Seminar

Using two case studies (Zimbabwean migrants in South African and Burmese migrants in Thailand) Amy Skoll demonstrates how precarity is mitigated by the home country context as well as the host country context, leading to variation in migrant mobilization.

We examine the impact of a large inflow of people from Puerto Rico into Orlando in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in September 2017. Around 120,000 people left the island in under six months, and a large plurality of them moved into the Orlando metropolitan area. We adopt a synthetic control estimation strategy to identify the short-term causal impact of the inflow on the Orlando labor market.

In this paper, Cynthia van der Werf studies how the largest inflow of refugees in U.S. history –Indochinese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War – affected U.S. children by examining whether native children’s academic achievement was lower in ZIP Codes with higher shares of refugees using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS88), the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and U.S. Census data.

In this paper, Xiaoman Luo investigates how parental out-migration affects the schooling outcomes of children left behind in rural China.

Alev Çakır will give an overview of her doctoral work that analyzes the governing of 'migrant entrepreneurship', taking the example of türkiyeli (coming from Turkey) entrepreneurs, in Austria by both, policies and 'migrant entrepreneurs' themselves. She investigates issues on neoliberal economization and ethnicization of the 'migrant subject' by discussing the role of intersectional power relations and the political embeddedness of these processes.

This paper by Yaxi Chen approaches the impact of China's booming housing market in the past 15 years, with a focus on the impact of the capital crowding out effect on other productive sector, and possible labor reallocation across different sectors.

In this project, Professor Joanna Regulska argues that IDPs use memory, acts of ‘re-membering’, in order to attain and maintain a state of mobility. She explores the relationship between memory and place-making (a practice of building ties with a place). She focuses on the agency of displaced persons as they act to overcome the experience of dis-placement and retain or regain the symbolic ties to home and homeland through their memories.  

Italians were the largest contributors to the rise in Southern European immigration that took place at the turn of the 20th century in the US. Assistant Professor Santiago Pérez compares the economic performance of Italians in Argentina and the US, the two largest destination countries during the age of mass migration.

In this talk, Assistant Professor Stacy Fahrenthold examines the politics of Syrian and Lebanese migration during the First World War. Examining how empires at war—from the Ottomans to the French—claimed emigrants abroad as part of the state-building process, Fahrenthold argues they transformed this diaspora into an epicenter for Arab nationalist politics.

Professor Brad Jones will share his experiences in providing humanitarian efforts on the border as well as discuss the migrant death crisis more generally in the context of U.S. immigration policy.