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Labor History and the New Migration History: A Review Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Michael P. Hanagan
Michael P. Hanagan
Affiliation:
New School for Social Research
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Extract

Debates over the significance of immigration and demands for its restriction in industrialized nations have been a major feature of political life in the 1980s and 1990s. There are several reasons for this heightened concern. In Western Europe, the 1990s have been a decade of slower growth, particularly compared with the halcyon decades of the 1950s and 1960s when mass migration, severely restricted during the interwar years, again became a routine aspect of European life.Even more persistent and troubling has been the declining position of less skilled workers in the economies of industrial nations. The International Monetary Fund notes that, beginning in the 1970s or the early 1980s, “labor markets in the advanced economies have been characterized by marked increases in wage inequality in some countries between the more skilled and less skilled, and in other countriesby rises in unemployment among the less skilled.” Many less skilled workers believe that migrants are responsible for their declining wages and unemployment.

Type
Migration, Labor Movements, and the Working Class
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 54 , Fall 1998 , pp. 57 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1998

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References

NOTES

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