Understanding International Migration: Comparative and Transcultural Perspectives

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book. The book deals with men and women and sometimes with migrant children or children left behind across the whole period from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The authors of the book emphasize, first, the key role international migration has played, and continues to play in shaping political, economic and social processes in the world economy. Second, they place migrant workers in all places in the frames of host states' policies and broader socio-economic issues which acutely disadvantaged and disadvantages them. All chapters in the book link migrants' experiences to fundamental structural and social processes in global power relationships connected with the international economy. Finally, it indicates how state and family, migration traditions and family economies, and regional economic as well as structural societal contexts influence women's migration. Keywords:international migration; migrant children; migrant men; migrant women