Integration and the State in the Americas

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Migration adds another dimension to the management of social welfare, requiring states in both the Global North and South to reconsider the rights of both citizens and newcomers with precarious status alike. In North America, racialized and neoliberal immigration policy has incited a growing reliance on temporary migrant labour as access to permanent residency and citizenship declines (Goldring et. al, 2009). Such temporary migration regimes provide vital employment for a privileged few, but do not ensure migrants’ economic let alone social or political integration. Indeed, many temporary foreign migrant workers find their mobility, membership and access to services in countries such as Canada increasingly restricted. Similar challenges are paramount in Central and South America, where high levels of poverty and inequality (ECLAC, 2011) make the extension of minimum levels of social welfare to the entire population (Martínez Franzoni, 2008) even more difficult. Even countries like Costa Rica and Argentina, with relatively generous social welfare policies for citizens, face neoliberal pressures of liberalization, deregulation and privatization, placing pressure on their social protection systems (Huber and Stephens 2012; Noy 2012) and making the issue of immigrant integration highly polemic. This panel discusses social policy and rights as well as integration and mobility in the Americas, with an explicit but not exclusive focus on migration.

Sub Track

• Migration and Latin American diasporas

Session Organizers

• Koen Voorend, Universidad de Costa Rica

• Elise Hjalmarson, University of British Columbia

Chair

• Koen Voorend, Universidad de Costa Rica

Individual Presentations

• Immigrant Welfare Worlds and Integration: Nicaraguan Immigrants’ Access to Costa Rican Social Policy - Koen Voorend, Universidad de Costa Rica

• Migrant Agricultural Workers and the Practice of Everyday Resistance in Canada - Amy L Cohen, Okanagan College; Elise Hjalmarson, University of British Columbia

• Gendered Statelessness: Mexican Migrant Women in Canada Managing Transnational Families at the Margins - Evelyn V Encalada Grez, York University

• Asylees, Refugees, or Immigrants? The Power of a Single Word in the Unaccompanied Child Migrant Crisis - Norma S Chinchilla, California State University/Long Beach