Book ReviewsBook Reviews Editor: Dr John Stillwell

CROSSING BORDERS: REGIONAL AND URBANPERSPECTIVES ON INTERNATIONALMIGRATION edited by C. Gorter, P. Nijkamp and J.Poot. Ashgate, Aldershot, 1998.No. of pages: xi� 376. Price: £42.50 (hardback).ISBN 1 84014 882 9.

Recent years have seen the publication of severalimportant overviews of global international migra-tion (Kritz et al., 1992; Cohen, 1995; Hammar et al.,1997; Skeldon, 1997; Castles and Miller, 1998). Thisvolume, edited by Gorter, Nijkamp and Poot, is auseful addition to this growing collection, not leastbecause it adopts a spatial economic approachwhich is not given such explicit recognition in othertexts that are written from more general geogra-phical, historical and sociological perspectives.Although there are a number of classic economicanalyses of internal migration, the empirical analy-sis of international migration is something of ablack hole in economics. Lack of appropriate spatialand time-series data is the common explanation forthis, but there are deeper ideological and episte-mological reasons. Applied economists seem tohave little interest in the migration question per se.Transnational migration involves historical andbehavioural factors which economists have haddif®culty in coming to terms with, quite apart fromthe tricky ethical and policy dimensions of migra-tion promotion or control. Whilst the discipline ofeconomics has been keen to analyse international¯ows of capital and goods, it has been cautiousabout grappling with the complexities of humanmigration.These background remarks provide a welcoming

context for this book, the appearance of which bearswitness to the fact that economists now acknowl-edge the historical role of migration in shapingeconomies and societies around the world as well asthe current global attention given to internationalmigration. But the objectives of this book are moreprecise than presenting an economic analysis ofinternational migration. The speci®c aims of thebook are to explore the regional and urbandimensions of cross-border migration, addressingthe following key questions:

. What are the causes of the pronounced spatialselectivity in international migration patterns?

. If prosperous regions and urban areas areattracting a disproportionate share of immi-

grants, what types of immigrants settle in theseareas, and why?

. What is the impact of immigrants on the citieswhere they settle?

. Can meaningful national and regional policies beimplemented to exploit the potential bene®ts ofinternational migrants?

. How do immigrants affect the public sectornationally and regionally?

The book originates from a workshop held on thesubject at the Tinbergen Institute in Amsterdam in1995. The papers have been revised since then anddo not suffer from the problem of datednesscommon to many edited volumes arising fromconferences several years earlier. The contributionsrange from useful conceptual and theoretical over-views to case studies of individual countries such asthe Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom,Israel and New Zealand. Hence it is very much a`First World' perspective that is presented.Crossing Borders has 15 chapters grouped into four

sections. The ®rst and last sections are mainlytheoretical; the middle two present empiricalanalyses of various aspects of spatial clustering ofimmigrants in selected destination countries andurban regions. In Part A of the book, the chapters byPeter Fischer (`Migration, economic integration andeconomic growth') and by Thomas Bauer and KlausZimmermann (`Causes of international migration')offer useful insights into the economics andregional impact of international migration. Thesetwo chapters, more than the others in this section,survey a lot of the economic literature on migrationand introduce fresh perspectives on how to inter-pret the key debates.Part B contains three chapters grouped under the

general heading of `Spatial clusters: internationalpatterns and linkages'. These comprise ManieGeyer's attempt to extend his theory of differentialurbanisation to an international dimension (someinnovative thinking, but parts of the analysis arerather forced); Gabriel Lipschitz's survey of thespatial dimension of immigration (which ®rstrelates the historical development of the interna-tional ¯ow patterns to the globalisation of the worldeconomy, and then looks at spatial patterningwithin the receiving countries); and a more speci®cchapter on recent labour migration to the Nether-lands by Arend Ore and Bert van der Knaap, whichcontains an interesting case study of the use of

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POPULATION GEOGRAPHYInt. J. Popul. Geogr. 6, 245±256 (2000)

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Polish labour in Dutch horticulture.The four chapters which make up Part C, `Spatial

clusters: regional and urban patterns and assimila-tion', look at immigrant segregation and urbanpolicies in Amsterdam (Sako Musterd et al.), thelabour market experiences of ethnic minorities inBritain (Anne Green), the housing and employmentintegration of immigrants from the Soviet Union inIsrael (Lipschitz again), and the economic integra-tion of immigrants in Sweden, with special refer-ence to MalmoÈ (Pieter Bevelander). Musterd'sanalysis is enriched by comparisons with London,Brussels and Frankfurt; London and Brussels aremore ethnically segregated than Amsterdam andFrankfurt, and housing markets and policies are themain determinants of these contrasts. Green usescluster analysis to explore the complex geographyof settlement of different ethnic groups in differenteconomic regions of Britain. She then goes on todescribe some of the employment patterns of ethnicgroups in the context of industrial restructuring andwith particular reference to the London region,where 45% of the minority population in Britain isconcentrated. Bevelander likewise shows an evol-ving situation of labour market deteriorationamongst foreign workers in Sweden. Immigrantsarriving since 1970 have generally lower employ-ment rates than those who came in the 1950s and1960s, and the earlier arrivals' employment condi-tions have worsened since 1970 due to structuralchanges in the Swedish economy. In contrast to thepicture of disadvantage for ethnic groups is Swedenand Britain, Lipschitz describes a process ofsuccessful integration for the recent wave ofRussian Jews migrating to Israel. Here the govern-ment reversed the previous top-down policy ofimmigrant absorption and let the immigrants,many of whom were highly educated, be allocatedby market forces. This resulted in two-thirds of theimmigrants clustering in the core districts of TelAviv, Central Israel and Haifa, whereas previouslymigrants had been placed in peripheral towns.

Part D of the volume contains three shortchapters on `Migration models'. Brigitte Waldorfattempts an economic modelling of networks ofinternational migration, Leo vanWissen and HarrieVisser compare three models of international

migration ¯ows within the European EconomicArea, and Jouke van Dijk et al. compare earningsattainments of immigrants in the USA and theNetherlands (migrants achieve better results in thelatter).Geographers and other social scientists interested

in migration will ®nd much of interest in this book.They will also ®nd much to criticise and much thatis missing. The book's overt emphasis on regionaleconomics inevitably means that other perspec-tives, notably those which emphasise the human,experiential and ethical aspects of migration, areoverlooked. This is not really the fault of the book,which did not set out to encompass all approachesto the study of international migration.The more valid criticisms are perhaps the more

niggardly ones: the lack of attention to copy-editing,the lack of an index, the variable quality of theillustrations (see especially pp. 233±6), and the poorlayout and presentation. The geographical coverageis patchy, as noted earlier, and the book is writtenvery much from the perspective of those highlydeveloped economies which receive immigrants.Whilst the book is a useful addition to the literature,it cannot be compared to the more comprehensiveand reader-friendly accounts recently provided byCastles and Miller (1998) and Hammar et al. (1997).

RUSSEL KING

University of Sussex, UK

REFERENCES

Castles, S. and Miller, M. J. (1998) The Age ofMigration, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan)

Cohen, R. (ed.) (1995) The Cambridge Survey of WorldMigration (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress)

Hammar, T., Brochmann, G., Tamas, K. and Faist, T.(eds) (1997) International Migration, Immobility andDevelopment (Oxford: Berg)

Kritz, M. M., Lim, L. L. and Zlotnik, H. (eds) (1992)International Migration Systems: a Global Approach(Oxford: Clarendon Press)

Skeldon, R. A. (1997) Migration and Development(Harlow: Longman)

CREATING A NEW CONSENSUS ON POPULA-TION by Jyoti Shankar Singh. Earthscan, London,1998. No of pages: xvi� 215. Price: £14.95 (paper-back). ISBN 185383 565 X.

Conferences come and conferences go, precipitatingpapers in profusion. None more than the huge 1994International Conference on Population and Devel-opment (ICPD) held in Cairo, a two-week jamboree

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Popul. Geogr. 6, 245±256 (2000)

246 Book Reviews