Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics

Migrants and Migration in Modern North America combines essays from scholars based in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Germany to challenge the ossified ideas about migration that have emerged in national historiographies. Contributors draw upon recent migration scholarship to debunk the dominant image of the typical migrant as a male crossing an international border. This includes recognizing the movements of groups thought to be sedentary, such as indigenous people and women; it also entails analyzing internal migration and historicizing the formation of borders. The vast majority of contributions are well written, with a lucid introductory synthesis and historiographical chapter by Dirk Hoerder. When unmoored from a myopic focus on the transatlantic journeys of Europeans to the United States, the North American framework is quite useful because it unites subfields of migration scholarship that are often treated separately. The significance of creating scholarly...