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Contemporary African Migrations in a Global Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2016

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
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Extract

Migrations from the South to the North are sometimes seen as representing civilizational counterpenetration, revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism. The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a fundamental feature of international migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that the patterns of migration, labor procurement, and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development, expansion, and accumulation. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor.

Type
Part I: Historic and Contemporary African Diasporas
Information
African Issues , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , 2002 , pp. 9 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2002 

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References

Notes

1. These are positions associated with, respectively, Mazrui, Ali A., Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa (London: Heinnemann, 1978)Google Scholar; Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York, US: Alfred Knopf, 1993)Google Scholar; and Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar. This essay is based on a much longer chapter in Zeleza’s, Paul Tiyambe Rethinking Africa’s Globalization, Volume 2, The Developmental Challenges (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

2. Castles, S. and Miller, M.J., The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7. See James Hollifield, “Ideas, Institutions, and Civil Society: On the Limits of Immigration Control in France” [December 1997, accessed 1999]; available at http://migration.ucdavis.edu/cmpr/sdreport/Hollfield-France.html.

8. OECD, Trends in International Migration. Annual Report. 1998 Edition (Paris: OECD, 1998): 101–107 Google Scholar.

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10. OECD, 1998: 175.

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12. See C.J. Gibson and E. Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850—1990,” Bureau of the Census (February 1999); available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/twps0029.html.

13. The Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) reports that African immigration nearly doubled from 26,716 in 1994 to 52,889 in 1996 primarily from the Diversity Program, which seeks to increase the diversity of the immigrant pool by expanding the intake from historically underrepre-sented countries and regions. See INS Statistics, “Characteristics of Legal Immigrants” (accessed 1999); available at http://www.ins.usdoj.gov/text/aboutins/statistics/annual/fy96/979.htm.

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16. OECD, 1998: 89.

17. Zeleza, Rethinking Africa’s Globalization.