Marx on Immigration: Workers, Wages, and Legal Status

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (9) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Wilson

Given the intense and often bitter debates over immigration now taking place in the United States and Europe…. [Marx's thoughts on the subject have] received surprisingly little attention from the modern left.… [Marx wrote about immigrant workers] nearly 150 years ago, and he was certainly not infallible, but a great deal of his analysis sounds remarkably contemporary.… [And among his insights, largely ignored by economists and activists alike, is] the one Marx considered "most important of all": the way immigration can be used to create "a working class divided into two hostile camps."Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (17) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Ángel Vázquez Ruiz

Resumen:El proceso de globalización de los procesos económicos, a primera vista sugiere un mundo de dimensiones homogéneas, muy interrelacionado entre sí y con igualdad de oportunidades de desarrollo para todos los países. Pero la realidad se desenvuelve en otra lógica: la globalización impulsa dinámicas muy segmentadas, donde el mundo vive las paradojas de la conformación de bloques regionales entre países y de regiones diferenciadas al interior de estos. En este sentido, uno de los espacios donde en la actualidad, por una razón u otra, se dan relaciones peculiares, son las fronterizas. Hay países donde los vínculos fronterizos se expresan como conflictos étnicos y religiosos; en cambio en otros, las conexiones más importantes son de índole económica y demográfica. Este es el caso de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, espacio donde se reproduce una de las relaciones binacionales más intensas entre países. En el presente artículo, se pretende avanzar en hacer una relectura de la frontera norte de México y sur de Estados Unidos, considerándola una región integrada por dos subregiones: la estadounidense y la mexicana. Para ello, se pasa revista a los más importantes enfoques teóricos para entender esa realidad, y se propone su revisión a la luz de las constantes modificaciones en ésta, que conducen a agotamientos muy rápidos en los "paradigmas" de análisis que cada autor del tema utiliza. Este planteamiento se documenta con la aportación de elementos cuantitativos y cualitativos acerca de las partes que configuran la región y, particularmente, se destacan las distintas modalidades de corredores económicos como medios de vinculación entre las "subregiones". Se plantea también reflexionar acerca de aspectos poco estudiados en estas últimas, como sería el perfil de los actores empresariales, básico para entender sus niveles de competitividad en la globalización a partir de una plataforma regional.Palabras clave: Globalización, Zonas fronterizas, Frontera México-Estados Unidos, Corredores económicos, Economía fronteriza.Abstract:The globalization of economic processes, at first sight, suggests a very inter- related world of homogenous dimensions, with equal opportunities of development for all countries. But reality comes about with another logic: globalization furthers very segmented dynamics, where the world experiences the paradox of the establishment of regional blocks among countries and regions that are differentiated within such blocks. In this sense, border areas are one of the spaces where presently, due to one reason or another, peculiar relations occur. There are countries where border ties are expressed as ethnic and religious conflicts, whereas, there are others, in which the most important connections are of an economic and demographic nature. This is the case of the Mexico-US border, space where one of the most intense binational relations between countries takes place. This article intends to review Mexico?s northern border and the United States southern border, considering it a region integrated by two subregions: the one of the United States and the one of Mexico. For such purpose, the most important theoretical approaches is reviewed in order to understand said reality. Its review is proposed in view of its constant modifications that lead to very fast depletions in the "paradigms" of analysis used by each author who writes about the subject. This statement is documented with the contribution of qualitative and quantitative elements about the parts that form the region, particularly underscoring the different modalities of economic corridors as means to link the "subregions". Statements are also made that lead to reflect on aspects that have been little studied in the latter, such as the pro file of the business actors, that is basic to understand their levels of competitiveness in globalization as of a regional platform .Key words: Globalization, Borderlines, USA-Mexico borderline, Economic corridors, Borderline economics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuan Wei ◽  
Gülcan Önel ◽  
Zhengfei Guan ◽  
Fritz Roka

AbstractThe policy debate surrounding the employment of immigrant workers in U.S. agriculture centers around the extent to which immigrant farmworkers adversely affect the economic opportunities of native farmworkers. To help answer this question, we propose a three-layer nested constant elasticity of substitution (CES) framework to investigate the substitutability among heterogeneous farmworker groups based on age, skill, and legal status utilizing National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) data from 1989 through 2012. We use farmwork experience and type of task performed as alternative proxies for skill to disentangle the substitution effect between U.S. citizens, authorized immigrants, and unauthorized immigrant farmworkers. Results show that substitutability between the three legal status groups is small; neither authorized nor unauthorized immigrant farmworkers have a significant impact on the employment of native farmworkers.


1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Marcus G. Singer

I am, naturally, greatly honoured to have been invited by the Royal Institute of Philosophy to organize and conduct their lecture series on American Philosophy. It has been an interesting if trying experience, and I must say that the process of organizing it has given me a special respect for the patience and administrative capacities of those who have the task year in year out. Of course there were special difficulties in the way of importing so many people from the United States (especially since the Institute does not have the funds needed to bring them over), but if the series was to be on American Philosophy—whatever that is—it seemed especially appropriate that the lectures be given predominantly by Americans who have made a special study of the subject— again, whatever that is. We may, of course, end with the conclusion that there is no such distinctive subject, and that the name ‘American Philosophy’ is as nominal as a name can be, but that, we should note, is something to be found out, not a conclusion dictated in advance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Max Ajl

Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied (London: Anthem, 2014), 250 pages, $40, paperback.Perhaps nowhere does violence collapse the horizon as it does in the Arab world. Imperial wars have demolished the Libyan state and turned Syria into a charnel house. Yemen, the region's poorest country, was a U.S. drone shooting gallery before Saudi Arabia…attacked it, sending it spiraling into famine. Iraq shudders under ISIS's car bombs after decades of wars and sanctions. And Palestine continues to bleed and resist under the weight of Israeli settler-colonialism.… Why so much violence? The academic mercenaries of counterinsurgency studies fixate on terrorism as a response to material grievance, and Western war as the response. Others ascribe the region's underdevelopment to a mix of institutional inadequacy and democratic deficits, remediable by the application of U.S. power.… Against this tableau, Ali Kadri in Arab Development Denied offers a coruscatingly intelligent account of how the United States has denied Arab development. Through wars, colonialism, and sanctions, it has sought for decades to prevent working-class sovereignty in the region.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Berman

In 2014, after years of grassroots organizing, a coalition of progressives transformed Richmond, California into the largest city in the United States governed by a Green Party mayor. But Richmond is not just Anytown: its economy and government has been dominated for a century by a giant Chevron refinery, and by a racist political machine determined to keep the city's working-class and nonwhite majority out of power.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


2001 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Lerner

As a result of the Mexican Revolution, many politicians from various factions were forced into exile between 1906 and 1940, particularly between 1910 and 1920. The subject has merited little attention until the present despite the fact that its study can provide another perspective on the Mexican Revolution, the one of the opponents who were defeated. This study focuses on the exile of the villistas that began in the autumn of 1915 and ended at the beginning of the 1920s. The article considers who were the villista exiles, how they escaped from Mexico, how they adapted economically in the United States, and when they returned to their country. It also examines certain political tendencies and their later activities between 1920 and 1940. Four political activities in the United States intended to change the political situation in Mexico are considered. Finally, the article examines how U.S. authorities, closely involved with their Mexican counterparts, treated the exiles. LaRevolucióón mexicanacausóó elexilio de muchos polííticos de distintas facciones entre 1906 y 1940, sobre todo entre 1910 y 1920. Este tema ha merecido muy pocaatencióón hasta elmomento presente,a pesarde que atravéés de éélpodemos aproximarnos desde otra perpectiva a la Revolucióón mexicana, desde el punto de vista de los opositores que muchas veces fueron los vencidos. Este estudio se centra en el exilio de los villistas que empezóó en el otoñño de 1915 y terminóó a principios de la déécada de 1920. En este artíículo se analiza quiéénes fueron los exiliados villistas, cóómo escaparon de Mééxico, su acomodo econóómico y laboral en Estados Unidos y el retorno a su patria, dejando ver ciertas tendencias polííticas de su actuacióónpolíítica ulterior entre 1920y 1940.Se desmenuzan cuatro actividades polííticas que emprendieron en Estados Unidos para cambiar la situacióón mexicana. Finalmente se abarca la forma en que fueron tratados durante su exilio en los Estados Unidos, por las autoridades de este paíís que estaban estrechamente vinculadas con las mexicanas.


1943 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Edwin E. Witte

There is by this time quite a literature on the war economy. With the one exception of the recent symposium by Professor Steiner and his associates, most of whom are connected with the University of Indiana, all of the longer treatises on the subject discuss the war economy in abstract terms or on the basis of the experience of the First World War. These treatises served a useful purpose and were the only books on the economies of war which could be written at the time; but they now seem unreal, because this war differs so greatly from the prior struggle. The University of Indiana book, dealing as it does with concrete problems of present war, is up-to-the-minute and excellently done in all respects. It does not attempt, however, to do what I am venturing: a brief, overall picture of what the war has been doing to the United States.


Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni

Close to seventeen million people in the United States, approximately 6 percent of the total population, identified themselves as Italian Americans in the 2016 census. Constituting the nation’s fifth largest ancestry group, they are the descendants of one of the greatest diasporas in human history. Since 1860, twenty-nine million Italians have left their homeland for better opportunities worldwide. Close to six million of them have settled in the United States with about five million arriving prior to World War I. Along with other European groups of the great transatlantic migrations of 1870–1920—Jews, Poles, Croatians, and Finns—they became an essential part of the American working class, building, shaping, and enriching its life and culture. Among the most ubiquitous of the early foreigners, Italians were initially confined to unskilled and manual jobs but gradually made their way into the ranks of semi-skilled operatives in mass-production manufacturing. By 1910, they constituted a vital segment of the American multinational workforce in the mining, garment, and steel industries and played key roles in the labor struggles of the early 20th century, providing both key leadership and mass militancy. Like other ethnic groups, Italian immigrant workers lived deeply transnational lives. Their class consciousness was continually informed by their ethnic identity and their complicated relationship to both Italy and the United States, as they sought to transform, and were transformed by, the political events, industrial conditions, and cultures of the two countries. The story of how Italian immigrant workers became “American” sheds light not only on their experience in the United States but also on the transnational character of the labor movement and the interplay of class, race, gender, and ethnic identities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (9) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Walda Katz-Fishman

In Acting Like It Matters, James McEnteer gives a compassionate account of John Malpede—actor, activist, and co-creator of the political theatre troupe the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD)—and of the Skid Row community that is the organization's heart and soul. The story of Malpede and the LAPD is one of life as art and art as life, and its protagonists are the dehumanized homeless citizens of Los Angeles and their compatriots in cities across the United States and the world, who represent a growing part of today's global working class pushed out of the formal economy.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


1866 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 626-628
Author(s):  
Wilson

Some twelve years ago M. Mége Mouriés had his attention directed to the composition of the grain of wheat, and to the processes of grinding and panification. The object of that gentleman's investigations was to show the defective knowledge and waste of material in the ordinary practices of the trade; but although these were fully proved by the results, there appeared to have been trade and other difficulties in the way of its general adoption. Having last year acted as juror on “Food Substances” at the Dublin Exhibition, I had my attention recalled to the subject by an article which was submitted to the jury under the name of “Cerealina,” purporting to be a preparation of wheat flour by the process indicated by M. Mége Mouriés, and which, on examination, confirmed the opinions which had been previously formed of its food value. On further inquiry, it was found that a simple mechanical process had been devised in the United States, where the flour had been prepared, for effecting the most difficult part of M. Mége Mouriés' process—that of decorticating the grain.


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