Through historical and comparative research on the immigrant rights
movements of the United States, France and the Netherlands, Cities and
Social Movements examines how small resistances against restrictive
immigration policies do - or don't - develop into large and sustained
mobilizations.
- Presents a comprehensive, comparative analysis of immigrant rights
politics in three countries over a period of five decades, providing
vivid accounts of the processes through which immigrants activists
challenged or confirmed the status quo
- Theorizes movements from the bottom-up, presenting an urban grassroots
account in order to identify how movement networks emerge or fall
apart
- Provides a unique contribution by examining how geography is
implicated in the evolution of social movements, discovering how and
why the networks constituting movements grow by tracing where they
develop
- Demonstrates how efforts to enforce national borders trigger countless
resistances and shows how some environments provide the relational
opportunities to nurture these small resistances into sustained
mobilizations
- Written to appeal to a broad audience of students, scholars, policy
makers, and activists, without sacrificing theoretical rigor