Premigration Legacies and Immigrant Social Mobility

"Premigration Legacies and Immigrant Social Mobility" traces the root causes of two immigrant groups' responses to social exclusion and discrimination. Drawn from extensive anthropological research in the Netherlands, Mies van Niekerk's work examines the relative success and failure of Indo- and Afro-Surinamese immigrants' adaptation to Dutch society. Drawn from a variety of sources -educational and employment data, the wider social environment of the receiving culture, premigration histories, and socio-cultural repertoires - the book plots, and explains, the varying social and economic trajectories of these two immigrant groups. The work is both a focused case study on the Surinamese diaspora and a wider comparative work that places its findings in the broader theoretical debate on the relevance of "structural" and "cultural" factors in the differential social mobility of immigrant groups.