Book Reviews 607

the common good to facilitate and to invest in such a framework of better coordin-
ation. While Ghosh proposes a set of valid and valuable recommendations to states,
most readers will nonetheless ask how this framework could ever become achieved,
particularly in the current political context that, even more likely than in previous
decades, favours quick and easy ‘fixes’ to major world problems over long-term,
sustainable and real solutions. While there is no well-defined path on how to achieve
the proposed international framework and an absence of an honest and realistic dis-
cussion on migration persists, the ideals of a new NIROMP should not be cast off as

Downloaded from http://jrs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on August 15, 2014
wishful thinking. Instead, it must finally be put into practical action; it is increasingly
urgent in light of the new challenges facing the world not only at the economic front,
but also in the face of demographic and climate change. Nonetheless, the challenge
faced by Ghosh and other experts with such well-intended visions clearly lies in
bridging the gaps between the necessarily ‘visionary’ ideas and recommendations of
consultants, the ‘real’ world and its inherent unpredictability, and the typically selfish
and ‘realist’ behaviour of nation-states and other international players. Ghosh’s
unique merit and importance lies in his continuing to lobby for a progressive ap-
proach to migration despite all doubts, criticism and lingering resistance.

Martin Geiger, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Ottawa

doi:10.1093/jrs/fet038

Human Rights, Migration, and Social Conflict: Toward a Decolonized Global Justice.
By Ariadna Estévez. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 236pp. $85. ISBN 978 0
230 33944 6.

The main argument presented in Ariadna Estévez’s critical analysis of the causal
relationship between globalization, migration, and social conflict is as follows: since
failure to respect the universal human rights of immigrants generates conflict in
receiving and transit nations, recognizing human rights would be in the best interest
of sending, receiving and transit countries alike. Estévez’s analysis is based on a
comparison of certain elements of North American (the three NAFTA countries of
the USA, Canada and Mexico) and European (European Union and individual
member states) immigration policy that result from discrimination against immigrants,
in particular the securitization of cooperation for development and borders, the use of
temporary detention centres, the toughening of asylum policy, the criminalization of
migration and the social marginalization of immigrants.
Following Giddens, Estévez argues that conflict is the predictable but not inevitable
result of the structuration relationship between globalization and migration. In turn,
three main conceptual frameworks underpin her analysis: firstly, De Genova’s concep-
tualization of illegality as being constituted by legal apparatuses that produce condi-
tions which serve to maintain the vulnerability and control of immigrants rather than
as situations inherent to undocumented migration; Coutin’s theory of illegality as a
space of nonexistence; and Honneth’s theory of intersubjective recognition. Based on
case examples from the North American and European countries included in the
analysis, the normative possibilities for the recognition of immigrants are evaluated
through the lenses of citizenship and universal human rights. As citizenship includes
a historical tendency to exclusion, the normative proposal is based on human rights
608 Book Reviews
understood not from a hegemonic or liberal perspective but as part of an intertextual
conceptualization. The latter forms the basis for the normative proposal of a decolo-
nized global justice.
The book’s focus is not immigration policy itself but rather the state of human
rights vis à vis various features of immigration policy related to the entry of migrants
and asylum seekers and their treatment by receiving countries. A number of similar
and contrasting points between North America and Europe provide material for the

Downloaded from http://jrs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on August 15, 2014
comparative analysis. Both regions receive a considerable number of immigrants and
forced migrants and officially adhere to universal human rights instruments, and yet
they respond differently to countries in the region which generate migration pressure.
They also differ in terms of the subsidy policies available for states within their
regions, with Europe transferring resources to the poorest member states to reduce
migration pressures, whereas North American states generally leave the responsibility
for development to migrants themselves through development policies based on
remittances.
The book is divided into two sections, with the first four chapters offering empirical
analysis and the case examples of North America and the European Union. After
establishing the causal link between globalization and migration in Chapter 1,
Chapters 2–4 take issue respectively with the securitization, criminalization and
denial of migrants’ human rights that generate conflict. The second part, comprising
Chapters 5 and 6, uses the analytical framework to produce a normative proposal
designed to suggest an ethical horizon that would prevent conflict. The limits of
traditional citizenship are discussed, concluding that human rights, rather than citi-
zenship, represent the most viable option and that only a decolonized global justice
could support a series of rights to mobility that would contribute to the prevention of
conflict. The conclusion in turn analyses the viability of the proposal presented and
argues that decolonized justice is in the international community’s own interest as it
would benefit migrant-receiving, migrant-sending and transit countries alike by miti-
gating the harmful consequences of closed-door immigration policies which lead to
racist exclusion.
The value of Estévez’s book is that it organizes, in a systematic and comparative
way, the story of current migration policy. The author brings renewed attention to
discussions of citizenship and human rights with an emphasis on exclusion. Equally
important is her focus on the criminalization of migrants and the human rights vio-
lations resulting from enhanced border control. Furthermore, the relative absence of
comparative research on the one hand, and the limited number of works produced by
Latin American scholars translated into English (and, indeed, vice versa) on the other,
means that a Mexican researcher’s analysis of European migration reality is in itself a
major contribution.
However, the strict focus on human rights and legal discussions nevertheless comes
at the price of leaving out important contributions from migration theory, at times
leading to sweeping commentaries such as the claim that theories of functionalism,
structuralism, transnationalism and accumulated causality ‘are deterministic since they
attribute full autonomy to social subjects who decide to migrate, or give full weight to
the role of structure in such decisions’ (p. 2). Another weakness is the lack of defin-
ition of respectively ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ expressions of migrant agency and their
complex relationship to long-distance nationalism.
 Book Reviews 609
These criticisms should not obscure what is otherwise an engaging and significant
contribution. Human Rights, Migration and Social Conflict is a book for a wide range
of audiences interested in migration issues and what could be done to make migration
policy not only more humane but also workable. The book is a timely critical study of
current migration experiences in two major global regions and is a valuable addition
to the field of interdisciplinary migration studies.

Downloaded from http://jrs.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on August 15, 2014
Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, Danish Institute for International Studies

doi:10.1093/jrs/fet043