A penetrating and comprehensive analysis of the history of migration and refugees from a leading expert in the field. Saskia Sassen's analyses of the global transfers of money and power have earned her a reputation as one of the world's leading experts on globalization. In Guests and Aliens she brings her impressive interpretive skills to bear on the related issue of immigration, putting current "crises" in an historical context for the first time. The American experience, she suggests, represents one phase in a long history of global border crossing. She describes the relative normality of the pursuit of work across borders during the emergence of the European nation-states and explains the economic and political mass migrations of Italians and Eastern European Jews during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also discusses the dislocations -- particularly those after the end of World War II -- that have engendered the "refugee" concept. Using these examples, Sassen explores the causes of immigration that have resulted in nations' welcoming incomers as guests or disparaging them as aliens. Sassen's impassioned conclusion describes ways to improve European and American immigration policy and helps us see current problems in an historical light.
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com).
Her new books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007). Other recent books are the 3rd. fully updated Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2006), the edited Deciphering the Global (Routledge 2007), and the co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005). She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [http://www.eolss.net ]. The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001.
Her books are translated into twentyone languages. She has received several honors and awards, most recently a doctor honoris causa from Delft University and DePaul University. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, OpenDemocracy.net, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, HuffingtonPost.com, among others.
