Immigration Studies

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the Major Problems in American History series introduces students to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in US history. This collection is designed for courses on Latina/o history.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

American political scientist Samuel Huntington argues that, before being a nation of immigrants, the United States is a nation of English settlers who defined the core values of American national identity during the colonial era of the 17th and 18th century. Thus, in addition to being characterized as a product of the “Founding Fathers”, Huntington's concept of the American nation was closely tied to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture created by the called “Founding Settlers”. This strict definition of the United States made it impossible for other groups, such as Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, to fully incorporate themselves into the American mainstream. Because they came from different historical backgrounds that deviated from the Anglo-Saxon norm, they were seen as challenging the “proper” ways of American immigration and assimilationism, such as those established by the massive flows of European immigration from the 19th and the first half of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, for Huntington, the war between Mexico and the United States in 1846-1848 produced the current idea that Mexicans are able to make political claims to the territories annexed by the United States after the course of the war, and therefore they represent an active threat to the physical integrity of modern US-territory. It is also important to highlight that, behind the apparently benevolent notion of assimilationism, there are structural relations of colonialism that nullify the power of agency of assimilating groups, subordinating them to a system of colonial rule that denies their full political engagement in the social landscape of the United States. As to the assimilation of both Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans this cannot take place because the concept of American assimilationism itself is linked to a hidden ideal of whiteness that does not accept the brown phenotypical traits of people of Mexican origins. 

Key words: national identity; American nation; Anglo-Saxon culture; Mexicans Americans;

(Español) Javier Fernández-Lasquetty incluye en este artículo principios liberales para una política de integración de los inmigrantes y analiza la actual situación de la inmigración y su evolución en España. Y lo hace con abundancia de datos, interesándose por sus aspectos más destacados: sus circunstancias legales, el impacto de la crisis económica sobre la inmigración y el acceso y utilización de los servicios públicos por los inmigrantes, además de exponer los retos actuales en la política de extranjería española.

(English) Javier Fernández-Lasquetty includes in this article classical-liberal principles for an immigration integrating policy and analyses the current situation of immigration and its evolution in Spain. And he does so with plenty of data, thinking about its more outstanding aspects: its legal circumstances, the impact of the economic crisis on immigration, and the access and use of public services by immigrants, on top of
discussing the current challenges of Spanish immigration policies.

1) Why did you choose to come to Canada? Tell about the conditions before coming and what attracted you here.

"Because Canada is an experiment - think about this, English and French couldn’t defeat each other and so made a nation together. Hence the “other” becomes an essential part of who you are. I thought that would be a fertile ground to strike roots - to do here what I was doing back home in Bombay (oops! Mumbai) – architecture, poetry and calligraphy (though I miss the Arabian Sea as I grew up in a house on its coast)."

Read more…
2) How was the move itself?
3) How easy/hard was it for you to get involved in architecture in Canada? What helped you find success?
4) What would you suggest to new immigrants who wish to get into the field

Interviewed by Rotem Yaniv;
Canadian Immigrant (online magazine)
November 2009

Cross Reference. See also:
"Between Two Tongues: Falling at The Speed of Light" in the Articles Section
"Impossible Toronto"  in the Articles Section
"Meditation on Clockfaces" in the Articles Section
"Flying Into Watercity" in the Articles Section
"The Travelling Nonvegetarian" in the Poetry Section

This article, published on my Korebelief.com blog in May 2018, is about an appeal for a parking fine I was slapped with by Norwich City Council that year.

As the article states, the appeal is "a small part of a program of human rights advocacy I have been pursuing on my own and others’ behalf, in response to a Barbados-sown, globally grown campaign of psychological warfare that has been directed against me for more than half a century".

The words of my appeal provide "a template" of the kind of "human ecology focused activist litigation" I have been developing with the direct and indirect assistance of visual artist Deborah Liversage, the environmental justice litigators Client Earth, the mental health advocacy network Emerging Proud and various other individuals and organizations which, while not inerrant and infallible agents, have much to offer as channels of healing in the world.

I published the appeal in the hope that it would underscore the links between the choices that Barbadians were about to make in the then imminent May 24 general elections on that island (where I was “parked” for a brief period in October 2017) and political and other developments unfolding in England, which has been my “bunker” since July 4th, 2006, when I arrived here as an immigrant.

The article documents my first use of an automotive parking fine as an opportunity to engage with the British legal system in a radically creative way.

I not only make vehicular parking a metaphor for the problem plagued legal status of immigrants in "Brexiting Britain", who like me, are being adversely affected by the UK's "hostile environment" policies. I also make it a metaphor for the transitory nature of words as their meanings change.

The article therefore adds to the broader discourse about language use that I have been developing through my book "The Bible: Beauty and Terror Reconciled" and related human ecology projects.

Fundamentally, it demonstrates the faith based creativity that has been my salvation in the face of the most daunting challenges I have experienced and provides a template for pragmatic, peaceful resistance - an alternative to characteristically violence inducing Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Communist, Capitalist, Feminist and other secular and religious ideological excesses.

It documents

Demétrio Habib é carioca e tem 76 anos. Nascido na rua Maria Amália, na Tijuca, é filho do imigrante Gabriel Habib, que foi um grande comerciante na cidade e fundador do bairro de Coelho Neto, Zona Norte do Rio. Ele chegou ao Brasil durante o Carnaval de 1910 e caminhou do Cais do Porto até a rua da Alfândega, onde encontrou os familiares já estabelecidos. Demétrio e o seu pai Gabriel, foram os fundadores da Sociedade dos Amigos das Adjacências da Rua da Alfândega, a SAARA, no Centro do Rio. O local foi o primeiro shopping center da cidade, transformado de lojas de atacado em varejo pela visão pioneira dos Habib. A entrevista com Demétrio Habib foi realizada pelo autor na loja Gabriel Habib, no SAARA, em dezenove de novembro de 2002.

Existing migration research has framed ‘middling migrants’ mainly in terms of transnational fluidity and flexibility, thus overlooking the issue of integration. This article adds to a burgeoning scholarship advocating a more locally embedded perspective (e.g. Meier, 2015b. Migrant Professionals in the City: Local Encounters, Identities, and Inequalities. New York and London: Routledge) by investigating the integration of immigrant teachers working in mainstream primary and secondary schools in the Asian city–state of Singapore. It is found that these immigrant teachers faced differentiated formal inclusion with respect to legal settlement, whereas their professional integration experiences also diverged between those who embodied certain ‘mainstream’ characteristics and those who did not. In negotiating professional integration, ‘non-mainstream’ immigrant teachers adopted a spectrum of strategies, but on the whole prioritised the pragmatic imperative to ‘fit in’, resulting in what may be termed muted diversification. In terms of broader ethnic and migration scholarship, this account serves to highlight the ways in which locally specific institutional and sociocultural conditions differentially shape middling migrants’ experiences in respect to settlement and work. With regard to the Singaporean context, this article fills an empirical gap in migration research while also reflecting on the accommodation and management of diversity in education.

Ce livre offre un portrait détaillé des journalistes français et américains en action, alors qu’ils débattent de la façon dont traiter et commenter l’un des sujets les plus importants de notre époque. En s’appuyant sur des interviews avec des journalistes de premier plan et sur les analyses d’un vaste échantillon d’informations tirées de la presse papier et de la télévision depuis les années 1970, Rodney Benson montre comment le débat sur l’immigration s’est progressivement focalisé sur les cadres spectaculaires et chargés d’émotion de l’humanitarisme et de l’ordre public.

Avec une préface de Érik Neveu.

My paper is focused on the way British newspapers covered Eastern European immigration into Britain from 2004 to 2007, a lapse of time involving the two waves of the fifth EU enlargement. 1 This enlargement resulted in a large influx of Eastern Europeans, considered by John Salt, a geographer at University College London, and Ian Fitzgerald, from Northumbria University, as the biggest influx in British history which surprised everybody, 2 contributing to the re-emergence of the immigration issue and its impact on British society. Articles covering the influx of Eastern Europeans and the related issues, published in three daily newspapers: the Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Mirror, 3 are qualitatively analyzed, using framing, a recognized tool in media studies. The intention is to study the link between media frames and public opinion in relation to the influx and its impact on people's attitudes about white European immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is carried out by comparing media representations to opinion polls dealing with the most important issues facing the country. I shall argue that daily newspapers' representations affected Britons' attitudes about the influx, thus creating a new 'other' in multicultural Britain.

This article examines the representation of home among members of the Lebanese diaspora in New York, Montreal and Paris. Lebanese immigrants view home as both a concrete reality that is achieved physically or in relation with others and a symbolic reference point that ...

Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans recreate the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers' transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.

This article empirically assesses the validity of current theoretical models of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper takes representative data from the World Value Survey and implements a multilevel model to test five of the main theories in the literature: the human capital theory, the social capital theory, the political orientation theory, the contact/group threat theory and the economic competition theory. The results from the analysis lend credence to the important effects of human capital, social capital and political-ideological variables on respondents’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy. However, results provide mixed and weak evidence for the contact/group threat theory and the role of economic determinants. Importantly, economic determinants tend to be more powerful in shaping people’s attitudes toward immigration policy than shaping attitudes toward immigrants as people. Altogether, this article sheds new light on the validity of current theoretical models based on western countries for other areas of the world. Finally, the results from the paper also support the usefulness of non-economic, as opposed to purely economic, models in the understanding of individuals’ attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policy in the Asia-Pacific region.

A history of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains.

The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment and deportation that the world has ever known. The Deportation Express is the first history of American deportation trains: a network of prison railroad cars repurposed by the Immigration Bureau to link jails, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses across the country and allow forced removal with terrifying efficiency. With this book, historian Ethan Blue uncovers the origins of the deportation train and finds the roots of the current moment, as immigrant restriction and mass deportation once again play critical and troubling roles in contemporary politics and legislation.

A century ago, deportation trains made constant circuits around the nation, gathering so-called "undesirable aliens"—migrants disdained for their poverty, political radicalism, criminal conviction, or mental illness—and conveyed them to ports for exile overseas. Previous deportation procedures had been violent, expensive, and relatively ad hoc, but the railroad industrialized the expulsion of the undesirable. Trains provided a powerful technology to divide "citizens" from "aliens" and displace people in unprecedented numbers. Drawing on the lives of migrants and the agents who expelled them, The Deportation Express is history told from aboard a deportation train. By following the lives of selected individuals caught within the deportation regime, this book dramatically reveals how the forces of state exclusion accompanied epic immigration in early twentieth-century America. These are the stories of people who traveled from around the globe, only to be locked up and cast out, deported through systems that bound the United States together, and in turn, pulled the world apart. Their journey would be followed by millions more in the years to come.

University of California Press, 2021

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520304444/the-deportation-express

This article draws on a unique dataset of more than eleven hundred postdeportation surveys to examine migrants' experiences with coyotes (human smugglers) along the U.S.-Mexico border. Our focus is on migrants' satisfaction with the services provided by their most recent smuggler and whether they would be willing to put family or friends in contact with that person. We find a distinct difference between people's expectations for their own migratory experience compared to what they would be willing to subject loved ones to. expectations of comfort and safety are decidedly low for oneself; but for loved ones, a more expressive, qualitative assessment shapes their willingness to recommend a coyote: qualities such as trustworthiness, honesty, comportment, and treatment come to the fore. News coverage focusing on the deaths of smuggled migrants often portrays coyotes as nefarious and exploitative, but the migrant-smuggler relationship is much more complex than suggested by th...

Donald Trump’s purported reference to “Sh*thole
Countries” has captured the (outraged) attention of the
global community.  And while there is some dispute as to
whether or not the President uttered those exact words,
what is not disputed is that the US President derided
certain countries while discussing US immigration policy
reform, suggesting that the US should have more
immigrants from countries like Norway. 

How the US Creates Sh*thole Countries seizes this unique
moment of global focus on the world’s most suffering
countries to address some causative factors, and the
extent to which their lamentable state is not of their
doing.  It questions the legitimacy, means and ends of US
interventions in their domestic affairs in pursuit of its
“interests”, which the US then regards as matters of
national security.  And from there it proceeds to other
questions:

Why and how does a country become a US target? 

What socio-economic, political and military policies—
overt and covert—does the US undertake to bring the
victim country into line? 

What are the results for the targeted countries? 

For US citizens, who have little idea what is going on, but
are footing the bill? 

The seasoned analysts contributing to this book come
from all walks of life and every shade of the political
spectrum. Some have held high positions in government
or at the United Nations; some taught or teach at
prestigious universities; some are in forced exile
because of their political beliefs and the exercise of their
Constitutional rights; some have spent time in prison for
acting on their beliefs; one of them sacrificed the limbs
on his body.

The catalyst for much of classical pragmatist political thought was the great waves of migration to the United States in the early twentieth century. José-Antonio Orosco examines the work of several pragmatist social thinkers, including John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams, regarding the challenges large-scale immigration brings to American democracy. Orosco argues that the ideas of the classical pragmatists can help us understand the ways in which immigrants might strengthen the cultural foundations of the United States in order to achieve a more deliberative and participatory democracy. Like earlier pragmatists, Orosco begins with a critique of the melting pot in favor of finding new ways to imagine the civic role of our immigrant population. He concludes that by applying the insights of American pragmatism, we can find guidance through controversial contemporary issues such as undocumented immigration, multicultural education, and racialized conceptions of citizenship.

In this working paper we will present a research methodology for describing and comparing corpus of video productions diffused and shared on social media platforms (here: You Tube). The objective of this research is: 1. to study and interpret the cultural representations of the figure of the migrant/immigrant and refugee in virtual local and global communities viewing, commenting and remediating (rewriting) such video productions and 2. to interpret these cultural representations as belonging to a diversity of (new) folk cultures offering especially people from the younger generations (the so-called Millennials and Post-Millennials also sometimes called Homelanders) an epistemic framework for thematizing and narrating the (social) Other (here: the migrant, the immigrant and the refugee). This paper constitutes the principal support of our course entitled “Cultural visions of (im)migrants and (im)migration in the digital social mediasphere”. This course is part of the EMICC (European Master in InterCultural Communication) program offered by a network of European universities and coordinated by the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) in Lugano . The methodology and results discussed in this paper will also be presented in the First Eurocampus Conference “Advances in Intercultural Communication” in January 2018 and hosted by the Universidade Aberta in Coimbra (Portugal). Finally, we would also like to stress that this is a first uncorrected version of a research article to be published in the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Communication, edited by Guido Rings and Sebastian Rasinger (expected publication date: end of 2018/first half of 2019).

A B S T R A C T This study is a case study of paths of success across different immigrant groups in the same national context. It investigated dimensions of immigrants' success and explored paths of success of immigrants from different countries of origin. Two main dimensions of immigrants' success were outlined: economic success and psychological well-being, when the latter included 'sense of belonging' and 'life satisfaction'. An instrument measuring both dimensions of success was developed. The study was based on data from the 2011 Immigrant Survey completed by a representative sample of the immigrant population in Israel, including 2927 immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, Asia & Africa, Europe & America, and Ethiopia. Structural Equation Modeling were used to generate the model of immigrants' success. The main paths of success were outlined. The path of the low-skilled visible minority contrasted with the path of other, more highly skilled groups of immigrants who resembled the local majority population to a greater degree. Understanding factors shaping the success of immigrants from different countries of origin might be used by policymakers to foster immigrants' economic and psychological well-being.

The documentary depicts the journey of a teenage girl and her mother who move to California in 2012 because of the Syrian civil war. Together they learn to live in a different culture and face challenges to their traditions - ­all while endeavoring to build a better future.

Le plus souvent ignoré de la politique d’immigration française, qui s’est essentiellement constituée autour d’impératifs économiques, l’aspect culturel des phénomènes liés aux migrations a néanmoins fait l’objet de mesures spécifiques. Au tournant des années 1980, il est possible de voir émerger une politique culturelle d’intégration. Retracer la genèse de cette politique donne des éléments d’analyse pour comprendre l’apparition d’un modèle français d’intégration et permet de mieux connaître les institutions qui portent aujourd’hui le projet de Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration.

What could a book on balut, an embryonated duck egg, possibly teach us about the world we live in? Margaret Magat hopes to delineate a whisper of subversion in the face of cultural domination by taking a street food from a peripheral corner of the Philippines and tracing its circulation both nationally and globally, through various mass mediated urban sites and diasporas, to pose sharp questions about culinary nationalism; omnivorousness and the accumulation of cultural capital; and the role of old and new media. Though folkloristics was one of the founding sources of food studies, it has receded from view under the glare of cultural anthropology, social history, and sociology, and thus the first compelling aspect of this book is Magat's utilization of that fecund theoretical domain. Our debt to folkloristics is hidden in what is thought to be common sense. Folklore was not only one of the earliest domains of scholarly inquiry to focus on the quotidian object such as food to understand people and their relationships to each other in a spatially-embedded, object-oriented way, but it also gave us a theory about why it had not been more extensively studied. Roger D. Abrahams formulated it succinctly as a " triviality barrier ". Out of folklore also emerges one of the earliest critiques of the fraught search for " authenticity " – that eternal question that haunts modern consumers of culture-undertaken by Regina Bendix, who links it to the discovery of the folk and their aura in nationalist historiography. Yet, that search for authenticity is the very reason why documentation and analysis of everyday life emerges in the first place, allowing us to accumulate data and critique it. By pursuing the apparently trivial balut...