Members Of Immigrant Communities Research Articles

The Border Network for Human Rights: From Community Organizing to Public Policy Action

AbstractThe Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR) is a community‐based organization in the United States‐Mexico borderlands, focused on human rights in the domain of immigration law enforcement and comprehensive immigration reform. BNHR has three important features. First, it focuses on the U.S.‐Mexico border region, the region of most intensive U.S. immigration enforcement. Second, the BNHR uses a base community organizing strategy, as opposed to external activist or service provider strategies. Third, the BNHR has brought the voices and perspectives of border and immigrant community members to the public policy process. In these ways, the BNHR is reformulating political agency in the borderlands and the U.S. [U.S.‐Mexico border, immigration, community organizing, human rights, public policy]

Leveraging University Diversity to Reach Potential Immigrant Farmers

As new residents of the U.S., immigrants may have inadequate access to organizations that provide free technical support. These underrepresented populations may rely more on personal relationships for information. An Extension meeting was developed and implemented between two Extension specialists and nine immigrant community members interested in U.S. agriculture. The bridge between these two diverse groups was an international graduate student who had developed a relationship with the participants and had a similar cultural background. Following the meeting and Extension presentation, guidelines were identified that may prove useful to others wishing to implement this concept.

Participatory Health Research: Who Participates in What?

Participatory research aims to study and change social reality in collaborative ways. The concept of plays a key role. In this article, I clarify the concept using the example of a participatory health research study. The study design presented here is based on the principles of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). These principles as well as the key concepts of and participation are introduced. Subsequently, the realization of these concepts is illustrated using a specific example: the PaKoMi project is a participatory research project on health promotion and HIV prevention with immigrant communities in Germany. The following questions are discussed: 1. Which actors are involved? (Who participates?); 2. What processes do they participate in?; 3. How is their realized? The actors, methods, and forms of are analyzed by focusing on research-related that takes place in participatory case studies and workshops. Community partners (members of immigrant communities), service providers (staff from AIDS service organizations), and share decision making power to differing degrees in all phases of the research processes—from formulating the aims and research questions, to collecting and analyzing data, to disseminating the study findings. Peer researchers were trained to conduct studies in their respective immigrant communities. Reflecting on the study design, I discuss the opportunities of doing research in participatory ways. Also, challenges and open questions are addressed, such as power differences and preconditions for the of socially marginalized groups, pitfalls in defining and involving community and the question of transferability of CBPR as a North-American research strategy to the German context. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs120176

The Effect of Immigrant Communities on Foreign-Born Student Achievement

This paper explores the effect of the human capital characteristics of co-ethnic immigrant communities on foreign-born students’ math achievement. We use data on New York City public school foreign-born students from 39 countries merged with census data on the characteristics of the immigrant household heads in the city from each nation of origin and estimate regressions of student achievement on co-ethnic immigrant community characteristics, controlling for student and school attributes. We find that the income and size of the co-ethnic immigrant community has no effect on immigrant student achievement, while the percent of college graduates may have a small positive effect. In addition, children in highly English proficient immigrant communities test slightly lower than children from less proficient communities. The results suggest that there may be some protective factors associated with immigrant community members’ education levels and use of native languages.

Migration and materialism: The roles of ethnic identity, religiosity, and generation

Culture is the most complex and powerful influence on consumer behavior. Within culturally heterogeneous societies, marketing managers must consider the psychological and behavioral effects that emanate from ethnic identity. Of the many values that immigrants bring to their adopted home, some have their basis in religious beliefs. Most migration occurs from the developing to the developed world, where the acquisition of and devotion to material possessions typify post-industrial society. A largely unanswered question concerns how members of immigrant communities cope with the conflicting values associated with materialism, and those associated with ethnic communal ties and religious fulfillment. This research focuses on materialism as manifested among first- and second-generation Korean-Canadians, as a function of both ethnic identity and religiosity. The researchers uncover generational differences on the interrelationships of these three constructs.

Research Note: Crime, Chemicals, and Culture: On the Complexity of Khat

In 2006, khat was the object of a federal government operation, which dismantled a Somali trafficking organization and seized five tons of the plant valued at $2 million. Khat is an evergreen tree that grows in Africa. Its leaves are chewed as a stimulant by six million people every day. This paper describes the complexity of khat, beginning with an overview of its international usage and its contradictory portrayals. Primary concern, however, is focused on khat's complexity in terms of its criminal, chemical, and cultural dimensions. According to the FBI, khat is a controlled substance. But others disagree. A khat plant might contain cathinone, a Schedule I drug. But shortly after harvesting, cathinone decomposes. Throughout history, colonizers have used laws against khat to control indigenous Muslim populations. In the U. S., utilization of khat is central to the lives of many members of immigrant communities. Targeting khat can be viewed as targeting members of these communities.

Nation and diaspora: Rethinking multiculturalism in a transnational context

Multiculturalism has redefined the nation as comprising a culturally pluralist population. However, the increased linkages between countries, produced by accelerated globlisation, have also engendered intricate transnational networks between diasporas residing in several states. The telephone, internet, satellite television and other media help construct a web of connections among these transnations enabling them to maintain and enhance their cultural identities. Diasporas have creatively engaged with transnational media and are participating in a globalisation-from-below. An increasingly cosmopolitan outlook has been fostered by the inter-continental links. But multiculturalism policies tend erroneously to continue viewing members of immigrant communities as having engaged in a oneway trajectory that breaks ties with their past. The current conceptualisation of multiculturalism as fixed within the context of the nation-state does not allow for a well-considered response to the transnational contexts in which immigrants live out their lives. Some migrant-producing states have begun to address these circumstances, but those of immigrant-receiving governments have generally been reluctant to acknowledge them.

‘Public toilets for a diverse neighborhood’: Spatial purification practices in community development discourse

This paper explores the dialectic of place and community identity in Mount Pleasant, a multi–ethnic and multi–class U.S. neighborhood where definitions of place are hotly contested among its residents. In a grant proposal for public toilets, Mount Pleasant writers use linguistic strategies such as presupposition, deixis, and contrast, coupled with discursive themes of filth and geography, to construct a core of the Mount Pleasant community. The writers place themselves and people who share their values in that core, and immigrants at the margins. These strategies serve as a discursive type of spatial purification practice (cf. Sibley 1988) through which the grantwriters set up a moral and spatial order where they and other core community members are deemed to use space ‘appropriately’, and thus inhabit positive moral positions, while immigrant community members’ imputed ‘inappropriate’ use of space is used to construct negative moral positions for them.

Quels changements linguistiques dans l’attrition de la L1 chez le bilingue tardif?

This article reports on some data of a psycholinguistic study of first language attrition in german first generation immigrants. On the basis of the individual variation in performance evidenced by the data, I claim that L1 attrition in late bilinguals is not only the consequence of lack of L1 use. A comparison of the performance of three selected German-English bilinguals rather suggests that, among other factors, contact with other immigrants – as is the case in immigrant communities – might generate changes in linguistic competence. In this case it would be necessary to distinguish to types of intra-generational L1 attrition: (a) attrition in isolated immigrants who never use L1 in the host country, which mainly yields processing difficulties and problems in lexical retrieval, and (b) attrition in members of immigrant communities where changes of the linguistic norm within the community can take place, resulting in modifications of linguistic competence.

The misuse value of the TV set

This article uses photography to document what I call ‘television settings’: the video installations that people make in everyday life by putting objects and images on and around the TV screen. Its focus is not on domestic TV, but rather on treatments of the TV set outside the home, in urban spaces of work and leisure that serve, and are operated by, members of immigrant communities in the USA. These treatments of the screen combine raw materials of diverse origin to register the complexities of transnational experience. Studies of transnationalism often describe media images as links to the elsewhere of the lost homeland. But TV settings complicate such singular views of TV’s relationship to place, calling attention instead to uses of the screen as an object in the ‘here and now’. Intertwining transnational perspectives on locality with the protocols and contingencies of small-scale commerce in the USA, the TV settings examined in this article testify to the flexibility of TV as an object through which people mark their positions in transnational and local cultural networks simultaneously.