Migration

People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a very stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health reducing the net benefits of migration. However, to truly understand the effect of migration on mental health one must compare the mental health of migrants to what their mental health would have been had they stayed in their home country. The existing literature is not able to do this and typically settles for comparing the mental health of migrants to that of natives in the destination country,which takes no account of any pre-existing differences between these groups. This paper overcomes the selection problems affecting previous studies of the effect of migration on mental health by examining a migrant lottery program. New Zealand allows a quota of Tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery used to choose amo...

"This chapter discusses how models, combined with modern data sources and statistical methods, can be used to test different hypotheses about the causes of migration. Mathematical formalisms for migration are presented. The ecological mechanisms that could spontaneously have given rise to migration-like patterns of space use from the interaction within and between groups of animals and their environment are discussed, showing that migration is best seen as to lie on a continuum from sedentary to nomadic movement patterns and not as a clearly distinct movement behaviour. Given the multitude of potential processes leading to migration, and the constraints imposed by data collection methods, it may be difficult to observe and identify the original cause. With this caveat in mind, the use of inferential methods to detect, quantify and identify the underlying mechanisms of migration is discussed and the links between models, data and inference are illustrated using three case studies.
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Updates:
The book already sold out! A corrected reprint is available since Dec 2011."

The issues of illegal immigration are not new to the global community; indeed one might argue that is the reason for the existence of countries such as New Zealand, Australia and many others born of the British Empire. Now, with the continuing mobility of global crime and terrorism, the issues of illegal immigration and, in particular, mass arrivals have become a topic of great importance. As other nations tighten down on such issues, New Zealand is becoming a potentially viable destination despite its isolation geographically. Through the examination of Australia and Canada, countries both geographically similar and with generally similar outlooks to such issues as immigration, the measured approach made by New Zealand can be bench-marked. Whilst being fortunate to have not had to face a mass arrival already, New Zealand now has suitable legislation in place to aid in deterring and dealing with eventual arrivals having taken the best of each nation’s experiences. The delicate balancing of the needs for maritime security while still meeting international obligations as a ‘good citizen’ of the global community are always open to opinion, although seemingly, New Zealand has hit the right balance and has obtained a good foundation to meet a rising threat.

L'hospitalité est une pratique en apparence simple et universellement partagée. Il serait donc tentant d'en fournir une définition générique : l'hospitalité est l'institution qui règle l'interaction entre un accueillant (chez lui) et un accueilli (nouveau venu), consistant en un processus de familiarisation réciproque (faire connaissance, entretenir une relation, etc.). Elle a comme fonctions la dispensation de bienfaits, l'amorçage de la socialité, l'identification de l'étranger, ou l'intégration temporaire de l'invité.
L'hospitalité ne saurait néanmoins être réduite à une vertu privée. Elle est au contraire une pratique politique : elle institue des règles, des frontières, et des dispositifs d'intégration ou d'exclusion. Cet ouvrage expose les différentes formes qu'elle a pu revêtir, des sociétés traditionnelles à nos jours en explicitant les relations de pouvoir qui se jouent dans le langage vertueux de l'hospitalité. Une telle généalogie permet de retrouver les moments et les lieux clés qui ont façonné ce concept en le transformant, le déplaçant et le recomposant selon sa fonction politique.

an exploration of the factors influencing the transnational transmission of telenovelas from Latin America, coupled with an analysis of the inscription of migratory narratives in telenovelas broadcast on Spanish-language television in the United States

Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.
Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the occurrences of life movingly interwoven with memories, associations, desires, and reflections. Readers are brought into a tender map of contemporary urban experience and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener includes parallel drawings based on the original audio recordings and appears as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code in the book.

I Centri di accoglienza sono le strutture nelle quali viene offerta una prima ospitalità e assistenza ai migranti. In Italia, negli anni e soprattutto in occasioni di «emergenze umanitarie», sono stati aperti tipi differenti di Centri. L'articolo, oltre a descrivere le differenti caratteristiche delle strutture oggi operative, presenta parte del dibattito in corso tra giuristi, scienziati politico-sociali ed esperti di servizi sociali, evidenziando i principali discorsi retorici sul tema e gli elementi di etichettamento degli stranieri inseriti in un progetto di assistenza.

Mexican cuisine has emerged as a paradox of globalization. Food enthusiasts throughout the world celebrate the humble taco at the same time that Mexicans are eating fewer tortillas and more processed food. Today Mexico is experiencing an epidemic of diet-related chronic illness. The precipitous rise of obesity and diabetes—attributed to changes in the Mexican diet—has resulted in a public health emergency.

In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico—sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have resulted in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives.

This article examines a cinematic artefact from 1957 titled The Housing Program of Iraq, which contains rare footage of sarifa (reed and mud) settlements inhabited by rural migrants in mid-century Baghdad. The film, which was never finished, was produced as a collaboration between the Greek architect Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the director Demetrios Gaziades, who shot and edited the footage between Baghdad and Athens. Through this film Doxiadis intended to complement the Doxiadis Associates’ (DA) entry for the Iraq National Housing Exhibition and also to promote the modern housing projects designed by DA. In this period, various statist actors used the representational medium of documentary film in an attempt to redefine the boundaries of Iraqi citizenship. This film, thus, offered a cinematic portal into an other Baghdad, which was staged as the problem of development. Subsequent scenes narrated the solution to these neighbourhoods and positioned a family in a modern low-income house to animate the film’s developmental fantasy. The film projected universal Iraqi home ownership as a form of citizenship where the house was an instrument to facilitate financial, legal, and social agreements between rural migrants and the Iraqi state. By interrogating the methodological question of how to assemble an archive of ephemeral and subaltern places, this essay suggests expanding our notion of historiographic evidence to understand the intertwined relationships between the politics of development and architecture, and their representation in media.

A new era of the feminist movement has already been established. We are
living in it. The organization of the international strikes of women, lesbians,
trans persons, and travestis since 2017 has marked a turning point in the
scale of the movement and in the conceptualization and constellation of
struggles that consider themselves feminist. It is this triple dimension of the movement (multiplicity of struggles, geographic scale, and common grammar) that has produced, with great political efficacy, concrete analyses and practices that oppose the predatory modes of the current phase of patriarchal and colonial capitalism.

The number of forcibly-displaced people in the world now exceed 65 million, due primarily to violent conflict, persecution, and natural disasters. This course examines the hardships most refugees face during their journeys, in the process of resettlement and integration, and after return. It introduces students to the policies that govern the protection of and assistance to refugees, and the humanitarian responses by international organizations, nation-states, local governments, NGOs, and others in an effort to alleviate their suffering. The course also discusses the future challenges, such as climate-induced displacement.

Even though anthropogenic climate change is largely caused by industrialized nations, its burden is distributed unevenly with poor developing countries suffering the most. A common response to livelihood insecurities and destruction is migration. Using Peter Singer's ‘historical principle’, this paper argues that a morally just evaluation requires taking causality between climate change and migration under consideration. The historical principle is employed to emphasize shortcomings in commonly made philosophical arguments to oppose immigration. The article concludes that none of these arguments is able to override the moral responsibility of industrialized countries to compensate for harms that their actions have caused.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Borderlands 2016 Table of Contents and Introduction

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world.  But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today?  What do we know about the individuals who fill these places, their hopes and fears, and about the kinds of social relationships that form between the groups of people who confront one another there – the migrants and refugees, the local residents, the police and other officials of the state? 

In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of  subject, the border inhabitant (or) the border dweller, who is  both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is  obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people.  In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a ‘cosmopolitan condition’ in which the experience of the unfamiliar is  more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal. .

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and politics, as well as anyone concerned with the pressing issues raised by migration today.

Magic rituals and Nigerian prostitution: the experience of an anthropological consultation for an Italian court of law.
International Conference: “Life on Ioan: work, debt, dependence”, Certosa di Pontignano (Siena) september, 24th to 26th 2004.
The paper illustrates a part of the results which emerged during the research I carried out on behalf of Bergamo Law Court, in my capacity as technical adviser in the field of cultural anthropology. This type of consultation is far from commonplace in Italy. The magistrates who, in pioneering fashion, commissioned the report, needed to arrive at a better understanding of the claims of young Nigerian women who reported their pimps (“madams”), also Nigerian women, to the police. The crimes the latter  are accused of (the trial is still under way) are reduction into slavery; aiding and abetting and living on the earnings of prostitution; and aiding and abetting illegal immigration. The accounts of the accusers featured references to the use of magic rituals (commonly referred by the mass media to as “voodoo ceremonies”) as well as to forms of violent intimidation. Moreover, searches carried out by criminal police in the houses where the accusers and the accused cohabited revealed organic and inorganic materials, which appeared to bear out the supposition that magic rituals had taken place. The petition for an anthropological consultation regarded the cultural contextualization of these practices through a comparison with existing ritual practices in Nigeria. The report did not so much aim to confirm the credibility of the accusers’ claims, but rather to provide a cultural context useful for understanding the circumstances recalled. The work used the testimony of young Nigerian women, victims of the trade (some of these were interviewed personally), documentation provided by the court and numerous ethnographical texts on Nigeria. The work was first delivered in the form of a written report and then presented in court during a hearing.
The ritual practices Nigerian women involved in the activity of prostitution in Italy claim they have been subjected to by the madam are divided into two types, which we have examined separately: the first performed by an adept back in Nigeria, and the second performed in the madam’s house in Italy.
As far as the ritual performed in Nigeria is concerned (despite the heterogeneity of the young women’s descriptions probably owing to the fact that the adepts who carry out the ritual come from different traditions), we can find accounts of similar acts in ethno-anthropological literature on the “magical-therapeutic” rituals of the populations of the south of Nigeria The ritual the girls are subjected to often assumes the form of a sort of oath-curse through which the girls are enjoined, under threat of death, to settle their “debt” (that is to pay back the sum they are told was loaned to pay for their journey) and not to report the madam.
The ritual practices performed in Italy by the madam require  more extensive and detailed research. However, from studies carried out so far it is clear that these practices consist in removing organic substances (nails, hair, body hair, blood and menstrual blood), clothes or personal objects from the victim, as well as in parcelling them up. This with the threat that the material will be used in rituals which might lead to death, rituals which the girls normally do not see and which they are therefore unable to describe. In some cases the threat is that the material will be sent to the same native-doctor who performed the ritual in Nigeria.
Whether it is carried out or not, the madam’s threat to perform (or to have somebody  perform) the ritual at the girl’s expense appears to appeal to a shared native cultural substratum, pertinent to the existence in Nigeria of magic-medicinal practices. Indeed, these practices are widespread and familiar in Nigeria, though not always accepted by worshippers of various religious faiths. In the case of young Christian girls- though scarcely aware of details concerning the adepts and the techniques and the materials they use- it emerges that they at least know of the existence of these practices and some of their aims. I am especially alluding to the very much feared practice of the curse.
To sum up, we can affirm that we are actually dealing with two types of ritual. The first  is the oath-curse performed in Nigeria by which the girl’s escape would betoken her death. This appears to be central. The second is the removing of organic substances carried out in Italy, which appears to act as a call to order, done as a precaution, or at critical moments (when the girl fails to obey the madam), involving the threat of performing a magic ritual and/or the evoking of the magic ritual previously performed in Nigeria.
On the other hand, oaths and curses performed by ritual adepts are  recorded at length in anthropological literature, just as Nigerian legal literature testifies to rituals performed to subjugate an individual (Penal Code and Criminal Code). The aims expressed or threatened by the madam’s rituals do not appear to be an entirely new phenomenon. Subjugating someone, cursing them, preventing them from speaking or reacting, are the aims of some types of ritual which are described in ethnographic literature as often as they are found in the evidence given by Nigerian women in Italy. A peculiar element of the rituals commissioned by the madam consists in their methodical, organised and large-scale nature (indeed they do not act on a single “enemy”). This enables us to interpret these rituals as a criminal “recycling” of traditional “magic-medicinal” knowledge and techniques.
Regarding the ritual performed in Italy, the marked preponderance of human organic materials compared with the numerous other ingredients (vegetal, mineral, etc..) listed in ethnographical literature on Nigerian rituals, is striking. This preponderance is observed both in victims’ accounts –where the extraction of organic substances appears to be fundamental- and in the criminal police’s descriptions of materials seized.
Between rituals belonging to Nigerian tradition and those performed within the context of the trade there appear to be both divergences and parallels concerning the purposes, techniques, or materials employed. Besides these divergences or parallels, what matters most of all is that- by virtue of common references to the madam and her victims to a universe of practices existing in Nigeria- there is clearly some form of blackmail taking place. Organic substances are extracted, appealing to the deep feelings and emotions these trigger, as they are associated with the victim’s individuality, with the aim of frightening the victims of the trade. Other objects or materials represent specific cultural references. These seem to have the purpose of directly and explicitly evoking magic practices (principally curses) current in Nigeria. Being organic substances, these objects and materials either foreshadow a future act of magic, or are genuinely used in a ritual, their principal role appearing to be explicitly, within the context of the madam/victim relationship , that of threatening the latter, and preserving and representing on a physical and sensorial level the relationship of total subjugation to the madam.

An increase of cross-cultural learning as a consequence of increased travel and migration between Egypt and the Levant during the Iron Age occurred after millennia of migration in earlier times. The result was an Egyptian-Levantine koine, often not recognized as relevant by historians due to an uncritical reproduction of ancient myths of separation. However, the cultural exchange triggered by migration is attested in the language, in the iconography of the region, in the history of the alphabet, in literary motifs, in the characterization of central characters of the Hebrew Bible and, last but not least, in the rise of new religions, which integrated the experience of otherness in a new ethos.

Many qiaoxiang in southern Fujian and Guangdong appear derelict, but from documenting the material heritage and interviewing people about its social significance, another image surfaces. The homeland of Overseas Chinese was not only found to be significant to the diaspora, but serve as an enduring reminder of a grassroots-based modernity in rural China. The qiaoxiang effectively became a transnational legacy of migration from southern China that has undergone the following stages of transformation: exodus-led emergence of a remittance landscape, sudden abandonment, and sometimes revival. Today, it has become a “repository” or “living museum” where tourists and scholars alike can visit and ponder about how humans adapted to post-rural life.

Slavs in the Making takes a fresh look at archaeological evidence from parts of Slavic-speaking Europe north of the Lower Danube, including the present-day territories of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

Nothing is known about what the inhabitants of those remote lands called themselves during the sixth century, or whether they spoke a Slavic language. The book engages critically with the archaeological evidence from these regions, and questions its association with the "Slavs" that has often been taken for granted. It also deals with the linguistic evidence—primarily names of rivers and other bodies of water—that has been used to identify the primordial homeland of the Slavs, and from which their migration towards the Lower Danube is believed to have started. It is precisely in this area that sociolinguistics can offer a serious alternative to the language tree model currently favoured in linguistic paleontology. The question of how best to explain the spread of Slavic remains a controversial issue. This book attempts to provide an answer, and not just a critique of the method of linguistic paleontology upon which the theory of the Slavic migration and homeland relies.

The book proposes a model of interpretation that builds upon the idea that (Common) Slavic cannot possibly be the result of Slavic migration. It addresses the question of migration in the archaeology of early medieval Eastern Europe, and makes a strong case for a more nuanced interpretation of the archaeological evidence of mobility. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in medieval history, migration, and the history of Eastern and Central Europe.

Passive optical network (PON) is one of the most successful broadband access architectures being deployed worldwide. PONs provide high capacity, increased reach, and low-power consumption at a very reasonable cost, on par with the cost of DSL deployments today. This paper provides an overview of present and emerging PON technologies, and discusses PON's important role in the evolution of optical access from the architectural perspective. While describing the evolution of optical access architecture, we present two important integration options: optical+wireless access integration and metro+access integration. Potential PON capacity upgrades are discussed with special emphasis on achieving a seamless upgrade. We evaluate different PON evolution strategies in the context of next-generation PON, where gradual, demand-based migration demonstrates a number of significant benefits.

The massive flow of asylum seekers, most of them from third countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Eritrea, led the EU institutions to recognize in April 2015 the exceptional nature of the situation, calling unsuccessfully for the adoption of solidarity measures to overcome the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the so-called "frontline Member States", such as the Hellenic Republic and the Italian Republic. In this context, the European Commission's Pact on Migration and Asylum of 23 September 2020 represents a package of proposals that incorporates previous measures advanced by the Commission after this migration crisis. Despite the expectations and premises of the new Pact, it retains an emergency and state-centered approach that has so far characterized the measures adopted by the Union. Therefore, article wants to show that the crisis is still ongoing and, for certain aspects, unresolved and unsolvable, because it is a deeper crisis that concerns the values of the Union which is intended differently by the EU Member States.

The Roman world is characterised by high levels of mobility, and by the diverse origins of its peoples. This volume is about the different kinds of evidence for the presence of foreigners, and about the ways in which locals and non-locals interacted and changed, and how complex and fluid identities were maintained and adapted through time.