San Antonio College Library

What is a diaspora? For the Greeks, from whose language the word originated, diaspora meant the dispersal of population through colonization. For Jews, Africans, Armenians, and others, the word acquired a more sinister and brutal meaning. Diaspora meant a collective trauma, a banishment into exile, and a heart-aching longing to return home. During the early modern period, trade and labor diasporas girded the mercantilist and early capitalist worlds....

In this groundbreaking unifying theory of migration, a group of researchers from various anthropological disciplines attempt to identify the social and environmental disruptions that led to migration, regardless of its temporal space. Never before has such a diverse group of scholars met to identify and codify across time the reasons humans migrate.

This work is a study of boat migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. It brings together the interactive global, cultural, and personal factors that induce thousands of Dominicans to journey across the Mona Passage in attempts to escape chronic poverty. The book provides in-depth treatment of decision-making, experiences at sea, migrant smuggling operations, and U.S. border enforcement. It also explores several topics that are rare in...

Drawing on decades of fieldwork in a high-emigration town in central Mexico, as well as nearly a thousand recent interviews, the authors investigate who migrates, how people-smuggling operates, whether border enforcement affects decisions to migrate, and migration's impact on family, health, and hometown economy. Their work sheds important new light on debates central to international migration studies. -- Back cover.

Presents a typology of migration-remittance systems. Discusses effects of remittances on economic development in migrant-sending countries. Points to the multidimensional ties that exist between migrants and the communities from which they originate.

Nigel Harris's ground-breaking book examines migration as a response to changes in the world economy. He shows that, despite tighter controls, increasing numbers of workers are moving, whether legally or not, between countries. Unskilled immigrant workers play a vital role in improving standards of living in the developed world. And in turn the countries from which they have come benefit in a major way from the earnings sent back home. Arguing that...