Given a renewed interest on immigrants and cities, I examine the continuities and changes in the positioning and roles played by Portuguese migrants and their local and transnational practices against the repositioning of New Bedford, MA and Portugal in the global political economy. Instead of adopting the ethnic group as my unit of analysis, I centralize my attention on New Bedford and local level politics to explain the relations among globalization, city scale and migrants' incorporation. By interrelating local and global processes, I show how the incorporation of these migrants in New Bedford is enmeshed with their simultaneous incorporation in Portugal and, by extension, in the European Union. From this perspective, I expose the apparent paradoxes that permeate the ongoing neo-liberal projects which are grounded upon the organization of flexible labor, restrictive immigration policies favoring national security and the criminalization of immigrants, and ideologies of cultural diversity as well.
city scale; transnational migration; unequal incorporation; uneven globalization
