How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands

How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands examines the range of economic, social, and cultural impacts immigrants have had, both knowingly and unknowingly, in their home countries. The book opens with overviews of the ways migrants become agents of homeland development. The essays that follow focus on the varied impacts immigrants have had in China, India, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Mozambique, and Turkey. One contributor examines the role Indians who worked in Silicon Valley played in shaping the structure, successes, and continued evolution of India's IT industry. Another traces how Salvadoran immigrants extend U.S. gangs and their brutal violence to El Salvador and neighboring countries. The tragic situation in Mozambique of economically desperate émigrés who travel to South Africa to work, contract HIV while there, and infect their wives upon their return is the subject of another essay. Taken together, the essays show the multiple ways countries are affected by immigration. Understanding these effects will provide a foundation for future policy reforms in ways that will strengthen the positive and minimize the negative effects of the current mobile world.Contributors. Victor Agadjanian, Boaventura Cau, José Miguel Cruz, Susan Eva Eckstein, Kyle Eischen, David Scott FitzGerald, Natasha Iskander, Riva Kastoryano, Cecilia Menjívar, Adil Najam, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Alejandro Portes, Min Ye

"Despite the breathless attention focused on how immigrants affect countries of destination, their influence on countries of origin is often more profound. Susan Eva Eckstein and Adil Najam offer a welcome corrective to this one-sidedness and move beyond the clichéd notions of both left and right. Drawing on work by the world's leading scholars of immigration, they reveal international migration to be neither a panacea nor a curse, but a basic component of globalization that can be turned to good or ill depending on decisions taken in sending and receiving nations and the actions of immigrants themselves. This collection is essential reading for those wishing to move beyond ideology and develop a fuller understanding of the place of international migration in the world today."—Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University, "In a welcome look at the flip side of immigration, How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands shows how emigration is not as simple as it looks. This book is an important reminder that economic and cultural remittances affect the home country for better or for worse, from needed investments to new models of behavior—mimicked or mocked—to AIDS."—Nancy L. Green, coeditor of Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, “The book will interest demographers, but faculty interested in development, globalization, and transnationalization will find the contributions to be valuable. Bringing together these studies expands the conceptual and practical importance of migration for global society. . . . Highly recommended.”, “[T]his book will appeal to students interested in populations, labour markets, and the everyday realities of migration…. This is a rich area for investigation.”, "These well-written and highly accessible case studies will be of use to both academics and students, and together grant an enriched understanding of the witting, and unwitting, consequences of migration. The wide-reaching discussions allow for sections of this collection to be utilised in a range of student courses from globalisation, transnational non-state actors and international global economy."

Susan Eva Eckstein is Professor of Sociology and International Relations at Boston University. Her many books include The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland, as well as What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America and Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America (both coedited with Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley). Adil Najam is Vice Chancellor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan, and Professor of International Relations and of Geography and Environment at Boston University. He is the author of Portrait of a Giving Community: Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora, coauthor of Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda, and editor of Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia.Adil Najam is Vice Chancellor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan and Professor of International Relations and of Geography and Environment at Boston University. He is the author of Portrait of a Giving Community: Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora; co-author of Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda, and editor of Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia.