Migrants and Migration in Modern North America Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

"This excellent collection is easily the best effort to date to interpret North American migrations. It takes seriously the inclusion of the Caribbean and Central America in its purview, successfully integrates analyses that range from the micro- to the macro-levels, and incorporates a long-term perspective that connects studies of 'pre-historic' Native America and the early modern slave trade to modern studies of 'immigration' and 'refugees.' Best of all, it provides readers with a marvelous introduction to the ways that a North American perspective on human movement differs, often remarkably so, from the national perspectives developed within the historiographies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico." Donna Gabaccia, author of Immigration and American Diversity: A Social and Cultural History "This volume achieves a feat of thematic and conceptual integration. It explores the demographic, socioeconomic, political, and symbolic role of migration in the formation of North American nations. Yet it transcends national borders and categories with examinations of the local, regional, borderlands, and hemispheric mobility of indigenous peoples, Asians, Europeans, Afro-descendants, Latinos, Anglo- and French-Canadians, among other sub- and supra-national groups. The result is a combination of macro and micro perspectives that illuminates both the forest and the trees." Jose C. Moya, author of Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 "The editors aim to develop what they call "transcultural social studies" in this integrated view of migration in North America via an interdisciplinary collection of essays illuminating the movements of people within and between Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and the US over the past two centuries. Contributors examine the movements of diverse populations across the continent in relation to changing cultural, political and economic patterns." - Times Higher Education, May 24th 2012 "Recent scholarship on borderlands has illuminated the ways in which the migration of diverse groups of peoples have both been influenced by and shaped economic, political, societal, and cultural patterns across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. In Migrants and Migration in Modern North America, coeditors Dirk Hoerder and the late Nora Faires have compiled a collection of essays that move beyond the boundaries of nation-states, offering a broader framework within which to understand translocal and transregional population movements... Certainly, most of the chapters apply this broadened perspective to examine elements of continuity/change and cross-currents of convergence/divergence in North American history while remaining complex and rich in detail. This integrationist approach serves as an exemplar for teaching and research in both migration and borderlands studies. Migrants and Migration in Modern North America presents a kaleidoscopic picture of human mobility by analyzing migration patterns from precontact to the present, from the "top down" and from the "bottom-up," and by considering a range of movement among local borderlands communities to sweeping diasporic experiences of First Peoples, Mexicans, Canadians, Americans, Asians, and Caribbean migrants." - Dominique Bregent-Heald, H-Borderlands