How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands

How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands examines the range of economic, social, and cultural impacts immigrants have had, both knowingly and unknowingly, in their home countries. The book opens with overviews of the ways migrants become agents of homeland development. The essays that follow focus on the varied impacts immigrants have had in China, India, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Mozambique, and Turkey. One contributor examines the role Indians who worked in Silicon Valley played in shaping the structure, successes, and continued evolution of India's IT industry. Another traces how Salvadoran immigrants extend U.S. gangs and their brutal violence to El Salvador and neighboring countries. The tragic situation in Mozambique of economically desperate émigrés who travel to South Africa to work, contract HIV while there, and infect their wives upon their return is the subject of another essay. Taken together, the essays show the multiple ways countries are affected by immigration. Understanding these effects will provide a foundation for future policy reforms in ways that will strengthen the positive and minimize the negative effects of the current mobile world.

Contributors. Victor Agadjanian, Boaventura Cau, José Miguel Cruz, Susan Eva Eckstein, Kyle Eischen, David Scott FitzGerald, Natasha Iskander, Riva Kastoryano, Cecilia Menjívar, Adil Najam, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Alejandro Portes, Min Ye
About the Author:

Susan Eva Eckstein is Professor of Sociology and International Relations at Boston University. Her many books include The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland, as well as What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America and Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America (both coedited with Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley). Adil Najam is Vice Chancellor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan, and Professor of International Relations and of Geography and Environment at Boston University. He is the author of Portrait of a Giving Community: Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora, coauthor of Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda, and editor of Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia.

Adil Najam is Vice Chancellor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan and Professor of International Relations and of Geography and Environment at Boston University. He is the author of Portrait of a Giving Community: Philanthropy by the Pakistani-American Diaspora; co-author of Global Environmental Governance: A Reform Agenda, and editor of Environment, Development and Human Security: Perspectives from South Asia.