Immigrant Settlement Research Articles

Nonprofit engagement with provincial policy officials: The case of NGO policy voice in Canadian immigrant settlement services

This paper explores the role of nonprofit organizations in the immigrant settlement and integration sector in the public policy process in three Canadian provinces. Drawing on thirty one (31) semi-structured interviews with nonprofit and mid-level policy officials (working for a provincial government) in three provinces (Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan), the place of nonprofit agencies in providing input and voice to policy issues in the area of settlement and integration services is presented. Issues regarding the willingness to use advocacy/voice with government funders, the usefulness of government consultations, strategies used in approaching government, the role of research in making evidence-based cases regarding policy and program change, among other considerations are examined. The assessments provided by key nonprofit actors and government policy officials are used to bring better understanding of the perceived roles of nonprofit organizations in the daily work of policy.

Romulus and Ritual in the Beverly Swamp: A Freemason Dreams of Theatre in Pre-confederation Ontario 1

During the 1820s and 1830s, Henry Lamb, a pioneer settler of Upper Canada (now Southern Ontario), mapped out a city called Romulus, which he intended to build in Beverly Township, a region best known for its dangerous swampland. In an advertisement calling for immigrant settlers, he promised a range of buildings, including “a first-class theatre.” This essay assesses the related documents: accounts of settlers identifying the location for un-built cathedrals; a description of an exaggerated town plan, laid out on a stump; and the newspaper advertisement. It places Lamb’s plans within the broader history of Ontario settlement, illustrated by comparison with fellow founder John Galt. The inclusion of a theatrical venue in a town plan was unusual for the time and region; there is a strong possibility that the plans for Romulus were informed by Lamb’s devotion to the secretive, and theatre-friendly, Freemasonic movement. The Freemasons were bastions of both enlightenment radicalism, and then of British imperialism; as such, they encouraged Lamb to build a prosperous life as a self-made man in a hostile environment, to dream of building a city in the wilderness—and to misjudge his intended community. Settlers at this time were more at ease with and in need of a popular performance culture, of outdoor rituals and kitchen parties, tavern songs and mechanics institute meetings, and not (or not yet) a theatre. This essay considers the plight of a man intent on the orderly, architectural administration of society in a world of improvised spaces.

Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands and the U.S. Racial-Imperialist Politics of the Hemispheric “Yellow Peril”

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This article examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime.

Immigrant settlement in rural Nova Scotia: Impacting the location decisions of newcomers

Immigration attraction and retention efforts can be an important tool for economic development in small and rural centres. This paper argues the techniques used to directly target immigrants to the Colchester Region of Nova Scotia could be employed by similar centres throughout Canada to positively impact economic development by addressing labour market issues and skill shortages. Through interviews with recent immigrants to Colchester and a data comparison with immigration trends in Manitoba, the author demonstrates how social networking, effective marketing and communications and providing enhanced information on employment can significantly influence the perception and geographic dispersion of immigrants. Keywords: immigration, small and rural centres, geographic settlement.

IMMIGRATION, JOBS, AND EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION: EVIDENCE FROM EUROPE BEFORE AND DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

In this paper we analyze the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of native jobs. We use data on fifteen Western European countries during the 1996-2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking manual-routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more “complex” (abstract and communication) jobs. Such positive reallocation occurred while the total number of jobs held by natives was unaffected. This job upgrade was associated in the short run to a 0.6% increase in native wages for a doubling of the immigrants’ share. These results are robust to the use of two alternative IV strategies based on past settlement of immigrants across European countries measured alternatively with Census or Labor Force data. The job upgrade slowed, but did not come to a halt, during the Great Recession. We also document the labor market flows behind it: the complexity of jobs offered to new native hires was higher relative to the complexity of lost jobs. Finally, we find evidence that such reallocation was significantly larger in countries with more flexible labor laws and that his tendency was particularly strong for less educated workers.

It takes (more than) two to tango: informal tango market dynamics in Barcelona

Purpose– This paper aims to address the tango market as a social institution by building on the notion of “globalization from below” as well as social capital theory to understand the market's dynamics as a part of the Barcelona grey economy and as one that supports immigration settlement and integration.Design/methodology/approach– The authors began with participant observation that helped the authors to capture the essence of the market, to observe the behaviours of the participants and then to interview different actors. For more than a year (October 2011-December 2012), the authors frequented various tango dancing floors and also attended different tango classes. The authors concentrated the interviews during the first quarter of 2013 (January-March). The authors conducted 15 recorded interviews with distinct categories of supplier to the tango market.Findings– The authors demonstrate how the resulting social exclusion is theraison d'êtreof globalization from below, through a cross-cultural symbiotic relationship. Moreover, the authors examine the causes of informal market relations and their impact on the nature of interactions among market participants.Originality/value– The tango in Barcelona is made up of a series of individual exchanges and transactions that create a functioning and ordered system. Economically speaking, it can be assumed as an emergent market. But this market is deeply embedded in a social and political context making it a social institution constructed in culturally specific ways. The local socio-political context opens the door to corruption, although not necessarily to breaking the law, allowing the market agents to remain within the system and “dance” with it. Their disobedience to the rule creates disorder but allows them to recreate a specific order.

Villa regina. Modello fascista d'emigrazione in Patagonia

Transplantation of families of Italian workers in a quenched and uninhabited territory in the Upper Valley of Rio Negro (Patagonia), with the foundation in 1924 in Colonia Regina de Alvear, now Villa Regina, took place on the basis of a political decision in Italy funded with public capital because of the will of Benito Mussolini. The Duce of Fascism, in fact, intervened in order to facilitate the operation because of the urgency of his friend and confidant Ottavio Dinale, delegate of the National Fascist Party in South America. The foundation of Villa Regina, the first Italian case of artificial colonization, however, was the result of a convergence of interests between Dinale, who developed several hypotheses for the settlement of Italian immigrants abroad, and the engineer Filippo Bonoli, author of the project in the Rio Negro, and afterwards promoter of the Italian-Argentinian Company of Colonization. The author, after having outlined the theoretical framework on migration policies and practices of fascism, on the basis of a work of empirical research conducted in Italy and Argentina and the use of original sources including documentation unexplored until now by historians of Italian emigration, has reconstructed the unknown aspects of a case considered a fascist model of migration, aspects that indicate Villa Regina as the first of the so-called Cities of the Duce.

Socio‐cultural Adaptation of Second‐generation Afghans in Iran

AbstractThe long‐term settlement of Afghan immigrants in Iran, along with their high fertility, has produced an important shift in the composition of their population with the emergence of a “second generation”. This article aims to examine how second‐generation Afghans have adapted to the host society and to what extent their adaptation patterns have correlated with demographic and contextual factors. The data is drawn from the 2010 Afghans Adaptation Survey which covered 520 second‐generation Afghans.Results revealed that second‐generation Afghans have a variety of adaptation patterns. Integration is the most prevalent pattern of adaptation and acculturation (which is observed among 35.8 per cent of respondents) followed by separation (33.3%), assimilation (17.1%) and marginalization (13.8%). Our multivariate analysis showed that such socio‐demographic factors as gender, education, ethnicity, perceived discrimination, family context, neighbourhood characteristics, length and city of residence are associated with their adaptation patterns.Policy Implications Successful implementation of policies and durable solutions for Afghans in Iran rests on the diversity of the adaptation patterns of their second‐generation. Restriction on employment opportunities has led to downward assimilation and marginalization of some of the Afghans in Iran. Improvement in labour laws would promote the integration of Afghans in the society. Afghan females have relatively better access to a gender‐equitable environment in Iran than they do in Afghanistan, and are less willing to return to their homeland. The Government of Afghanistan should improve service and security provisions for women to ensure their voluntary repatriation.

Migrant Networks and the Spread of Misinformation

Diaspora networks provide information to future migrants and influence both their decision to migrate and their success in the host country. While the existing literature explains the effect of networks on migration decisions through the size of the migrant community, we show that the quality of the network is an equally important determinant. We argue that networks that are more integrated in the society of the host country can give more accurate information about job prospects to future migrants. In a decision model with imperfect signalling we show that migrants with access to a better network are more likely to make the right decision - they migrate only if they gain - and they migrate earlier. We test these predictions empirically using data on recent Mexican migrants to the US, and exploit the geographic diffusion of Mexicans since the 1980s as well as the settlement of immigrants that came during the Bracero program in the 1950s to instrument for the quality of networks. The results provide strong evidence that connections to a better-integrated network lead to better outcomes after migration. Yet we find no evidence that the quality of the network affects the timing of migration.

Settling In: A Comparison of Local Immigrant Organizations in the United States and Canada

This article examines the effects of national policies and institutional contexts on local immigrant organizations in US and Canadian cities. Drawing on Goldberg and Mercer’s comparative framework, the analysis traces the impacts of three factors on immigrant settlement organizations: divergent national immigration and integration policies, subnational roles, and traditions and understandings of racial and ethnic diversity. Drawing on case studies of Ottawa, Ontario, and Newark, New Jersey, the article illustrates two quite different settlement sectors. A professionalized and federally funded set of non-governmental organizations in Ottawa provides an array of settlement services to newcomers, whereas the Newark sector includes a wide range of organizations from volunteer to professionally run, which carry out activities ranging from legal and political activism to service provision. Formal and informal partnerships mark Ottawa’s settlement sector, whereas collaboration is infrequent and ad hoc in Newark. In Ottawa, a politics of bureaucratic consultation with diverse groups contrasts with a competitive electoral race-based politics in Newark. This study suggests that divergence marks Canadian and American cities at least in the policy arena of immigrant settlement.

Operation 1000 for the Settlement of Jewish-American Immigrants in the Occupied Territories

The article examines the unknown settlement program Mivza Ha-Elef [Operation 1000], a partnership between the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI), the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful], Hadassah, and the American-Jewish religious denominations that aimed to attract Jewish-Americans to live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip between 1980 and 1985. Through an examination of archival documents, periodical press, film, and other existing media never before brought to light, I reconstruct this unique initiative and its discourses for the first time in the scholarly literature. This study is based in historical methodology, but draws upon an interdisciplinary framework of inquiry. While the program itself bore mixed results, its discussion adds an important dimension to our understanding of the participation of Jewish-American immigrants within the Israeli settlement enterprise as well as new theoretical alternatives offered by considering this case-study within the framework of ethnic return migration.

Beyond the Average: Peer Heterogeneity and Intergenerational Transmission of Education

Estimating the effect of ‘ethnic capital’ on human capital investment decisions is complicated by the endogeneity of location choice of immigrants and the reflection problem. We exploit a rare immigrant settlement policy in Germany to identify the causal impact of parental peer-heterogeneity on the educational outcomes of their children. To identify the direction of peer effect we restrict to no-child-adult-peers who completed their education much before the children in our sample of interest. We find that children of low-educated parents benefit significantly from the presence of high-educated neighbors, with more pronounced effects in more polarized neighborhoods and significant gender heterogeneity. In contrast, we do not find any negative influence coming from the low-educated neighbors. Our estimates are robust to a range of flexible peer definitions. Overall, the findings suggest an increase in parental aspirations as the possible mechanism rather than a direct child-to-child peer effect.

Immigrants, islandness and perceptions of quality-of-life on Prince Edward Island, Canada

This paper explores perceptions of immigrant quality-of-life (QOL) and islandness in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and compares these perceptions to those of Canadian-born residents of the same provincial capital. The study employed a mixedmethods approach, including a household telephone survey conducted in the summer of 2012 (n=302), focus group interviews with immigrants in late 2012 and observations on preliminary results by the staff of the PEI Association of Newcomers to Canada (PEIANC), the primary immigrant settlement service agency on the island. The analysis of the results suggests that immigrants have a high and undifferentiated assessment of their own QOL, sense of belonging and sense of place compared to Canadian-born islanders; immigrants are also critical of the quality of education and of the range of recreational and cultural events underway on the Island. While they express positive sentiments regarding life on the Island, immigrants still feel excluded from social and economic opportunities.

The impact of unionization and other factors on undocumented immigrant settlement patterns in the US

In this study, we seek to add to the literature on undocumented immigrants by (1) identifying key determinants of the settlement patterns of undocumented immigrants and (2) testing a new hypothesis, what is referred to here as the ‘union-aversion hypothesis’. This hypothesis is elaborated upon in Section II of this study, but ultimately it argues that undocumented workers prefer to settle in states where the percentage of the labour force that is unionized is lower. Our findings suggest that the state-level settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants in the US is an increasing function of a state’s median family income level, the mean January temperature in a state and the relative size of the documented Hispanic population in the state, while being a decreasing function of the overall cost of living in the state. In addition, strong empirical support for the union-aversion hypothesis is obtained, namely the settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants is a decreasing function of the percentage of a state’s labour force that is unionized.

Immigrant Settlement Work in Canada: Limits and Possibilities for Professionalization

Cet article dépeint l’émergence du travail d’établissement auprès des immigrants au Canada et explore les perspectives d'avenir de celui‐ci en tant que profession. À l'heure actuelle, le travail d'établissement comprend trois formes de pratique : (1) un travail aux contours flous; (2) une spécialité du travail social; et (3) une profession en émergence. Cet article soutient que le travail d'établissement aura probablement un avenir professionnel. Cependant, la question de savoir s'il devient une profession indépendante dépend en grande partie du régime de financement du secteur des services d'établissement. Si le régime de financement fédéral et à court terme continue d'exister, le travail d'établissement cherchera encore sa définition au sein du domaine général du travail de service social. S'il émerge un régime de financement provincial et à long terme, les perspectives d'un travail d'établissement professionnel et indépendant s'amélioreront.This paper portrays the emergence of Canadian settlement work with immigrants and explores its prospects as an occupation. Currently, settlement work includes three forms of practice: (1) a loose occupation; (2) a specialty of social work; and (3) an emerging profession. The paper argues that settlement work is likely to have a professional future. However, whether or not it will become an independent profession depends largely on the funding regime of the settlement service sector. If the existing federal and short‐term funding regime continues, settlement work will still be trying to define itself in the broader field of social service work. If a provincial and long‐term funding regime emerges, prospects for an independent professional settlement work will improve.

Service Delivery on Rusty Health Care Wheels: Implications for Visible Minority Women

The primary purpose of this article is to demonstrate how immigrant/refugee women's access to health services is influenced by both immigration and health policies. The author argues that the wheel of health care must revolve along with the wheel of immigration. The application of health immigration policies that existed preconfederation, as well as health care interventions based on Eurocentric principles, limit minority women's accessibility to health services. An integrated dialogue between all levels of government, health care professionals, policy makers, researchers, and immigrant groups is critical to provide equitable access to health care to foster immigrant settlement in Canada's smaller communities and rural areas.

Shifting Settlement Patterns & Mismatched Resources: The Landscape of Immigrant Organizations in Urban & Suburban Philadelphia

Do urban or suburban neighborhoods provide greater access to organizations that offer immigrants needed services throughout various stages of the integration process? We pose this question in the face of historical shifts in immigration patterns: the bypassing of central cities for the suburbs as the direct site of immigrant settlement. In asking this question, we are concerned with immigrant resources as one aspect of neighborhood advantage. Using American Community Survey 2005-2009 five year estimates and original data of immigrant organizations in the Philadelphia region, we employ a method of spatial buffering to examine the distribution of immigrant organizations in greater Philadelphia region, including the cities of Philadelphia, PA, Camden, NJ, and Wilmington, DE and their surrounding suburbs. Our results reveal a critical spatial mismatch between current patterns of direct immigrant settlement in suburbs and a persistent urban advantage in access to immigrant resources. In the Philadelphia region, urban areas have, on average, approximately an additional 1.14 more organizations per census tract when compared to non-urban tracts, controlling for neighborhood characteristics. We find that this urban advantage varies by resource type. While for cultural maintenance organizations the urban advantage is only 0.9 additional organizations in urban tracts over suburban tracts, for subsistence and mobility organizations that provide immigrants essential services, the urban advantage more than doubles, with 2.0 more subsistence and 1.9 more mobility organizations in urban tracts compared to suburban ones. Suburban landscapes present far greater challenges to immigrant newcomers in terms of access to resources than urban landscapes so. The urban bias also varies by ethnic orientation of organizations. Organizations focused on providing resources to Asian and European immigrants have a stronger urban bias than those focused on providing resources to Latino and African immigrants, while organizations providing resources for all immigrants regardless of ethnicity have the strongest urban bias, with 1.6 more of these general organizations in urban tracts compared to suburban tracts. Last, we find that neighborhood poverty affects this relationship across groups differently, such that increases in poverty are positively linked to greater access to immigrant organizations providing services for Latino and African immigrants, but negatively linked to greater access to immigrant organizations aimed at serving Asian or European immigrants. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding the unique contours of immigrant integration within a new and changing suburban context.

Ethnic Concentration and Nonprofit Organizations: The Political and Urban Geography of Immigrant Services in Boston, Massachusetts

This article considers the geographic distribution of nonprofit organizations serving immigrants across municipalities within the Greater Boston area in an effort to identify variations in the levels of assistance available to major foreign-born populations in the region. The analysis relies on data from the Census and the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Results suggest that geographic context matters, including immigrant settlement patterns, racial heterogeneity, and fiscal and institutional characteristics of towns and cities, in shaping availability of nonprofit resources to immigrants. These findings highlight large socio-spatial disparities in immigrant services and challenge the wisdom of devolving responsibility for such assistance to local governments and ultimately nonprofits, as new entrants settle in larger numbers in areas previously unaffected by immigration and ill-prepared to address immigrant needs. The research contributes to debates on the rescaling of immigrant policy and service provision and literature on the geography of integration by engaging with scholarship in urban and political geography.

Resettlement as Rebirth: How Effective Are the Midwives?

Resettlement as Rebirth: How Effective Are the Midwives?

Crime Victimization Among Immigrant Latino Day Laborers in Post-Katrina New Orleans.

Reports indicate that the criminal victimization of Latino immigrants in the United States has been increasing yet is often underreported. This may be especially true in new immigrant settlement cities that lack an established Latino community to provide support and feelings of security. New Orleans is an important context to investigate criminal victimization as it has experienced a large demographic shift in Latino composition post-Hurricane Katrina. This ethnographic study elucidates the social processes and structural factors that contribute to the criminal victimization of Latino day laborers (LDLs) in New Orleans. Three emergent social processes associated to criminal victimization are discussed, including: (1) distinct settlement process; (2) chaos of the setting and lifestyle; and (3) high-risk exposure. LDLs' experiences of crime victimization are also explored. Findings reveal distinct structural factors associated to new immigrant settlement cities that contribute to the heightened vulnerability of LDLs.