Abstract
It's better to be frank right from the start. Therefore, I have to admit that I am guilty on at least three counts. First, I have known the author personally for quite some time and he has been an important source of inspiration for me over the years. Ivan Light even thanks me in the Acknowledgments of the book under review. Second, I will quote some people who are close to me. Third, I derive part of my arguments from the case that I know best, that of the Netherlands. This review, hence, stands a good chance to suffer from a combination of nepotism and myopic parochialism. I tend to think, nevertheless, that I am able to transcend these limitations. I begin with a conceptual critique, followed by a brief attempt to determine to what extent the case of Los Angeles can indeed be generalized to other countries by discussing its relevance for the Dutch situation. I will conclude with some more general observations.
Ivan Light's chain of reasoning is clear. Migration flows may start because of an apparent demand for labor in the region of settlement, but once underway the process can become self–sustaining as networks start to generate migration flows by themselves by creating a desire to migrate among friends and relatives in the regions of origin and by lowering the transaction (search) costs of the migration. Migration flows, in other words, transform from being demand–driven into supply–driven. This does not mean that the demand for labor has become totally irrelevant for immigrants. On the contrary, if the demand in the mainstream economy becomes saturated, newcomers may still come but now they have to seek other ways to find a living. According to Light, these migrants have to try their luck in the ethnic economy. The ethnic economy thus serves as a kind buffer by absorbing the migrants who cannot find work in the mainstream economy. The ethnic economy itself consists of the ethnic ownership economy and the informal economy. The labor conditions in especially the latter part are not just substandard but in many respects unlawful. The potential size of the informal economy is virtually limitless and tolerating the flouting of rules and regulations enables it to expand and lower the labor conditions even further. Only when a city council stops turning a blind eye to these developments and starts to enforce its own (and the national) rules and regulations is the expansion of the informal sector stopped. The enforcement does not only apply to the labor conditions but also, notably, to housing conditions that deteriorate too as migrants keep coming. Enforcing does not just mean a return to law, but also implies a rise of the threshold(s) to live in that city and newcomers lacking in financial and human capital are thus deflected to other places. Given the fact that national states are either unwilling or unable (or both) to thwart large–scale immigration from less–developed countries, cities that want to prevent the emergence of shantytowns and miserable labor conditions caused by supply–driven migration have to devise their own immigration policy by reverting to stricter enforcement.
This seems to me, overall, a convincing line of argumentation. The argument crucially hinges on the high barriers between the mainstream and the ethnic economy. I am, though, not completely sure if these barriers are indeed that high. The informal economy, for instance, is not the exclusive domain of immigrants (acknowledged by the author elsewhere in the book) as many nonimmigrants participate as well. The incidence of stricter enforcement might, however, fall disproportionately hard on immigrants and that might have adverse consequences. Related to that, I also have doubts about the juxtaposition of the mainstream and the ethnic economy, in particular, the informal economy. A significant chunk of the informal economy is intimately related to, and intertwined with, the mainstream economy. The large agricultural sector in southern California employs many informal workers, mostly on a seasonal base, but is very much part of the mainstream export base of the state. The size of that part of the informal economy is linked to the developments in the mainstream, and it seems to me that there are endogenous limits to the potential expansion of at least this part of the informal economy. Its role as a buffer might therefore be, on the one hand, more constrained economically and, on the other, more exchange (in the case of legal workers) may take place between the mainstream and the informal sector than Ivan Light proposes. Another related conceptual issue is the apparent view of the mainstream as a constant. There are, of course, short–term limits to the labor absorption capacity of the mainstream fixed entity, but one should not fall into the trap of some kind of lump–of–labor fallacy and underestimate the long–term capacity to respond to an increase of the labor supply.
These observations do not, however, amount to anything like a refutation of the supply–driven migration process described by Ivan Light. He is also right that the case of Los Angeles “by inference” might serve as a case for other places as well. The high unemployment rates that Joanne van der Leun and I have found among undocumented workers in the Netherlands also seem to point in the direction of supply–driven migration (Van der Leun and Kloosterman, 2006). There is one line of argument that is quite important in the continental European context that seems to be lacking in Deflecting Immigration, namely the fact that welfare arrangements (high minimum wage and social benefits), on the one hand, attract low–skilled migrants by offering an apparently decent level of living. These very arrangements, on the other hand, help to block entry into the mainstream market and thereby, indirectly, encourage informal labor practices in mainstream–related activities such as restaurants and catering, horticulture, housecleaning, and child and elderly care. The dilemma depicted by Ivan Light between tolerating these practices (and their sometimes dire consequences for housing, health care, and education) and upholding the law (and depriving employers—small and large—of their workers and these workers of their jobs) only emerges in an even more outspoken way (Engelen, 2003; Van der Leun, 2003). The deflection from cities that actively enforce to others that do not, has not been documented (yet) for the Netherlands.
Overall, therefore, I agree with Ivan Light's analysis and he has opened my eyes—once more, I should say—by his original and compactly formulated argument. He has made an important contribution to the formulation of a more general migration theory that goes beyond mere economism. He also distances himself in a more epistemological sense from at least orthodox economics by not simply assuming that the tendencies toward equilibriums are dominant, but instead takes a cumulative causation process with strong positive feedback effects as his main analytical instrument to understand what is happening in social reality. Ivan Light makes his point not just by reviewing the existing literature and then adding his own view, but corroborates his view with extensive empirical research. After reading this book, I have to reconsider my position on immigrant policies in the Netherlands, where tolerance and turning a blind eye (“gedogen”) was seen as a wise way to deal with minor breaches of the law.