Immigrant Vulnerability and Resilience
A new book edited volume by Maria AyAysa Lastra and Lorenzo Cachón explores how the current sustained economic slow-down in Europe and North America has increased migrant vulnerability in the labour market and in everyday life. The various chapters detail the ways in which global recession has affected the migrants and their countries of origin. The book first focuses on the immediate effects of the Great recession on migrants’ employment. It next connects the experience of migrants in the labour market with experiences in the social arena of receiving societies. Coverage also explores the effects of the economic downturn on transnational practices, remittances and return of Latin American migrants to their countries of origin.
DIIS senior researcher Ninna Nyberg Sørensen contributes a chapter on the effect of deportation to Latin America. The chapter "Great Recession, Migration Management and the Effect of Deportations to Latin America"considers the importance of the economic crisis on academic thinking around the effects of migration on development. Historically, migration has played an important role in the globalization of Latin American livelihood and governance strategies and, as such, provided empirical background to the transnational migration paradigm and concepts such as transnationalism from ‘below’ and from ‘above’. The Great Recession and the ensuing intensification and diversification of migration control nevertheless have made apparent that promises of development and global incorporation through migration do not necessarily apply to marginalized sectors of society whose migrants often remain undocumented. The chapter argues that to the extent that pre-recession migrants with relative ease managed to settle the relationship between migration and development through more or less or self-determined processes of recruitment, remittances, and circularity, post-recession migratory projects are increasingly marked by strenuous experiences of irregularity, danger, debt and deportation.
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