Convergence? Globalization and State Policies in the Production of Postcolonial Citizen and Ethnic Migration

Abstract

This chapter examines the forces that have produced post-1985/1990 postcolonial Dutch Antillean citizen and Nikkeijin ethnic migrations to the Netherlands and Japan and analyses several bodies of international labour migration thought including push—pull models, dual labour market, world-systems, and globalization. Globalization and state policies best explain the convergence in the use of formal citizenship and shared ethnicity in these unintended and intended legal migrations. Other theories are quite convincing in their emphasis on the labour market and wage differentials, the temporary status of immigrants, and core periphery relations. However, they fail to adequately take into account the role of the state in producing migrations and the ways in which shared citizenship and ethnicity with the host country facilitates these phenomena.

Many thanks to Mélanie Perroud of Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France for her extensive comments on previous versions of this chapter. Additionally, I would like to thank the International Conference on Comparative Social Science (ICCSS) — Probing the Frontiers of Comparative Inquiry held at Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan (15–16 July 2006); the Fourth Annual Summer Institute on International Migration, a collaborative project with the Social Science Research Council, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies held at the University of California, San Diego (19–23 June 2006); and the PhD Brain Lab of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands (12 January 2007) for their comments on earlier versions.