Migration, Class and Transnational Identities: Croations in Australia and America

2. The Global Context

2 The Global Context Human Capital on the Move to Promised Lands Over the past several decades, the process of globalization intensified and diversified world migration. Although population movements flow in a variety of directions and for a variety of reasons, the most massive migration flows still run from less-developed to more-developed countries (Castles and Miller 2003). In this context, the contested notions of the world’s developed “center,” “semi-periphery,” and “periphery” still have heuristic value in understanding global mobility. Different levels of urbanization and economic development, and the subsequent earning differential between countries, remain the most important cause of world migrations; most migrants move to places where they expect to get higher returns for their “human capital.” The concept of human capital first appeared as part of corporate management vocabulary. In migration studies, and especially in the economic sociology of migration, it is used in the analysis of the mobility of “economic migrants,” who are presumably mainly motivated by an expectation of attracting higher returns for their skills in another country (Portes 1995). Following the restructuring of the global economy in the 1960s and 1970s, the intake of skilled human capital replaced the import of unskilled labor in developed economies. At that time, much manufacturing moved to developing countries , and the “rust belts,” with high unemployment of the low-skilled and accompanying social problems, were created in the previous industrial areas of Britain, the United States, and other developed countries. Since then, the service sector has dominated Western economies. i-xiv_1-258_Coli.indd 54 9/23/08 11:10:52 AM the global context · 55 Adopting the human capital approach in Australian immigration policy meant almost total exclusion of low-skilled immigrants. This reorientation has been internationally admired as highly efficient and rational, in terms of the need of the labor market but also in terms of designing the nation through immigration. In the United States, on the other hand, the familysponsored migration remains the largest intake. However, gradual polarization of the labor demand in the past two decades, with highly skilled and professional jobs on the one side and low-skilled service jobs on the other, left Australia and other Western countries grappling with labor shortages on the low end of the labor market. Due to gentrification of the previously working-class, manufacturing, inner-city areas of large Western cities, the labor-intensive low-skill sectors, which provide services to the growing population of high-income professionals, have expanded. These industries, such as cleaning, catering, restaurants, domestic service, delivery, and aged care, require a constant supply of low-wage immigrant workers (Sassen 1991). In spite of general rise in the education levels of the workforce and the creation of many new professions, the United States, according to Harris (1995, 212–13), still “employs one and a half times as many janitors as lawyers, accountants , investment bankers, stockbrokers and computer programmers put together.” In the United States, the low end of the resegmented labor market that the native-born shun is filled by non-white immigrants, many of them undocumented. In Australia, the humanitarian intake is directed into these jobs even though many refugees are highly skilled and therefore dramatically occupationally downgraded (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury 2006). During the past couple of years, a program of temporary “guest workers” has been introduced, bringing labor from rural China, the Philippines, and other underdeveloped parts of Asia. The imminent demographic crisis of the aging Western populations contributes to the labor shortages. As far as international migration is concerned, the onset of the modern industrial era polarized national economic systems into “sending” and “receiving ” countries. For a number of complex historical reasons, capitalist market-based economies that first evolved in western Europe and North America were able to create, productively use, sustain, and attract educated and innovative human resources, often at the expense of other parts of the world. Once human mobility assumed global proportions, less industrialized countries inevitably became countries of emigration. Highly industrialized and these days “post-industrial” market economies assumed the role of “host countries.” International migration was relatively free until the First World War, when state control of immigration started to assume the shape of today’s i-xiv_1-258_Coli.indd 55 9/23/08 11:10:52 AM 56 . migration, class, and transnational identities system of passports, visas, and residency and citizenship rules (Moch 1992). Nowadays, virtually all Western countries have a...