This excellent volume is a timely companion to recently published collections, such as Global Migration Governance (ed. Alexander Betts, 2011) and Refugees in International Relations (ed. Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher, 2011), that position migration as a key concern of the discipline of international relations and its various subfields. Migration in the Global Political Economy brings together an impressive list of scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of the political economy of contemporary global migration. The volume is impressive as a well-conceived and integrated project, as a self-consciously interdisciplinary approach to the intersection of migration and political economy, and as a critical engagement with the analytics of migration and development. Approachable in style and rich in empirical detail, the book will be an excellent teaching resource for the growing number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses that address migration as a key dimension of globalization, labor relations, development, and global social movements. It is also an excellent introduction to these issues not only for researchers seeking inroads into global migration trends as they relate to questions of political economy, but also for those interested in problematizing key frameworks used for analysis from a critical perspective.

The volume is divided logically into three sections. The first, “Migration and Global Capitalism,” provides conceptual and analytical frameworks that position contemporary migration within the context of late-twentieth- and twenty-first century political and economic transformations. The lead chapter, by Carl-Ulrich Schierup and Stephen Castles, charts the transition from welfare to neoliberal states in Europe and the United States. The authors argue that the decline of the welfare state has been a racialized process through which migrants are increasingly exposed to substandard working conditions in deregulated sections of the labor market. The effects of this process have been masked, the authors claim, by a discourse of “social exclusion” that paints social dysfunction as an “ethnic” matter, rather than an economic one. The second chapter (arguably a more appropriate lead chapter) is more global in orientation, assessing the regulation of labor through migration. Here, Harald Bauder connects with recent analysis by Aihwa Ong and Saskia Sassen, among others, to provide an overview of the polarized transnational labor markets that characterize post-Fordist development and the global hierarchies that ensue. Nicola Piper's chapter makes a compelling case for a gendered analysis of the political economy of migration by investigating the feminization of global commodity chains and global care chains and demonstrating the centrality of both productive and reproductive economies to contemporary migration patterns. Finally, H. Richard Friman outlines the elements of an illegal migration industry as an “outgrowth of the ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship of states and markets … and a post-Fordist intersection of the licit and illicit global economies” (p. 84).

The second section, “The Migration-Development Nexus,” is perhaps the most integrated and interesting, combining comprehensive geographical and empirical coverage of migration within and from the global South with a critical take on the theory and practice of development through which much of that migration is typically understood. Excellent chapters by Oliver Bakewell and Nicola Phillips focus on migration and development in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, respectively. Both provide useful accounts of the significance of colonial relations on contemporary migration and problematize the development models employed to analyze and govern migration in these contexts on account of both their “sedentary bias” (p. 122) and their frequent conflation of national and human development measures. The section is fronted by a helpful introductory chapter by Ronald Skeldon that outlines the key issues in the migration and development debates, and Ken Young's chapter illustrates why intra-Asian migration has much to reveal about contemporary global trends in a huge variety of migrations from skilled to illegal to student, refugee, and business modes.

It is refreshing to see that the volume as a whole and chapter authors, for the most part, have addressed migration in all of its forms, without falling into the more common approach of designating certain types of migration (political or economic, formal or informal, high skilled or low skilled and so on) as the focus of study. The more integrated approach is indicative of the critical style of engagement that flows through the volume, taking into account the ways in which categories of migration (and key concepts in development) are themselves implicated in profound questions of data collection, governance, distribution, and livelihood.

The third section, “The Governance of Migration,” has an interesting contribution from Andrew Geddes that takes up a complex and multidimensional notion of “borders” in order to analyze the governance of migration in the context of the European Union. Susan Martin outlines the recent history of immigration reform (or lack thereof) in the United States, and positions the policy stalemate over undocumented migration in terms of the broader global political economy and the tension between market drives and political imperatives. The same tensions are evident in Jock Collins's analysis of immigration policy in the Australian context, which serves as an example of the contradictions evident in broader processes of globalization. This section lacks a more general introductory chapter on the global governance of migration, though some of the ideological patterns emerging at the global level are addressed in the book's first section. Given the growth of forums, commissions, consultations, and collaborations on border control and transnational labor regulation at regional and global scales, a dedicated chapter on the political-economic dimensions of these developments would have been a worthy addition, as would some engagement with the growing calls, from neoliberal as much as from humanitarian perspectives, for more open borders and global regulation toward that end. Likewise, the book's first section might have benefited from a more general historical chapter that provided some context for the more recent rise of migration as a security, governance, and economic flashpoint.

The volume largely achieves its goal of taking a middle ground between structure and agency in terms of its approach. From the editor's perspective, migration studies too often emphasize an agent-centred approach to the choices, networks, and circumstances that drive migration paths, at the expense of deep analysis of the structural stakes in play. Global political economy, by contrast, Phillips contends, often misses the nuances that come from close engagement with real people's journeys and the diversity of factors behind them. The volume succeeds at an analytical level in reflecting on the significance of structural trends alongside more community and/or individually oriented influences on migration that defy generalization. In general, this collection avoids “uniform and reductive assumptions about the forces that drive migration” (p. 165) and sheds considerable light on the complexity, diversity, and mixed results that characterize migration in the context of a global political economy. The occasional inclusion of narrative accounts of migrant journeys might have enlivened what can sometimes be a slightly dry analysis. However, this is a minor criticism in style, rather than substance, since the absence of characters does not equate to an absence of people per se. For anyone engaged in the study of migration (in any of its forms) and the shape of the global political economy today, this volume is a worthy companion.