Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World

What pulls people away from home to begin again somewhere far away? And what happens—to the migrants, to those they leave behind, and to the societies that receive them—when global movement transforms the old idea of home into something multiple and fluid? In Migration, Incorporation, and Change in an Interconnected World, sociologists Syed Ali and Douglas Hartmann explore these questions through a sweeping yet accessible sociological lens. They explain how migration is reshaping not only individual lives but also economies, politics, and cultural identities across the planet.

Ali and Hartmann don’t treat migration simply as a matter of border crossings. They argue that to understand why people migrate and how they are incorporated, we must look at the contexts that shape and constrain choices: economic forces, political and legal systems, cultural expectations, and globalization itself. Drawing on centuries of movement—yet speaking directly to the post–Cold War world of cheap air fares, remittances, and globalized labor markets—they show that migration has become one of the most important engines of social change in the twenty-first century.

Four Foundational Questions of Migration

The book is organized around four deceptively simple questions: Why do people leave home? Where do they go and how do they get there? What do they do once they arrive? And what happens to their children? Every chapter interrogates one of these questions, linking vivid real-world stories—of Filipino nannies, Indian IT specialists, Emirati contract workers, Muslim teens in Paris—to long-standing sociological theories of migration and assimilation. Together, they form an integrated framework for understanding global movement not as a random flow of people but as a patterned, structured system of labor, policy, and human aspiration.

Context Matters

Few sociologists make the point as clearly as Ali and Hartmann: migration cannot be understood in isolation from context. They identify four key types of context:

• Economic context — Nations require workers; workers require wages. The global imbalance of labor demand and supply initiates much of human mobility.
• Cultural context — Class, gender, and race define who migrates, what kinds of jobs they get, and how they are received in destination societies.
• Legal and political context — Immigration laws, border enforcement, and citizenship regimes draw the line between inclusion and exclusion.
• Global context — Globalization has accelerated the interdependence between sending and receiving communities, creating transnational spaces and hybrid identities.

Ali and Hartmann insist that these contexts do not just create opportunities; they also create constraints. For example, the same border wall that keeps many Mexican workers out of the United States also encourages others to stay longer and settle permanently. Similarly, restrictive visa laws in Dubai make transnationalism a necessity rather than a choice. In this sense, migration is as much a story of states and structures as it is of individuals with courage and ambition.

Migration as Transformation—For All

While many studies focus on migrants themselves, Ali and Hartmann stress that migration transforms everyone: the movers, the stayers, and the societies into which newcomers arrive. Migration doesn’t just fill job vacancies—it changes economies, reconfigures cultures, and transforms the meaning of citizenship. The authors trace how remittances shape entire villages in South Asia, how government policies define who belongs, and how cultural anxieties about race and religion (especially around Muslim communities) shape national identities in Europe and the United States.

Migration, Ali and Hartmann argue, “changes things for everyone: for the societies people leave, for those they enter, and for the people already living there.”

Throughout the book, migration serves as a mirror for globalization itself: showing not only the mobility of labor but also the circulation of ideas, identities, and inequalities. Global cities like Dubai, London, or New York become laboratories for understanding how inequality, privilege, and cosmopolitanism coexist within the same streets.

An Engaging, Sociological Approach

Ali and Hartmann combine rigorous sociological theory with storytelling—what they call “making the complex clear.” They distill classic ideas like the “push-pull” model, network theory, and different assimilation paradigms (from Milton Gordon’s linear model to Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou’s segmented assimilation) and make them accessible through living examples. A story about an Indian engineer pressured by his family to migrate sits alongside reflections on peer influence, gender roles, and cultural adaptation. They show how macro structures and micro decisions intertwine in the messy reality of human movement.

The book is divided into six thematic chapters: why migrants leave (economic and cultural motives), the global labor market (“cheap meat”), the rise of professional expatriates, the assimilation of second-generation children, the challenges facing Muslim minorities in the West, and finally, the broad societal impacts of migration. Each chapter builds toward the final argument that migration is not a marginal phenomenon—it is the foundation of the modern global world.

Why These Ideas Matter

In our era of border walls, refugee crises, and culture wars, understanding the sociology of migration has never been more urgent. Ali and Hartmann’s work offers more than facts and figures; it gives us tools to think critically about belonging, inequality, and humanity in a world of constant motion. Whether you’re a policymaker, student, or simply someone trying to make sense of the global headlines, this book reminds you that migrants are not the exception—they are the norm of human history. And in learning how migration shapes both individuals and nations, you might also discover what it means to live meaningfully in an interconnected world.

Ali and Hartmann begin with one of migration’s oldest questions: why do people leave home? They trace how economics, networks, culture, and politics push and pull people across borders. This section challenges you to reconsider migration as more than a choice for survival—it’s also a learned desire, something people are taught to want through family expectations, social pressures, and cultural aspirations.

Economic Drives and the Push–Pull Model

The first explanation is familiar: people migrate because of economics. Classic “push–pull” models describe how poverty and unemployment push workers out of poorer countries, while higher wages and better jobs pull them toward richer ones. Yet, as Ali notes, if money were the only factor, far more people from the poorest nations would migrate. In reality, those who migrate are not necessarily the most destitute but those with enough education, resources, and connections to act on opportunity. For instance, Hyderabad middle-class professionals dream of Saudi or Canadian jobs not because they are starving—but because migration raises family honor and mobility expectations.

Networks Matter

Economic logic alone cannot explain why Indians end up in the U.K. or Mexicans in the United States. Migration follows personal networks. Where one person goes, others follow. Once pathways open, each successful mover lowers the cost and risk for the next. Scholars call this “chain migration” or “cumulative causation.” For example, Kerala’s massive presence in Gulf labor markets emerged through kin connections: uncles called nephews; neighbors shared recruiters’ names. Maritsa Poros expands this idea to include both strong ties (family, friends) and weak ties (employers, bureaucrats, or diaspora institutions) that spread access and information.

(Sociologist Mark Granovetter’s famous “strength of weak ties” theory is echoed here: sometimes distant acquaintances provide more opportunity than close kin.)

Culture of Migration

Beyond economics and networks lies something subtler: a culture of migration. In many communities, migration becomes the measure of personal worth. In Hyderabad, Ali’s research found young men sipping tea and waiting for visa agents, sporting U.S., U.K., or Dubai sticker flags on their motorcycles. Staying home, as one local engineer named Salman discovered, could make you seem like a failure—even when leaving meant emotional loss. In such societies, migration is not only a rational decision but also a moral one—proof of ambition, masculinity, or filial duty.

Remittances and Social Status

Remittances—money and goods sent back from abroad—keep these cultures alive. Families use overseas earnings to build new houses, fund weddings, or gain prestige. Tajikistan receives half of its GDP from remittances. India and China lead globally, sending tens of billions home yearly. Beyond money, migrants send social remittances: new ideas about politics, gender, or entrepreneurship. In Dominican and Mexican villages, overseas migrants have financed schools and roads but also transmitted modern lifestyles and consumer tastes. Sometimes remittances bring freedom; at other times, they deepen inequality and fuel competition.

Transnationalism and Government Control

Ali and Hartmann then turn to transnationalism—the practice of maintaining lives across borders. Cheap travel, instant payments, and digital communication make it easy for migrants to belong to two worlds at once. Yet, as Ali shows through the case of migrants in Dubai, this mobility is often not a privilege but a necessity. Because foreign workers there can never gain citizenship, they live permanently on temporary visas—compelled to remain transnational. Governments, too, are central players: they issue passports, regulate labor visas, and sometimes build walls that transform circular migration into permanent settlement (as with Mexicans in the U.S. after the 1990s).

Middlemen and Migration Brokers

Finally, the authors spotlight an often-overlooked figure: the migration broker. These middlemen—legal or underground—turn potential journeys into reality. From Indian recruiters in the IT industry to Chinese “snakeheads” like the infamous Sister Ping, who smuggled hundreds to New York’s Chinatown, brokers form the hidden infrastructure of global movement. Some exploit migrants; others make impossible dreams achievable. For many, paying a smuggler or agent is not an act of criminality—it’s a pathway amid tightening borders.

By linking personal ambition with structural constraint, Ali and Hartmann transform the question “why people leave” into a multidimensional story: migration is at once economic necessity, social expectation, cultural aspiration, and political negotiation. It begins with the hope for a better life—but quickly becomes a lesson in how global systems shape even the smallest decisions of leaving home.

What happens after people leave? For millions, global migration means joining what Ali calls the market for “cheap meat”—the world’s vast army of nannies, maids, drivers, construction workers, and factory laborers. This chapter exposes the paradox of globalization: while goods and capital move freely, the people who make those goods move under severe constraint.

Economic Push and Pull

Workers like Filipino pool cleaner Emmet Comodas exemplify the global labor economy. His move to Saudi Arabia turned him from a struggling father into the family’s provider through remittances that paid for home repairs and education. For sending countries such as the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh, these remittances are economic lifelines. For receiving nations from the Gulf to the United States, migrant labor fills undesired jobs in agriculture, construction, and domestic work. But the price of opportunity is precarity—contracts tied to employers, no legal protections, and constant threats of deportation.

The Cost of Recruitment

The workers’ journeys begin with debt. In Dubai’s Saadiyat Island projects—future home to branches of the Louvre and New York University—migrants paid brokers illegal recruitment fees as high as $4,000, locking them in debt bondage. Human Rights Watch documented how their wages were slashed upon arrival and passports confiscated. Similar networks exist in Taiwan, where agencies coordinate legal placements but charge exorbitant fees. Brokers profit from both state policy and individual desperation.

Gendered Labor and the Hidden Household Economy

Women’s migration complicates the old image of male breadwinners. As western women entered paid work, they outsourced care to migrants from poorer nations—a phenomenon Barbara Ehrenreich calls the global care chain. In Taiwan and the Gulf, female domestics face “visible” and “invisible” work systems: live-out maids negotiate terms and freedom, while live-ins—especially in private homes—suffer isolation, wage theft, and abuse. Some nations even restrict domestic workers from marrying citizens, ensuring their labor remains temporary.

Remittances and Empowerment—or Exploitation?

Paradoxically, governments encourage these migrant programs. The Philippines brands itself a supplier of “global heroes” and creates banking laws to ease remittances that substitute for social welfare. Studies show women remit more reliably than men, often funding family education and medical care, though their control over how money is spent is limited. Migration reshapes gender roles but can reinforce patriarchal obligations: the good daughter or wife is the one who sends.

Marriage, Sex Work, and Human Trafficking

Ali and Hartmann boldly confront sensitive issues like marriage migration and sex work. The lines blur between consent, coercion, and economic need. Some Vietnamese women strategically marry Western men as a route out of poverty; others find empowerment through the earnings of sex work while facing stigma. Hollywood images of trafficking, like the film Taken, obscure these complexities by portraying women solely as victims. Field studies reveal that many are aware of their work or later reframe it as opportunity. Meanwhile, “anti-trafficking” campaigns often serve neo-colonial and moral agendas, policing sexuality more than protecting labor rights.

Disposable Bodies and Global Inequality

Ultimately, the “cheap meat” metaphor underscores global capitalism’s inhuman efficiency. Whether building stadiums for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup or caring for children in Singapore, workers are treated as replaceable labor units—sometimes literally as organs for sale, as Anne Gallagher’s essay on organ trafficking reminds us. Yet these migrants’ sacrifices sustain both home economies and the comfort of the cosmopolitan elite. For the global poor, migration becomes the only development program that works, because it does not rely on states—it relies on bodies willing to move.

Not all migrants are exploited laborers. Many are part of what Ali and Hartmann call the globally mobile professional class—corporate managers, NGO workers, engineers, and teachers who traverse borders with ease. Yet even their privilege reveals inequalities hidden in globalization: who gets to be called an “expatriate” versus a “migrant” often depends on race, class, and passport color.

Western Expatriates Abroad

Western professionals moving to Asia—say, British bankers in Singapore or American consultants in Dubai—find lucrative jobs and luxury lifestyles. Their contracts include free housing, school tuition, and domestic servants. But this gilded cage also isolates them. Many socialize only with fellow expats, forming nationality-based clubs that reproduce privilege abroad. In Shanghai’s bars, Ali observes cultural segregation: Western men treat clubs as “sexual paradises,” enjoying casual relationships with local women while Western women feel sidelined. Beneath cosmopolitan niceties lie uneven power dynamics of race and gender.

Non-Western Expatriates in the Gulf

In contrast, Indian and Arab professionals in Dubai or Bahrain, though highly skilled, occupy a middle tier—essential to the economy yet denied permanence. Ali contrasts two Bombay brothers who migrated to Dubai in the 1970s: Ahmed later moved to the U.S. and lived a modest suburban life; Asghar stayed in Dubai, became a millionaire, and mingled with Bollywood elites. Still, both remain migrants without citizenship. Many secure multiple passports or “flexible citizenship” to hedge against legal precarity, proving how status in the Gulf depends more on nationality than on talent.

Asian Professionals Moving Within Asia

Globalization has also encouraged South–South mobility. Singaporean and Taiwanese professionals relocating to China describe their journeys as both economic ventures and “returns to roots.” Yet disillusionment follows: they discover cultural friction and hierarchy. Despite shared ethnicity with Chinese locals, they maintain distance, living in gated expatriate communities. As Yeoh and Willis’s studies show, these migrants enjoy high status but little integration—mirroring Westerners abroad, just without racial privilege.

Indian IT Workers and Temporary Citizenship

For Indians heading West on temporary IT visas, privilege mixes with vulnerability. Xiang Biao’s concept of “body shopping” illustrates how Indian labor is commodified through transnational placement agencies that lease workers to tech firms. Programmers on short-term H1-B visas in the U.S. earn well compared to India but face job insecurity and visa dependence. Ali’s cousin’s story—cycling between Hyderabad, Saudi Arabia, and the U.K.—shows how temporary migration becomes permanent limbo.

The Cosmopolitan Nomads

At the top of the spectrum are serial migrants—professionals who move between three or more countries and identify with no single nation. They claim cosmopolitanism as freedom from tradition, race, or patriotism. Yet Ali notes the paradox: even the freest movers rely on borders that privilege their passports. For the majority of humanity, such global fluidity is unreachable. Still, these cosmopolitan elites illustrate the cultural side of globalization: belonging not to one place but to multiple worlds at once.

Through these stories, Ali and Hartmann suggest that migration’s hierarchy mirrors global inequality. Westerners travel; others migrate. Professionals experience mobility as adventure; laborers experience it as necessity. And while the global elite cross borders effortlessly, millions remain stuck cleaning the floors beneath their skyscrapers.

What happens after migrants’ children grow up? Do they become part of their new societies—or remain perpetual outsiders? In exploring the assimilation of second-generation immigrants, Ali and Hartmann revisit classic sociology while adding fresh insight: assimilation is not inevitable, and it varies not only between groups but within families and peer circles.

Theories of Assimilation

Milton Gordon’s 1960s model imagined a straight line toward “becoming American”: immigrants would adopt mainstream culture, intermarry, and eventually lose distinct ethnicity. Later, Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou introduced segmented assimilation, arguing that some groups rise while others fall into urban poverty, depending on parental resources, racial discrimination, and community context. Then Richard Alba and Victor Nee’s new assimilation theory reframed the mainstream itself as changing—more plural and open than in the past. Yet all three approaches share a focus on structure: parents, class, and policy.

Peers and Personal Networks

Ali’s breakthrough contribution is introducing peer influence as a missing variable. Why do siblings in the same family follow divergent paths—one joining a gang, another becoming a lawyer? Peers, he argues, shape assimilation more than parents do. In case studies from South Asian, Caribbean, and Turkish youth, friendships determine cultural behavior and academic achievement. For instance, Punjabi students in California pressured each other to succeed, while others shunned “acting white.” Across Europe, surveys show Turkish second-generation youth with more native friends are more acculturated and economically mobile. Friends are microcosms of opportunity.

Assimilation Beyond the West

Ali extends the conversation beyond American cities to the non-Western world. In the Gulf, where foreign-born families are never granted citizenship, even third-generation migrants remain outsiders. In contrast, groups like Yemeni descendants in Hyderabad have assimilated over generations, blending language and lifestyle. These global comparisons challenge the idea that assimilation is uniquely Western—it’s a universal process shaped by local power and law.

Symbolic Ethnicity and Identity Choices

By the third generation, many descendents—especially of European stock—display what Herbert Gans called “symbolic ethnicity”: being Irish on St. Patrick’s Day but otherwise mainstream. Yet, for minorities like Mexican Americans or Muslims, persistent racism keeps ethnicity consequential. Identity choices depend on social costs and peer environments: ethnicity becomes optional only when it no longer determines opportunity.

Through this lens, Ali and Hartmann redefine assimilation not as loss of culture but as negotiation shaped by peers, policies, and prejudice. Belonging, they remind us, is never automatic—it’s forged in daily interactions, one friendship at a time.

Muslims, Ali and Hartmann note, are “the most maligned migrants in the West.” Post-9/11 politics and media have cast them as threats rather than citizens. By comparing the United States and Western Europe, the authors show how history, class, and policy—not religion—shape Muslim incorporation.

Fear, Media, and the “Culture of Fear”

Terrorism dominates public imagination, yet statistics prove its rarity. Between 1990 and 2011, more Europeans died from right-wing violence than from Islamist attacks. In the U.S., toddlers with guns killed more people than terrorists. Still, media and politicians amplify fear because it sells. Drawing from Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear, the authors call this an economy of panic: when fear becomes a business, Muslims become targets.

Migration Patterns and Class Contrast

In Europe, Muslims arrived as working-class laborers from North Africa, Turkey, and South Asia after World War II. In America, most came after 1965 as educated professionals. This difference matters: U.S. Muslims are relatively prosperous, while European Muslims face chronic unemployment and discrimination. Yet across both regions, Muslims remain seen as permanent outsiders, reminding us how religion intersects with race.

Integration and Everyday Life

Ali and Hartmann dismantle stereotypes of Muslim isolation. In France, surveys show 60% of Algerian-origin citizens have many French friends, and most young Muslims support secular education. In the U.S., about half of Muslims’ friends are non-Muslim, and the majority reject extremism. Marriage, however, reveals cultural boundaries: Turkish and Moroccan Europeans still largely marry co-ethnics, while intermarriage is higher for Algerians and Americans. Education and local networks predict openness—where contact expands, prejudice shrinks.

Faith, Choice, and Cultural Expression

Religiosity among Western Muslims varies widely. In France, only 5% attend mosque weekly; in the U.S., half do. Some young Muslims express their dual identities creatively, such as the “Mipsterz” (Muslim hipsters) who reinterpret fashion and faith. The hijab, once rare, has become both religious symbol and pop-culture statement—an American-born fusion rather than a foreign imposition. Ali’s interviews show many women choose it against parental or societal expectations, reframing modesty as empowerment.

Islamophobia and Civic Belonging

From mosque controversies in Staten Island to France’s veil bans, Islam has become a public test of national identity. Yet, when Muslim community leaders engaged directly with neighbors—visiting homes and explaining their practices—they defused fear and built solidarity. Still, widespread surveillance and profiling remind Muslims that legality does not equal acceptance. Ali and Hartmann close the chapter urging readers to see Muslims not as anomalies but as integral citizens whose struggles parallel earlier waves of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants once deemed unassimilable.

Migration doesn’t end at arrival—it reshapes entire societies. Ali and Hartmann’s penultimate chapter asks: what are the lasting effects of migration on economies, demographics, and culture?

Economic Impacts

Migrants typically gain economically: a fifteenfold income boost on average when moving from poor to rich countries. Their remittances sustain home economies, sometimes forming 10% of GDP. Contrary to popular fears, studies show that migration also benefits receiving nations by filling essential jobs and stimulating consumption. Yet the benefits are not evenly shared. Employers and consumers gain cheap labor, while local working-class citizens face wage competition. The politics of immigration, they argue, often reflect this imbalance—voters want cheap goods but tight borders, a contradiction at the heart of global capitalism.

Demographics and Racial Reconfiguration

In societies like the United States, migration drives population growth and alters racial hierarchies. By 2050, nonwhites will be the majority. Sociologist Richard Alba envisions a hopeful future of “blurring boundaries,” as intermarriage and educational mobility erode color lines. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, however, foresees a hardened tri-racial system—whites, honorary whites, and the collective black—sustaining hidden inequality under colorblind rhetoric. Migration thus becomes a mirror for how societies define race and belonging.

Culture, Ethnicity, and Multiculturalism

Migration is also culture in motion. Like Irish Catholics changing the Protestant face of early America, today’s migrants diversify food, music, and values worldwide. The authors trace how multiculturalism—once a radical idea—became mainstream civic ideology (“We are all multiculturalists now,” writes Nathan Glazer). Yet backlash persists: from right-wing populism in Europe to cultural nationalism in the U.S. post-9/11. Still, immigrant enclaves like the Hmong community in St. Paul show that bicultural lives can enrich societies, producing hybrid traditions instead of cultural loss.

Backlash and New Solidarities

Multiculturalism’s crisis, argue scholars Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley, lies in how “diversity talk” masks inequality. Celebrating difference often substitutes for ensuring justice. Ali and Hartmann, following Douglas Hartmann’s collaboration with Joseph Gerteis, outline three responses to diversity: cosmopolitanism (individual equality under law), segmented pluralism (separate-but-equal communities), and interactive multiculturalism (dialogue across difference). Which path societies choose will define the moral future of globalization.

Migration’s ripple effects remind us that the story isn’t about movers alone—it’s about how receptors, institutions, and cultures evolve. Every border crossed redrafts the social contract.

Ali and Hartmann close with cautious optimism: migration will remain small in percentage—about 3% of humanity—but massive in impact. They identify the forces most likely to determine its future: the global economy, networks and brokers, politics and law, migrants’ own agency, and enduring divides of race, class, and gender.

Economic Flows

Economic growth shifts the sender-receiver map. Nations once exporting workers—like Ireland or South Korea—become magnets for immigrants. Rising economies such as China, India, and Brazil may follow. Meanwhile, declining middle classes in the U.S. may look northward. Economic crises, they warn, trigger backlashes that can close borders as effectively as walls.

Networks, Brokers, and Policy

As long as migrants trust someone abroad, new routes will form. Global brokers already redirect flows to unexpected places—Malaysia or Kazakhstan today could be tomorrow’s Dubai. States, however, remain gatekeepers. The authors recount how policies from the 1924 restriction act to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reshaped global movement. Modern debates—like U.S. visa reforms and European border controls—continue to oscillate between economic need and nationalist fear.

Agency, Identity, and Inequality

Ultimately, migration’s direction depends on migrants themselves: their choices of where to live, who to marry, and what to claim as identity. Hispanic population growth in the U.S. now stems more from births than from migration, showing agency through family formation. Interracial marriages are rising, identities shifting. Yet these acts of personal freedom still occur within systems shaped by race, class, and gender. Wealthy professionals move as “expats”; poor laborers as “illegals.” Women often face both gendered expectation and economic exploitation. These inequalities are not aberrations—they are the structure of global movement itself.

Ali and Hartmann leave readers with a call to sociological imagination: to see migration not as crisis, but as connection. Understanding why people move—and how societies change when they do—is essential to navigating an increasingly interconnected world.