Conférence – Trump, Migration, and Guest Workers

Trump, Migration, and Guest Workers*

Professeur Philip Martin
21 septembre 2017, 18h-20h
Salle D-R200, Pavillon Athanase-David, Université du Québec à Montréal
Inscription obligatoire (sans frais): criec2@uqam.ca

*La conférence se déroulera en anglais, mais un service de traduction simultané sera offert. Pour y avoir accès vous devrez avoir un téléphone intelligent et une paire d’écouteurs.

Résumé
President Trump issued four executive orders dealing with immigration since taking office, setting in motion plans to build a wall on the 2,000 mile Mexico-US border, to increase deportations, to reduce refugee admissions, and to protect US workers. These executive orders signal a new era in migration policy that emphasizes enforcement against unauthorized foreigners and protections for US workers, but their major effect so far is a changed tone in migration policy, a change from welcoming newcomers from around the world to the US being perceived as a country where natives fear immigrants and immigrants live in fear.

This talk reviews the role of the 11 million unauthorized foreigners in helping Trump to win the 2016 presidential election, the roles of eight million unauthorized workers in the US economy (five percent of all US workers, and 50 percent of crop workers, are unauthorized), and the likely effects of stepped up enforcement against unauthorized workers, viz, expanded and new programs to admit low-skilled migrant workers. The US currently admits about 250,000 legal H-2A and H-2B guest workers a year, most for up to 10 months.

Conférencier
Philip Martin, Professeur émérite, Université de Californie
Philip Martin is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California-Davis. He edits Rural Migration News (http://migration.ucdavis.edu/), has served on several federal commissions, testifies frequently before Congress, and works for UN agencies around the world on labor and migration issues. Martin is an award-winning author whose research focuses on the impacts of migrant workers on labor markets in destination countries, the effects of emigration and remittances on sending countries, and the recruitment business that moves workers over borders. His most recent book is Managing Merchants of Labor: Recruiters and International Labor Migration (Oxford, 2017).