ABSTRACT
Until the 1980s, however, migration was largely neglected within mainstream anthropology, seen as something of a scholarly turkey, the domain of applied anthropologists with little to offer a discipline still largely committed to theoretical perspectives that assumed that cultures and the people who practiced them were bounded and fixed. Migration thus poses a profound challenge to anthropology. Theoretical exigencies aside, there are more pressing and practical reasons why migration has recently become such an important and yet troubling issue for anthropology. Of equal importance, migration has catapulted to the top of state and global concerns. Rarely celebrated as a source of cultural and social vibrancy, it is variously blamed for overpopulation, the loss of jobs for native people, civil disturbance, and terrorism. Migration is approached in terms of structures and systems rather than individuals and their decisions, and is therefore understood in terms of the extraction of labor value from peripheries to the core.
