Introduction

According to the theoretical reasoning concerning the push and pull factors for the new immigration in the global city theoretical framework addressed in the previous chapter, this immigration is driven by economic globalization. This logic was partly corroborated in Chapter 4, as Dutch foreign direct investments were indeed strongly related to immigration flows to cities in the Netherlands from newly-industrializing countries. Given that the central aim in the global city debate is to assess the impact of economic globalization on the social and economic realities of cities, it seems to be overly one-sided to merely examine what drives immigration. This is because immigration is not only a consequence of economic globalization, but also one of its constituting elements (cf. Sassen, 2006d: 315, Sassen, 1998: xxi). As a result, it is often referred to using the abstract term ‘the globalization of labour’. Several immigration researchers active in the global city debate consequently recommend treating it as such (Benton-Short et al., 2005), and some even suggest using it as another indicator of the globalness of cities along with the clustering of advanced producer services (Malecki & Ewers, 2007).

Many studies that treat immigration as the globalization of labour assess the tenability of the substitution thesis, which asserts that immigrants can be substitutes for natives and former waves of immigrants with whom they compete on the labour market. By applying classic economic logic to the labour market, the substitution thesis claims that immigration leads to downward pressure on the wages of natives and former waves of immigrants, especially in regulated labour markets, eventually causing the unemployment of these groups.