The No-Nonsense Guide to International Migration

This book is one of twelve (as of autumn 2003) in an unabashedly left-wing series on global issues; the volumes are co-sponsored by Toronto's Between The Lines Books and New Internationalist magazine. The book has a tone as solemn and earnest as its non-descript physical appearance; in short, it isn't exactly a lot of fun to read, but it is unassuming in its approach and uncomplicated in its presentation. Perhaps most useful to readers in a super-migrant city like my Toronto, where immigration is a perennial hot-button issue, is the book's unstated contextualization of what"immigration" really is. To wit, legal (!) immigration is best seen less as self-contained bureaucratic system to handle newcomers to a nation state than as the most judicial way to handle the way people move across borders. We are reminded of how, everywhere in the developing world, migrants ("legal" or not) do the bulk of 3-D jobs (Dirty, Dangerous, and Difficult). Especially intriguing is the penultimate of the six chapters, "Emigrants as Heroes"; yes, the word is `emigrant': many developing countries get a not-insignificant portion of their revenue from earnings transferred "home" from the expatriates. The title of the book's final chapter, "Shock Absorbers for the Global Economy," is an apt metaphor for what happens to struggling little people who are overlooked by the naive apologists for globalization who lionize the amoral CEOs of big corporations. A touchstone for debate (at least in Canada, one of the Big Four immigrant countries in the contemporary world, along with the United States, Australia, and New Zealand) would be a comparison of ideas in this book, ones set in a global context, to those in Neal Bissoondath's early 1990s book SELLING ILLUSIONS, his critique of Canada's "multiculturalism" policy. (Postscript:: Corel WordPerfect 8 , presumably a state-of-the-art product of mega-corporate global technology, does not in its Spellcheck option recognize the word "multiculturalism."