Rita Chin

Rita Chin holds a BA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has just finished The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History, which will appear with Princeton UP in August 2017. She is also the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge UP, 2007) and co-author of After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, American Council for Learned Societies' Burkhardt Fellowship, and Institute for Advanced Study.

Current Work:

Rita Chin has an ongoing project on "The European New Left and Postwar Immigration," which examines New Left engagements with "difference," race, and immigration. She has also begun work on "Visible and Invisible Labor: A History of Precarious Immigration to Postwar Europe" that draws particular attention to the highly insecure existence of migrants who arrived through unregulated channels (e.g., older colonial networks for domestic work, free movement of labor). This study seeks to make a number of interventions. First, it provides a synthetic analysis of postwar European immigration that will serve as a critical introduction to the broader patterns of non-European worker and their settlement in Europe after the Second World War. This is a crucial contribution at a moment when public discourse assumes that the problem of immigrants simply "appeared," as if Europeans had no role in their arrival and settlement. Second, the project offers a comparative examination of both state-sanctioned and unregulated forms of immigration in order to explore the wide range of migrant experiences. Relying on a significant body of secondary literature to flesh out the state regulated forms of immigration, the focus of this research effort is on unregulated forms of migration: people who came to Europe in the interstices of devolving empires that were scrambling to put formal immigration laws into place; or people who arrived to work in informal economies with businesses loathe to regularize their legal status, the so-called sans papiers; or people who came as tourists or students who ended up settling permanently.

Research Area Keyword(s):

immigration, race, gender, processes of racialization, post-1945 period, Europe, especially Germany, Britain, France