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s associated with so-called social problems (Portes 1995: 2). Like otherapplied subjects, both have attracted the attention of scholars from across thesocial sciences and have generated a voluminous body of literature. However,
immigration is strangely neglected by industrial relations scholars and onlyoccasionally draws the interest of industrial sociologists.2 This omission
becomes all the more striking once we acknowledge that immigration is, asthe legendary US labour leader Samuel Gompers insisted, fundamentally a
labour problem (Gompers 1925: 157). After all, most migrants move in orderto find work and much of the public concern about immigration focuses onthe labour market consequences of an influx of foreign labour. By contrast,the influence of economics is becoming increasingly pronounced, not onlywithin the academic literature but also in the formulation of immigrationpolicy (Massey et al. 1998: 19).
This is not surprising in one respect as labour migrants are often describedas the closest living embodiment of homo economicus — that rational, selfseeking,amoral agent who propels economic models of human behaviour. Atleast on the surface, migrants appear to be motivated primarily by moneyand, as they are separated from their original social environments, care littleabout the status of their jobs, or the concerns of native-born workers. Nevertheless,I would like to argue that even economic migration, with its apparentlyeconomically driven behaviour, can be fruitfully examined withoutsuccumbing to the seductive simplifications of neoclassical economics. Inparticular, I wish to argue that immigration presents employment researchers
with a promising strategic research site (Merton 1973) precisely because itraises a number of theoretically significant problems with approaches that
treat labour primarily as a commodity. More specifically, I shall argue thatimmigration brings the institutional nature of labour markets into sharprelief as it exposes, among other things, the influence of the nation state,218 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.processes of labour market segmentation, and the role of trade union policyand practice. To that end, I shall begin by identifying some of the moreobvious limitations in the way immigration is treated in the mainstream
economics literature before sketching out three areas where a more institutionallyoriented approach may prove to be particularly fruitful.
2. Homo economicus and the (im)mobility of labourConventional wisdom suggests that immigrants are poor, have limited prospects
in their country of origin, and so migrate to other countries where theymay earn higher wages, even for relatively unskilled jobs.3 Initial formulations
of the neoclassical economic model suggested that international migration

 

Notes
1. In producing these estimates, the United Nations (UN) uses the widely accepted
definition of an immigrant as anyone who changes his or her country of usual
residence for a period of more than 12 months.
2. With the possible exception of geography, the subject of migration has generally
been neglected by British social science. One of the few British specialists on the
subject, Robert Miles, claims that this reflects the dominance of the ‘race relations’
perspective, which focuses on the problematic presence of ‘coloured’ peoples, and
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