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DOI 10.1007/s10624-013-9325-y
In these troubled economic times where we see yet further evidence of capitalisms
tendency toward periodic crises, analysts within the academy and beyond turn
increasingly to political economy and Marxism. They question whether and how the
current moment can be historically situated in the periodic crises that continue to
beleaguer the capitalist world.1 These paradigms, so many contend, are inherently
suited to the study of social and economic turbulence, for their conceptual and
methodological schemata are wholly committed to illuminating mutations of
capitalism and its cyclical fluctuations (see Harvey 1990). For scholarship on
migration, the turn to these diagnostics is also salutary, as it has long been
established that migration and capitalism are entwined in a relationship between
reciprocal formation and transformation. This relationship is made most vivid under
the long shadow cast by financial meltdowns, bailouts, monetarism, economist
restructuring, state rescaling, rising unemployment, and various modes of dispos-
session of people from their means of livelihood (Harvey 2003; Kasmir and
Carbonella 2008). In this, as in other tumultuous periods, the movement of people
across spaces and boundaries has escalated, and the entangled relationship between
capitalism and migration has been thrown into stark relief. This relationship is no
less extricable now than in previous eras as the development of capitalism
proceeded apace.2 Indeed, capitalisms nascent formations were premised upon the
transatlantic movement of people. Under the regimes of imperialism and
1
See for example Ho (2009), Wade (2008) and McNally (2008). Also relevant are Masse (2008), Fox
(2008), and Collins (2008) whose articles appear in conservative newspapers.
2
See for example Sassen (1999), Castles and Miller (2009) and also Lem and Barber (2010).
W. Lem (&)
Trent University, Peterborough, Canada
e-mail: wlem@trentu.ca
P. G. Barber
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
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358 W. Lem, P. G. Barber
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The dialectics of migration 359
7
See Ravenstein (1885).
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360 W. Lem, P. G. Barber
123
The dialectics of migration 361
landscape of Tel Aviv. Shapiro argues that while they share public spaces and are
partially integrated by sojourning in the world of their privileged employers, as a
result of their poverty, they are in fact precariously positioned in Tel Aviv society.
In this way, Shapiro argues, these women and their children have come to constitute
a privileged underclass, likely to change social structures in unprecedented ways.
The tensions of economic turmoil, locality, and class are also pursued by Shu Fan
Wen. Her discussion focuses on how the recent turbulence and instabilities of the
global economy have conditioned a process of return migration. Wens research is
based on skilled workers in the US health sector who migrated from China to the
USA in the 1980s and 1990s. After settling to work for extended periods of time in
health and pharmaceutical companies, a number of members of this professional
class responded to the recent economic downturn through repatriation to China.
Chinese market reform, commencing in 1979, created favorable economic
conditions that in turn informed the decision to return. Wen focuses on the
experience of return to Shanghai, which in the post-reform era developed rapidly to
become the most commercialized modern city in China. She then examines the
challenges posed by the reinsertion of such transnational populations, who were
formed as a product of global change, into a national context which has also itself
been transformed by global capitalism and neoliberalism.
Sharon Rosemans article pursues an issue raised in Wens contribution on the
difficulty of entry into geographically available wage labor markets. Drawing on
research in northern Spain, Roseman focuses on internal or regional migrations of
young adult workers from rural parts of Galicia. She records how the quest for wage
work (involving multiple job entries and reentries) literally involves moving back
and forth to enter into dispersed labor markets. Rural Galicia is a region that has
experienced a prolonged history of very high levels of unemployment. Unemploy-
ment, and particularly youth unemployment, is one of the most serious issues facing
Spain, but also to varying degrees other countries of the EU, and indeed states all
over the world. In Spain, this problem is at crisis levels of over 50 % in the current
period, but the issue has been longstanding. Rosemans article examines the
shifting, interrelated contexts for unemployment and the push to seek waged work
outside of local labor markets during the period from the 1960s to the present. Her
contribution takes an approach to labor migration that includes daily commuting as
well as travel over longer distances and durations. Such varied mobilities include
both temporary displacement and seemingly more permanent resettlement. Her
article then considers the role of various government policies overtime in instituting,
supporting, or discouraging different geographic trajectories and forms of move-
ment for young rural Galician workers, and under shifting conditions in the
economy of capitalism.
These articles and the articles that will follow in Part 2 of this special issue show
that as capitalism continues to prevail as the dominant system which organizes our
world, it also conditions the livelihood and social circumstances of mobile people.
Because of this, so we argue here, analyses centered on capitalism are most relevant
to the task of illuminating the transformations, processes, and crises in the
contemporary world. Drawing on cross continental examples of the transregional
and transnational circulations of people, these papers embed the analyses of
123
362 W. Lem, P. G. Barber
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