This thesis consists of three chapters. The first one is an empirical assessment of the consequences of post-2004 temporary restrictions to welfare access for some European immigrants in the UK in terms of their benefits take-up and their labour supply. I provide evidence that when access to benefits is restricted, immigrants compensate for the foregone income by working more. This is particularly true for females. Nevertheless, even in the absence of any restrictions, immigrants are less reliant on welfare and work more than their native counterparts. The second chapter focuses on the determinants of geographical mobility of British labour market entrants over the period 1991-2008, with an emphasis on the role of education. Given the absence of an appropriate index for mobility in the data, I compute a continuous measure of distance that is then matched to the individual information. Results suggest that having a degree has a positive impact on the mobility of young adults and, hence, on their labour market opportunities. Moreover, an important role is played by previous mobility experience and some other environmental factors. In the third chapter of this dissertation I evaluate the long-term effects of undergoing job turnover during a woman’s early career on her demand for children. In doing so, I make a distinction between voluntary and involuntary job separations. The empirical analysis is made on a sample of British women who have left education in the years 1959-1986, for which I construct job experience and family formation variables on the basis of retrospective information. The findings imply that women with stronger preferences for children might self-select into more rewarding career paths, possibly in pursuance of better labour market conditions that can guarantee a more adequate child rearing.

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This thesis examines the nature and role of resilience in forced migrants’ lives with particular reference to the day-to-day lives of Somali women living in the UK. In contrast to the dominant discourse of victimhood associated with the label of ‘forced migrant’ this empirical study explores the notion of the ‘strong migrant woman’. Drawing upon perspectives that illuminate power relations and adopting a social constructionist framework, a qualitative and predominantly ethnographic approach was taken to elicit Somali women’s accounts of their family life in a city in southern England. Challenges encountered within the research field, including language barriers, issues of informed consent and women’s reluctance to engage with the study, led to the adoption of an increasingly informal, flexible process of data generation. This was via formal and informal individual and group interviews and participant observation of women’s daily activities. Together these rich sources of data illuminate the complexity and contraction of the resilience concept and in doing so promote a more informed understanding of the diversity and richness of forced migrants’ lives. Findings from this study challenge the use of static frameworks and labels in determining and categorising migratory journeys and experiences of (re)settlement. The need for recognition of the complexity and fluidity surrounding the nature of border crossings is argued. Drawing on a pluralistic theoretical approach to understanding resilience, this thesis illuminates the complex ways in which risk and protection, strengths and vulnerability operate within women’s day-to-day lives. ‘Complexity and contradiction’ and ‘movement and fluidity’ are identified as key inter-related themes in understanding the nature of resilience within these migrant women’s family life. A model developed on the basis of this study’s findings and encompassing a more holistic approach is outlined as a potential tool to aid the complex task of resilience assessment.

All nations with significant dimensions of immigration and ethnic minorities are facing policy tensions stemming from two contradicting fundamental constitutional principles. The establishment and preservation of nationhood seems to require cultural homogeneity and associated integration of the population living on a specified territory. However, the aim of integration is challenged by the principle of recognising and safeguarding cultural identities of minorities and immigrants. One of central debates concerns language policy. This country study concerns the recent relation of language policy and immigration policy in Germany. It is based on the analysis of public discourses circling around the legislative process and the subsequent application and amendment of the foreigners’ statute of 1997 and the immigration statute of 2004 including the Green card initiative (2000) and the debate about restrictive policies after the Madrid bombing (2004). It also contains a case study of the controversies on the German-only policy on the playground of a multi-ethnic school in Wedding, a district of Berlin. Recent media coverage shows that this example, picked in 2006, has since achieved a paradigmatic quality. The thesis outlines and applies aspects of critical discourse analysis for the interpretation of selected relevant texts, mainly contained in national quality newspapers. The case study is also based on interviews and use of correspondence addressed to the school.

This thesis traces cultural and socio-political responses to the alien Jew in Britain through the prism of genre, space and time. Beginning with the reports of persecution of Jews in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, it examines how representations of these foreign Jews changed and developed as sympathy for their plight turned to anxiety at the prospect of their arrival in Britain. It shows how a Semitic discourse evolved alongside, and in response to, wider debates about the state of the self, nation and empire at the fin de siècle, arguing that the vocabulary and mentality of imperialism was a crucial tool for deciphering the nature of Jewish „difference‟. However, this thesis also enables fresh perspectives by considering the gender and spatial dynamics of Semitic representations in Britain during and beyond the period of mass immigration, from the end of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the twenty first. This extended view of the Jewish 'other', which follows the 'typical' Jewish migrant journey from the shtetl of Eastern Europe to the North London suburb of the present-day, considers how Jewish spatial and cultural practices have been interpreted and articulated by the British and the British-Jewish onlooker. The thesis' opening section, divided into three chapters, adopts an original approach to the aliens question by exploring how perspectives on the alien Jew were shaped and expressed within different mediums, or 'genres' at the fin de siècle. Through an assessment of newspapers, political debates, and fiction, this section offers a comparative analysis of how the particular dynamics and agendas of each of these genres operated to produce different textual and visual images of 'the Jew'. Building upon Bryan Cheyette's seminal work in relation to fiction, each of these chapters demonstrates not only the inherently ambivalent nature of Semitic representations but also reveal that, crucially, gender was an important moderator of Jewish „difference‟. This reading extends into the second section which, across four chapters, explores how gender functioned in conjunction with space to construct ideas in Britain about alien Jews as they traversed time and space from shtetl to suburb. Beginning with the point of departure, the opening chapter of the section reviews the long tradition of representing Eastern Europe by „the West‟, arguing that this tradition laid the foundation for a paradoxical view of the Jew in Eastern Europe as both territorialized and territorializing. This perceived struggle for spatial ownership amongst Jews also featured in narratives of the migrant journey – the topic of the second chapter. That perception generated the notion that migrating Jews were staging an alien invasion of Britain. Thus the prolonged fascination with London's Jewish 'ghetto' and its interior – 'alien' territory par excellence – provides the focus for the third chapter which, in turn, lays the foundation for the final chapter‟s exploration of the replacement of the urban with the suburban as the alien Jew's 'territory' of choice.

This thesis covers the analysis of current UK economic issues relating to immigration and the labour market. In particular, since the late 1990s, the UK has experienced increasing immigration inflows significantly affecting both the economy and society as a whole. In parallel, over the last two decades the country has undergone other substantial changes in the structure of the labour market, primarily due to an intrinsic rapid educational upgrading and the pervasive effect of technological change. Chapter 1 studies immigrant assimilation by comparing the life satisfaction of immigrants across different generations against that of their native peers. Chapter 2 develops and empircally tests a model to explain the channels through which heterogeneous firms may adjust their product and process innovation activities in response to local labour supply shocks such as immigration inflows. Chapter 3 estimates the causal effect of technological exposure on UK local labour markets while providing suggestive evidence on the role of changes in the composition of the labour force.

This is a study of some of the major aspects of the development of post-colonial labour policy in Zambia. It examines the Zambian Government's attempts to 'incorporate' trade unions into its strategy of national development. Except for such later references as it was possible to include, it covers the period from 1971 to 1986. The purpose of the study is to examine the role played by law in the Zambian Government's attempts to incorporate trade unions and the rank and file sufficiently in the plans for national development. Zambian trade unions at independence were quite autonomous. Given the power and autonomy of trade unions, their attitude and approach have been viewed by the Government as crucial elements of national development. The Government has, therefore, progressively adopted measures aimed at the closer control and regulation of the trade union movement and its membership. In spite of such attempts, however, the approach in Zambia has been less coercive than in some other African countries. The Government has tended to rely on "pressure rather than force". In this context government reforms are examined in four key areas: the regulation of trade union activity, the restructuring of collective bargaining (including incomes policy), industrial conflict and dispute settlement procedures, and workers' participation. It is concluded that the Government has not achieved its stated major objectives. Although trade unions and their members have generally accepted the Government's overall authority to set the agenda of national development, they have resisted attempts to curtail their autonomy. It is on account of this failure that the Government now intends to integrate trade unions into the State completely.

British imperial culture and indigenous patriarchy both work to subjugate women. There is very little room for resistance. Madness as protest is a dominant theme in Victorian literature as well as late twentieth-century postcolonial writing by women. This thesis refashions our understanding of the madwoman trope by investigating writers’ use of it to capture the diverse experiences of ‘other’ madwomen. Instead of a strictly Eurocentric approach to female protagonists’ experiences of madness, the thesis places British imperial literary culture in the nineteenth century alongside postcolonial writing by women, whether in the Caribbean (Dominica), South Asia (India) or the Middle East and North Africa (Jordan and Egypt). Jeans Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt and Miral Al-Tahawy’s The Tent are placed alongside Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. A transnational approach is necessary to establish commonality between Eastern and Western women’s literary experiences of madness. Such commonality persistently emerges, once one is alert to its possibility, despite the often obvious differences between literary madwomen’s experiences in a transnational frame. The relationship between madness and empire, madness and patriarchy, and madwomen as agents of resistance is exemplified throughout the thesis by closely analysing each literary text.

This thesis contains three papers on immigrants, i.e. foreign-born people, in the UK. The first paper is methodological, the other two papers focus on physical health. All papers use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) which started in 2009 and includes an Ethnic Minority Boost sample, providing large enough sample sizes to study the immigrant population in detail. The first paper analyses sample attrition of immigrants at wave 2 of the UKHLS. We find that non-contact of immigrants is mainly determined by characteristics related to high residential mobility. However, it is also predicted by poor cooperation at the first interview. This suggests that for some immigrants non-contact could constitute a hidden refusal. Interview refusal of immigrants is predicted by similar characteristics than for UK-born. The second paper investigates the Healthy Immigrant Effect (HIE) in the UK. The HIE is understood as a health advantage of recent immigrants compared to the native-born population, which gets smaller with increasing length of residence. The cross-sectional analysis finds that immigrants have a health advantage in the first years after immigration, which decreases the longer immigrants have been in the country. The magnitude of the HIE depends on the measure of poor health: poor self-rated health and diagnosed chronic condition yield much larger HIE than poor physical health functioning (Short-Form 12) which is arguably more suitable to this immigrant-native comparison. The last paper considers one possible explanation for the duration effect, i.e. why immigrants lose their initial health advantage: Immigrants tend to have poorer work conditions than native-born employees. We find that physical work conditions explain some of the excess deterioration of immigrants’ health, while psychosocial work conditions only play a minor role. Health deterioration among less educated immigrants is better explained with work conditions than that among degree-educated immigrants.

The diploma thesis deals with the issue of labor migration into the Czech Republic in the years 2003 -- 2013 and verifies the hypothesis that the amount of the labor immigrants into the Czech Republic is increasing. The theoretical part defines the basic concepts related to migration, and since labor migration has the biggest impact on the labor market, it must also deals with the theory of the labor market For a deeper understanding of immigration there are explained economic theories, which deal with this issue. The legislative measures of the host country is an important factor for immigration, and therefore this topic devoted an entire chapter. The biggest added value of this work brings the fifth chapter, which deals with foreigners on the Czech labor market. The hypothesis was confirmed only partly because the number of immigrants was growing only until 2008. After that began the economic recession and many foreigners left the country, which was also caused by changes in legislation. However, economic growth is again expected influx of immigrants, and also due to the fact that the Czech government supports by its projects legal employment of foreigners in our country.