration of Jewish Uzbekistanis from Bukhara to Broadway
If you walk down 108th Street in Queens, NY, you’ll see some familiar sites of an Uzbek diaspora community: tandoor restaurants, traditional clothing stores, and newspaper stands carrying a publication called the Bukharan Times. More curious things you may find are signs with Hebrew alongside Uzbek Cyrillic, synagogues, and Jewish community centers. One does not […]
Does Xenophobia have a Face?
In The Age of Migration De Haas refers racism and xenophobia interchangeably; previously, I associated xenophobia only with the fear of foreign people or culture (De Haas 2020). According to The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy however, my assessment was incomplete. The book defines xenophobia as “an unreasonable fear, distrust, or hatred of strangers, foreigners, […]
“Dirty Labor”: Construction Workers in Russia
Why do migrants work in jobs that natives shun? And why do natives resent them for it? In many of the cases we have studied so far, there seems to be a disconnect between the economic realities of a country and the attitudes of its citizens. In the case of Russia, we see that migrant […]