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Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration

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Who knew that there was a time when Chinese workers were smuggled into the US pretending to be Mexicans--because Mexicans were welcome while Asians were not? Or that workers now regularly follow the jobs--and corporations like Dell--from Ireland to Poland to wherever the next paycheck is? Every page of this book has another little known but critical fact about immigration and shows that what is happening in the US is just a piece of an international puzzle about the movement of people. But perhaps it is the stories of the people Kaye profiles that most grippingly show how complicated the issue of immigration is. Moving Millions will stay on your mind long after you've finished reading it.

Moving Millions - Coyote Capitalism

June 16, 2010 by cmaule

There is too much and there is not enough immigration are opposing dialogues that summarise the discourse on immigration in Canada. Those favouring immigration stress the humanitarian responsibilities of wealthier societies and the need in Canada's case to address the demographic deficit of an ageing population and falling birth rate. Those opposed argue that immigration aggravates the level of unemployment and causes ethnic conflict when people from different cultures mix with each other and with the founding French, English and aboriginal communities. Similar arguments are heard in other countries especially in Europe and Asia. Turkish migrants to Western Europe face a hostile reception, while Japan has a policy of racial homogeneity which opposes immigration despite its obvious ageing population.

Immigration research is often one-sided. In developed countries, the focus is on its domestic impact with little consideration of the effect which it has on those countries supplying immigrants. When outward migration occurs, the possibility of a brain drain is mentioned but little suggested to mitigate the effects. Developing countries are far more aware of the loss to their economies and the low probability that emigrants will return, although they may send remittances home. In the case of the Philippines, remittances in 2008 were the second largest source of export revenues after electronics. Another ignored consequence is that any benefit from aid is negated when developed countries compete to attract the best and brightest from the aid recipients.

In a sense the mix of migration and economics has always been so, as documented in Jeffrey Kaye's excellent new book Moving Millions, How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration (Wiley 2010). He recounts how the long-time residents of Hazelton, Pennsylvania are reacting today to the arrival of Hispanics in exactly the same way that in earlier times residents of neighbouring coal mining communities responded to the arrival of Slavic, English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Italian, and Lithuanian miners from around 1875 to 1910. Their descendants have responded to the Hispanic invasion with the passage in 2006 of "one of the nation's strictest anti-illegal immigration laws."

Kaye's book is based on extensive interviews with recent immigrants to the US and with those responsible both for attempting to integrate them into American society and for preventing them from entering in the case of illegals. Immigration is an international industry and one which works in the shadows as suggested by chapter titles such as "Recruitment Agencies and Body Shops," "Smugglers as Migration Service Providers," and "Servitude and Cash Flows." It is not a pretty picture and, although commented on in the press, is seldom given the in-depth treatment that Kaye provides by looking at the economics and politics in both the source and recipient countries for migrants.

There are some delicious ironies reported where right wing opponents in the US and other developed countries, who deplore the social consequences of legal and illegal immigration are opposed by their right wing colleagues, who own businesses that would die without the immigrant workers. Their left wing opponents have in some instances exploited this division in order to gain recognition of the problems posed and lobby for changes to immigration policy.

Elsewhere Kaye details the operation of international supply chains that link supply to demand for all types of migrants and outlines the political pressures in both developed countries and the few international bodies that address migration issues. Most of the examples provided are from the US experience with recognition given to the movement of Africans across the Mediterranean into Europe, and those who migrate from Eastern to Western Europe as well as from Vietnam to Poland.

The book is a healthy reminder that we are all immigrants in North America including aboriginals if one goes back far enough, as they too came from somewhere else. Despite the past American civil war and current frictions, a large number of immigrants have integrated into North American society within a short time period.

Kaye recounts his own ancestry from continental Europe and the UK. Mine is a mix. My father's ancestors came to England from what is now France sometime after 1066. I and my wife came to Canada in the 1950s. My children were born in Canada but one left to live in Thailand and has a Thai wife. They now live in Singapore and we have twin Thai-Canadian grandsons. I challenge anyone in North America and most other countries to research their ancestry and not find an immigrant connection. When deploring the present, remember the past.

Kaye's final chapter surveys the weak international attempts to address the issues that arise in both source and recipient countries for immigrants. Economist Jagdish Bhagwati has proposed a global agency to regulate immigration policies, similar to the WTO for trade. In 1990 the UN General Assembly adopted an International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. By 2009, 41 of 192 member states had ratified it, but none included a migrant-dependent industrialized nation.

I found this book a significant contribution to understanding global migration. Unlike most discussions it forces the reader to look at the circumstances of both sending and receiving countries in the migratory process as well as those countries through which migrants travel.

The term Coyote Capitalism in the book's title refers less to the animal that roams the border area between Mexico and the US and more to coyote's original meaning of "an illegitimate intermediary for cutting red tape," a role economists will recognize. The immigration industry supply chain has similarities to what happened during prohibition with dubious intermediaries ensuring the flow of booze.

Moving Millions offers a new perspective on the issue of human migration. Kaye makes us realize that the immigration issue, worldwide, not just in the Unites States, is actually much more complicated than it might seem. It lifts us out of the legal/illegal dichotomy and makes us look at the real issue, which is the unstoppable human imperative to go where better economic opportunities can be found. Any solution to the immigration issue will have to take into account this immutable force. This book should help policy-makers and ordinary citizens who are grappling with this timely political issue. Kaye's readable narrative is enhanced by numerous examples from his world-wide travels as a journalist over many years.

Dina Cramer

One cannot go a day without hearing about "the need for a wall" to keep out the cause of this nation's troubles. Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration is a necessary read to dispel not only the notion that immigration entry is the cause; it additionally explains in careful detail how such a proposal is a complete waste of time and financial resources. From the personal anecdotes to the statistical analysis, the book allows the reader to better understand the worldly involvement of global immigration.

Contemporary migration of people is illuminated by author Kaye's choice of borders, countries, and situations. He goes beyond the all-American focus of others. I liked the sections on Poles in Ireland, the Irish in Poland, and the smuggling of Chinese across the US-Canadian border in the 1890s.

Though he's an experienced journalist, having PBS and other big name gigs, he writes in a style appropriate for a book of this length. Topic sentences often conclude a paragraph.

Kaye apparently feels no country can control illegal immigration and so we shouldn't try. He cites King Canute commanding the tide to recede, as if the immigration of people were a force beyond the ability of any country to control. He never mentions Japan, Switzerland, or North Korea. He spends most of p. 236 quoting those who argue for the rule of law, then on the next page makes it clear he's against it. He is not so foolish as to say "Law and order are bad. Anarchy is better than law. Chaos is better than order." Instead he argues essentially that if laws are not fair, we should take the moral high ground and avoid the "firm and fair" enforcement advocated by some.

His rebellious slant brings Kaye to advocate non-enforcement. We don't know if he prefers cheap labor be available so large corporations can make profits more easily, or that he wants to bring down wages of working class native born citizens of the developed world because he doesn't like them. Perhaps in his next book he'll let us know.

One redeeming quality of this book is that, IMHO, Kaye did not choose his examples to support his anarchist slant. Plus two stars for that.

In his book "Moving Millions", Jeffrey Kaye has framed the entire immigration debate in a whole new light, certainly far different from what we hear from governmental officials and the media today. I couldn't help but flash back to my childhood, growing up on a farm in Salinas Valley, California, in the 1950's & 1960's as my father continued to struggle as a small farmer. I recalled his Filipino foremen and the harvest crews of Mexican laborers, which were part of the Bracero program. At the time I was too young to think, let alone to care much, about where these laborers were coming from, and at that time there was little or no debate or discussion about them, and certainly not much about immigration, whether legal or not. To me, they were the necessary labor force my dad hired to help out on the farm, and to bring the crops in on time. It certainly never crossed my mind as a young boy to wonder about their families or their homes in foreign countries, but this book brought those questions into focus, albeit some 50 years later. It also made me think about my grandparents who, as teenagers, immigrated with their parents through Ellis Island from the Azores Islands of Portugal, looking for a better life here in America. While their entry into the country was legal, I remember as a teenager that they encouraged many relatives from their island home country to come to California for a year or two, the purpose being to earn, with back-breaking field labor, more money than they could have ever imagined in their poor island home in Portugal. They would then return home and buy land there with their newly-made "fortune" to begin their own farms. I worked side-by-side with some of these distant relatives one summer, chopping weeds in endless rows of field crops, but they spoke no English, I spoke no Portuguese, and I failed to ever have any substantial conversations with them about what my grandparents longingly referred to as the "old country", a failure I regret to this day. Jeffrey Kayes' book speaks eloquently of this "circular migration" pattern, and I can see it in my own family history.

If it were within my power, I would mandate this book be issued as required reading to all border-patrol agents, self-appointed minute-men, and to every politician, at state and national levels, to serve as a well-balanced and carefully-researched base of reference from which to frame todays' immigration policy. At the very least, I would wish that everyone who has ever complained about "illegal immigrants" could read the last paragraph of the book, which is a wonderful distillation of the essance of the migration issues facing this country and the world at large.