Maura I. Toro-Morn, Migration and Immigration

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Sept, 2005 by Clare Sheridan

Maura I. Toro-Morn, Migration and Immigration. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004. $49.95 hardcover.

Migration and Immigration provides a broad overview of global migration. Through fourteen case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, North and South America and Australia, it illustrates different patterns and trends in international migration. Presenting a truly global view, it reaches beyond the conventional dichotomies in the migration literature of core and periphery and sending and receiving countries. While it recognizes that historical colonial relationships still shape migratory flows, it also highlights the effects that globalization has had on population movements. For instance, women have become a greater part of the migration stream, moving from rural areas to cities to fill jobs in the global assembly line. This is largely a phenomenon of internal migration, as the concentration of manufacturing and production has shifted from developed countries to developing ones. Women have also joined the international migration stream to become domestics in economies based on finance and technology.

While the vast majority of migrants occupy low-skilled jobs, educated professionals also migrate. Large numbers of well-educated Ghanaians, for example, have migrated to Canada, the United States and Western Europe in search of economic opportunity. According to the editors, these two types of migrant flows comprise "two sides of the same coin in the global economy." Yu Zhou's excellent chapter on China illustrates this phenomenon with two case studies of Chinese immigrants to the United States.

In Africa another phenomenon, "circular migration," is occurring in which relatively prosperous and peaceful nations such as Tanzania accept migrants and refugees from neighboring countries. Other intraregional migratory patterns include the movement of people from underdeveloped economies such as Cambodia and Indonesia to work in Japan, Singapore and the other "tiger economies."

Finally, the costs and benefits of guest worker programs to both sending and receiving countries are addressed in several chapters, including one on the Philippine Overseas Employment Program and ones on France and the Netherlands, both countries with declining populations. Their approach contrasts to Australia's, which has an immigrant policy that helps to incorporate newcomers into society.

As in most edited volumes, the quality of the contributions is uneven. The editors' attempt to create a coherent whole by having the authors follow a template, including a country profile a vignette, is unsuccessful. The vignettes are not integrated into the text and the profiles often provide far too much information, leading readers' attention to wander. However, the breadth of the migration experiences described is indispensable to understanding the complexity of migration in a global world. Nobuko Adachi's story of Japanese Brazilian migration to Japan, for example, will be new to many readers and adds insight to the intergenerational dynamics of migrants' lives. Migration and Immigration does a service by exposing readers to new trends in the rapidly changing state of global migration.

Clare Sheridan, University of California, Berkeley