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Stereotyped as “model minorities” who excel in the classroom, Asian Americans are more highly educated than all other U.S. groups. Once in the labor market, they outearn White Americans. Some believe this is evidence that White privilege, racial bias, and gender discrimination are fictitious narratives of a liberal “woke” agenda. Others use it as proof that confirms their stereotypes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter and harder working than other groups. While much attention has focused on Asian Americans’ academic achievement, far less research considers whether their later careers mirror their early success. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Jennifer Lee, Kimberly Goyette, Xi Song, and Yu Xie, management scholar Jackson G. Lu, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how Asian Americans fare in the workplace.

The ten articles in this issue examine the ways in which Asian Americans, due to geographic clustering, are advantaged at a national level but disadvantaged at the regional level, how gender, family, and marriage impact Asian Americans in the workplace, and the different ways Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market. Robert Manduca and Jane Furey reveal that while, on average, Asian Americans outearn White Americans at a national level, when compared to Whites living in the same metropolitan area, Asians earn only 88 percent as much. Sharon Sassler and Gabrielle Sorresso find that among computer science professionals, Indian women have a larger gender wage gap than White and Chinese women and experience larger marriage and parenthood penalties in earnings. Sojung Lim and Wonjeong Jeong show that Asian women are more likely to live with extended family than White women, leading to higher rates of employment among Asian women with children. Angelina Grigoryeva finds that while Asian Americans are more likely to receive stock-based compensation than White Americans, this is because they are more likely to work in jobs where stock options are provided. Asians and Whites working in the same types of jobs are equally likely to receive stock-based compensation and in similar amounts. Shih-Chun Chien and colleagues find that despite being the fastest-growing racial minority group entering the legal profession, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership positions. They find this pattern is attributed, in part, to employers’ pervasive stereotypes that Asian Americans lack traits typically associated with leadership, such as creativity and assertiveness.

This issue of RSF reveals that the perception of the Asian American advantage in the workplace is illusory and sheds light on the lived experiences of the “model minority” when they go to work.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the U.S. and the only majority foreign-born group in the country. With immigration fueling most of the growth, Asians are projected to surpass Hispanics as the largest immigrant group by 2055. Yet, “Asian” is a catch-all category that masks tremendous diversity. In this issue of RSF, sociologist Jennifer Lee and political scientist Karthick Ramakrishnan and an interdisciplinary roster of experts present nuanced narratives of Asian American integration that correct biased assumptions and dispel dated stereotypes. The result is an issue that makes an original and vital contribution to social science research on this understudied population.
 
Rather than treating Asian Americans as a monolithic group, the contributors use the 2016 National Asian American Survey to pinpoint areas of convergence and divergence within the U.S. Asian population. Despite their diversity, Asian Americans share many attitudes, behavior, and experiences in ways that exceed expectations based on socioeconomic status alone— what Lee and Ramakrishnan refer to as the “diversity-convergence paradox.”  This paradox — of convergence despite divergence in national origins and socioeconomic status — is the animating question of this issue of RSF.
 
Contributors Janelle Wong and Sono Shah find strong political consensus within the Asian American population, particularly with regard to a robust government role in setting public policies ranging from environmental protection to gun control to higher taxation and social service provision, and even affirmative action. Wong and Shah posit that political differences within the Asian American community are between progressives and those who are even more progressive. Analyzing where policy opinions converge and diverge, Sunmin Kim finds that while many Asian Americans support government interventions in health care, education, and racial justice, some diverge sharply with regard to Muslim immigration. Lucas G. Drouhot and Filiz Garip construct a novel typology of five subgroups of Asian immigrants spanning class, gender, region, and immigrant generation to examine varied experiences of immigrant inclusion. They show how different subgroups contend with the effects of racialized othering and inclusion simultaneously at play. Van C. Tran and Natasha Warikoo analyze both interracial and intra-Asian attitudes toward immigration and find diversity among Asians’ views by national origin: As labor migrants, Filipinos support Congress increasing the number of annual work visas; as economic migrants, Chinese and Indians support an increase in annual family visas; and as refugees, Vietnamese are least supportive of pro-immigration policies.
 
Placing Asian Americans at the center of their analyses, the contributors illuminate how such a broadly diverse population shares similar attitudes and experiences in often surprising ways. By turning a lens on the richly diverse U.S. Asian population, this issue of RSF unveils comprehensive, compelling narratives about Asian Americans and advances our understanding of race and immigrant integration in the 21st century.
 

Today there are over 40 million immigrants living in the United States, most of whom come seeking work to improve their earnings and living conditions. Depending on their education and skills, their social networks, government regulations, and other factors, immigrant groups tend to concentrate in specific sectors of the labor market. The articles in this issue of RSF, edited by sociologist Susan Eckstein and economist Giovanni Peri, explore how new immigrant groups navigate the opportunities and constraints presented by various niches in the labor market and how they influence the economic and social fabric of American society.
 
Several articles survey the history of immigrant labor market niches and how they have affected local economies. Siobhan O’Keefe and Sarah Quincy investigate a labor niche—farming—created by Russian Jews in rural New Jersey in the nineteenth century that revitalized local markets and reduced the outmigration of natives from the area. Zai Liang and Bo Zhou study the occupational niches held by Chinese immigrants from the turn of the century to present day. They show that restaurants have historically provided, and continue to provide, a major source of employment for low-skilled Chinese immigrants and that these immigrants tend to use new job-finding services such as employment agencies and internet advertising. These services have also allowed Chinese-owned restaurants to expand into new geographical locations.
 
Other contributors analyze the divisions between high and low-skill labor market niches. In his ethnographic study of restaurants in Los Angeles, Eli Wilson finds that Mexican immigrants primarily work “back of the house” jobs performing low-wage manual labor with few opportunities for advancement, while English-speaking whites hold higher-paid “front of the house” jobs interacting with customers. However, bilingual second-generation Latinos are often able to bridge these two roles, increasing their chances for promotions and greater job responsibilities. Yasmin Ortiga explores the effects of programs designed to recruit middle-skill nurses from the Philippines. She finds that because the United States only accepts a certain number of nurses, these programs have contributed to an oversupply of trained nurses in the Philippines and increased joblessness and underemployment there.
 
Together, the studies in this issue contribute to a deeper understanding of how and why new immigrants gravitate to specific lines of work. They also reveal how these labor niches influence markets both within the United States and abroad.
 

The notorious Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson made state-sanctioned racial segregation the law of the land in the United States in 1896. While the Civil Rights movement and subsequent Supreme Court decisions in the twentieth century did much to mitigate its effects, its consequences reverberate in ways large and small today. This special volume of RSF revisits the legacy of the decision on its 125th anniversary to consider the connection between constitutionally imposed segregation, institutionalized white supremacy, and enduring racial inequality. Edited by john a. powell, Samuel L. Myers, and Susan T. Gooden – eminent scholars in constitutional law, economics, and public administration respectively – the volume includes contributions from an interdisciplinary roster of experts, each offering fresh insights on the doctrine of “Separate but Equal” as it relates to citizenship, colorism, and civil rights in the United States.
 
The contributors grapple with a central overarching question: How is it that a court decision from 125 years ago still has such an enduring impact on racial disparities? john a. powell provides a nuanced overview of the legal context of the case to show that segregation was not only about separating people by race but was primarily about preserving White supremacy. The wide latitude for judicial interpretation granted to judges means that who decides matters, and today, just as much as in 1896, the justices sitting on the Supreme Court matter. If the views of Justice Harlan – the lone dissenter in Plessy – had prevailed, U.S. jurisprudence would look very different today. 
 
Thomas J. Davis discusses how control over personal identity lay at the heart of Plessy, and how its denial of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms reverberates today. From sex and marriage to adoption, gender recognition, employment, and voting, persistent discrimination turns in various degrees on state authority to define, categorize, and deny freedom of personal identity. To ensure personal autonomy in such domains requires the continual reevaluation of U.S. law to recognize the freedom of individuals to define and express their own identities.
 
Looking at enduring educational impact of “Separate but Equal,” which was not entirely rectified by the 1954 decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Dania V. Francis and William A. Darity, Jr., link today’s ongoing within-school segregation to the legacy of racialized tracking born from White resistance to desegregation. They demonstrate how a short-term, concerted effort to increase the number of Black high school students taking advanced courses could lead to long-term benefits in closing the educational achievement gap and eliminating institutionalized segregation within our schools.
 
Plessy rightfully stands as one of the continuing stains on the history of our country in its ambivalence and unwillingness to address White dominance. This issue of RSF both corrects and expands the narrative around the Plessy decision, and provides important lessons for addressing the nation’s continuing racial travails. It is ideal for use by scholars, community leaders, and policy makers alike.
 
 

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.

 Immigration has long been viewed as both essential to American society and a polarizing political issue. Recent flashpoints around immigration include a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the legality of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), enacted in 2012, to provide a pathway to citizenship for young, undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration has limited visas for foreign workers, banned travelers from predominantly Muslim countries, narrowed asylum-seeking procedures, and increased immigration enforcement. In this issue of RSF, edited by demographer Katharine M. Donato and economist Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, an interdisciplinary group of scholars traces the history and contemporary landscape of legal immigration to the United States.
Donato and Amuedo-Dorantes outline American immigration policies from 1880 to the present and consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on immigration. They underscore the fact that many recent immigration policies have been a result of presidential executive orders rather than legislative acts, making families and workers who enter the country without proper documentation especially vulnerable. They also examine how and why these orders are often racist and xenophobic, privileging some racial and ethnic groups and excluding others.
 Contributors to the issue investigate the various ways in which immigrants secure visas, working permits, and citizenship in the United States, including through employment and family ties, as well as special statuses for military veterans, refugees, asylum seekers, and unaccompanied minors. Daniel Costa writes about how temporary migrant workers’ precarious immigration status makes them particularly likely to experience workplace abuse because they fear losing their jobs and being deported if they complain about unfair labor practices. Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny consider the substantial increase in employer demand for temporary work visas, demonstrating how improved economic conditions have led to this surge, creating a viable alternative to hiring unauthorized workers. Julia Gelatt uses employment and economic data analysis to compare multiple classes of legal immigrants. Her research demonstrates that employer-sponsored immigrants are better educated, exhibit higher English proficiency, and work in more highly skilled jobs than other types of immigrants (including family-sponsored, humanitarian, and diversity visa immigrants).
            Other contributors examine the experiences of immigrants with special statuses, including veterans. Cara Wong and Jonathan Bonaguro find that Americans are more likely to support a path to citizenship via military service for immigrants who entered the country with the appropriate documentation, and that many Americans believe that undocumented migrants should be barred from the military, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and firefighting. Van C. Tran and Francisco Lara-García find little variation in early socioeconomic outcomes between refugee groups from various countries. They show that schooling and employment, along with strategic financial, community building, and other support services, are critical factors in the successful integration and improved socioeconomic outcomes of refugees. Luis Edward Tenorio finds that the patchwork of legal systems, including family, immigration, and federal courts that adjudicate the laws for children with special immigrant juvenile status, make for the uneasy and uneven integration of unaccompanied minors into key social institutions.
            This issue of RSF is a timely contribution that will invigorate the field of scholarly work on the American legal immigration system.
 

Located a mere fifteen minutes from Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley is an incubator for California's new ethnic politics. Here, Latinos and Asian Americans are the dominant groups. Politics are Latino-dominated, while a large infusion of Chinese immigrants and capital has made the San Gabriel Valley the center of the nation's largest Chinese ethnic economy. The white population, meanwhile, has dropped from an overwhelming majority in 1970 to a minority in 1990. 

Leland T. Saito presents an insider's view of the political, economic, and cultural implications of this ethnic mix. He examines how diverse residents of the region have worked to overcome their initial antagonisms and develop new, more effective political alliances. 

Tracing grassroots political organization along racial and ethnic lines, Race and Politics focuses on the construction of new identities in general and the panethnic affiliation "Asian American" in particular.

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.

Between the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador in 1979 and its conclusion in 1992, some 1.5 million Salvadorans fled the violence. This book focuses on the displaced Salvadorans who remained in Central America, seeking refuge in Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. Their story has been almost entirely overshadowed by the greater numbers who fled farther north to the United States; however, as Rachael De La Cruz shows, the Central American history of Salvadoran refugees is rich, complex, and instructive for scholars of refugee studies, international relations, and human rights.

The isthmus nations that received Salvadoran refugees did not react consistently, and the arriving Salvadorans themselves were not passive participants. National mythologies, perceptions of economic contributions and burdens, regional militarization, state violence, and varying capacities for refugee activism, compounded by the fraught and variable circumstances of the Cold War, together shaped the multitude of government attitudes and policies toward the refugee communities within these countries’ borders. Rarely were refugees simply “a problem to solve”; rather, they represented and acted as catalysts for economic, social, and geopolitical change.
 

The Hmong diaspora radiates from Southeast Asia to include far-flung nations like the United States, New Zealand, and Argentina. Sangmi Lee draws on the concept of diasporic identity to explore the contemporary experiences of Hmong people living in Vang Vieng, Laos, and Sacramento, California. Hmong form a sense of belonging based on two types of experiences: shared transnational cultural and social relations across borders; and national differences that arise from living in separate countries. As Lee shows, these disparate influences contribute to a dual sense of belonging but also to a transnational mobility and cultural fluidity that defies stereotypes of Hmong as a homogenous people bound to one place. Lee’s on-the-ground fieldwork lends distinctive detail to communities and individuals while her theoretically informed approach clarifies and refines what it means when already hybrid and dynamic identities become diasporic.

In-depth and interdisciplinary, Reclaiming Diasporic Identity blends ethnography and history to provide a fresh consideration of Hmong life today.

Taking us on a journey of remembering and rediscovery, anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez explores his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary fields of transborder and applied anthropology. He shows us his path through anthropology as both a theoretical and an applied anthropologist whose work has strongly influenced borderlands and applied research. Importantly, he explains the underlying, often hidden process that led to his long insistence on making a difference in lives of people of Mexican origin on both sides of the border and to contribute to a “People with Histories.”

In each chapter, Vélez-Ibáñez revisits a critical piece of his written work, providing a new introduction and discussion of ideas, sources, and influences for the piece. These are followed by the work, chosen because it accentuates key aspects of his development and formation as an anthropologist. By returning to these previously published works, Vélez-Ibáñez offers insight not only into the evolution of his own thinking and conceptualization but also into changes in the fields in which he has been so influential. Throughout his career, Vélez-Ibáñez has addressed why he does the work that he does, and in this volume he continues to address the personal and intellectual drives that have brought him from Netzahualcóyotl to Aztlán.

Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist shows how both Vélez-Ibáñez and anthropology have changed and formed over a fifty-year period. Throughout, he has worked to understand how people survive and thrive against all odds. Vélez-Ibáñez has been guided by the burning desire to understand inequality, exploitation, and legitimacy, and, most importantly, to provide platforms for the voiceless to narrate their own histories.

The journeys and experiences of refugees and migrants are deeply complex and highly varied. It takes critical reflections from a diverse range of fields and angles to communicate the nuanced tangles of power structures and inequalities on local, national, and international levels. Bringing (?) together over thirty contributions, Refuge in a Moving World discusses migration and displacement from a kaleidoscopic collection of voices.
 
Through interdisciplinary lenses, the contributors explore the ways that different people experience and respond to their own situations and to those of other people. Refuge in a Moving World combines vital reflections on the intricacies of conceptualizing experiences of forced migration and how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life. Ultimately, Refuge in a Moving World argues that working collaboratively to share experiences of migration and displacement fosters more sustainable responses to our moving world.
 

A comparative analysis of the politics surrounding the welcome afforded to refugees in Zambia and South Africa.

While state-based reception is frequently framed as one-off moments such as registration, Refugee Reception in Southern Africa proposes a new understanding whereby reception is a process that reflects the complex dynamics of contemporary refugee arrival. By adopting this understanding, the book demonstrates how reception is a complex and ongoing process of negotiations between refugees and the state. Indeed, the relationship between the refugee and host state often remains fragile and prone to ruptures, especially when less formal reception policies allow refugees to move back and forth between refugee camps and local areas. Nevertheless, through these negotiations, Refugee Reception in Southern Africa shows how reception policies are vital in shaping a refugee’s ability to settle and engage with local communities and labor markets.

Using the cases of Zambia and South Africa, the book explores why some countries maintain encampment reception policies for refugees and others use a more liberal “free settlement” approach, whereby refugees are granted freedom of movement and permitted to settle in cities and towns. This book offers an original and unique perspective on refugee hosting in southern Africa, one that does not look upon persons who flee across a border as a homogenous group whose movement abruptly ends once they arrive in a host state or refugee camp.
 

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
 

 

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.

This book follows the perspectives of refugee activists to examine cities shaped by layered histories of war, colonialism, and partition. Challenging the crisis-driven, state-centric frameworks that dominate migration and border studies – where refugees are often cast as passive victims or threats – the book foregrounds their agency in reimagining urban heritage. Moving beyond the edge of the state to the heritage sites of the urban sphere, Remaking Urban Heritage explores refugee-led walking tours in Berlin, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv, tracing the entangled geographies of the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Through a participatory ‘walk-along’ ethnography grounded in artistic practice, the book reconceptualizes heritage-making as a dynamic, contested, and transcultural process. By centring refugee storytelling, performance, and spatial knowledge, it offers a critical intervention into memory, urban, and migration studies – urging scholars and practitioners to rethink the politics of belonging amid ongoing displacement and to attend to the fluidity of urban heritage.

On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history.

Paul A. Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acquittal of the deputies who perpetrated it, spurred membership in the United Mine Workers. By blending archival and archaeological research with interviews, he weighs how the people living in the region remember--and forget--what happened. Now in positions of power, the descendants of the slain miners have themselves become rabidly anti-union and anti-immigrant as Dominicans and other Latinos change the community. Shackel shows how the social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding historic Lattimer connect in profound ways to the riven communities of today.

Compelling and timely, Remembering Lattimer restores an American tragedy to our public memory.

Remittance as Belonging: Global Migration, Transnationalism, and the Quest for Home argues that migrants' remittances express their  sense of belonging and connectedness to their home country of origin, making an integral part of both migrants’ ethnic identity and sense of what they call home. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork with Bangladeshi migrants in Tokyo and Los Angeles, Hasan Mahmud demonstrates that while migrants go abroad for various reasons, they do not travel alone. Although they leave behind their families in Bangladesh, they move abroad essentially as members of their family and community and maintain their belonging to home through transnational practices, including remittance sending. By conceptualizing remittance as an expression of migrants’ belonging, this book presents detailed accounts of the emergence, growth, decline, and revival of remittances as a function of transformations in migrants’ sense of belonging to home.

While there is a long history of state violence toward immigrants in the United States, the essayists in this interdisciplinary collection tackle head-on the impacts of the Trump administration.

This volume provides a well-argued look at the Trump era. Insightful contributions delve into the impact of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies on migrants detained and returned, immigrant children separated from their parents and placed in detention centers, and migrant women subjected to sexual and reproductive abuses, among other timely topics. The chapter authors document a long list in what the book calls “Trump’s Reign of Terror.”

Organized thematically, the book has four sections: The first gathers histories about the Trump years’ roots in a longer history of anti-migration; the second includes essays on artistic and activist responses on the border during the Trump years; the third critiques the normalization of Trump’s rhetoric and actions in popular media and culture; and the fourth envisions the future.

Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands is an essential reader for those wishing to understand the extent of the damage caused by the Trump era and its impact on Latinx people.

Contributors
Arturo J. Aldama
Rebecca Avalos
Cynthia Bejarano
Tria Blu Wakpa
Renata Carvalho Barreto
Karma R. Chávez
Leo R. Chavez
Jennifer Cullison
Jasmin Lilian Diab
Allison Glover
Jamila Hammami
Alexandria Herrera
Diana J. Lopez
Sergio A. Macías
Cinthya Martinez
Alexis N. Meza
Roberto A. Mónico
José Enrique Navarro
Jessica Ordaz
Eliseo Ortiz
Kiara Padilla
Leslie Quintanilla
J-M Rivera
Heidy Sarabia
Tina Shull
Nishant Upadhyay
Maria Vargas
Antonio Vásquez

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala began arriving without parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. In many cases, the parents had left for the United States years earlier to earn money that they could send back home. In Reunited sociologists Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks explain the reasons for Central American youths’ migration, describe the journey, and document how the young migrants experience separation from and subsequent reunification with their families.
 
In interviews with Central American youth, their sponsors, and social services practitioners in and around Washington, D.C., Castañeda and Jenks find that Central American minors migrate on their own mainly for three reasons: gang violence, lack of educational and economic opportunity, and a longing for family reunification. The authors note that youth who feel comfortable leaving and have feelings of belonging upon arrival integrate quickly and easily while those who experience trauma in their home countries and on their way to the United States face more challenges.
 
Castañeda and Jenks recount these young migrants’ journey from Central America to the U.S. border, detailing the youths’ difficulties passing through Mexico, proving to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials that they have a legitimate fear of returning or are victims of trafficking, and staying in shelters while their sponsorship, placement, and departure are arranged. The authors also describe the tensions the youth face when they reunite with family members they may view as strangers. Despite their biological, emotional, and financial bonds to these relatives, the youth must learn how to relate to new authority figures and decide whether or how to follow their rules.
 
The experience of migrating can have a lasting effect on the mental health of young migrants, Castañeda and Jenks note. Although the authors find that Central American youths’ mental health improves after migrating to the United States, the young migrants remain at risk of further problems. They are likely to have lived through traumatizing experiences that inhibit their integration. Difficulty integrating, in turn, creates new stressors that exacerbate PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Consequently, schools and social service organizations are critical, the authors argue, for enhancing youth migrants’ sense of belonging and their integration into their new communities. Bilingual programs, Spanish-speaking PTA groups, message boards, mentoring of immigrant children, and after-school programs for members of reunited families are all integral in supporting immigrant youth as they learn English, finish high school, apply to college, and find jobs.
 
Offering a complex exploration of youth migration and family reunification, Reunited provides a moving account of how young Central American migrants make the journey north and ultimately reintegrate with their families in the United States.
 

A bold, transnational interpretation of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinema that invites readers to encounter his films as meditations on history, migration, and collective survival.

The cinema of Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76) continues to resonate across borders and generations. His films—largely shaped by the 1947 Partition of Bengal and the experience of displacement—probe the fractured human condition through bold formal experimentation, unforgettable soundscapes, and a profound sense of myth and memory. Though his body of work was modest in size, Ghatak’s influence has steadily expanded, securing his place as a major figure in world cinema. This distinctive volume, which marks the centenary of this visionary filmmaker, gathers essays by important scholars and thinkers from around the world.

Moving beyond conventional film criticism and area studies, the collection stages new, transnational encounters with Ghatak’s films—approaching them as world texts, as sonic and visual experiments, and as meditations on migration, collectivity, and social existence.