LAUSR

This book is a collection of essays written by Adrian Favell between 1989 and 2014. Despite its form which may suggest the compilation of random topics, it is a holistic work presenting the most important ideas from several decades of migration studies. Favell postulates that migration studies should be conducted across disciplines and national political contexts, and he offers a good attempt at such an approach. To explain phenomena in the field of immigration, integration and mobility, Favell uses theories from sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, economics and demography (pp. ix–x). The perfect audience for this book would be scholars of migration studies looking for a new interpretation of their own research results. The volume consists of four themed parts (each comprising two essays), along with an Introduction and a Conclusion that have a more general character. Part I deals with the problem of applying political philosophy to the empirical analysis of immigration policies in Western Europe. Part II considers the challenges of integration – in both the European and the American context. In Part III, myths regarding migration of the highly skilled are confronted with the data. Finally, Part IV discusses the impact of European integration on migration in Europe. The situation created by East–West migration after the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2008 is considered by Favell to be the best illustration of the consequences of free mobility. Favell successfully presents how diversified fields of migration studies can be unified in order to support the theoretical analysis. He combines theories with field research and supports his arguments indiscriminately with findings from both big quantitative surveys and small in-depth qualitative studies conducted by a wide variety of researchers. To make his points, he moves both in time (through decades of migration theories) and geographical space (mostly between Europe and the United States). His goal is to fight the naivety of the migration debate by setting it in a wider theoretical context. The strength of the book is its author’s passionate attitude and emotional involvement with his arguments, which makes his writing very appealing to the reader. The book’s greatest weakness is the time flow. Although the author claims that his essays have been revised and updated (p. xi), sometimes the quoted data seem to contradict him. To discuss the social mobility of migrants, he uses the European Social Survey 2004, while new statistics are published every 2 years (pp. 148–150), or the Labour Force Survey 2006 (p. 153), even though it is an annual publication.