We develop a model to explain two-way migration of high-skilled individuals between countries that are similar in their economic characteristics. High-skilled migration results from the combination of workers whose abilities are private knowledge, and a production technology that gives incentives to firms for hiring workers of similar ability. In the presence of migration cost, high-skilled workers self-select into the group of migrants. The laissez-faire equilibrium features too much migration, explained by a negative migration externality. We also show that for sufficiently low levels of migration cost the optimal level of migration, while smaller than in the laissez-faire equilibrium, is strictly positive. Finally, we extend our model into different directions to capture stylized facts in the data and show that our baseline results also hold in these more complex modelling environments.

This thesis examines the most prolific emigration of any European peoples to the United States in the nineteenth century. From the close of the Napoleonic Wars to the turn of the twentieth century, some 5 million people left the area outlined by Bismarck’s Reich, headed for America.1 As a consequence of this migration, Germans represent the largest ethnic heritage group in the modern day United States. As of 2008, official German heritage in the U.S. (the lineage of at least one parent) was 50,271,790, against a total population of 304,059,728, a 16.5% share.2 By comparison, those of Irish heritage numbered 36,278,332, and those of Mexican heritage 30,272,000.3 During the nineteenth century, the mass movement of Germans across the Atlantic occurred in distinct phases. The period between 1830 and the mid-­‐1840s was a period of growth; the annual figure of 10,000 departures was reached by 1832, and by the time of the 1848 revolutions, nearly half a million had left for the USA. Then, between the late 1840s and the early 1880s, a prolonged and heavy mass movement took place, during which the number of departures achieved close to, or exceeded, three quarters of a million per decade. Then, from the mid-­‐1880s to the outbreak of the First World War, the emigration entered terminal decline. The last significant years of emigration were recorded in 1891-­‐2; by the turn of the twentieth century, it was all but over.

International retirement migration (IRM) is a growing and significant feature of the European Union. It has important economic implications in terms of the redistribution of social costs, factors reward and incomes. Using overlapping generations models and simulation techniques this thesis focuses on the economic effects of International Retirement Migration (IRM) within the European Union (EU). Three main parts make up this thesis. The first part summaries the legal and the social framework within the European Union where IRM takes place. Access to European welfare system is based on the principle of non-discrimination. However, the European Comunity law regulates the possibility of free riding through the resource requirement. In the second part, after a brief literature review in social security, the thesis develops a quantitative model that tries to explain some reasons why IRM may take place. Starting with a difference between "environment" of European countries, some people may opt for a better life in another country when they retire. We also focus on the capital accumulation effect for home and host countries. The presence of large populations of retired foreign residents in European countries raises fundamental questions with respect to the right of access to health and welfare services. In the third part, bearing in mind the principle of free movement of capital and the non-discrimination principle in accessing public service within the EU, we focus on the economic effects of IRM for the host country, for the individual migrants themselves, for the host communities and for public policy.

This dissertation is about how Jonathan Dickinson (1663-1722), a second-generation Anglo-Jamaican planter and early-Philadelphian merchant, made sense of the mercurial and uncertain Atlantic world around the turn of the eighteenth century. The following chapters examine Dickinson’s interactions with an extremely diverse group of European, Native American, and African peoples who collectively comprised a formative generation of colonial society in North America and the West Indies. The main purpose of this dissertation is to provide a counterpoint to the many tautologous, whiggish, and nationalistic interpretations of Anglo-Atlantic history that tend to deemphasise the obvious disconnections, disruptions, discord, and diversity apparent during the lateseventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. This dissertation further contends that individuals, driven by self-preservation and influenced by local circumstances, dictated the direction and the pace of many inter-colonial, inter-imperial, and trans-Atlantic developments familiar to the late-eighteenth century Anglo-Atlantic world. In short, new exigencies outweighed custom, and self-preservation, rather than directives from metropolitan governments, guided Atlantic peoples’ actions. By extension of individual actions, the nascent British Atlantic Empire began to take shape.

This thesis presents interdisciplinary work on indigenous Mexican migration from a gender perspective. It uses a conceptual framework drawn from Agarwal (1994) and Kabeer (2001) to explore the role of transnational migration in the transformation of gender relations and identities and to enrich our understanding of the link between transnational migration and empowerment. Based on innovative multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the Mixtec town of Santiago Cacaloxtepec, the Zapotec town of San Bartolomé Quialana; both located in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico; and the state of California, US; this research presents a high resolution comparative analysis of changing gender relations in the communities of origin and diaspora due to indigenous (mainly) male migration. Migration from both communities is transnational, gendered and undocumented; indigenous men are still seen as the natural subjects of migration, especially when this is international, but nowadays indigenous women are also expected to migrate at least while they are single. Longer-term absence of male inhabitants has been understood as a determining factor which progressively re-constructs gender relations, increases female participation in political life and is a catalyst for women's empowerment. However a close scrutiny of the socio-political context of the communities, the dynamics of migration and a desegregation of female respondents by age/generation allows this research to argue that not all women are sharing equally in the shifts in gender relations. Moreover, while transnational migration is found to be both initiating and contributing to processes of women’s empowerment, its significance is differentiated by the location, age, civil status and migrant experiences of women, and it is not the only factor at work. In the diaspora, changes in gender relations have been observed in favour of women, as they take advantage of new opportunities in employment and education and men are obliged to participate in household work. Important processes of empowerment were detected among male and female migrants who have found opportunities that they could not have obtained in their communities of origin. However, their clandestine status still jeopardizes their transformative achievements. Transnational migration has also served as an opportunity to re-construct and question the forms of femininity and masculinity practised in the communities. Femininity has ceased to be represented only through motherhood and marriage, to give way to more active and transformative expressions. Dominant forms of indigenous masculinities have been based on elderly-wisdom power arrangements; however the trajectory of transnational migration is seeing them give way to a masculinity represented by the younger "brave" and experienced migrant.

In one of his publications, the politician and merchant Anthony Bacon asked if ‘some honest Persons, of plain Understanding, and of tolerable Judgement and Experience, could be engaged, at the Government’s Expence, to make the general Tour of North America’. This person, he thought, would be able to forge a connexion between the metropolitan centre and the far-flung reaches of America and improve the relationship between mother country and colony by increasing the level of understanding of the other on both sides of the Atlantic. Bacon appreciated that this lack of knowledge of their American brethren meant that British politics and politicians were often working with limited, or biased, information when formulating imperial policy. This thesis analyses the ways six MPs with significant American connexions operated throughout the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s. It establishes that these men operated at the highest levels of British politics at this time and sought to create themselves as the predominant experts on the American colonies. In the debates on the nature of the British Empire throughout the 1760s and 1770s, these men were at the forefront of the political mind and, at least until the hardening of opinions in the 1770s, had an impact on the way in which the colonies were governed. More than that, however, this work has shown that – contrary to much earlier belief – the House of Commons in the later eighteenth century was not working in ignorance of the situation in the Americas: rather, there were a small but significant number of men with real and personal connexions to, and knowledge about, the colonies. As the imperial grounds shifted through the 1770s, however, even the most well-versed of these ‘American MPs’ began to appear to have suffered some disconnection from the colonial viewpoint. This thesis takes into account the Atlantic and imperial networks under which these MPs worked and formed their political theories and opinions. In addition, it seeks in some way to bring the politics of the American Revolution into the fold of Atlantic History and to assess the ways in which those with the greatest experience of working in the peripheries of empire sought to reshape and reorganise its structure from the metropole after the close of the Seven Years War.

No description available.

In a context characterised by the shift from fordism to post-fordism in the Iberian peninsula, this thesis addresses the following question how are capital, governments and social movements organised in the processes of integration and resistance that affect foreign immigration' in Barcelona and Lisbon? Thus, in the first chapter, an analysis of the concept of "integration" is undertaken in order to understand the complexities and elusiveness that hide behind it, giving special attention to immigrants' integration literature. A distinction between systemic integration and social integration is adopted, and thus in the second chapter recent theorisation on capital and the state (i. e. systemic institutions) is approached, while in the third chapter social movements and organisations are taken into account. In chapter four epistemological and methodological elements are noted. The last three chapters are devoted to analyse original fieldwork data (mainly qualitative interviews): chapter 6 analyses immigration governmental policies at European, 'national-state', 'national-regional', and local levels; chapter 7 studies social and capital organisations in Barcelona in relation to 'foreign immigration'; and in chapter 8 social and capital organisations are studied in relation to 'foreign immigration' in Lisbon. Finally, some conclusions are revealed whilst other questions are posed.

The present work examines writings by authors of Somali origin in the Italian language. The analysis draws on and critically evaluates Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature. Firstly, it investigates the different strategies through which these texts insert Somali words within the Italian text. Secondly, it scrutinizes the political engagement of Somali-Italian writings with the issue of racism, and their attempt to show the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Italy. Thirdly, it considers the ways in which these partly autobiographical texts envision a relational, plural and dialogical identity for Somali-Italian characters. In particular, the construction of alternative communities and multiple belongings beyond the dichotomy between Italians and Somalis through means of exclusion and inclusion of other minoritarian groups is analyzed. In conclusion, this work suggests rethinking the ways in which Italian literature is conceived, in order to include “minor” transnational narratives that exceed national paradigms.

This research examines the proliferation of discourses associated with the development of Postcolonial Studies in the field of historical and philological sciences. The principal objective of the thesis is to describe this cultural phenomenon as a discursive event in the history of critical practices. Analyses developing Michel Foucault's work on regulations of discursive practices and Michel de Certeau's work on the historiographical operation are organised around three sites. The first site features Jean de Léry's Histoire d‟un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1575). The purpose of the work on this ethnographic document is not to reconstitute its early modern context, but first to interrogate this documentary relation when Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau rediscover the text. In this perspective, the text functions as the archive of an inaugural moment referring to the exclusion of the 'Savage' from the making of history. To that extent, the first part of the thesis focuses on the illegible/inaudible part of Jean de Léry's text, in order to question what postcolonial readings try to circumscribe in the colonial corpus, and which historiographical rituals make this reading possible in the case of Histoire d'un voyage. The second site is constituted by the formulation of Gayatri C. Spivak's famous question: 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' and her archival work endeavoured to attempt to answer the question. This foundational intervention in the field of Postcolonial study pertains at the inclusion/exclusion of the historical positivity of the discourse of the Other. Building on this proposition, this second part of the thesis reinscribes the historicity of postcolonial criticism in the project of a cultural history of the hermeneutic listening. The third site addresses the historicity of haunting in a series of Patrick Chamoiseau narratives dealing with ghosts of the Caribbean past: Lettres créoles (1991), Ecrire en pays dominé (1997), L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), and Biblique des derniers gestes (2001). This part of the thesis examines rituals that enable Chamoiseau to convert the return of the repressed into a historiographical operation. Following this, it appears that the development and proliferation of postcolonial scholarships cannot be properly explained by the crisis of a historiographical paradigm, but has to be referred in the first instance to a ritual dimension of the making of history in the Western modernity.