Deflecting Immigration: Networks, Markets, and Regulation in Los Angeles

Chapter 1 Globalization and Migration Networks

Chapter 1 Globalization and Migration Networks U NTIL RECENTLY, globalization theorists claimed that Third World immigration to the world’s large cities was simply a product of the changing income structure in the countries receiving those immigrants , especially in the largest cities.1 This change in income distribution had produced a large and growing effective demand for cheap labor to which the Third World immigrants responded.2 At the top of the income distribution, so the globalization argument proceeded, newly rich dual earner households need cleaners, gardeners, roofers, and childcare providers.3 Immigrants from poor countries took these low-wage jobs and unemployed native workers declined them.4 The immigrant workers received no social security benefits and no employer-paid health care. Their wages were not reported to tax officials, and their job tenure was casual. Immigrant employees of rich households therefore could not afford the mainstream products and services that require a mainstream income. Like their newly downsized native-born counterparts, immigrant workers looked for discounted goods produced and sold in the informal sector. Like the rich, the immigrant poor bought clothing manufactured in the informal sector. Unlike the rich, who bought clothing in fancy boutiques , the workers in the informal sector bought garments from streetcorner vendors and swap meets. Their housing was cheap, dilapidated, and overcrowded. The flow-chart in figure 1.1 shows how the leading theorist of demanddriven immigration, Saskia Sassen, explained Third World immigration and informalization.5 Sassen’s explanation was linear.6 First, global restructuring changes the income structure of the advanced countries, on the one hand increasing the number of the wealthy and their share of total income, and on the other increasing the number of the poor but decreasing their share of the income. The hourglass income distribution creates demand for low-priced goods the poor can afford, and for the personal services the rich want. Responding to the new demand for personal services and informal 1 2 Deflecting Immigration production workers, immigrants from poor countries swarm into the great cities of the developed world where they fill both needs. Much of this employment is informal. Whether they work for wealthy households or for industrial sweatshops, the immigrant poor receive substandard pay and benefits, often in cash. However, in this view, globalization-induced changes in demand completely explain immigration and informalization. In a nutshell, restructuring theory maintained that globalization emanates from world cities whose income structures “create a strong demand for immigrant labor.”7 By the millennium year, both immigration and informalization had increased in the large cities of the developed world,8 just as expected, but a strict demand-driven explanation seemed less convincing than it had earlier.9 Its major proponent had even modified it in the face of criticism.10 Insisting that “the recent growth of an informal economy in the large cities of the core countries” still required explanation, Saskia Sassen claimed only that “a good share of the informal economy” was attributable to demanddriven immigration.11 This modification invites the conclusion that another, and equally good, share was the product of “immigrant survival strategies” imported from sending countries. If so, Sassen belatedly acknowledged that immigration was partially supply-driven after all. Sassen’s theoretical revision addressed and incorporated criticism of her earlier demanddriven theory.12 Critics agreed that changes in income structure in the 1970s, the alleged globalization effect, had triggered the Third World migration to the most developed countries. However, once under way, it was argued, Third World migration soon saturated the original demand, and then began to propagate itself through migration networks independently of labor demand. In this argument, critics advanced a two-stage model of immigration of which the second stage was supply-driven, and the first demand-driven. That is, whatever may originally have initiated it, Third World immigration to the developed world’s biggest cities later derived from what Douglas Massey, George Durand, and Nolan Malone called “cumulative causation”13 rather than, or in addition to, the original causes.14 Cumulative causation means that, once begun, migrations build momentum independent of the initiating conditions. Thereafter, they no longer depend upon the initiating condition for continuation. There is ample historical precedent for such “spillover” migration.15 Global Restructuring Demand for Cheap Labor Immigration from Third World Informalization Source: Author’s compilation. Figure 1.1 Global Restructuring and Informalization Urbanization or Overurbanization? Moreover, a two-stage...