Results by title

112 books match the query 'Immigration' and 9 start with r

Sort by

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Immigration and Changing Identities

Kay Deaux

Russell Sage Foundation, 2018

Since the 1960s, the United States has undergone a profound demographic transformation due to increased immigration from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Today immigrants and their U.S.-born children represent approximately 25 percent of the population, or more than 85 million people. How has immigration changed the way that both newcomers and the native-born understand what it means to be American? This issue of RSF, edited by immigration scholars Kay Deaux, Katharine Donato, and Nancy Foner investigates how immigration has shaped the way longer-established Americans, as well as immigrants and their children, see themelves and others in terms of race, ethnicity, and national identity --- and also considers the implications for intergroup relations.

Several articles explore how immigrants negotiate their positions in the racial hierarchy and how they perceive themselves in relation to native-born groups. Michael Jones-Correa and coauthors find that while Mexican immigrants are more likely to identify as Americans the more they report positive interactions with both native-born whites and blacks, Indian immigrants’ identification with being American is largely shaped by positive interactions just with whites. Prema Kurien shows that in response to the wave of hate crimes after 9/11, Sikh Americans sought to be recognized as an American religious minority, as well as an ethnic group distinct from Indian Americans. In their study of the children of immigrants in middle adulthood, Cynthia Feliciano and Rubén G. Rumbaut find that some second-generation immigrants retain a strong attachment to an ethnic identity into their late thirties, but that ethnic identification for others wanes as their social identities as parents, workers, or spouses become more important.

Other contributors investigate the extent to which longer-established Americans respond to increased immigration. Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson show that whites living in areas with large or increasing racial minority populations are more likely to believe that anti-white discrimination is on the rise. Deborah Schildkraut and Satia Morotta similarly find that when millennials—particularly those who identify as white and Republican—are exposed to information on the changing racial makeup of the U.S., they express more conservative political views.

At a time when questions of immigration and national identity are at the forefront of our political and public discourse, understanding how immigrants and their offspring influence—and are influenced by—conceptions of race and identity is critical for social scientists. This issue provides key insights into the challenges of a rapidly changing population.

[more]

RSF

The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: The Deportation System and Its Aftermath

Caitlin Patler

Russell Sage Foundation, 2025

The United States is home to the largest deportation system in the world: Between 2001 and 2022, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out nearly 6.5 million deportations. Deportation is often framed as a singular event that happens to an individual. However, as public policy scholar Caitlin Patler and political scientist Brad Jones argue in this issue of RSF, deportation is a system that encompasses premigration, within-U.S., and post-deportation contexts and outcomes. With Congress recently approving a massive expansion of the US deportation system, understanding its consequences is more important than ever before.

In this issue, an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore the wide range of impacts of the U.S. deportation system. The introductory chapter by Patler and Jones defines the U.S. deportation system and provides a comprehensive historical context for understanding its causes and consequences. Mass deportation is enabled primarily through the merging of U.S. immigration and criminal laws. Ian Peacock explores the proliferation of 287(g) agreements, which deputize local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. He shows that counties with stronger ties to public official associations, such as the National Sheriff’s Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America, were more likely to adopt identical 287(g) agreements, devote more jail space to ICE detainees, and comply with ICE detainer requests at higher rates. The issue also presents empirical analyses of the consequences of the US deportation system. Articles by Youngjin Stephanie Hong and colleagues, Cora Bennett and colleagues, and J. Jacob Kirksey and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, link deportation to reduced Head Start enrollment, lower K-12 test scores, and declines in college enrollment, respectively. The remaining articles turn to the aftermath of deportation. Erin R. Hamilton and colleagues show that between 2015 and 2020, 11,000 individuals were de facto deportees—family members who leave the country because another family member has been deported—in Mexico, with a disproportionate number being women and children. Further highlighting the importance of family, Ángel A. Escamilla García and Adriana M. Cerón analyze survey data from recently deported Central Americans and find those who left minor children in the U.S. were more likely to intend to remigrate to the U.S.

This issue of RSF sheds light on various dimensions of the increasingly punitive U.S. deportation system and the many ways it harms individuals and communities. In the current era of mass expansion of immigration law enforcement, it will be a valuable educational tool for students, faculty, policymakers, and many other stakeholders.

[more]

Radical Hospitality

American Policy, Media, and Immigration

Nour Halabi

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Radical Hospitality: American Policy, Media, and Immigration re-imagines the ethical relationship of host societies towards newcomers by applying the concept of hospitality to two specific realms that impact the lives of immigrants in the United States: policy and media. The book calls attention to the moral responsibility of the host in welcoming a stranger. It sets the stage for the analysis with a historical background of the first host-guest diads of American hospitality, arguing that the early history of American hospitality was marked by the degeneration of the host-guest relationship into one of host-hostage, normalizing a racial discrimination that continues to plague immigration hospitality to this day. Author Nour Halabi presents a historical policy and media discourse analysis of immigration regulation and media coverage during three periods of US history: the 1880s and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1920s and the National Origins Act and the 2000s and the Muslim travel ban. In so doing, it demonstrates how U.S. immigration hospitality, from its peaks in the post-Independence period to its nadir in the Muslim travel ban, has fallen short of true hospitality in spite of the nation’s oft-touted identity as a “nation of immigrants.” At the same time, the book calls attention to how a discourse of hospitality, although fraught, may allow a radical reimagining of belonging and authority that unsettles settler-colonial assumptions of belonging and welcome a restorative outlook to immigration policy and its media coverage in society.

[more]

Refugees and Citizens in Twentieth-Century East Central Europe

An Unlikely Refuge?

Michal Frankl

Central European University Press, 2026

Visited by violence and wars, border changes and political instability, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes as well as ethnic conflict, cleansing, and genocide, East-Central Europe in the twentieth century seemed an unlikely place of protection for refugees. This volume challenges this widespread view and explores a variety of forms of refugee protection, humanitarianism, and refugee agency in settings beyond the perceived stability of “Western” liberal democracies. Analyzing Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Yugoslavia over the twentieth century, the contributors provide a multi-faceted picture of refugee reception and aid, or its absence, across very different political regimes.

[more]

Refugees in America

Stories of Courage, Resilience, and Hope in Their Own Words

Lee T Bycel

Rutgers University Press, 2019

It is not an easy road—but hope is the oxygen of my life. These insightful words of Meron Semedar, a refugee from Eritrea, reflect the feelings of the eleven men and women featured in this book. These refugees share their extraordinary experiences of fleeing oppression, violence and war in their home countries in search of a better life in the United States.

Each chapter of Refugees in America focuses on an individual from a different country, from a 93-year-old Polish grandmother who came to the United States after surviving the horrors of Auschwitz to a young undocumented immigrant from El Salvador who became an American college graduate, despite being born impoverished and blind. Some have found it easy to reinvent themselves in the United States, while others have struggled to adjust to America, with its new culture, language, prejudices, and norms.

Each of them speaks candidly about their experiences to author Lee T. Bycel, who provides illuminating background information on the refugee crises in their native countries. Their stories help reveal the real people at the center of political debates about US immigration.

Giving a voice to refugees from such far-flung locations as South Sudan, Guatemala, Syria, and Vietnam, this book weaves together a rich tapestry of human resilience, suffering, and determination.

Profits from the sale of this book will be donated to two organizations that are doing excellent refugee resettlement work and offer many opportunities to support refugees: HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) hias.org International Rescue Committee (IRC) rescue.org

[more]

Regulating Difference

Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West

Marian Burchardt

Rutgers University Press, 2020

2021 ISSR Best Book Award (International Society for the Sociology of Religion)

Transnational migration has contributed to the rise of religious diversity and has led to profound changes in the religious make-up of society across the Western world. As a result, societies and nation-states have faced the challenge of crafting ways to bring new religious communities into existing institutions and the legal frameworks. Regulating Difference explores how the state regulates religious diversity and examines the processes whereby religious diversity and expression becomes part of administrative landscapes of nation-states and people’s everyday lives. Arguing that concepts of nationhood are key to understanding the governance of religious diversity, Regulating Difference employs a transatlantic comparison of the Spanish region of Catalonia and the Canadian province of Quebec to show how processes of nation-building, religious heritage-making and the mobilization of divergent interpretations of secularism are co-implicated in shaping religious diversity. It argues that religious diversity has become central for governing national and urban spaces.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.

[more]

Remaking Chinese America

Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940-1965

Zhao, Xiaojian

Rutgers University Press, 2001

In Remaking Chinese America, Xiaojian Zhao explores the myriad forces that changed and unified Chinese Americans during a key period in American history. Prior to 1940, this immigrant community was predominantly male, but between 1940 and 1965 it was transformed into a family-centered American ethnic community. Zhao pays special attention to forces both inside and outside of the country in order to explain these changing demographics. She scrutinizes the repealed exclusion laws and the immigration laws enacted after 1940. Careful attention is also paid to evolving gender roles, since women constituted the majority of newcomers, significantly changing the sex ratio of the Chinese American population.

As members of a minority sharing a common cultural heritage as well as pressures from the larger society, Chinese Americans networked and struggled to gain equal rights during the cold war period. In defining the political circumstances that brought the Chinese together as a cohesive political body, Zhao also delves into the complexities they faced when questioning their personal national allegiances. Remaking Chinese America uses a wealth of primary sources, including oral histories, newspapers, genealogical documents, and immigration files to illuminate what it was like to be Chinese living in the United States during a period that—until now—has been little studied.

[more]

Reproducing the French Race

Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century

Elisa Camiscioli

Duke University Press, 2009

In Reproducing the French Race, Elisa Camiscioli argues that immigration was a defining feature of early-twentieth-century France, and she examines the political, cultural, and social issues implicated in public debates about immigration and national identity at the time. Camiscioli demonstrates that mass immigration provided politicians, jurists, industrialists, racial theorists, feminists, and others with ample opportunity to explore questions of French racial belonging, France’s relationship to the colonial empire and the rest of Europe, and the connections between race and national anxieties regarding depopulation and degeneration. She also shows that discussions of the nation and its citizenry consistently returned to the body: its color and gender, its expenditure of labor power, its reproductive capacity, and its experience of desire. Of paramount importance was the question of which kinds of bodies could assimilate into the “French race.”

By focusing on telling aspects of the immigration debate, Camiscioli reveals how racial hierarchies were constructed, how gender figured in their creation, and how only white Europeans were cast as assimilable. Delving into pronatalist politics, she describes how potential immigrants were ranked according to their imagined capacity to adapt to the workplace and family life in France. She traces the links between racialized categories and concerns about industrial skills and output, and she examines medico-hygienic texts on interracial sex, connecting those to the crusade against prostitution and the related campaign to abolish “white slavery,” the alleged entrapment of (white) women for sale into prostitution abroad. Camiscioli also explores the debate surrounding the 1927 law that first made it possible for French women who married foreigners to keep their French nationality. She concludes by linking the Third Republic’s impulse to create racial hierarchies to the emergence of the Vichy regime.

[more]