Proposed changes to the H-2A program would affect labor costs in the United States and California

The H-2A visa program allows farmers in the United States to be certified by the U.S. Department of Labor to recruit and employ guest workers, usually for a maximum of 10 months, when they are unable to find enough workers living in the United States (including U.S. citizens, other legally authorized workers, and workers not authorized to work in the United States). We analyzed U.S. and California H-2A job certification data to determine how the program is currently used and how a proposed H-2A wage freeze would likely affect future farm labor costs. Our analysis suggests that changes in the H-2A visa program would likely expand the program while reducing labor costs in California and elsewhere.

A Decade of Studying Guest Workers Through the Projects of the Serbian Ethnological and Anthropological Society

This review paper provides an overview of the ten-year long anthropological research on the cultural identity of guest workers and their descendants as part of the projects implemented by the associates of the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade and the SASA Institute of Ethnography. The projects were supported by the Serbian Ethnological and Anthropological Society and the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. The phenomenon of “temporary workers abroad”, or the so-called guest workers (Gastarbeiter), which emerged in the early 1960s and continued in the decades to come, has long remained beyond the interest of Serbian anthropological and ethnological science. This is why, after having noticed a scientific research gap related to this phenomenon, in 2010 we initiated the anthropological research of the cultural identity of guest workers. Our intention was to take into account different factors of guest-worker identity construction and to look at the processes, discourses and concepts related to this socio-cultural group from different angles. Over time, as we delved deeper into the problem of migrant workers and migration in general, our interests, and consequently our research, expanded to other topics in addition to cultural identity. In that context, this review paper intends to inform the scientific and professional public about the findings of research on migrants working temporarily abroad and their descendants, and to highlight some of the most important topics that we focused on in this research, while being aware that the phenomenon of migrants and migration is so diverse that it is impossible to include or investigate all its elements that make it so complex.

The Emergence and Persistence of Racialised Stereotypes on Dutch Television

Today, stereotypical and racialised imaginations of Muslims are pervasive on Dutch television. This article traces the history of Dutch television coverage of Muslim immigrants through the lens of the archive of Sound and Vision. It demonstrates that during their symbolic transformation from ‘guest workers’ to ‘ethnic minorities’ to ‘allochtonen’ and ‘Muslims’, television’s visual repertoire of Muslim immigrants has become increasingly racially inscribed. Finally, it argues that the archive of Sound and Vision has played a performative role in the emergence and persistence of racialised stock stereotypes of Muslim immigrants.

A ‘Melting Pot’ City: Migration and Municipality in the Reconstruction of Dortmund

This article explores how Dortmund’s municipal government propagated a concept of city-citizenship and belonging for new arrivals by mediating between expellee, refugee and migrant communities and ‘native’ civil society in the 1940s-1950s. The devastation of Dortmund during the Second World War, and the housing and energy shortages that followed, meant that the arrival of over a hundred thousand expellees and refugees in 1945–1960 placed severe strains on municipal resources while exacerbating conflicts between ‘native’ Dortmunders and new arrivals. The success of the Social Democratic Party (spd) in building a hegemonic position in postwar politics and administration by the late 1940s facilitated the coordination of municipal efforts to foster inter-community relations and introduce new populations to city life. Within the city council and government, in expellee meetings, and in municipal events we observe sustained municipal efforts to 1) exert social control over expellee/refugee arrivals to deflect anger at the poor conditions of the reconstruction period away from municipal officials and 2) inculcate taboos based on peace and democratic norms to delegitimise the politics of inter-community resentment. It concludes by tracing how official narratives and municipal practices constructed in the 1940s-50s were redeployed during the arrival of guest workers in the 1960s.

Greek Gastarbeiter in Germany and European Expatriates from Greece: Diaspora Interactions between Immigrants and Neo-Immigrants

Between 1953 and 1973, emigration depleted the Modern Greek state by roughly one fifth of its total population. A significant number of those migrants relocated to Germany, which since 1960, has been home to a sizeable community of former Gastarbeiter (guest-workers) and their descendants. Following three decades of European Integration and relative prosperity, the 2009 Greek sovereign debt crisis initiated a new wave of Greek emigration, analogous, yet different to that of the post-war era. Germany remains an attractive destination for Greek expatriates, but in contrast to guest-workers from the 1960s, "neo-migrants" are typically skilled or highly-skilled persons who relocate individually. This paper examines the qualitative attributes of Greek expatriates and "neo-migrants" in Germany and compares them to those of former guest-workers; furthermore, this paper compares the narratives of Gastarbeiter to those of European expatriates. Finally, the perceptions of Greek expatriates for the established Greek community in Germany are looked into, as well as the individual and collective efforts of the Greek community and institutions to help and ease their socioeconomic integration. Keywords: Gastarbeiter, neo-migrants, expatriates, Germany, Greece

Language Attitudes Studies Between the Past and the Present: The Current State of Research in the Arab World and Within the Saudi Context

Language attitudes studies are integral to our understanding of language-society dynamics, specifically in regions where linguistic diversity can create issues connected to social structure and social cohesion. The field of language attitudes studies heavily impacts research in areas such as language planning and policy, education and workplace inequality, and cultural discrimination. Thus, it is important to have a work that presents an overview of the most important notions and concepts in this field, with a specific focus on topics such as defining language attitudes, the components of an attitude, and the different methods of measuring it. This paper aims at providing this overview in addition to assessing the current status of language attitudes studies in the Arab world and outlining the challenges and opportunities for researchers in this field. One of the significant characteristics of language attitudes research in this region is the lack of studies that focus on the inequality dimension. Many studies in this region have opted to investigate the Standard-Spoken dichotomy and the attitudes of speakers toward foreign languages such as French and English. Researching issues such as the attitudes toward other Arabic varieties and toward migrant guest workers’ use of pidgins remains limited in the Arab context. Factors such as cultural rivalry and national pride may represent some of the obstacles in the path of conducting broader studies in the field of language attitudes in this region.

Immigration Enforcement and the Hiring of Low-Skilled Labor

We examine how firms adjust their labor demand to immigration policy changes resulting from intensified interior immigration enforcement. Using the temporal and geographic variation in the adoption of such policies as a source of identification, we find that firms boost their demand for low-skilled foreign-born labor under the H-2B visa program as enforcement intensifies. Furthermore, firms' increased demand for guest workers is inversely related to natives' employment in occupations where most H-2B workers are hired; however, it does not seem to alter natives' wages or work hours, nor does it seem to redistribute native labor away from those occupations.