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  • The High Stakes of International Migration and the Rediscovery of Its History
  • Dr. Mark J. Miller
Migrations and Cultures: A World View. By Thomas Sowell. New York: Basic Books, 1996. 516 pp. $27.50/Cloth.
Immigrant America: A Portrait Second Edition. By Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 369 pp. $40.00/Cloth.
The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen. By Jonathan Marcus. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 212 pp. $45.00/Cloth.

In the lexicon of international relations theory, international migration has gone from low to high politics. Through an historical analysis of immigration, the three books reviewed here, Migrations and Cultures: A World View, Immigrant America: A Portrait, and The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all contribute to dispelling the attitude that international migration is somehow marginal to the affairs of mankind and states. In Migrations and Cultures: A World View, Thomas Sowell’s conservative views are most apparent in his Cold War-influenced considerations of certain regimes and in his endeavor to refute simplistic notions of random equality that underlie some advocacy of affirmative action. In Immigrant America: A Portrait, Portes and Rumbaut seek to rebut the likes of former Governor Lamm of Colorado, Gary Imhoff, the Federation for American Immigration Reforms (FAIR) and Peter Brimelow whose calls for more restrictive immigration policies in the United States have gained a certain currency. Portes and Rumbaut portray the contemporary US restrictionist attitude towards immigration as a recurrence of nativism. They argue that nativist opposition to immigration was misguided in the past and continues to be misguided today. In The National Front and French Politics: The Resistible Rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jonathan Marcus clearly views the politics of the [End Page 187] National Front as distasteful and threatening. He all but concludes that the National Front is a late twentieth century re-emergence of earlier French anti-Semitic and xenophobic movements. In the context of France, Marcus skillfully delineates connections between the disparate factions and personalities of the National Front, its extreme right forerunners in the Vichy government, the supporters of French Algeria, and the neo-fascist student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Common to all three of these books is the assertion that international migration has significantly shaped the history of states and peoples since time immemorial. Sowell’s Migrations and Cultures amounts to a treatise on the comparative history of six immigrant populations which have greatly affected many states and regions. Portes and Rumbaut reiterate the observation of an important scholar of US immigration history, Oscar Handlin, that to write about immigration to the US is to write the history of the US. Marcus reviews the history of the French Revolution, long-standing quarrels over religion and education, the Vichy regime, and the trauma of the Algerian war of national liberation, in order to shed light on the National Front, its supporters and opponents.

Because the scope of inquiry is so vast, Sowell’s book reminds one of Reinhard Bendix’s lengthy book, Kings or People. He compares the history of German, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Jewish, and Indian emigration to discern patterns of the effects of immigration on host and sending states as well as on the emigrants involved. The historiography of each of these outflows is enormous and complex, and by throwing his net so wide, Sowell sacrifices mastery of the subject matter and the completeness of his research. For example, unlike in Kings or People, which examined the transformation from monarchy to democracy, only English-language sources were surveyed by Sowell, and these only partially. Consequently his rendering of history is far less authoritative than Bendix’s. Nonetheless there are flashes of great insight and, on the whole, competent summaries of the histories of these six emigrations. Yet Sowell does not explain why he selected the groups studied or why others, say the Irish or the Lebanese, were not selected. In addition his book contains errors, imprecisions, and questionable interpretations.

Sowell’s sketches of the six emigrant groups are far more useful to non-specialists than to...

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