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The recruitment and retention of foreign talent are crucial dimensions of the global education and labour markets. This paper examines how entwined migration policies and corporate practices shape the development and flow of international skill. I pair an original dataset of employment histories with 105 interviews with skilled migrants and institutional actors to examine the process of skill and knowledge formation among foreign-born workers in the United States and return migrants in India. The findings show that employer-sponsored visas constrain the development of foreign skill and inefficiencies in the implementation of H-1B visas andgreen cards are contributing to return migration. Return migrants leave the United States with knowledge and skills in STEM and business that they developed while studying and working in the United States. At the same time, multinational employers are increasingly conceptualising migration experience as a skill, giving return migrants an advantage in their home labour markets. The findings of this paper illustrate how interactions between state and corporate institutions shape the process of skill formation throughout the migration journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon an abundance of theoretical literature describing the role of deportation in the assertion of nation-state sovereignty, this article asks how deportees experience state sovereignty. Its conclusions are informed by an 'ethnography of removal' drawing on 62 interviews with 25 Mexican deportees interviewed in their communities of origin in Oaxaca after '3D' (detection, detention and deportation) removal. Acknowledging deportation as an example of legal violence, the paper describes various other types of violence (physical, structural and symbolic; executed by state agents, private contractors, other deportees, criminal organisations, and communities of origin) that produce US sovereignty at the level of individual experience. '3D' deportation causes suffering, embarrassment and fear. The paper shows how US borders are externalised on the micro and meso level without the involvement of state actors as deportees, invested with a new governmentality after being violently deported, exercise border controls over themselves and refrain from returning to the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be a 'good American'? Immigrants to the United States have obtained civic knowledge in a variety of ways, including federal textbooks and independent learning, and in different contexts over time, from employer-organised classes to handbooks written by civil society groups. This paper analyses citizenship manuals from one such group – the Daughters of the American Revolution ('D.A.R.') – to trace continuities and changes in definitions of American citizenship over the twentieth century. This paper is the first to make use of these manual archives, which contain over 30 different citizenship manuals, printed between 1921 and 1996. To compare and analyse the corpus of manuals, the paper employs both computer-assisted content analysis through topic modelling and textual interpretation. This approach provides rich descriptive evidence of how American citizenship norms change over a century, the influence of scarcity and war on that identity, as well as the changing role for organisations like the D.A.R. in the civic education of immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After release from immigrant detainment centres in the United States, a select group of unaccompanied immigrant children enter a community-based programme known as 'post-release services' (PRS) because of an identified vulnerability. Despite the name, post-release services do not confer actual services – only a referral for them. We use an intersectional lens to examine the tension for service providers within PRS policy between the rights of the child and the stigma and increasing criminalisation of being undocumented. This paper is based on document analysis of all public federal documents on unaccompanied children, ethnographic fieldwork in four PRS serving sites in the US, and interviews with 20 unaccompanied children, 17 sponsors, and 13 employees of the government subcontracting agency. Drawing on these unique data sets, we consider how age and legal status intersect in shaping the implementation of services for unaccompanied children and subsequent outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines if internal migrants at the turn of the twentieth century have influenced the long-term economic development of the counties where they settled over 100 years ago. Using Census microdata from 1880 and 1910, the distance travelled by American-born migrants between birthplace and county of residence is examined to assess its relevance for the economic development of US counties today. The settlement patterns of domestic migrants across the 48 continental states are then linked to current county-level development. Factors influencing both migration at the time and the level of development of the county today are controlled for. The results of the analysis underline the economic importance of internal migration. Counties that attracted American-born migrants more than 100 years ago are significantly richer today. Moreover, distance is crucial for the impact of internal migration on long-term economic development; the larger the distance travelled by domestic migrants, the greater the long-term economic impact on the receiving territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed-race people can be caught in a web of stereotypes – being pathologised as tragically 'mixed up' or heralded as the precursors of a 'rainbow nation'. Many of these stereotypes have come primarily from research and popular cultural images in the US and the UK. Recently, within Critical Mixed-Race Studies, there is a call to study mixed-race people outside of these stereotypes, particularly those living outside the US and UK. Ireland is a unique place to look at mixed-race experiences. As a post-colonial nation within Europe with a strongly racialised past (non-white to white) and a global history of emigration, Ireland is actively grappling with contemporary rapid migration and racial/ethnic change from the 2000s to today and is now possibly becoming less white. This paper examines the historical and contemporary contexts of being mixed-race in Ireland to analyse the potential political and social meanings of mixed-race Irishness today. It begins with a demographic snapshot of racial/ethnic changes in Ireland and examines the role of symbolic representations of mixed-race in Ireland. Through indicative qualitative interviews, it concludes with some tentative ideas about how understandings of mixed-race may be shifting within Ireland today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a wide range of research in the social sciences on mixed or multiracial identity, yet existing research in the United States looks primarily at the multiracial identity choices of U.S. born Black–White or White-Asian multiracial individuals. Therefore, this paper will expand the discussion through in-depth interviews with 22 young adults with parents of different races and ethnicities, who currently live in New York City, focusing on individuals with first-generation mixed background with varied racial/ethnic combinations, most of whom have transnational families with different religious and geographical background. This offers a more nuanced and global view and expands on previous research findings through an exploration of how factors such as family and community influence their identity choices. Yet recognizing how racial and ethnic identities exist and operate globally in different ways, we will focus on how living in a diverse global city with transnational ties affect these young adults, as they navigate their mixed identities. In particular, the varied ways young people's families, and different communities, influenced their identity development is central, especially when there are strong transnational ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) increased healthcare access for many Americans. But, its exclusion of most noncitizens and imperfect state-level implementation stratified coverage by documentation status, place, income level, race, and ethnicity across the U.S.A. Drawing from the sociological literature on boundaries, this paper argues that these demographic boundaries facilitate de jure and de facto stratification for immigrants and low-income Americans of various ethnoracial backgrounds. Using existing survey research regarding national ACA implementation and a qualitative study of ACA implementation in Boston, MA, this paper shows how such stratification may worsen existing disparities in healthcare coverage and access among the U.S. population. Implications regarding President Donald Trump and conservative lawmakers’ plans to repeal the ACA are also discussed. The paper contributes to researchers’ understanding of how public policies produce boundaries by place, documentation status, race, ethnicity, and income that facilitate inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historic and primarily Latino 2006 immigrant rights protest wave occurred in response to proposed federal anti-immigrant legislation (H.R. 4437). Research on the unprecedented series of demonstrations suggests that the draconian and racialized nature of the bill helps explain why it incited large-scale collective action. Utilising a new survey with a considerable oversample of Latino respondents, the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), this paper investigates the role that collective identities, racialisation, and social networks play in Latino support for contemporary immigrant rights activism. To do so, we incorporate measures such as linked fate, perceptions of anti-immigrant sentiments, knowing undocumented people, and concerns about immigration enforcement policies. The results of our analysis indicate that some of the same factors that influenced Latino engagement in the 2006 mobilisations, such as identity and racialisation, concerns over enforcement, and social networks, continue to impact Latino support for contentious politics on behalf of the foreign-born. We also find evidence that political party and past protest activity, play a significant role in explaining levels of support for activism. Our results have important implications for understanding how anti-immigrant policies and racialized nativism influence Latino support for contentious politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The immigrant rights movement in the United States evolved from largely localised and grassroots struggles in the 1990s into a coherent and coordinated national social movement in the late 2000s and 2010s. Scaling up in this way is challenging because grassroots organisations tend to lack the resources needed to operate at the national level over an extended period. This paper examines how this movement overcame the obstacle by focusing on role of national organisations in concentrating key resources (money, political capital, discursive power) and developing a national social movement infrastructure. The consequences of this process are shown to be paradoxical: While it enabled potent advocacy in the national political arena, the concentration of resources generated constraints on strategies and tactics, inequalities, and conflicts between different factions of the movement. This article describes the process by drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, tax files, newspapers, foundation documents, and White House visitor records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While discussions of state involvement in migration generally focus on restriction, states are actively involved in the promotion of labour migration through guestworker programmes, among other examples. While these programmes are state-sponsored, they often rely heavily on private actors in order to function. Drawing on the examples of the H-2 visa in the United States and the recruitment of foreign workers to Malaysia, this paper examines the common elements of state direction of migration combined with a focus on temporariness and an outsourcing of recruitment and supervision that are present in both guestworker schemes. In drawing on the geographically, economically, and politically distinct contexts of the U.S. and Malaysia we look to how these schemes contain a mixture of state and private authority which permits an especially potent form of control over the lives of guestworkers that is greater than what either state or private actors could produce individually. Such control raises important questions about the nature of public/private governance within migration more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between October 2013 and July 2016, over 156,000 children travelling without their guardians were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border and transferred to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). During that same period, ORR placed over 123,000 unaccompanied migrant youth - predominantly from Central America - with a parent or other adult sponsor residing in the U.S. Following placement, local communities are tasked with integrating migrant youth, many of whom experience pre- and in-transit migration traumas, family separation, limited/interrupted schooling, and unauthorised legal status, placing them at heightened risk for psychological distress, academic disengagement, maltreatment, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, fewer than 10% of young people receive formal post-release services (PRS). This paper addresses the paucity of research on the experiences of the 90% of children and youth without access to PRS. To bridge this gap, this article: (a) describes the post-release experiences of unaccompanied youth, focusing on legal, family, health, and educational contexts; (b) identifies methodological and ethical challenges and solutions in conducting research with this population of young people and their families; and (c) proposes research to identify structural challenges to the provision of services and to inform best practices in support of unaccompanied youth. [196 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entering the debate over segmented assimilation, this paper seeks to refocus discussion on a core, but neglected claim: that inter-group disparities among immigrant offspring derive from differences in a contextual feature shared by immigrant and immigrant descendants: a nationality's mode of incorporation. The paper engages in both theoretical and empirical assessment. We critically examine the concept of mode of incorporation, demonstrating that its operational implications have not been correctly understood; consequently, the core hypothesis has never been appropriately tested. The second part of the paper implements those tests, making use of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey. We do so by using nationality as a proxy for mode of incorporation, systematically contrasting more advantaged against less advantaged nationalities. We show: (a) that tests systematically varying modes classified as more or less advantageous yield inconsistent outcomes; (b) that positive or negative modes of incorporation are associated with few long-lasting effects; (c) that differences in governmental reception are particularly unlikely to be associated with interethnic disparities; and (d) that compared to theoretically relevant nationalities, neither Mexicans, a nationality assigned to a negative mode of incorporation, nor pre-Mariel Cubans, a nationality assigned to positive mode of incorporation, prove distinctive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1990, a temporary-to-permanent pathway was established for highly skilled workers admitted to the United States under non-immigrant programmes. This paper argues that this policy shift has allowed employers to play a crucial role in the immigration of highly skilled workers, thereby creating labour-market institutional selection that gives a salary advantage to highly skilled temporarily admitted workers retained in the US. Through analyses of the salary differentials among admission-category groups, the paper finds that the salary advantage is based on recruitment from Western countries, adjustment from temporary to permanent status after a second employer screening, working in the information technology sector and the private sector, holding a supervisory position, or having a skill-matched job, all of which are consequences of institutional selection rather than individual self-selection. The results also reveal a difference between those admitted from abroad and those recruited from graduating foreign students in US higher-education institutions, which suggests a distinction between overseas and domestic hiring. Policy implications for the US and other receiving countries are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent trends suggest a decline in the rate of intermarriage between Mexicans and non-Hispanic whites. In this paper, we argue that interpretations of this trend as a decline in preferences for intermarriage are misleading because of the lack of adequate data that captures both spatial and temporal variation in the level of intergroup contact. Using data from the Decennial Census (1980–2000) and the American Community Survey (2008–2011), we employ a novel methodological approach to disentangle the impact of spatial diffusion, ethnic replenishment, and shifts in preferences for homophily on Mexican ethnic intermarriage patterns across 543 Consistent Public Use Microdata Areas (c-PUMA). Once changes in the demographic composition of c-PUMAs are accounted for, multilevel models for repeated cross-sectional data provide no evidence of a change in the marital preferences of Mexicans over time. Trends in intermarriage rates are predominantly explained by compositional and structural changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses several less-explored dimensions of current scholarship on globalisation, migration and transnationalism: north–south migration streams, the role of second-generation ‘heritage migrants’ and the importance of social capital within unequal transnational social fields. We compare two circuits of second-generation migrants, Turk-Germans and Turk-Americans, engaged in ‘intensive transnationalism’ having independently moved to reside in their parents’ homeland. Istanbul becomes the site of homeland return for these distinct streams of educated heritage migrants. Cross-national comparison of the children of the more stigmatised Turk-German ‘guest workers’ with the socially less salient Turk-Americans of middle-class backgrounds offers insight into the way class networks and national capital are distinctly leveraged by adult children with immigrant parents of distinct contexts of homeland exit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our paper introduces this special issue of JEMS on the role of the local context in immigrant and second-generation integration in the United States. Recent literature has argued that national contexts are important for understanding the integration of immigrants and their descendents. The articles in this issue make the case that local contexts, broadly defined at any sub-national scale, are also important for understanding integration within the US; they suggest that it is incorrect to think of a singular and spatially undifferentiated integration process for US immigrants. In addition to previewing the contents of the articles in this issue, our paper includes a review of the meaning of generations and integration and a general discussion of the roles of local contexts in mediating processes of integration. This discussion raises questions about the appropriate spatial scale for the analysis of integration and for comparisons of the integration experience across contexts. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research on local contexts of integration within the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys a range of contemporary issues regarding illegal immigration in the United States, with a focus on the consequences of undocumented immigrants on the economy. The analysis looks at the effects of illegal immigration on jobs and wages in a dual labour market model and the fiscal impacts of illegal immigrants (taxes paid and costs imposed on society through use of public services). The paper argues that illegal immigration has a positive impact on the US economy; although illegal immigrants impose a fiscal cost at the state and local levels, this cost should be addressed by efficiently allocating resources between the federal and state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that transnational relations between the Mexican government and Mexican immigrants in the US are not new. However, the characteristics of these connections have varied across time, depending on the evolution and characteristics of migrant organisations, political and economic circumstances in Mexico, and foreign policy considerations involving US-Mexico relations. The historical links between the government and the Mexican population abroad have influenced the development of current organisations of Mexican immigrants in the US as well as the recent creation and development of the Mexican government's institutions to manage this relationship. For more recent years, we identify a change in Mexico's traditional approach to migration issues in the bilateral agenda, as well as a shift in the relationship between the Mexican immigrant communities and the government. The process of institutionalisation of this new relation began with the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad in 1990, and was strongly consolidated in 2003 with the creation of the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (IME). We argue that IME is the first transnational institution dealing with these issues and we explore some of the challenges it faces in order to achieve its objectives and exert a positive influence for Mexican migrants in the US. The paper is in three parts. In the first, we discuss the value of using a historical perspective for the study of transnational politics. The second part offers a historical account of the development of transnational relations between the Mexican government and the organised Mexican immigrant community from 1848 to 2005. In the third and final part we analyse the challenges faced by IME as a transnational institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from a survey of 2004 Latinos in four urban counties in the USA, this paper considers a question that has not been systematically investigated: how has increasing police involvement in immigration enforcement impacted the perceptions of the police that are held by immigrant and non-immigrant Latinos? Survey results indicate that many Latinos report fear of police, contributing to their social isolation and exacerbating their mistrust of law enforcement authorities. A substantial portion of Latino respondents report that they would be less likely to voluntarily contact the police if they are the victim of a crime, or to provide information about a crime, because they fear that police would use this contact as an opportunity to investigate their immigration status or that of their friends and family members. We use regression analysis to further analyse the determinants of these responses. Our findings suggest that negative encounters with police involving questions of immigration status and perceived unfair treatment, as well as vulnerabilities due to immigration and documentation status, contribute to social isolation and hesitancy to report crimes to police. These findings have implications for cooperation between police and Latino communities, particularly since local authorities have been enrolled in immigration enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper accounts for important shifts in the debate on immigration reform by considering the geographies of protest. Our findings point to the importance of urban hubs of activists and organisations that have worked with one another over extended periods of time. While these urban hubs constitute distinctive activist worlds, they have also connected to one another and coordinated nation-wide actions through a variety of networks (social media, interpersonal, and inter-organisational). Using interviews, network analysis, and data on funding, we show how this decentralised network evolved and eventually outflanked nationally centred and reformist advocacy organisations in recent anti-deportation campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A demographic transition to greater ethno-racial diversity, the product in part of large-scale immigration over decades, will create challenges and opportunities for Western societies in coming decades. In this paper, based on our study of the USA and four Western European countries, we sift evidence from the first decade of the twenty-first century to look for clues about the possible consequences of the transition for the integration of the second generation, specifically, the children of low-status immigrants. We find unmet challenges when it comes to educational attainment and early labour-market position. That is, although on average the second generation advances beyond its parents, in each society it lags well behind its agemates from the native majority. Yet we also find, using data from the USA, that segments of the second generation are experiencing social mobility into the upper tiers of the occupational hierarchy and socially integrating with members of the majority group, arguably expanding the societal mainstream. This paradoxical picture, we argue, captures crucial dynamics that will affect the near future in the wealthy West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For undocumented people who become eligible for a US immigrant visa, the pathway to lawful status bifurcates around one central question: how did you get into the USA? While most visa overstayers can adjust their status within the USA, undocumented border crossers must leave the USA to change their status. When they do, all but a few trigger a 10-year bar—often called ‘el castigo’ in Spanish or ‘the punishment’—on their return. This paper draws on a three-year ethnographic study to explore the process of legalisation for Latinos who entered and lived in the USA unlawfully. I pay particular attention to how ‘grounds of inadmissibility’ and federal criminal prosecutions for unauthorised entry disproportionately penalise working-class Latinos, creating a minefield of racialised obstacles to their lawful status. Together, I argue, racialised criminalisation and higher hurdles to lawful status amount to a one–two punch that makes it extraordinarily difficult for undocumented Latinos to ever change their status, even when they are eligible for an immigrant visa based on their marriage to US citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we examine patterns of congressional action and inaction on immigration issues in the USA over the past two decades, with attention to the impact of partisan polarisation and examples of the effects of public opinion on members' votes and the immigration agenda itself. Our analysis covers 391 immigration policy votes between 1993 and 2012. Analysing 10 Congresses allows us to test hypotheses about the effects of partisan polarisation on immigration policy-making in Congress over time. Congressional attention to immigration issues has waxed and waned, and relatively few bills were enacted in the period under study, although there were a considerable number of procedural votes on immigration measures. The relatively short list of enacted legislation over the 20-year period is due to the mechanisms that exist for stifling major change such as comprehensive immigration reform. On the other hand, in 2012 pressure for meaningful immigration reform increased as the result of powerful pro-reform coalitions, and the rising importance of a constituency of Latino voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, immigration has emerged as a highly contentious local issue in the United States, particularly in non-traditional settlement areas like new metropolitan gateways and suburban communities. This paper uses survey data from the Pew Research Center to analyse how geographic context within and across metropolitan gateways influences both perceptions of the local impacts of immigration, as well as respondents' attitudes toward immigration as a national issue. While immigrant concentration is positively associated with perceptions of immigration as a local problem, a relative absence of immigrants in a respondent's community predicts negative attitudes towards immigrants at the national level. Further, areas that respond unfavourably to immigration at the local level do not always coincide with the areas that are most opposed to immigration to the United States more generally. As such, this analysis identifies tangible differences between immigration as a local and national issue, suggesting a distinct unevenness in the multi-scalar politics of US immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper empirically examines the role of religion on immigrant integration outcomes. Specifically it focuses on Islam and tests the validity of the ‘clash of cultures’ hypothesis to find out whether high levels of attachment to Islamic values, practices and Muslim identity impede the cultural and civic integration of Muslim immigrant women into American society and polity. The statistical analysis of two original surveys administered to first- and second-generation Muslim immigrant women in Southern California indicated a paradox in their integration patterns. Commitment to Islam increased Muslim immigrant women's civic and political engagement but decreased their cultural and psychological integration into US society. The findings from the narrative analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with a selected subgroup of survey respondents help to explain Islam's paradoxical impact on Muslim immigrant communities' integration outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent Canada–US ‘Beyond the Border’ negotiations have been accompanied by a highlighting of the issue of unauthorised crossings at the Canada–US border. In this paper, I offer some grounded contextualisation of this current politicisation by drawing upon press reports and interviews to document Canadian border-resident and press constructions of unauthorised crossings in one Canada–US border region in the late 1990s to mid-2000s. The evidence suggests that there is widespread local awareness of these crossings, including the dangers and sometimes death faced by would-be migrants. The analysis explores why this knowledge has not served to challenge still-dominant constructions of a ‘benign’ Canada–US border and/or ongoing projects of border securitisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to improve our understanding of migration–development links by comparing the Mexico–US and Morocco–EU cases. Despite significant differences, Mexico and Morocco share a common geopolitical location on the global South–North migration frontier and a common position as prime reserves of low-cost, low-skilled migrant labour for the US and the EU. The analysis highlights the large extent to which Mexican and Moroccan migration is determined by business cycles and political-economic and labour-market transformations in the US and the EU. Mexican and Moroccan migration patterns and trends show striking similarities. Persistent economic gaps and migrant networks partly explain why, despite recruitment freezes in Mexico (1964) and Morocco (1973) and increasing border controls, migration has endured through family and irregular migration and a diversification of migration origins and destinations. Simultaneously, economic liberalisation and labour-market transformations in origin and destination countries have increased supply and demand for casual and informal labour in the service sector, agriculture and construction. In spite of surging remittances and the considerable contributions of Mexican and Moroccan migrants to improved living standards in origin areas, migration cannot overcome structural development obstacles and deeply ingrained political and economic inequalities in Morocco and Mexico. In fact, migration may deepen such inequalities and deflect the attention away from states' failure to create favourable conditions for equitable development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The migration of Nepalis to the United States of America is a recent phenomenon that has not received serious academic attention to date. This paper sheds light on this migration flow by analysing data gathered through a survey of 61 Nepalese migrants in the US. There are five major conclusions to be drawn. First, the migration of Nepalis to the US has escalated over the last decade. Second, the migrants tend to be highly skilled. Third, a lack of educational and career opportunities, along with increased migrant networks and political instability in Nepal, are the major factors driving the surge. Fourth, survey data suggest a rapid assimilation of these migrants into the American mainstream. Finally, although skilled Nepalese migrants are less likely to remit to their families, they contribute significantly towards the development of Nepal through personal initiatives and participation in transnational organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whiteness is often detached from the notion of diaspora in the recent flurry of interest in the phenomenon, yet it is a key feature of some of the largest and oldest displacements. This paper explores the specific contexts of white racial belonging and status over two centuries in two main destinations of the Irish diaspora, the USA and Britain. Its major contribution is a tracing of the untold story of ‘How the Irish became white in Britain’ to parallel and contrast with the much more fully developed narrative in the USA. It argues that, contrary to popular belief, the racialisation of the Irish in England did not fade away at the end of the nineteenth century but became transmuted in new forms which have continued to place the ‘white’ Irish outside the boundaries of the English nation. These have been strangely ignored by social scientists, who conflate Irishness and working-class identities in England without acknowledging the distinctive contribution of Irish backgrounds to constructions of class difference. Gender locates Irish women and men differently in relation to these class positions, for example allowing mothers to be blamed for the perpetuation of the underclass. Class and gender are also largely unrecognised dimensions of Irish ethnicity in the USA, where the presence of ‘poor white’ neighbourhoods continues to challenge the iconic story of Irish upward mobility. Irishness thus remains central to the construction of mainstream ‘white’ identities in both the USA and Britain into the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fundamental to the neoliberal era has been the systemic obsolescence of grand narratives of group and national exceptionality. This paper contends that the demise of grand narratives has proved particularly detrimental to anti-immigration groups in the developed Western economies. The obsolescence of metanarratives has made it difficult for anti-immigration organisations to enlist the virtue of national exceptionalism due to their increasing inability to effectively rationalise-in cultural terms-the exclusion of the foreign 'other'. Consequently, what is slowly emerging from the core of anti-immigration proponents on both sides of the North Atlantic Ocean is an unprecedented mass rationale for peremptory privilege through immigration policy that is largely free of traditional conceptions of otherness (race, merit, industriousness, etc.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment niching. They also may cluster geographically; these districts can be neighbourhoods where workers reside or places of work (industrial quarters where labour is performed). The intrametropolitan spatial division of labour is perhaps best conceived as the relationships among employment concentrations in industrial niches and places of work shaped in large measure by the geographies of residence. The analysis of six immigrant groups reported in this paper models the effect of residential concentration on the chances that an immigrant holds a job in a particular line of work, labours in a particular work place, or does both—works in a particular job and work place. The study, which uses Greater Los Angeles' census tracts for the analysis, reveals that residential patterns help to govern the extent of this industrial segmentation and employment geography but that this relationship is not consistent across immigrant groups. The investigation adds to the literature on labour market segmentation by ethnicity, gender, nativity and home-work relations and offers new perspectives on the relationship between spaces of production and social reproduction in metropolitan places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 60 years, the United States has accepted some two million refugees for resettlement. Standard opinion polls suggest that the American response to these refugees has been mixed. Yet, despite much ambivalence about particular refugees and where they may belong in the grid of American social and cultural categories, the notion of refuge and the imperative toward support and welcome to refugees endure. As an extended example, this paper considers press treatment of refugees in Richmond, Virginia during the last quarter of the twentieth century—before security concerns and surging numbers of illegal immigrants irrevocably changed the nature of American immigration. Unlike the ambivalent response that emerges in national opinion polls and some other venues, in this case the construction of refugees is neither negative nor ambivalent, but is instead solidly positive. This positive construction extends across a broad range of racial and national-origin groups and is conditioned by a peculiarly American notion of how refugees relate to broader American categories, particularly that of 'immigrant'. In this local story from the United States lies a broader tale of how refugees are woven into the existing social and cultural categories of the countries in which they resettle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last five decades, immigration has profoundly transformed the population of metropolitan New York, long divided by race and class. The almost-forgotten 'underclass' debate established that New York was the nation's capital of concentrated poverty, which grew significantly worse during the 1970s and 1980s. Though more recent data show that New York has achieved a remarkable turnaround since 1990, most probably associated with immigration, it remains a city of economic extremes and stubbornly high poverty. Concern about where new immigrants—and their children—might fit into this matrix of urban inequality led several leading social scientists to hypothesise that some members of the second generation would be downwardly mobile. To investigate this possibility, in 1999 and 2000, the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York (ISGMNY) surveyed 3,415 young people aged 18 to 32 years, from five immigrant and three native-born racial and ethnic backgrounds, about their life trajectories. This paper conducts an analysis of the contextual effects of the neighbourhoods in which respondents grew up on their later experiences in terms of educational attainment and labour market success. Using OLS and HLM modelling, we find small but consistent and theoretically interesting effects. In particular, growing up in a poor neighbourhood has a negative effect on later outcomes, while growing up in a black neighbourhood does not, once poverty is taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine how local labour market contexts matter for the Hispanic adult children of immigrants in the United States. Specifically, I consider how these workers fit into ethnic divisions of labour in five metropolitan areas: the traditional immigrant cities of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, and the newer immigrant gateways of Atlanta and Phoenix. I focus on the changing economies of these cities in the 1990s, and how industrial changes affect the jobs and relative wages available to immigrants and their adult children. I also examine the extent to which the adult children of immigrants are occupationally clustered in 'immigrant jobs'. Intergenerational occupational shifts vary by metropolitan area, but are heavily gendered across all of them. I also discuss the interactions of other scales of context, since state and national-level legislation, local organising efforts and internal migration all shape the settings within which the children of immigrants come of age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-skilled immigration to the United States is a growing area in immigration, labour and policy research. Research on this subject focuses on the labour market impact of the largest skilled immigrant group: H-1Bs, temporary visa-holders with at least a baccalaureate degree. Many studies have demonstrated that these workers are paid the prevailing wage, yet they continue to be recruited despite unemployment and wage stagnation in H-1B sectors. In this paper I argue that, to understand the attractiveness of H-1Bs, we must look beyond their effects on wages and unemployment, and frame the flow of skilled migrants to the US in terms of the broader advantages they provide: flexible labour, the most up-to-date skills, and the lower expectations of immigrants regarding working conditions and benefits. I broaden the debate on skilled immigrants by examining the relationship between recently arrived immigrant status and two crucial labour market dimensions: contingent employment and eligibility for employer-subsidised health-care and retirement benefits. In addition, wage differentials are reassessed with contingent status, years since immigration, and high-tech industry controlled. My findings support the conclusions of prior studies that H-1Bs are not 'cheap labour'; rather, this study shows they are utilised as flexible labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I review and examine the assumed link between intermarriage and integration. I focus primarily on literature from the US and Britain. Intermarriage is said to signal a significant lessening of 'social distance' between a minority group and the White majority, enabling unions between groups which would previously have been taboo. It is often assumed that intermarriage for ethnic minorities is the ultimate litmus test of integration, but is it? And if there is a link between intermarriage and integration, what is the nature and extent of 'integration' achieved by minority groups and by the minority partner? I argue that the link between intermarriage and integration is both more tenuous and more complex than many social scientists have argued, and needs a critical reappraisal, especially in multiethnic societies which are witnessing unprecedented levels of diversity, both across and within their ethnic minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Afrocuban cultural practices in New York City, specifically the 'folkloric' music and dance complex known as rumba. I look at these cultural performances as arenas in which black Cubans from the post-1980 migratory cohorts (among others) craft and negotiate identifications that are shaped—discursively and spatially—by the larger social contexts, but are also sites for contesting hegemonic constructions of Cuban identity. Although most participants claim they are not political, I argue that they are engaged in a politics of recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in political science and psychology emphasises the role of parental socialisation in political learning. However, because the children of immigrants living in the United States may have more experience and exposure to US politics than their parents, immigrant children may be a critical source of political information about the US within immigrant families. In addition, parents in immigrant families may be socialising their children to politics within a transnational context. Political socialisation in immigrant families may be a bi-directional process. This paper provides preliminary research on and raises important questions about how political learning takes place in immigrant families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the huge influx of immigrants into the United States in recent years, considerable efforts have been devoted to describing the extent and variation of labour market concentration across ethnic groups within or between regions. However, there is no consensus among social scientists on how to measure and identify ethnic labour market concentration patterns. The issues mainly include, firstly, how to define an employment sector - as an industrial or an occupational sector; secondly, how to break down employment categories; and thirdly the extent to which a job sector can be identified as an ethnic-concentrated sector, that is, what index and what threshold value should be used to define a 'niche' sector? Using the case of Chinese in the San Francisco Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area, this paper demonstrates how different choices could encourage different evaluation and understanding of multi-ethnic urban labour market segmentation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the strategy for controlling ‘unwanted’ immigration that has been implemented by the US government since 1993, and suggests explanations for the failure of that strategy to achieve its stated objectives thus far. Available evidence suggests that a strategy of immigration control that overwhelmingly emphasises border enforcement and short-changes interior (especially workplace) enforcement has caused illegal entries to be redistributed along the south-west border. The evidence also suggests that the financial cost of illegal entry has more than quadrupled; that undocumented migrants are staying longer in the United States; that migrant deaths resulting from clandestine border crossings have risen sharply; and that there has been a surge in anti-immigrant vigilante activity. Consequences predicted by advocates of the concentrated border enforcement strategy have not yet materialised: there is no evidence that unauthorised migration is being deterred at the point of origin; that would-be illegal entrants are being discouraged at the border after multiple apprehensions by the Border Patrol and returning home; that their employment prospects in the US have been curtailed; or that the resident population of undocumented immigrants is shrinking. It is argued that a severely constrained employer-sanctions enforcement effort that has left demand for unauthorised immigrant labour intact is the fundamental reason why steadily escalating spending on border enforcement during the last ten years has had such a weak deterrent effect. Reasons for the persistence of a failed immigration control policy are discussed, and alternatives to the current policy are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to review the evolution of Mexican migration to the United States in an historical context, paying due attention to economic factors in both countries and, for more recent analysis, setting the globalisation context. The article is in four parts. Firstly, the profile and trends of Mexican migration to the US are reviewed. Secondly, I present recent evidence and data on the incorporation of Mexicans in the US labour market; this helps to counteract the stereotype of Mexicans as temporary migrants. The third section of the article overviews the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, which helps to explain changing social, gender and geographical origins of Mexican migration in recent years. Fourthly, attention is turned to the US context, with a particular focus on processes of labour flexibilisation, segmentation and polarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the possibilities for transnational activities among the 1.5 and second generations and focuses on the effects of both social positions, such as class and ethnicity and receiving and sending state actions and policies on the potential for the maintenance of these generations' transnational ties. Empirically it is based on the experiences of poor Guatemalan indigenous and non-indigenous children living in Los Angeles—who are often members of 'transnational families'—as seen through the institutional spaces of the church and the maintenance of language. The study demonstrates that class and ethnicity affect the perceptions that the children's generations have of their parents' efforts to keep them connected to their places of origin, and argues that the nation-state, through its policies to limit movement across borders, is still a powerful actor that leads immigrants to focus on the host countries, particularly the children's generations. In the Guatemalan case there are only few opportunities and spaces that may foster the children's ties to the communities of origin; thus, this generation is not nearly as inclined as the parents' to remain linked to the origin communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares recent resurgences of racial/ethnic identity among Lithuanian Americans and Native Americans in the United States, and examines the phenomenon of 'ethnic re-identification', defined as the adoption of an ethnic identity after a period of non-identification. This comparison of two very different groups – one a racial category comprised of a variety of diverse indigenous groups, the other a white ethnic ancestry category with some, but relatively much less internal differentiation – provides us with an opportunity to identify several general processes shaping ethnic re-identification. Similarities in patterns of ethnic re-identification in these two groups suggest that ethnic re-identification tends to occur within particular historical epochs, for example the US civil rights era and the disintegration of the Soviet Union; often involves specific symbolic moments, such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island or the Lithuanian declaration of independence; and tends to be bolstered by various forms of individual and collective ethnic action such as visits to ethnic homelands – whether countries or reservations – or protest activism. Ethnic re-identification can both strengthen and weaken ethnic group solidarity: it is strengthened by the cultural renewal activities and inflow of resources generated by re-identifying group members; but is weakened by debates about ethnic authenticity and group boundaries that result from the influx of new, often non-traditional members and the transformation of traditional practices and institutions that accompanies cultural renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The racial identity of South Asians has long been a subject of controversy in the United States. Their inchoate racial status translates into a variety of racial descriptors being chosen by and for South Asians. This paper uses 1990 census data to examine the socio-economic and demographic correlates of the racial self-identification choices made by household heads of Asian Indian origin, both foreign-and US-born. The results of multinomial logit analysis show that respondents who are more acculturated to the United States are more likely to describe themselves as 'Black' or 'White' than are those with less familiarity with American society. However, higher socio-economic levels are associated with a greater likelihood of self-identification as South Asian on the census race question. Finally, comparison with a sample of Asian Indian children reveals the latter's greater tendency to be identified with a race other than South Asian, due both to their more extensive mixed ancestry and their larger share of US-born respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]