Discrimination | nccr – on the move

Border Bureaucracies: A Literature Review of Discretion in Migration Control

Nora Bardelli — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 09:49:52 +0000

This literature review summarizes findings from 63 articles published between 2001 and 2020 that study discretion of frontline workers at migration control. The results demonstrate that discretionary practices in various migration control situations (e.g., border zones, migration agencies, courts, public welfare services, and detention centers) are widespread but share common patterns. Frontline workers’ racialized prejudices and perceptions of migrant deservingness were the most dominant patterns found in the data, although there were some disagreements about which were most influential. Discretion of frontline workers was described as foremost detrimental to migrants, as it amplified the migrants’ vulnerable situations, even if it occasionally could increase individual migrants’ room for agency and strategic maneuvering. Contrary to the assumption underpinning the control gap-thesis in immigration policy literature that governments’ capacity to control migration is hampered by the significant discretion at the frontlines, many studies in our sample describe how governments shape the discretionary practices of frontline workers through informal, subtle, and opaque governing strategies. These informal governing strategies enable central governments to deflect responsibility for discriminatory and inhumane policy outcomes.

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To Go or Not to Go: Unpacking Mobility Decisions in Mumbai During the COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020

Annique Lombard — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 17:30:54 +0000

The hastily announced lockdown in March 2020 by the Indian government precipitated a wave of uncertainty and fear among urban residents living in auto-constructed settlements. In subsequent weeks, images poured in of people undertaking arduous journeys across hundreds of miles to try and get back to their native villages – a process that was dubbed the ‘migrant crisis’ by the mainstream media. This coinage, however, hides a number of differences in the positionality of city residents in terms of housing, employment, access to credit, political clientelism and family structure, factors which are themselves circumscribed by caste, religion, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on qualitative research in two separate field sites within Mumbai, this paper seeks to provide insight into the way choices on staying, leaving and returning to the city were made by various informal workers at the individual, family and community levels. While offering a chronological account of how the lockdown unfolded in the city, it makes three central observations. First, the status and relationship between landlord and tenant within the autoconstructed settlement was a key axis along which migratory decisions were negotiated. Second, the unforeseen gendered fallouts of punitive state action structured certain people’s desperation to leave. Finally, the collective psychology of fear and safety worked more along the lines of caste, religion and ethnic community rather than friends and neighbors. Taken together, these insights aim to emphasize the need for more granular categories and new vocabularies to understand the evolving relationship between mobility, social structures and precarious forms of urban labor.

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Worker Cooperatives’ Potential for Migrant Women‘s Self-Empowerment. Insights from a Case Study in New York City

Annique Lombard — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 11:37:07 +0000

Many migrant women in New York City face structural discrimination and administrative hurdles that complicate their access to safe and well-paid labor. Worker cooperatives have been shown to reduce the precarity and economic exclusion of marginalized groups. However, although much is known about worker cooperatives’ economic potential for improving workers’ lives, other social effects remain far less well explored. The present research contributes to exploring this gap by examining how joining a worker cooperative empowers migrant women in their everyday lives. We apply the concept of self-empowerment to several spheres of the everyday lives of migrant women. At an empirical level, the study focuses on migrant women who are members of nine cleaning- or care-worker cooperatives in New York City. The data were gathered using a participatory research approach and consist of interviews, participant observations, and a quantitative survey. The findings are that worker cooperatives have empowering effects on migrant women beyond the sphere of paid work. Although the additional unpaid workload as co-owners of cooperatives represents an extra burden for many migrant women, they now have better wages, more flexibility, and safer workplaces. Furthermore, they acquire a range of leadership skills, enlarge their social network beyond their ethnic communities, and earn increased esteem as co-owners of businesses. Through worker-ownership, migrant women thus increase their economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital, which enables them to exercise more agency not only in their paid work but also in their families and leisure time.

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Why Do Employers Sometimes Prefer Minority Candidates? Theoretical Review and Empirical Test

Annique Lombard — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 22:27:02 +0000

Correspondence tests on ethnic discrimination in the labor market usually focus on how often native majority candidates and ethnic minority candidates are invited for job interviews on an aggregated level. Cases in which only minority candidates are invited for an interview have mostly been disregarded as noise and not analyzed further. In this paper, we argue that employers who prefer minority over majority candidates may have good reasons to do so. We propose several theoretical mechanisms that explain why it would be desirable to hire individuals with a non-native background and test these expectations quantitatively with correspondence test data that was collected in Switzerland between October 2017 and December 2018. We find partial support for our expectations: in particular, in urban and thus likely more international firm settings; and among owners doing the recruitment themselves in the context of small enterprises, where close supervision is possible, we identified employers who are more willing to “take the risk” and to invite only minority applicants for a job interview. We argue that employer behavior is likely to be complex and that research should analyze instances of minority preferences more systematically.

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R.I.C.E. – An Integrated Model of Welfare Deservingness Perceptions

Annique Lombard — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 12:40:18 +0000

Research on deservingness perceptions is currently one of the most vibrant areas in the field of welfare state analysis. In this manuscript, we critically assess the state-of-the-art in this field of research and, in particular, the two dominant theoretical approaches, the C.A.R.I.N. framework and the ‘deservingness heuristics’ model. In doing so, we identify some important problems, including conceptual ambiguities and an insufficient explicit integration of the two theoretical models. We suggest a revised and integrated theoretical framework, which we believe provides a way to resolve these issues. Our model suggests four criteria to inform deservingness perceptions: Reciprocity, Identity, Control, and Effort (R.I.C.E.). We provide evidence for our model in the form of vignette experiments administered to online panels in the US and Germany.

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