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Part I Theories and Concepts of International Migration IN THE OPENING ESSAY in this section, Alejandro Portes cautions scholars against attempting to formulate a "grand theory" of immigration to the United States. He asserts that a unifYing theory, which presumably would seek to explain the origins , processes, and outcomes of international migration , would have to be posed at so general a level of abstraction as to be futile or vacuous. For example, he argues, "the theory that colonial capitalist penetration played a significant role in the initiation of large-scale labor migration from less developed countries says nothing about who among the population of those countries was more likely to migrate, nor can it be tested at the level of individual decisionmaking." Although international migration may result from the connections between individuals deciding to migrate and the broader structural contexts within which they live, Portes argues that micro and macro levels of analysis are not "fungible." Instead, he proposes that theory can be usefully organized around four topics, which encompass the international migration process: the origins, flows, employment, and sociocultural adaptation of immigrants. Although he recognizes that these different aspects of migration are interconnected, he proposes that midlevel theories limited to explaining specified areas ofmigration or relations between them are preferable to all-encompassing statements. If formulating a unifYing theoretical paradigm is not feasible, then a coherent overall understanding of the origins, processes, and outcomes of international migration to the United States must be based on the collective theoretical efforts of scholars who make the study of immigration a field of the social sciences by combining their diverse disciplinary trainings, research methods, and analytical approaches. The grouping of chapters by some of these scholars within the different parts of this book represents one way of organizing the field into separate and interconnected areas for theoretical analysis. Part I assesses the role of theory in shaping the field of immigration studies in general and more specifically in explaining the origins and processes of international migration and providing conceptual paradigms that link migration to immigrant incorporation. In tum, parts II and III examine theoretical explanations of the outcomes of migration, focusing on immigrant incorporation into American society, its impacts on native-born Americans, and their reactions. The first and last chapters in part I, by Alejandro Portes and Charles Hirschman, respectively, address the general nature of theory and its relation to research that has and will continue to shape the field of immigration studies. The four chapters in between more specifically address theoretical explanations of immigration to the United States but seek to broaden the explanatory reach of their theoretical approaches in different ways. Douglas Massey and Aristide Zolberg evaluate and synthesize prevailing theories of the origins and process of international migration. Massey focuses on the complementarity of prevailing theories, which tend to emphasize-though not exclusively -the importance of economic factors, while Zolberg brings in an often neglected political perspective regarding the role of the state. Nina Glick Schiller and Patricia Pessar also seek to link different theoretical perspectives, but they do so on the basis of reconceptualizing prevailing understandings of"immigrants" as a basic category ofanalysis. IdentifYing immigrants who sustain international ties to their home countries as "transnational migrants ," Glick Schiller explores how the transnational activities of migrants and states have influ- 14 The Handbook ofInternational Migration enced one another since the turn of the century. Pessar explores the implications of an "engendered " notion of immigrants for both migration and feminist theory. By showing how various theoretical perspectives can be linked with one another through synthesis and reconceptualization of basic understandings, each of these essays contributes to the intellectual coherence ofimmigration studies as an interdisciplinary subfield within the social sciences . SYNTHESIZING THEORY Theories that explain why international migration takes place have often been presented as based in competing and mutually exclusive perspectives and as having distinctive implications for state immigration policies. Assessing the contributions of these theories under the headings of classical economics , new economics, segmented labor market, world systems, social capital, and cumulative causation theories, Douglas Massey concludes in his chapter, "Why Does Immigration Occur?," that, because they "posit causal mechanisms operating at multiple levels of aggregation, the various explanations are not necessarily contradictory." In fact, he adds, the various theories that address different factors as causes of migration-ranging from those considered in individual calculations of advantages to those connected to the transformation of local and regional social, political, and economic structures-are best understood as complementary to...

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