A report on gender discrimination in South Africa's 2002 Immigration Act: masculinizing the migrant

Changes in immigration policy and legislation have the power to shape and alter the gendering of migration in significant ways, and can have a dramatic effect on the lives and relationships of the men, women and families involved. In this paper, we examine the provisions of the new Immigration Act introduced in South Africa in 2002. The Act, which replaces the outdated Aliens Control Act of 1991, gives considerable cause for concern on gender grounds. Foremost, the Act entrenches a system of male-dominated regional labour migration that has its origins in the 19th-century discovery of gold and diamonds. The male bias in the work permit and other employment-based categories along with the limits to family reunification for those entering for work are likely in effect to discriminate against women to a greater extent than men. While similar gender concerns are common to most immigration policy regimes around the world, the particular circumstances of the South African case, where both skilled and unskilled migration streams are heavily male-dominated, makes them especially acute here. This paper contextualizes migration regimes in South Africa and examines in detail the likely implications of the new Immigration Act.     

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, ... But Make Sure They Have a Green Card: The Effects of Documented and Undocumented Migrant Context on Anglo Opinion Toward Immigration

Although few controversies in our political environment are as contentious as the current debate over immigration policy, the research on public opinion toward immigration is quite limited. In particular, we know relatively little about the contextual determinants of opinions on immigration issues. We address this issue by investigating the impact of migrant context on Anglo opinions toward immigration. We find that Anglo support for increased immigration is directly related to the size of the documented migrant population. Conversely, as the relative size of the undocumented migrant population increases, Anglo support for increased immigration decreases. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of our findings for the study of immigration opinion, in particular, and the study of intergroup relations more generally.     

Local Context and Democratization in Mexico

While democratization is often seen as a national-level process, we argue that there is important scope for local effects. Through analysis of Mexican public opinion data collected on the eve of that country's historic 2000 elections, we demonstrate that local context greatly affects evaluations of the legitimacy of the system, and these evaluations, in turn, help to shape the willingness of citizens to engage with the system. Citizens are more willing to participate in politics if they think the process is fair, and direct evidence of the fairness of the system is provided by the local political context. This local connection, then, becomes critical in the process of individuals becoming, in Almond and Verba's classic term, "participatory" citizens (1963).