What I Do…

My goal as a sociologist is to advance social scientific knowledge about how and why state organizations exercise control over people, their geographic mobility, and the kinds of belonging that determine life chances. I take a global, systems approach that examines mobility and membership in the context of an international system of states rather than focusing solely on discrete constituent states. A common starting point in my scholarship is a contemporary pattern of (im)migration or nationality policy that I then explain by placing it in global and historical perspective. These analytical perspectives often challenge, or at least qualify, nationally or regionally inflected claims of exceptionality. Coming from a “southern standpoint”, I strive to avoid making universals of empirical cases and theories of the North Atlantic west, and to uncover the workings of political power.

Substantively, I focus on economic, organizational, and ideological explanations of migration related phenomena ranging from permanent settlement to temporary labor migration and related legal statuses. The instances in my historical analysis are drawn especially from the Americas and Southern Europe, but also from the Indian Ocean region, the Middle East, and Australia – regions linked by migration systems and policy schemes. By using an international political field framework – which examines states and policies as parts of a global pecking order and not solely as discrete political entities – I explain how and why state organizations select immigrants and prospective citizens, the development of the capacity to manage people, and what state practices and capacities mean for social inequality and solidarity. I examine how efforts to manage migration affect people’s lives and how people respond to such efforts. In terms of sources, I rely on an analysis of laws and regulations, official statistics and archives, and accounts of policymakers, bureaucrats, employers, labor brokers, and migrants.

Past Work…

The Politics of Nationality. Relying on this focus and approach, I uncover the circumstances under which global politics shape quintessentially nationalist policies of emigration, immigration, citizenship, and temporary labor migration. My work reveals that nationality laws historically result from negotiations between sending and receiving states to affiliate and gain the allegiance of migrants, challenging the notion that they solely emerge from domestic interest group competition. Ethnic preferences nationality policies that result from these dynamics have effects that reach into the present such as the phenomenon of Latin Americans claiming ancestral homeland citizenship in Europe. Dynamics like these apply in migration systems that include countries with shifting geopolitical and economic positions in the global North and South as well as within the global South. These are the arguments developed in The Scramble for Citizens: Dual Nationality and State Competition for Immigrants (Stanford University Press, 2013), and in several related articles and chapters. This book received the ASA’s Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book on International Migration Award.

Racial Selection in Immigration and nationality law. How common have ethnically and racially selective immigration and nationality policies been? What is their relationship to liberal democracy? Is the adoption of ethnic selection by one country independent of what other countries have done or does the adoption of such policies by one country affect the likelihood that another country will do the same? In another project, I examine the rise and fall of ethnic and racial discrimination by means of ab analysis of laws in 22 countries of the Americas since 1790 as well as of six country case studies and a case study of international organizations. My co-author and I also explain the rise and persistence of positive ethnic preferences and consider the implications for contemporary policies. We identify the conditions under which policies diffuse not only from North to South, and across similar epistemic communities, but also against political gravity and by bridging cultural legal communities (Cook-Martín and FitzGerald 2019). We also show that scientific institutions played an important role in giving legitimacy to and spreading selective immigration policies – which were efforts to shape stratification systems in each of the countries studied. Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard University Press 2014) and related articles and chapters present these findings. This book received the ASA’s Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award (2017), the Thomas and Znaniecki Best Book on International Migration Award (2015), among other awards.

Current Project…

Policies devised to craft national populations through ethnoracial preferences and discrimination have created challenges for capitalists. These policies confer rights and a secure residence status to immigrants that make them less likely to do undesirable jobs for the wages offered by employers. Moreover, selecting by origin excludes the very workers likely to accept low wages and difficult working conditions. In response to these challenges in the period before World War II, states have created and managed temporary labor migration schemes (TLMSs) which purport to reconcile the interests of capital and nation by managing how long foreign workers can stay. By “schemes,” I mean both a system of organizing foreign labor through rules and bureaucracies, and an ideological agenda to legitimate such systems. In these schemes, national states play the leading role in arranging migration for contractually specified durations. Other actors like employers, labor brokers, and workers themselves play roles that vary depending on political economic factors and historical context. After the 1960s when most countries eschewed overly discriminatory migration policies, TLMSs have given the appearance of selecting workers on neutral grounds such as skills while in practice allowing employers to infer worker skills, aptitudes, and tractability from origins.

My current project examines temporary labor migration in a global and historical perspective. The book manuscript, tentatively titled Temporary Migration: Making Workers without Rights since Abolition, investigates how temporariness became a feature of global migration systems and its implications for geographic mobility and citizenship. The book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the historical emergence of temporary labor migration schemes and its consequences. Beginning with the legal template of indenture in the Indian Ocean region, states have used contracts that set the duration of the labor relationship to supply tractable foreign workers. In colonial Australia, southern Africa, and imperial Prussia, states further hone the legal deployment of time to limit foreign workers’ stay in a country. Early guestworker and bracero schemes in Europe and North America experiment with similar templates and by mid-20th Century develop into temporary labor migration programs (TLMPs)– a configuration in which states play the dominant role in managing labor albeit in dialogue with employers, labor brokers, and workers. Beginning in the 1990s, TLMPs become the modal expression of temporariness in major receiving countries in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.