Creative State: Forty Years of Migration and Development Policy in Morocco and Mexico

{Excerpt} This book tells the political story of how migrants from Morocco and Mexico changed the communities they left, and how their initiatives, small and bold, would ultimately transform the nations from which they had emigrated. Accounts of the ways migrants have changed their communities of origin for the better have become widespread; in their most celebratory versions, migrants\u27 philanthropic efforts at community development offer reassuring confirmation that small is indeed beautiful and that economic change can occur far outside the reach of the state. These laudatory portrayals omit a central protagonist. They minimize, when not completely obscuring, the role of governments in shaping the impact that migrants\u27 efforts to improve the lives of their families have on their communities and, more broadly, on their nation. However, the clinic in the mountain village in Morocco was not built nor was the road between the isolated Mexican town and the modern hospital paved without government support. In both cases, government policies mediated migrant investment in their communities of origin. In Morocco, government guidelines for medical equipment and the nursing staff the government provided turned the small concrete room into a working health center. In Mexico, municipal officials with maps of the potential roads in hand sought out migrants and asked them to raise funds for the project, with the promise that any road paved with migrant dollars would serve as a permanent symbol of their strong commitment to their communities, despite the border that kept them far from home. This book rehabilitates the place of the state in the narrative about the relationship between migration and development. It argues that the impact that migrants had on the welfare of their communities and countries of origin grew directly out of their involvement with the very governments that had—discreetly in the case of Mexico, enthusiastically in that of Morocco—encouraged their departure while actively neglecting the development of the areas they came from

Migration, development and the state in Morocco and Mexico, 1963-2005

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 421-448).Mexico and Morocco have some of the longest standing and most advanced policies linking the emigration of their low-skilled workers to their national and sub-national economic development. In my dissertation, I examine the processes through which the governments of both countries designed the migration and development policies now being emulated by sending countries around the world as models of "best practice." Based on multi-sited longitudinal case studies of the main migration and development policies deployed by both countries, I follow current policy instruments back through their earlier - including failed -- iterations as well as through the multiple geographic and national spaces in both migration sending and receiving areas where those policies were implemented. I argue that Moroccan and Mexican processes of migration and development policy elaboration suggest a need to re-consider the purchase of current models of policy formulation. Most representations of policy design depict a process best described as analytic. Policy makers analyze a problem, identify solutions, and then evaluate their effectiveness. However, the Moroccan and Mexican experiences with crafting migration and development policy, with all of their messy indeterminacy, illustrate a process that was essentially interpretive in character.(cont.) Policy makers were acting in social and economic contexts that were constantly shifting, that were incessantly being remolded by massive migration patters - and that were, as a result, unintelligible to policy makers and extremely resistant to straightforward analysis. Policy makers engaged migrant and migration communities in interpretative processes through which they generated new meanings, constructed new identities, and forged new relationships, in an effort to make sense of the mutable field in which they endeavored to act. Those insights and connections served as the basis for the new institutions that would come to be regarded as major policy breakthroughs. The institutions provided structures through which the state, migrants, and their communities could re-envision local and national development in an on-going manner and could generate new conceptual and institutional innovations. Stated differently, they built institutional spaces for continuous state learning and innovation.by Natasha N. Iskander.Ph.D

Protesting theories about immigrant workers : economic change and Sans-Papiers activism in France

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-141).A wave of protests by undocumented immigrants has swept through France over the past three years, and has pushed the issue of immigration and the changing role of migrant workers in the economy to the fore of the political stage. These protests have brought to light how shifts in the French industrial structure have impacted the way that undocumented immigrants navigate the labor market. In this paper, I use these protests as a window onto how the status of undocumented immigrants in the labor market has changed as French firms and state policy makers have adopted "flexibility" as their new mantra. However, I also draw on them to illustrate the role that undocumented immigrants, through conspicuous and politically poignant appeals for their rights, have played in shaping their labor market position. Finally, my theoretical project in describing this wave of activism is to suggest some of the places where immigration models and industrial relations theory have become brittle and outdated. The paper concludes with the implications that this study raises for policy design.by Natasha N. Iskander.M.C.P

Anthropogenic Disturbance Can Determine the Magnitude of Opportunistic Species Responses on Marine Urban Infrastructures

Background: Coastal landscapes are being transformed as a consequence of the increasing demand for infrastructures to sustain residential, commercial and tourist activities. Thus, intertidal and shallow marine habitats are largely being replaced by a variety of artificial substrata (e.g. breakwaters, seawalls, jetties). Understanding the ecological functioning of these artificial habitats is key to planning their design and management, in order to minimise their impacts and to improve their potential to contribute to marine biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Nonetheless, little effort has been made to assess the role of human disturbances in shaping the structure of assemblages on marine artificial infrastructures. We tested the hypothesis that some negative impacts associated with the expansion of opportunistic and invasive species on urban infrastructures can be related to the severe human disturbances that are typical of these environments, such as those from maintenance and renovation works. Methodology/Principal Findings: Maintenance caused a marked decrease in the cover of dominant space occupiers, such as mussels and oysters, and a significant enhancement of opportunistic and invasive forms, such as biofilm and macroalgae. These effects were particularly pronounced on sheltered substrata compared to exposed substrata. Experimental application of the disturbance in winter reduced the magnitude of the impacts compared to application in spring or summer. We use these results to identify possible management strategies to inform the improvement of the ecological value of artificial marine infrastructures. Conclusions/Significance: We demonstrate that some of the impacts of globally expanding marine urban infrastructures, such as those related to the spread of opportunistic, and invasive species could be mitigated through ecologically-driven planning and management of long-term maintenance of these structures. Impact mitigation is a possible outcome of policies that consider the ecological features of built infrastructures and the fundamental value of controlling biodiversity in marine urban systems

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

The centre cannot hold: arrival, margins, and the politics of ambivalence introduction to ‘arrival at the margins’, a special issue of migration studies

This special issue calls on scholars to simultaneously centre and unsettle the margin: to recognise the multiplicity of margins as politically generative spaces, frequently contoured by sustained and varied forms of mobility. Taken together, the studies collected in this volume are a call to view margins as vital socio-political spaces and objects of study. They are created, transformed, or maintained through interactions among the multiple ethnic, political, or religious groups within it but also through connections to allies, families, and interlocutors elsewhere that people in the margins draw in. Powerful states, corporations, and other play a role, but the contributors do not presume they are the most significant force at play. To be sure, margins can reflect liminality and suspension, but they are also sites of contentious politics. As space–time compression, multi-localism, economic precarity, and political fragmentation continue apace, margins are decreasingly discrete spaces between, but are instead spaces where lives are made. As sites that help structure engagements among groups—and sometimes within the groups themselves—appear and fade, margins take on varied levels of significance as contestations and convivialities take shape and transform. They are multiple, often intersecting, sometimes geographic and formally demarcated, sometimes largely invisible or unspoken but no less powerful. And they can be anywhere