MER Article States of Fragmentation in North Africa Nearly 50 years after independence, the North African states of Algeria and Morocco face challenges to their national unity and territorial integrity. In Algeria, a Paul Silverstein • 18 min read
MER Article No Shelter “Angela” came to Jordan to work as a housekeeper because she is a single mother and needs to save for her children’s schooling. She paid a recruiter in the Philippines 11,000 pesos, about $234, “for the processing of my papers.” An hour before she went to the airport, she says, she signed a contract Rola Abimourched • 13 min read
Current Analysis The Precarious Existence of Dubai's Indian Middle Class Dubai, according to the conventional wisdom, is a bust. The International Monetary Fund predicts that economic growth in the United Arab Emirates as a whole will be lower in 2009 than in the last five years; the Dubai government has borrowed billions of dollars from Abu Dhabi to bail out its banks; Neha Vora • 11 min read
MER Article Remittances and Development The Middle East and North Africa have been hit hard by the global recession. Several of the oil-rich Gulf states are in the midst of an economic contraction, with their famed sovereign wealth funds having lost 27 percent of their value in 2008. The Gulf states, along with the European Union, buy mos Sameera Fazili • 6 min read
MER Article Storming the Fences "'Black locusts' are taking over Morocco!" So ran the September 12, 2005 headline of al-Shamal, an Arabic-language Tangier newspaper, describing the forays of masses of in-transit sub-Saharan Africans trying to scale the security fences separating Morocco from the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Elie Goldschmidt • 17 min read
MER Article The Other Casualties of War in Iraq Labor practices in Iraq are under scrutiny, as contractors hire poor non-Iraqis to work low-wage jobs in a deadly environment. Migrant workers are employed through complex layers of companies working in Iraq. At the top of the pyramid is the US government, which assigned over $24 billion in contract Rebecca Milligan • 4 min read
MER Article Risking the Strait Men who had never wanted anything very much saw the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants. And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man Gregory White • 12 min read
MER Article Boys in the Mud For migrants of Maghrebi (North African) origin, the internal barriers of popular prejudices among the “host” population are often as difficult to surmount as the external frontiers of fortress Europe. Dominated by majority ethnic groups, the media have played a powerful role in disseminating largely negative images of immigrant minorities. Alec C. Hargreaves • 4 min read
MER Article Migration, Modernity and Islam in Rural Sudan For the villagers of Wad al-Abbas in northern Sudan, transnational migration has generated new understandings of what it means to be a Muslim. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, Wad al-Abbas’s incorporation into the global economy was mediated primarily by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi kingdom exerted Victoria Bernal • 8 min read
MER Article Keeping Migrant Workers in Check For nearly half a century, the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- have been a destination point for international labor migration, annually attracting large numbers of workers from the Middle East and Asia Anh Nga Longva • 9 min read
MER Article Recent Trends in Middle Eastern Migration Although the history of Middle Eastern labor migration to North America is not as well known as that of Irish and Southern European immigrants, Yemenis were working in Detroit by the 1920s and Palestinian and Lebanese diasporas existed around the globe before the end of the nineteenth century. North David McMurray • 12 min read
MER Article Russian Jewish Immigration and the Future of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Russian Jewish migration to Israel, like other international streams of the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a mass phenomenon that can be explained primarily by traditional factors. Migration occurs when people are pulled to a new country where conditions appear better, or are pushed to escape from difficult circumstances. Bernard Sabella • 11 min read
