Freedom of Migration: Oxymoron or Paradox?

• Author: Caytas, Joanna
• Position: Book review

A Review of Migration and Freedom: Mobility, Citizenship and Exclusion

By Brad K. Blitz

(Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 2014), 256 pages.

Prospects for meaningful immigration reform grow ever more remote on the agenda of the U.S. Congress. $46 billion was earmarked in 2013 for border security, a wastefully ineffectual increase of U.S. national debt. (1) Public interest in prioritizing educated tech workers or job-creating investors remains a footnote to an afterthought. (2) America: built on freedom of migration? A narrative's power does not necessarily depend on its truth. What if the problem lies within its relativity and had at its core not the migration of foreigners, but the immobility and inadaptability of its own poverty-stricken citizens?

Any serious look at freedom of movement will examine experiences elsewhere in the First World. That is why an analysis of European experiences and regulatory responses ranging from the sophisticated to the crude--even barbaric--matters to the parallel discourse in the United States. After all, the European Union (EU) was built on three axiomatic freedoms of movement: of goods and services, of capital, and of people. The final one, though, remained hindered by policy and never entirely left the drawing board of theory.

Acknowledging that national borders, discrimination based on citizenship, and notions of sovereignty will not die in our lifetime despite frequent obituaries eulogizing the nation state since World War II, scholar Brad K. Blitz has now addressed dimensions of international law and policy, political theory, and sociology in Migration and Freedom: Mobility, Citizenship and Exclusion. A noted expert on human rights, statelessness, public and social policy, migration, and post-conflict transition, Blitz conducted more than 170 field interviews over a decade to distill opportunities and challenges arising out of the ambiguous context of existing rights to free movement (and, more importantly, to settlement and establishment) shown through the lens of five case studies: Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, Spain/United Kingdom (UK), and Russia. His original study seeks to demonstrate how formal vs. informal and official vs. de facto restraints affect individual mobility and result in all new categories of citizenship in Europe, internal and external to the EU, within and across national borders. (3)

Specifically in each case study, Blitz examines Spanish doctors in the UK, European...