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Migration plays an important role in determining skills supply, and certain ethnic groups tend to be over-represented in low-paid work. This article considers the implications of the complex interplay of migration, ethnicity and workplace progression for skills policy by comparing and contrasting the opportunities faced by low-paid workers of diverse ethnicities in progressing to better paid work. This is done by drawing on a qualitative study of nine case study organisations in Scotland and England, including interviews with sixty-five workers and forty-three managers. We argue that while all low-paid workers face formidable barriers to progression, recent migrants and settled ethnic minorities face additional challenges that should be considered in skills and wider social policies related to low-paid work.

Cet article analyse les enjeux de la cartographie des migrations et des déplacements de populations causés par des catastrophes environnementales, en prenant pour objet d'étude le tremblement de terre de L'Aquila survenu en avril 2009 dans cette commune chef-lieu de la région des Abruzzes, au centre de l'Italie. À partir de l'étude des données démographiques de l' Institut national de statistiques ( istat ) sur les migrations internes en Italie lors de la période précédant le tremblement de terre (2002-2008) et pendant la période qui a suivi cette catastrophe naturelle (2009-2013), nous proposons un modèle d'analyse des effets possibles des catastrophes environnementales sur les migrations et déplacements de populations, et émettons des hypothèses concernant les principaux défis liés à la gouvernance post-catastrophe. Cet article démontre que la période post-sismique est caractérisée par une forte augmentation des flux d'émigration de L'Aquila vers d'autres provinces, au sein de la région des Abruzzes et en dehors, en particulier vers les régions les plus proches (Latium, Campanie).

Structural changes in the labor force of the receiving country can provide some important clues to the speed and nature of replacement of migrant workers by indigenous ones. This article analyzes changes in the national labor force with regard to volume, age and sex composition, retention in the labor force, productivity, type of occupation, and sector of activity. Changes in the above features during the last two decades indicate that the median age of the national male labor force remains low, its concentration in the public sector has increased, and its participation in production and manual work has declined further. The labor force participation of females has increased substantially, and they comprised 31 percent of the national labor force in 1993. Kuwaiti females participate mainly in the professional or technical and clerical occupations. The number of non-Kuwaiti females in the labor force has increased, with domestic servants as a major category. The above structural changes suggest that the national labor force is growing in a manner that implies a continued long-term dependence on foreign workers. Dependence on expatriates is likely to be greatest for occupations involving maintenance of infrastructures and personal services.

This article sheds light on the interrelationship of seasonal migration, subsistence production and peasant relations in a community (Sakli) located in Turkey's northwestern countryside. Most studies argue that rural outmigration is either an adaptation to persistent unemployment or a phenomenon resulting from pressures and counterpressures in the social relations of production. These approaches tend to overlook the specific features of rural culture and power in determining conditions for seasonal migration and its effects on social relations. While migrant labor is understood by local villagers as forming part of a continual battle to preserve local tradition and kinship ties, this article shows how it reduces the dominion of landlords while creating internal household differentiation and gendered hierarchies.

The paper explores the circumstances under which Los Angeles Mexican American men turn to formal or informal, Mexican or non-Mexican resources. Formal sources are most likely to be utilized for advice or help in dealing with the city government, second with regard to money problems, third with regard to politics, and least likely for personal problems. Formalization of resources is associated with length of residence in the city, but birthplace shows a different pattern. The data do not support the theoretical notion that urbanization is associated with abandonment of primary-group resources for this population. In fact, native Angelenos, with greater access to "cheaper" gemeinschaft resources, tend to adhere to them. The findings have implications for theories of urbanism as well as understanding of Mexican Americans.

This article examines the place of reproduction in the UK migration policy popularly known as 'the hostile environment', introduced in 2012 by the Conservative–Lib Dem Coalition government, and the 'Windrush scandal' that followed. In order to think through how the reproductive sphere comes in to play in this policy and its consequences, I draw on theoretical insights from the work of Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, both of whom invite us to reflect on the ways in which the afterlife of enslavement and empire continues to impinge on the status of Black subjects, and the ways in which our notions of the maternal, reproduction, kinship and belonging are entangled in this process. I begin by examining the place of the reproductive sphere in the hostile environment policy itself, before moving on to discuss the Windrush scandal and the ways in which it can be seen as an attack on the reproductive needs of its victims. I then consider these findings further through an engagement with the work of Sharpe and Hartman, arguing that the scandal reveals ways in which we continue to live 'in the wake' of racialised understandings of the reproductive that mean that some people are refused the possibilities of attachment and affiliation, so that, in Hartman's words, theirs is 'the perilous condition of existing in a world in which you have no investment'. In the final section, I respond to Sharpe's call for white people to 'rend the fabric of the kinship narrative' that produces these exclusionary terms of belonging and permits the repetition of such brutalities as the hostile environment.

This volume, which appears in the series "Le Zebre" on the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Center for Studies on the Languages of Identities at the University of Bergamo (October 1998), collects essays that were first presented at the XIX Biennial International Conference of the Italian Association of North-American Studies (AISNA), held in Macerata on October 4-6, 2007. The conference was entitled USA: Identities, Cultures, and Politics in National, Transnational, and Global Perspectives, and most of the contributions come from the workshop organized by Vincenzo Bavaro and Raffaella Malandrino on Queer Migrations: Identities across the Borders - all in the plural, of course, and in the planetary perspectives that are today's mark. The hermeneutical category of "queer" is adopted by all contributors as the one that best enables us to discern the intricate weaving of sexual and national identities in the most disparate literary and cultural products linking the United States, Europe, and Asia. From their specific focuses and in their convergent approach, these essays prove how queer definitely cuts across the borders of its original gay and lesbian territory, and how vastly and subtly it can travel in time and space, in conspicuous ways as well as under the skin of cultural bodies. One could indeed argue that, while in most nations across the planet the material, political, and juridical statuses of queer people are still badly impaired, in most of this same planet queer seems to have infiltrated and destabilized significant mainstream and transnational domains.