Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Home and citizenship carry contradictory and ambiguous meanings for immigrants as they negotiate lives ‘here’ and ‘there’. We use the concept of topography to analyze the ways in which activists in the Arab-American community draw connections between homes in the United States and in the Middle East. In intensive interviews, we ask activists about how their understanding of home influences their activism and positioning as citizens within the United States. Activists often bring to their work conceptualizations of home and citizenship that are open, and that connect home to broader forces operating at various scales and in more than one place. Rather than pursuing a deterritorialized, transnational citizenship, our respondents forged a politics of home and citizenship whose topography transcended localities and nations, even as they were often rooted in the spaces of both.

Recent academic debates on transnationalism, immigration, and citizenship have largely ignored migrants' perspectives on citizenship. On the basis of ethnographic research in Germany and the United States between 1998 and 2001, we examine the values and meanings contemporary migrants assign to national citizenship and their citizenship practices. We argue that dominant discourses of liberal democratic citizenship and migrants' situated subject positions condition and mediate in complex ways their imaginings and practices of citizenship. We discuss how and why migrants' perspectives conform in significant ways across these two countries, while also varying among migrants. National citizenship remains meaningful in their struggle for mobility across borders, for equal protection under the law, and for equal access to social and political rights. However, migrants are also aware of the discrepancy between promises of equity and fairness associated with liberal democratic citizenship and the reality in which even naturalized migrants experience discrimination. Issues of belonging to and identification with the national community render national citizenship complicated for migrants as they negotiate multiple identities and allegiances, with varying outcomes. Differences among migrants notwithstanding, the majority can and do identify with multiple communities, and desire to participate and become members in more than one national community, suggesting that migrants challenge conceptions of bounded national citizenship. This does not entail, however, a deterritorialization of citizenship and identities.

It is widely claimed that recent migration trends show increasing levels of transnational activity, but there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the relationship between transnationalism and citizenship participation, particularly from a gendered perspective. A study of immigrants from Hong Kong to Vancouver and Toronto, the largest group of immigrants to Canada in the period 1989 to 1997, shows that, although migration occurred in a context of anticipated political instability around reunification with the People's Republic of China, the most significant justification for emigration was to further the interests of the family, particularly children's education. Gender differences are subtle, but women tend to focus more strongly on family considerations, whereas men are somewhat more concerned with economic and political issues. Transnational activities focus around ties of family and friendship, rather than around political or economic ties. Women and men both seek formal rights of citizenship, and are beginning to express a desire for more participation in Canadian society. Contrary to theories of hypermobility among Hong Kong emigrants, transnationalism and citizenship participation are seen as a basis for settlement. Gendered approaches to transnationalism need to understand how the concept of citizenship, and citizenship participation, develops as a result of wider social relations that are structured differently for women and men.

In this paper I explore immigrants' notions and practices of citizenship, and how these contribute to the citizenship debate. In order to achieve this, I examine Latin American immigrants' struggle for belonging in Toronto by looking at the Canadian Hispanic Day Parade. This multicultural celebration of ethnic diversity takes place in a marginalized suburban neighbourhood of the city, and I argue that Latin Americans use it to affirm the existence of a Latin American identity and community in Toronto. But, while the parade serves to contest dominant representations of immigrants, visible minorities, and the disadvantaged, it also reveals how forms of community mobilization can internalize neoliberal social relations and even promote a neoliberal agenda. The aim of the paper is to reflect upon the political potential of ethnic celebrations, as well as the constraints and complexities of immigrant citizenship practice within the contemporary context of Canadian multiculturalism and neoliberalism.

In this paper I examine the ways in which politicians, media, and native residents formulate assimilation discourses—that is, expectations for immigrants to adapt to prevailing norms and cultures—and the effects that such discourses have on social relations in immigrant-receiving societies. Archival and ethnographic research in Germany illustrates that assimilation discourses are central in the dialectical process of identity construction in which native-born Germans and immigrants from Turkey construct their respective ‘other’, and thereby themselves. I pay particular attention to the effects of assimilation discourses in negotiations over belonging and culture at multiple scales in Germany—from the national to the neighborhood level. Space figures prominently in these negotiations, as the spaces that immigrants occupy and create often become the focus of debates about difference, otherness, and the unassimilability of migrants in Germany.

The role of state discourses in the construction of ‘otherness’ and in the production of inequality has become a major issue during a time of increasing changes in migration flows, of an increased presence of nationalist parties, and of increasingly restrictive immigration policies in Europe. In this paper we examine historical shifts in the representation of foreigners within Swiss state discourses and the effects of these shifts on the integration of immigrants into Swiss society. As state discourses regarding foreigners significantly changed after the First World War, the emphasis of immigration policies shifted from a facilitating to a constraining approach. Überfremdung, the notion that excessive numbers of foreigners can threaten Swiss identity, emerged as one of the most influential discourses in Switzerland and provided the foundation for a quantitative and qualitative strategy of defence against the immigration, settlement, and naturalisation of foreigners. In recent years, however, an agreement on freedom of movement between Switzerland and the European Union has been struck, and immigration policies have once again adopted a facilitating stance. As this applies only to citizens of the European Union, a stratified system of immigrant rights has been continued and perpetuated. At the same time, right-wing parties, which have recently risen to power, have successfully used Überfremdung propaganda to persuade Swiss populations to vote against the relaxation of conditions for the naturalisation of foreigners, thus ensuring that immigrants will be excluded from access to citizenship rights over generations. The politics of immigration in Switzerland is above all a politics of national identity.

Much of the scholarship on the empowerment of suburbs (‘edge city’, ‘ex-urb’, and so on) focuses on American cases and draws upon social and economic variables to explain the phenomenon. In this paper I aim to broaden the empirical reach of the literature by examining the transformation of several municipalities from rural backwaters into powerful political and economic forces in Toulouse, France. I also aim to broaden existing theoretical approaches by closely examining the state's role in the empowerment of this particular patch of suburbs. In particular, I argue that changes in both local economic and state structures have presented officials across Toulouse, France with a broad range of opportunities. Actors with heightened strategic capacities, like those actors composing the suburbs under investigation, have been better able to acquire the wealth and power needed to become potent territorial forces.

Increased interest in and recognition of the value of the region and particularly the ‘ordinary region’ as opposed to more-glamorous ‘exceptional regions’ encourages us to reexplore the nature and purpose of what could be described as the first methodological blueprint of modern British geographical enquiry. Received histories of geography which give the impression of the production of geographical knowledge as a (near) universal male domain and the post-1960s critique of the regional approach as descriptive and nonhermeneutical have combined to make invisible the geographical work of most women (and some men) working in British universities in the first half of the 20th century. Despite this, insights can clearly be gained from biographical studies of both ‘ordinary’ geographers like Hilda Ormsby and the epistemology of the ‘ordinary region’. This allows for a richer and more-nuanced critical historiography of geography, but there is also a potentially fruitful reciprocity in conversation between that history of geographical ideas and explorations of economic alterity. Regional studies which may have been dismissed as ‘merely descriptive’ can be found to articulate detailed accounts of local socioeconomic practices giving evidence of the historical grounding for current economic standing, including complex and sometimes resistant interaction with dominant modes of economic ‘success’.

Past research on labour-market skills shortages indicates that employers report skills shortages or hard-to-fill vacancies for a variety of different reasons. Nevertheless, there is some consensus that skills-shortages analysis needs to examine such shortages within the context of the local labour market in order to understand the labour-market dynamics and structural factors that affect the propensity for unemployed people to fill ‘skills shortage’ vacancies. The traditional approach has been to utilise qualitative analysis and case studies. In contrast, in this paper we undertake a multivariate probit analysis of employer perceptions of skills shortages utilising a subregional dataset from a survey of Dorset employers undertaken in 1998. On a general level, we demonstrate the complexity involved in attempting to measure skills problems using the responses of employers to standard surveys. The key findings of the probit analysis are that: firm size is a significant determinant in skills-deficiency perception, growing firms have a higher skills-shortage perception, and reported perceptions of skills deficiencies vary significantly according to the position of the respondent in the organisation. This reinforces the message that great care needs to be taken when analysing measures of skills deficiencies that are derived solely from employer surveys at national or subregional level.