This collection of essays revises and broadens scholarly assumptions about the history of migration in search of work. The book begins with a critique of current concepts in migration history and a general survey of European labor migration from the 1820s to the 1920s. The following section discusses important emigration and immigration countries and examines in detail the problems of internal European migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author then focuses on the acculturation of labor migrants on both sides of the Atlantic. The final section of this work tackles the much neglected question of return migration. A bibliographic essay, as well as numerous graphs, maps, and illustrations, supplement this collection of essays.

Emigration, immigration, economic aspects, Great Britain, USA.

Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914—the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years. Globalization is not a new phenomenon, nor is it irreversible. In Gobalization and History, Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson present a coherent picture of trade, migration, and international capital flows in the Atlantic economy in the century prior to 1914—the first great globalization boom, which anticipated the experience of the last fifty years. The authors estimate the extent of globalization and its impact on the participating countries, and discuss the political reactions that it provoked. The book's originality lies in its application of the tools of open-economy economics to this critical historical period—differentiating it from most previous work, which has been based on closed-economy or single-sector models. The authors also keep a close eye on globalization debates of the 1990s, using history to inform the present and vice versa. The book brings together research conducted by the authors over the past decade—work that has profoundly influenced how economic history is now written and that has found audiences in economics and history, as well as in the popular press.

The Economics of Labor Migration: A Behavioral Analysis presents an in-depth study of the various factors and conditions that lead to a worker's decision to migrate. The book applies theoretical and empirical procedures to the analysis and comprehension of the labor migration phenomenon. The text is organized in that the first chapter provides an introduction of the subject and an overview and outline of the study. Chapter 2 reviews previous studies on the determinants of interregional migration and geographic mobility. In Chapter 3, a theoretical behavioral model of the migration decision is developed. The judgments used in developing a data base suitable for estimation purposes and the aggregate characteristics of the sample of workers are presented in Chapter 4. The fifth chapter discusses the estimation results. Chapter 6 evaluates the data using collinearity diagnostics that identify sources of collinearity. The final chapter gives a summary of the study, recommendations for further research, and an assessment of the migration policy in the United States. Demographers, economists, sociologists, employers, and government administrators will find the book invaluable.

Includes statistics.

More than twenty million migrant workers send $40 billion to their countries of origin each year, making labor second only to oil as the most important commodity traded internationally. The essays contained here deal with this unsettled sociopolitical issue--international labor migration and its relationship to economic development--seeking to determine the effects of recruitment, remittances, and return migration on labor-exporting countries. Many analysts, sending-country governments, employers, and migrant workers feel that countries with unemployed workers should, if possible, export them to countries with labor shortages. Remittances from migrants and returning workers who were trained abroad should stimulate economic growth enough to reduce unemployment and pressures to emigrate. It was projected that within a decade or less, labor-importing countries would emerge from the labor-shortage phase of their development. However, migrant workers have become a structural feature of the economies in Western Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and the United States: emigration does not promote development in the sending countries. This collection of twelve chapters by experts in the field examines the conceptual and theoretical issues in international labor migration and looks at the relationship between migration and development in Africa, between Mediterranean countries and Europe, between Asian labor exporters and Middle Eastern importers, and the effects of emigration on Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to comprehensive introductory and concluding sections, Conceptual and Theoretical Issues in International Labor Migration and The Unsettled Relationship between Migration and Development, the volume is divided into four additional sections that scrutinize labor migration and development in Africa, Greece, and Turkey, Asian countries, and Latin America, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The book's recurring theme states that there is no iron law of migration-induced development: recruitment, remittances, and returns do not automatically generate stay-at-home development. This first thorough and comparative treatment, with its focus on the population, social policy, labor market, language, and foreign policy implications of recent and present policies, will be invaluable for courses on refugees and migrants in sociology and comparative public policy. Research libraries and international assistance organizations will find it an indispensable resource.

This book analyzes the impact of thirty years of labor migration from the Mediterranean region and from Finland to western and northern continental Europe. The authors consider the effects on the host countries of the role foreign migrants play in host countries economies, the formation of new ethnic communities, choices made concerning the educati

In the globalized economy, labor migration has become of central importance. A key issue in the analysis of immigration is how the migrants fare in the economy in which they migrate, and how they assimilate towards the behavior of the natives. Using data from the United States, Canada, many European countries, Australia and New Zealand, the chapters study the developments of earnings, employment, unemployment, self-employment, occupational choices and educational attainment after migration. The book also investigates the role of language in labor market integration and examines the situation of illegal, legalized and unwilling migrants. Policy effects are also studied: Among those are the effects of selection criteria of labor market success and the effects immigrants have on the public sector budget of the receiving country. Hence, the book provides a broad picture of the performance of migrants.

The essays in this collection address issues significant to labor within regional, national and international contexts. Themes of the chapters will focus on managed labor migration; organizing in multi-ethnic and multi-national contexts; global economics and labor; global economics and inequality; gender and labor; racism and globalization; regional trade agreements and labor.

As part of a process that has been at work since 1850, real wages among the current OECD countries converged during the late 19th century. The convergence was pronounced as that which we have seen in the post World War Il period. This paper uses computable general equilibrium models to isolate the sources of that economic convergence by assessing the relative performance of the two most important economies in the Old World and the New -- Britain and the USA. It turns out that between 1870 and 1910, the convergence forces that mattered were those that generated by commodity price convergence, stresses by Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, and mass migration, stressed by Knut Wicksell. It turns out that offsetting forces were contributing to late 19th century divergence, a finding consistent with economic historians' traditional attention to Britain's alleged failure and America's spectacular rise to industrial supremacy. The convergence forces, however, dominated for most of the period.