Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access originally published online on May 17, 2007
Journal of Economic Geography 2007 7(6):780-782; doi:10.1093/jeg/lbm017
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Book review |
Deflecting immigration: networks, markets and regulation in Los Angeles
Ivan Light
Deflecting immigration: networks, markets and regulation in Los Angeles
Ivan Light
New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006.
246 pp. Price: $35.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Immigration scholars are very familiar with the important place Ivan Light occupies with regard to immigration and ethnic enterprise, a field he was instrumental in identifying in the early 1970s. In Deflecting Immigration Light makes yet another significant contribution to the immigration debate in the USA, and his work may have some resonance with an international audience interested in urban growth and immigration. In a coherent, readable, and extremely persuasive book, Light suggests that municipalities are effectively creating national immigration policy in the USA, and that policy is one of sequential immigrant absorption and deflection shaped by both macro-economic conditions and local political decision making. Light bases his argument on primary and secondary sources with an emphasis on Mexican immigration to Los Angeles. Half of the chapters are articles previously published elsewhere, but the entire book reads fairly seamlessly, although a chapter on Asian place entrepreneurs does seem somewhat misplaced.
Department of Geography and
Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier
University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada