Immigration in Global Cities

By Saskia Sassen

The master images used to describe the advanced urban economy in developed countries emphasize the centrality of highly educated labor and highly specialized services. Workers and firms that do not fit this mold are thought to be fundamentally obsolete. Where does this leave the large numbers of immigrants from developing countries who have found their way to these cities? There is growing conviction in the developed countries that there is no longer a role for immigrants with modest levels of education in the new postindustrial city of today and tomorrow — that the presence of a large supply of lowly educated workers is a drag on the economic operation and growth. And it is largely in these cities where a significant majority of immigrants are concentrated in Western Europe, North America and Japan.

This type of account about the nature of the advanced urban economy is partial to the point of distortion. And it carries important political implications. On the one hand, the advanced urban economy or the so-called "postindustrial" city requires vast numbers of low-wage workers whose educational levels are irrelevant for their jobs. And this holds even for the leading complex of industries, finance and corporate services. On the other hand, there has been a casualization of the employment relation in a growing number of jobs, both in growth and declining sectors. The combination of these two processes and the notion that the advanced urban economy basically needs only high level personnel contributes to the further devaluing (devalorization) of those jobs and labor markets. At the limit this devaluing or devalorization begins to justify low wages and lack of employment security.

The growth of low-wage jobs and the casualization of the employment relation contribute specific conditions in the postindustrial city for (a) the creation of an effective demand for the kinds of workers represented by a large majority of immigrants in these cities, and (b) a labor market dynamic that facilitates the incorporation of newcomers, "outsiders," unlike what was the case, for instance, in the large unionized Fordist factory. Large cities have since their origins received and incorporated migrants coming from near and far. But the specific conditions under which such incorporation occurs and is sustained changes with the times and the places.

Several factors contribute to this growth of international migration as a global process: (a) unequal levels of development between receiving and sending countries; (b) the growing internationalization of all developed economies; (c) major changes in the organization of the economy and of labor markets in advanced economies which have created multiple opportunities for the incorporation of immigrants.

Here I will focus particularly on the second and third aspect. Furthermore, the first factor, unequal levels of development has been widely documented and recognized as crucial in the formation of international labor migrations.

Internationalization is particularly important in the current period. It creates bridges with other countries — bridges initially designed to be traveled by capital flows but eventually also used by immigrants. When these bridges connect highly developed countries, this immigration is largely of professionals; when they connect with less developed countries, you have labor migration. Both types of flows are constitutive elements of that which we call the global economy: this has been recognized in the case of the upper labor circuits, i.e. the new transnational professional and managerial workforce. But it has not been recognized in the case of migrations of workers with low levels of education or directed to low-wage jobs.

That internationalization matters is made evident by the distinct patterning of international migration flows: most immigrants to the U.S. come from countries where the U.S. has been an active economic, political and/or military presence. The same can be said for France, or for the Netherlands, or for Japan. Migration systems connect major powers to their zones of influence: the Caribbean Basin countries and certain areas of Southeast Asia in the case of the U.S.; Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia in the case of France; much of South and Southeast Asia in the case of Japan. Each of these, and other, major countries has very different immigration policies, yet they all have become major recipients of immigrants from their zones of influence. I will first discuss this subject before entering into the analysis of immigrants in advanced urban economies because I consider it central to a proper appreciation of the presence of immigrants in such major cities in the highly developed countries.

Elsewhere I have argued at length that the mainstream language constructs immigration as a devalued process in so far as it describes the entry of people from generally poorer, disadvantaged countries, in search of the better lives that the receiving country can offer; it contains an implicit valorization of the receiving country and a devalorization of the sending country. It is furthermore a language derived from an earlier historical period which proceeds as if the world economic system were the same today as it was one hundred years ago. What would happen to the representation of that process which we call immigration if we were to cast it in terms akin to those typically used to describe the internationalization of capital, a process represented as imbued with positive economic properties? What would happen if we did not privilege wealth over poverty, wealthy countries over poor countries; if we saw immigrants as using bridges built by the internationalization of capital or the internationalization of the U.S. military activities; and if we saw immigrants as moving within an internationalized labor market?

Immigrants in the Advanced Urban Economy

The question for us today is how the ongoing inflow of immigrants from less developed countries into the most advanced urban economies is going to work out. If we take some of the dominant accounts about the nature of these economies to heart the suggestion is that (a) immigrants are totally out of place in them, and (b) if immigrants nonetheless do go to such cities they will create backward subeconomies and backward economic effects in the process of securing their survival.

Let me suggest that some of the major processes of economic and spatial organization evident in many of these advanced urban economies paint a very different picture about jobs and labor markets from that suggested by current notions of the postindustrial city. While present in many cities, these development assume rather specific forms and operate through distinct social arrangements in each case. Here I will focus only on three of these processes. (For a full treatment of the subject and bibliography, see Sassen 1994.)

One is the actual work process involved in the specialized services and international corporate headquarters sector which has indeed emerged as the economic core of major postindustrial cities. While this sector may not account for the majority of jobs, it establishes a new regime of economic activity and the associated spatial and social transformations evident in these cities.

A second process is the downgrading of the manufacturing sector, a concept I use to describe a mode of political and technical reorganization of manufacturing that is to be distinguished from the decline and obsolescence of manufacturing activities; according to such a notion, then, the downgraded manufacturing center represents a mode of incorporation into the "postindustrial" economy.

The third process is the informalization of a growing array of economic activities, a process that encompasses certain components of the downgraded manufacturing sector; informalization represents a mode of reorganizing the production and distribution of goods and services that falls outside or escapes the regulatory apparatus of the formal economy.

Conclusion

In brief, developments in cities cannot be understood in isolation from fundamental changes in the larger organization of advanced economies. The combination of economic, political, and technical forces that has contributed to the decline of mass production as the central driving element in advanced economies brought about a decline in a broader institutional framework that shaped the employment relation. The group of service industries that are the driving economic force in the 1980s and into the 1990s is characterized by greater earnings and occupational dispersion, weak unions, and mostly a growing share of unsheltered jobs in the lower paying echelons along with a growing share of high income jobs. The associated institutional framework shaping the employment relation is very different from the earlier one. This contributes to a reshaping of the sphere of social reproduction and consumption, which in turn has a feedback effect on economic organization and earnings. Whereas in the earlier period this feedback effect contributed to reproduction of the middle class, currently it reproduces growing earnings disparity and labor market casualization. The overall result is a tendency toward increased economic polarization.

This is a period of sharp transition in the economic organization of advanced economies, and immigrants, far from being a burden, have played a strategic role in this transition. Immigration has contributed flexibility in a situation where the norms of established labor markets and firm organization were often no longer viable due to extreme price competition, both national and international. And immigrants have brought with them a vast pool of entrepreneurial energy at time when small-scale, low-profit entrepreneurship became necessary to meet the demand for various goods and services that larger standardized firms often could no longer handle due to low profit levels and increased costs of operation. Immigrants in this context are almost akin to a rapid deployment force.

But immigrants have also absorbed the cost attached to being such a flexible labor supply and pool of entrepreneurial energy. A good part of this need for flexibility comes down to low-wage, casual jobs and entrepreneurial activities demanding much self-sacrifice. If these conditions cannot be upgraded as the new forms of economic organization move out of the transition phase and into a fully accomplished restructuring, then the flexibility and the talent brought by immigrants will not have been maximized. Rather than serving to get these economies going in a period of difficult and costly transition for a broad range of economic sectors, flexibility, and low-cost entrepreneurship will wind up expanding the low-income population. That would be a pity.

NOTES

S. Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge/Sage 1994).

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Urban Planning and also serves on the faculty of the School for International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Her books are The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press 1988), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press Paperbacks 1993), Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge/Sage Publications 1994), and has recently completed Immigrants and Refugees: A European Dilemma? for Fischer Verlag in Germany, to be published in October 1996. The 1995 Schoff Memorial Lectures she delivered at Columbia University will be published in 1996 under the title On Governing the Global Economy (Columbia University Press). She has received a grant from the Twentieth Century Fund to write a book about immigration policy in a world economy.