Page 124 Labor Movement: How Migration Regulates Labor Markets Book by: Harald Bauder Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 Review by: Marion Traub-Werner Department of Geography University of Minnesota Labor Movement is a wide-ranging study of immigrants in labor markets, illustrating how varied social processes coalesce to systematically undermine the livelihood opportunities for immigrant workers. Through interviews and analysis of survey data, Bauder effectively shows how the devaluation of immigrant labor is integral to the segmentation of the labor market, a process that not only benefits employers, he argues, but also bolsters the relatively more privileged position of non-immigrant workers. The publication is well timed. In the US and Canada, it is clearer than ever that immigration crystallizes the very paradoxes of neoliberal economies. The apparent deregulation of labor markets, associated with declining union density and the roll back of labor protections, is tightly coupled with immigration policies and proposals that multiply juridical categories of labor. This “roll out” neoliberalism underwrites the proliferation of categories of unfree labor in the form of guest-worker and workfare programs, in addition to crippling underemployment amongst the economically poor, women, immigrants and people of color (Peck and Tickell 2002). Bauder provides an insightful perspective on this process by analyzing how the mobility of workers and the segmentation of labor markets intersect. The principal concepts to understand this relationship are citizenship, closely tied to immigration policies, and cultural representations, understood as the forms of discrimination that serve to devalue immigrant labor. Through his focus on citizenship, Bauder aims to denaturalize the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by pointing to the ways in which this difference is transformed into labor market segmentation along citizenship lines. The author unpacks the social process of aligning citizenship with hierarchically valued work by drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of social and cultural capital as well as habitus. He argues that diverse formulations of capital are exchanged in the labor market, socially reproducing hierarchical differences between immigrant and non-immigrant labor. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, summarized as embodied cultural capital, is an important component to this framework and the subsequent analysis. Through the lens of habitus, the study of labor markets is opened up to the everyday practices that constitute the powerful unspoken elements of discrimination against culturally “othered” migrants. This conceptual approach to labor markets and immigration is drawn unevenly through the book’s three case studies. The first two cases – focused on immigrants in Vancouver and Berlin – are more developed and use a similar methodology, drawing primarily on key informant interviews with governmental and non-governmental immigrant service providers. The Vancouver case focuses on the labor market constraints and adaptations of South Asian and former-Yugoslav migrants. The author finds that the different immigrant class categories established by the Canadian state divide migrant workers along the lines of transferable social privilege: the “skilled immigrant” class is also the group that is more likely to be able to navigate the Canadian labor market through conforming to standard practices such as résumé writing and interview etiquette. The immigrant class categories created by the Canadian state mirror home-country social class and privilege, reproducing class structures within migrant communities in their new home. This reproduction of class is stymied drastically, however, by the effective deskilling of formally educated migrants. In the Canadian contexts, he points to the rather pernicious paradox that while, on the one hand, the state recognizes formal education in its immigration classification scheme, on the other hand, once in Canada, these credentials are often denied validity. The result is the relegation of highly skilled migrants to the secondary labor market. A similar process occurs in Berlin. Bauder argues that the deskilling of professionals is far from an oversight: the incongruence between immigration policy and labor market regulation produces a skilled, low-wage workforce that secures non-migrant’s professional status and benefits employers in low-wage sectors. Questions related to gender and ethnicity are addressed through an analysis of habitus and representations of cultural difference. For example, Bauder draws out some differences experienced by Yugoslav and South Asian migrant women in Vancouver. Yugoslav women have no expectations of gender discrimination coming from a national context where such discrimination is relatively minimal in employment. Their experience of being shunted into positions that are culturally feminized in the Canadian context is