Migration and Inequality

by Mirna Safi

Overview

In a world of increasingly heated political debates on migration, relentlessly caught up in questions of security, humanitarian crisis, and cultural “problems,” this book radically shifts the focus to address migration through the lens of inequality.
 
Taking an innovative approach, Mirna Safi offers a fresh perspective on how migration is embedded in the elementary mechanisms that shape the landscape of inequality. She sketches out three distinct channels which lead to unequal outcomes for different migrating and non-migrating groups: the global division of labor; the production of legal and administrative categories; and the reconfiguration of symbolic ethnoracial groups. Respectively, these channels categorize migrants as “type of workers,” “type of citizens,” and “type of humans.” Examining this intersection across the U.S. and Europe, she shows how studying international migration together with inequality can challenge nationally established paradigms of social justice.
 
This timely book will be essential reading for all students and researchers interested in the sociology and politics of migration, ethnic and racial studies, and social inequality and stratification.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781509522118
Publisher:	Polity Press
Publication date:	02/18/2020
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mirna Safi is Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 From National to Migration Societies

Chapter 2 - Migration and Elementary Mechanisms of Social Inequality: a conceptual framework

Chapter 3 The Economic Channel: Migrant Workers in the Global Division of Labor

Chapter 4 The Legal Channel: Immigration Law, Administrative Management of Migrants and Civic stratification

Chapter 5 The Ethnoracial Channel: Migration, Group Boundary-Making and Ethnoracial Classification
Struggles

Conclusion: Migration, an Issue of Social Justice

Editorial Reviews

"This short and brilliant synthetic work successfully reconfigures the study of international migration as a facet of global inequality. […] It is one of the most essential books to have been published in the field in a number of years."
Adrian Favell, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Migration and inequality are the twin challenges facing the developed world, with leaders and people deeply divided and uncertain how to respond. For readers in search of insight, Safi’s book is an essential source. Drawing on a vast multidisciplinary literature, Safi provides the crucial tools needed to understand today’s bewilderingly unequal and diverse world."
Roger Waldinger, UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration

"Migration and Inequality is a book of impressive originality. Safi opens new paths in the sociology of ethno-racial formation by connecting distributional, legal and symbolic processes of inequality, and also skillfully captures national, transnational and global pathways at work. Her book should be widely read and discussed by social scientists across the disciplines."
Michèle Lamont, Coauthor of Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil and Israel

"Mirna Safi brilliantly marries the theoretical movement toward relational approaches to stratification and the fate of migrant populations. We learn that the elementary process of social stratification —cultural and cognitive categorization married to the distributional mechanisms of exclusion and exploitation – create migrants as social categories and steer their destination cultural, political and economic reception. This book will be read widely and referred to often."
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

"[Moving] between concepts and empirical research at the macro, meso, and micro levels, [and] literature across disciplines and national contexts [… Safi] touches upon many of the most pressing concerns around migration today, including narratives of a migrant 'crisis', citizenship rights, and ever-present racial and ethnic inequalities. […] Safi provides a thoughtful approach to bridging migration and social stratification research, and the reader is sure to gain a richer understanding of connections between migration and forms of inequality."
Social Forces

From the Publisher