Anti-immigrant Politics Research Articles

Exploring Program Process at Movimiento La Libertad: Examining Nuances of Youth Programs That Develop Latinx Critical Consciousness Toward Educational Injustice and Anti-Immigrant Politics

ABSTRACT In the midst of political attacks on public schools to prevent discussions on social injustice and Latinx youth culture, there are after-school programs that nurture Latinx youth critical consciousness and social justice activism. This study uses agencies of transformational resistance (ATR) as a framework to explore one after-school program’s organizational processes that foster Latinx critical consciousness and social justice activism. Using semi-structured interviews, the data revealed the (a) curriculum, (b) pedagogy, and (c) co-conspirators are three organizational processes that nurtured Latinx youth critical consciousness. This study contributes to the critical youth development scholarship by highlighting nuances of three program processes of one Latinx youth afterschool program in an urban city in Iowa. This study suggests afterschool programs afford Latinx with organizational processes that nurture their critical consciousness. The Midwest, and specifically Iowa, have a growing Latinx population that is understudied.

Exploring the Multidimensions of Wellbeing that Latinx Youth Experienced When they Engaged in Critical Action Toward Anti-Immigrant Politics

Latinx youth are often engaged in critical action to transform social injustices, yet we know little about the wellbeing of Latinx youth activists. This study draws on critical ethnographic research to understand the multidimensions of wellbeing that Latinx youth experienced when they engaged in critical action toward anti-immigrant politics during the Trump Era. Data collected through open-ended interviews with Latinx youth who participated in social protests revealed that (a) concepts of wellbeing need to be extensively explored for a more nuanced understanding of its characteristics, and (b) when youth engage in critical action, they experience physical and socioemotional wellbeing in distinct ways. This research contributes to the critical consciousness and wellbeing scholarship by (1) adding to the dearth of research on Latinx youth physical wellbeing and critical action, (2) theorizing nuances of physical, mental, and socioemotional wellbeing as simultaneously present during critical action, and (3) centering the voices and experiences of Latinx youth, specifically Latina youth, who have historically been omitted from the literature.

Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America

Abstract To make a nation on stolen land using enslaved labor, the early American state relied on gun and immigration policy to create a well-armed white settler population. This legacy continues to animate modern conservativism, which is staked on supporting gun-friendly and anti-immigrant policies. Despite this history and ongoing political reality, however, the sociology of migration has largely ignored the relationship between firearms and immigration politics. To explore this relationship, the current study draws on 20 months of ethnographic data from the U.S.-Mexico border. I show how contemporary American gun culture bolsters anti-immigrant organizations through two mechanisms. First, gun shows and shooting ranges are important sites of recruitment among anti-immigrant groups. Second, the thrill of handling firearms mitigates the monotony of everyday anti-immigrant activism, while also easing the disenchantment that participants may otherwise feel about the effectiveness of their actions in bringing about long-term change. The article concludes by urging scholars of American politics to be mindful of the legacies of settler-colonialism and to take seriously the reinforcing effects of guns on nativist politics.

Social Trust, Human Values, and Anti-immigrant Sentiment: Does Trust Work With or Against Values?

Abstract Two separate lines of literature have analyzed the role social trust and human values, such as universalism and conservatism, have on anti-immigrant sentiment. While both show strong effects, the question of whether social trust weakens or strengthens already embodied values has not been addressed. The possibility that trust works against or with conservatism, for example, predicts two opposing forces on anti-immigrant sentiment. This study analyzes the potential moderating effect of trust on human values, and how this varies cross-nationally. It develops a conceptual framework that hypothesizes different models of trust and tests these using eight rounds of the European Social Survey (2002–2016). Findings point to trust consistently working with values, which suggests a magnification of conservative values’ anti-immigrant effects. While there is little evidence for national cultures of trust and values, country-specific results show variation in how trust moderates values, with greater evidence for trust’s moderation of conservatism and some unpredicted patterns in countries like Cyprus. Findings are discussed within the context of anti-immigrant politics and entrenched values, scholarly debates surrounding bridging and bonding, and the resulting extent of social trust’s radius.

Aktiv modstand

In this article, we examine the notion of ‘active resistance’ as a distinct activist and artistic practice. With the so-called Banana Collective, an art collective comprised of a wide variety of people, as our point of departure we investigate a new mode of political art in which critical, caring, loud-mouthed, uncompromising and loving resistance toward a violent political system are practised simultaneously. This resistance takes place at the edges of democracy, it concerns people our society has displaced at these edges (e.g., refugees and immigrants), but the resistance also finds its way to museums and concert halls: venues where more advantaged eyes are looking. The article discusses whether functioning in this spectrum is what makes The Banana Collective’s work stand out within an increasingly conscious and political art scene. It investigates the collective’s specific take on socially engaged art and points to its potential for influencing current neoliberal and anti-immigrant politics. The article aims to shed light on the specific type of avant-gardism practiced by the group: an avant-gardism that seeks a more radical amalgamation of life and art by building new spaces of appearance and a new language of resistance. And it attempts to answer if this type of direct avant-gardism has the potency of political or/and social change.

Powellite nostalgia and racialised nationalist narratives: Connecting Global Britain and Little England

This article explores how a Powellite form of nostalgia – named for the anti-immigration politics of former British MP Enoch Powell – connects seemingly contradictory nationalist narratives known as Global Britain and Little England. While the former is typically aligned with an expansive and buccaneering national biography, the latter is held to operate via a more defensive and exclusionary imaginary. This article challenges such a binary distinction by demonstrating how the two discursive strands are intimately connected by nostalgic views about white English racial dominance, cultivated during Britain’s pursuit of empire. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of verbal and visual sources from the Brexit referendum, plus 13 interviews with Leave campaigners, the article shows how Powellite nostalgia reproduces gendered and racialised colonial images of the nation amid immigration ‘crisis’. Despite the detoxifying effects of much post-referendum Brexit analysis, the article also demonstrates how Powellite nostalgia is shared across the Eurosceptic spectrum and within broader English culture, persisting into the post-Brexit era.

Adolescent immigrant youth: Creating spaces of belonging

Abstract Drawing on 24 months of participant observation and interviews with adolescent arrivals in the central coast region of California, this study examines how recently arrived immigrant teens create spaces of belonging. This immigrant population is simultaneously undergoing two life-changing transitions—adolescence and immigration. These two, life-altering transitions, greatly shape the trajectories of immigrant youth in the host country. Unfamiliar with US customs, the educational system, or the mainstream language, adolescent arrivals constantly struggle to belong in a place they hardly know. I advance the concept of immigrant youth vitality to conceptually analyze how shared experiences based on the age of migration and context of reception shape how immigrant youth create safe spaces for themselves. As recent immigrants and teenage newcomers, adolescent arrivals are experiencing for the first time the wrath of anti-immigrant politics directed at them. This study shows that adolescent arrivals often navigate life in the host country by relying on the familiar and their collective experiences including discrimination and exclusion to create spaces where they feel safe and welcomed. I find that by claiming safe spaces the youth actively engage in redefining what belonging means, looks, and feels like for newcomer teenagers.

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino The Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) began publication in 1998 as the official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies. With the current issue, we are now commemorating the journal's twenty-fifth anniversary and to mark this significant moment, we invited distinguished scholars to comment on what they view as important intellectual developments in Asian American Studies. We had intended these "reflections of the field" essays to provide a focused and timely critique on a given topic that coincides with their own area of research. In their respective essays, Moon-Ho Jung, Professor and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies in the History Department at the University of Washington, and Martin Manalansan IV, Professor and the Beverly & Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts in the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, did just this and more. Moon-Ho Jung begins with an arresting vignette–lasting a few minutes at most–of an interaction between Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn that occurred in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq. This fleeting interaction sets the stage for Jung's incisive critique of nationalism and its persistent existence in articulations of Asian American history. Like some of the most significant contributions in Asian American studies, Jung takes a seemingly minute exchange and analytically pulls out a meaningful assertation that lies beneath–that the narrative of "immigrant America" is a nationalistic, sanitizing process that reinforces US empire. Martin Manalansan, takes a different but equally powerful approach in his essay. Following his own (disjointed) career trajectory, Manalansan outlines the experience of exceptionalism and isolation that results from the ways in which Asian American studies and LGBTQ studies have each worked to institutionalize their respective fields. Ever the optimist, Manalansan concludes his essay by providing an analytical key to creating a more expansive, fluid, and [End Page v] coalitional future–it is in fact something we already know as foundational to the beginnings of both Asian American studies and LGBTQ studies. He writes that we need to get back to "street knowledge;" grounded in the "realities of injustices, oppressions, and violence that compel us to act and move beyond institutionalized arrangements and scripted futures." To round out the commemorative section of this issue, Donna Doan Anderson took on the challenge of articulating a history of JAAS. Editorial Assistant for JAAS and graduate student in history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, Anderson contacted past editors of JAAS and sorted through data accumulated over the past twenty-five years to provide a snapshot of the journal and its reflection of the many shifts and tensions in the field. Anderson astutely notes that JAAS exists to "grapple with the field's growing pains" and, while the journal has successfully developed into an important academic resource (top 10 percent of journals viewed on Project MUSE!), questions remain about the costs of institutionalization and the current purpose of Asian American studies. As Editors of JAAS, we view these pressing, difficult concerns as central to the continued relevance of the journal itself. It is why JAAS exists. The next section of this issue is devoted to two research articles. The first is an important contribution by Na-Rae Kim, which focuses on the shifting cultural, legal, and political uses of North Koreans in the US imaginary. Bringing together theoretical critiques of war, militarization, humanitarianism, and critical refugee studies, Kim analyzes memoirs by a North Korean defector and a Korean American journalist about their experiences in North Korea, both published in 2015. Kim argues that 2015 was a pivotal year in which North Korean refugees became assimilable; culminating in 2018, when Donald Trump (who won the presidency based largely on anti-immigration politics) featured Ji Seong-ho, a North Korean defector, as an "American hero" in his State of the Union address. Kim's fascinating interdisciplinary study thoughtfully and engagingly explains how such an incongruent event came to pass. She shows also that the narrative structure of both memoirs are familiar constructions, with deep roots in both US and global literary traditions. Kim summarizes her analysis by reinforcing a foundational lesson in...

Integrating Public Health Research and Teaching With Social Justice Activism: Lessons From 80 Years of Practice.

In this commentary, we reflect on the lessons we have learned from our successes and failures in aligning the roles of scholars and activists. Our hope is to provide insights that can guide public health students, faculty, practitioners, and activists seeking to chart their professional, political, and personal futures in today's polarized and catastrophe-burdened world. Several experiences motivate us to write this commentary now. In the last few years, inspired in part by the new activism against systemic racism sparked by the murder of George Floyd and others, growing climate emergencies, the COVID pandemic, anti-immigrant politics, increasing anti-Asian acts of violence, gun bloodshed, attacks on the right to reproductive and sexual health, resurgence of interest in worker organizing, and the ongoing quest for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTQI+) rights, we are impressed by the number of young people engaged in activism to defend and expand their rights and show that another world is possible.

The immigration scholarship of Stephen Castles

The immigration scholarship of Stephen Castles

Constitutional Generation

The potential of emancipatory social movements to generate new legal norms is a source of hope for feminist activists. Yet there are also serious doubts as to the impact that marginalized women can have on legal institutions and constitution-making. This tribute to Drucilla Cornell foregrounds her contributions to theorizing women’s movements as a source of social-cultural values that could spark constitutional transformation. While Cornell’s concept of “global apartheid,” which exposes the linkages among legalized racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation, and anti-immigrant politics, might seem to reinforce doubts concerning women’s capabilities, the overall legacy of her legal philosophy is hopeful. Building on social movement practices of intergenerational storytelling, ethical witnessing, historical recollection, and respect for the dignity of women brutalized by apartheid systems, Cornell envisioned a revolutionary constitutionalism powerful enough to dismantle global apartheid. Out of women’s movement spaces, she showed us, dignitarian norms emerge with momentum to transform constitutional law.

Borderland (Narco) Folk Saints and Texas Media

This study investigates and reflects upon the interpretations of (narco) folk saints on the Texas–Mexico border by analyzing their recent representations in local Texan and national U.S. print media. These articles portray the melding of religion and crime to promote anti-immigration ideas and politics in Texas. To understand the connection between culture and crime on the Texas–Mexico border, this essay first delves into each aspect individually, providing their origins and historical context. An analysis of U.S. and Mexican statistics illustrates that many of the societal issues spurring the creation and devotion of folk saints remain prevalent in borderland culture today, including governmental shortcomings, dissatisfaction with the Church, social conditions, and media prejudice. The ubiquity of these themes in borderland daily life continuously incites more (narco) folk saint devotees, and Texas print media further distort the relationship among religion, culture, and crime until they eventually become inseparably intertwined in popular public opinion.

Politicized ethno-racial shock as group threat: “Refugee crisis” immigration and anti-immigrant voting in Sweden

ABSTRACT Far-right politics has gained significant support across Europe in recent decades. Previous literature has investigated the conditions that lead to immigrants being perceived as “threats”, leading to increased support for anti-immigrant parties. However, how certain “shock events” – times of dramatic change – mobilize far-right support around anti-immigrant sentiment has been understudied. Drawing on social movement literature, I examine how support for anti-immigrant politics was driven by demographic change during the “refugee crisis” in Sweden. I use a unique dataset on Swedish municipalities (N = 290) between 2014 and 2018 to examine the relationship between immigration and far-right outcomes. I show that increases in Syrian immigrants during the “refugee crisis” led to significant gains in support for anti-immigrant politics at the municipal level. I suggest that the “refugee crisis” constituted a politicized ethno-racial shock that lead to increases in far-right support, as political actors seized on increased immigration to mobilize around threat perceptions.

The entanglement of substantive and symbolic politics in immigrant integration: insights from a regional state in Germany

ABSTRACT When discussing the governance of immigrant integration, researchers and policymakers have gone back and forth in either conceiving national governments as determining immigrant integration or ascribing the local level as a strong influence in this field of policy-making. This article focuses on the regional level instead, which has so far often been left out of the picture. Based on extensive fieldwork in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration in the regional state Baden-Württemberg in Germany, we examine the character of immigrant integration policy-making in Baden-Württemberg in the aftermath of the long summer of migration. Our findings show the pertinence of symbolic uses of integration policies in combination with substantive uses. We make sense of these findings in light of an increased role of the regional level, the intrinsic symbolic character of immigrant integration, and the resurgence of anti-immigrant politics after 2015 in Baden-Württemberg. Based on our findings we counter a common binary of substantive and symbolic uses of policies and argue that these are often combined and entangled. Furthermore, the results of this study underscore that policy-making on immigrant integration is not reserved for municipalities and national governments and adds that the regional level plays a role too.

The spillover of anti-immigration politics to the schoolyard

There has been a resurgence in populist politics, often accompanied by anti-immigrant rhetoric. This may potentially spill over into societal hostility towards immigrants. We use census data on 5th-grade Italian students to estimate the causal effect of anti-immigration politics on school bullying. Using variations in the timing of municipal elections, we demonstrate that where elections occur and the anti-immigration party Lega Nord is highly active, the victimisation of immigrant children increases, while we find no effect where Lega Nord has little support and for native children, suggesting important negative spillovers from politics to the wellbeing of children.

Moralizing Immigration: Political Framing, Moral Conviction, and Polarization in the United States and Denmark

Morally charged rhetoric is commonplace in political discourse on immigration but scholars have not examined how it affects divisions over the issue among the public. To address this gap, we employ preregistered survey experiments in two countries where anti-immigration rhetoric has been prominent: the United States and Denmark. We demonstrate that exposure to moralized messages leads respondents to place greater moral weight on their existing immigration opinions and become more averse to political leaders and, in the United States, social interaction partners who espouse opposite beliefs. This suggests that political moralization contributes to moral conflict and affective polarization. We find no evidence, however, that moral framing produces attitudinal polarization—that is, more extreme immigration opinions. Our study helps make sense of the heightened intensity of anti-immigrant politics even when attitudes are stable. It also suggests a promising avenue for comparative research on affective polarization by shifting the focus from partisanship to the moralization of existing issue disagreements.

No Country for Young People? The Rise of Anti-Immigration Politics in Ageing Societies

No Country for Young People? The Rise of Anti-Immigration Politics in Ageing Societies

No Country for Young People? The Rise of Anti-Immigration Politics in Ageing Societies

No Country for Young People? The Rise of Anti-Immigration Politics in Ageing Societies

Environmental Displacement in the Anthropocene

This intervention invites more substantial scholarly attention to human displacement in and of the Anthropocene—this current epoch in which humans have become the primary drivers of global environmental change—and sets out an initial framework for its study. The framework is organized around three interrelated contributions. First is the recognition that displacement is driven not just by climate change but also broader forms of environmental change defining the Anthropocene, including biodiversity loss, changes to land and water resources, and the buildup of nuclear debris, along with their intersections. Second, the framework parses out three distinct moments of displacement in the Anthropocene: displacement as a consequence of, prerequisite to, and active response to environmental change. Third, the framework rejects environmental (neo)determinism by showing how displacement across these distinct moments and drivers is more than environmental: It is the articulation of environmental and sociopolitical–economic factors, which are routinely shaped by inequality and play out within a broader series of crises and crisis narratives that drive displacement and hinder viable solutions. We ground these interventions in examples of political conflict, anti-immigrant politics, the posttruth and colonial politics of knowledge production, and the Anthropocene itself as crisis requiring displacement to clean up its mess. Although each example is quite distinct, a common thread stitched across them is colonialism, highlighting a recurring extra-environmental driver of displacement. Taken together, these dynamics underscore that displacement is not an unfortunate by-product of the Anthropocene but woven into its very fabric.

The Representation of Violence in the Middle East: Diasporic Interventions in the Work of Wafaa Bilal, Tammam Azzam, and Reza Aramesh

Presently, many states in the Middle East are experiencing instability and mass displacement due to political violence. In the wake of these upheavals, and particularly post 9/11, a spotlight has fallen on art from the region, and more specifically on art with violence and political conflict as theme. This article investigates the ways in which three artists in diaspora from the Middle East, namely Wafaa Bilal, Tammam Azzam, and Reza Aramesh, portray violence in their art, reflecting on the meaning of violence and opening up possibilities for reconsidering the representation of violence from this region. The conceptual sleight of hand in the work of the artists chosen for this thematic and contextual analysis offers insight into the experience and depiction of violence in their respective countries of origin in order to, arguably, dispel the often distorted and simplistic perception of the region and its troubles. This investigation includes a discussion of reductive depictions of violence in the Middle East by Western media, focusing on the historical, political, socioeconomic, and emotional factors that lead to such representations. Against the backdrop of the global proliferation of Islamophobic and xenophobic social relations, anti-immigration politics, and ongoing conflict, the work of the artists selected for discussion in this article foregrounds the emancipatory potential of art to challenge perceptions, negotiate identities, encourage collective memory, and reconcile trauma.