Wiley-Blackwell Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the US, France, and the Netherlands, 1970-2015 (IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change Book Series)

From the Inside Flap Given the hostile climate facing immigrants, it might be expected that they would try to remain hidden and under the radar. However, many immigrants have asserted their rights for equality in the countries they reside in. While the general policy evolution has been in the direction of greater restrictions, some immigrant mobilizations have successfully swum against the tide and achieved important wins including large-scale regularizations. Cities and Social Movements make sense of these remarkable mobilizations and their successes or failures. Through historical and comparative research on the immigrant rights movements of the United States, France, and the Netherlands, this book examines how small resistances against restrictive immigration policies do – or don’t – develop into large and sustained mobilizations. Drawing on a range of disciplines, the book rethinks movements from the bottom-up. The authors descend to the urban grassroots to uncover the micro-mechanisms through which movement networks emerge or disband. Cities and Social Movements demonstrate how efforts to enforce national borders trigger countless resistances and shows how some environments provide the opportunities to nurture these small resistances into sustained and system-challenging mobilizations. Product Description Through historical and comparative research on the immigrant rights movements of the United States, France and the Netherlands, Cities and Social Movements examines how small resistances against restrictive immigration policies do – or don’t – develop into large and sustained mobilizations.Presents a comprehensive, comparative analysis of immigrant rights politics in three countries over a period of five decades, providing vivid accounts of the processes through which immigrants activists challenged or confirmed the status quoTheorizes movements from the bottom-up, presenting an urban grassroots account in order to identify how movement networks emerge or fall apartProvides a unique contribution by examining how geography is implicated in the evolution of social movements, discovering how and why the networks constituting movements grow by tracing where they developDemonstrates how efforts to enforce national borders trigger countless resistances and shows how some environments provide the relational opportunities to nurture these small resistances into sustained mobilizationsWritten to appeal to a broad audience of students, scholars, policy makers, and activists, without sacrificing theoretical rigor Review “Nicholls and Uitermark’s book offers a richly textured and insightful analysis of the complex dynamics of immigrant rights movements in Los Angeles, Paris and Amsterdam. Their “bottom up” approach exposes the ways in which immigrant “illegality” is constructed and contested in those three different contexts, each with its own distinctive governmental regime, and reminds us once again that all politics is local.”Ruth Milkman, Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center, New York“What makes social movements by groups usually considered as resourceless possible? Through cross-national comparison and using a historical perspective, aptly bridging sociology and geography, this volume convincingly argues that, notwithstanding more and more exclusive neoliberal policies in global cities, the relational qualities of some places help the incubation of resistance.”Donatella della Porta, Director of the Centre on Social Movement Studies, Scuola normale superiore di Firenze, Florence“Bringing diverse people together, cities are not just sites of tension, but also alliances. As Nicholls and Uitermark show in their innovative comparison, public policies and city residents’ relations as neighbors, co-workers and community members can spark movements of resistance and solidarity. As anti-immigrant rhetoric pervades European and American politics, Nicholls and Uitermark’s empirically and theoretically rich