Immigration Streams Research Articles

Assessing the Differentiated Impacts of COVID-19 on the Immigration Flows to Europe

The immediate effects of COVID-19 on mortality, fertility, and internal and international migration have been widely studied. Particularly, immigration to high-income countries declined in 2020. However, the persistence of these declines and the extent to which they have impacted different migration flows are yet to be established. Drawing on immigration flows from Eurostat and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) time-series models, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on different immigration streams to seven European countries. We forecast counterfactual levels of immigration in 2020 and 2021 assuming no pandemic, and compare these estimates with actual immigration counts. We use regression modeling to explore the role of immigrants’ origin, distance, stringency measures, and gross domestic product (GDP) trends at origins and destinations as potential driving forces of changes in immigration during COVID-19. Our results show that, while there was a general decline in immigration during 2020, inflows returned to expected levels in 2021, except for Spain. However, drops in immigration flows from countries outside the Schengen Area to Europe persisted in 2021. Immigrants’ origin emerged as the main factor modulating immigration changes during the pandemic, and to a lesser extent stringency measures and GDP trends in destination countries. Contextual factors at origin seem to have been less important.

Spatial Contexts of Language Shift and Heritage Language Retention within a Highly Diverse Population: Sydney, Australia

AbstractIn immigrant countries like America, Canada and Australia, heritage language retention and language shift (to the language of the receiving society) have long been associated with classical spatial theory, of initial segregation into inner city ethnic enclaves and subsequent intra‐urban migration into majority ‘white’ or ‘mainstream’ residential suburbia, respectively. First through third generation spatial dynamics of shift and retention in Sydney are analysed for the ten largest post‐1945 labour workforce immigrant streams from Europe and the ten post‐1960s mainly skilled immigrant streams from the Middle East and Asia. Quartile and diversity analyses show that the association of intergenerational heritage language retention with spatial concentration and language shift with spatial dispersion has been superceded by a new set of spatial dynamics. Instead, patterns of retention and shift are responding to high levels of population diversity and minority majority suburbs where culturally hegemonic mainstream and minority cultural groups are intermixed across 80 per cent of Sydney's suburbs.

Still a Nation of White Immigrants? Notes on the Present Debate

Abstract Recent years have generated an unprecedented popular decision about US racial identity. Before this, popular sentiment and legal policy clearly and congruently promoted immigration of white noncitizens, while severely restricting others. Until the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, the US law reflected Justice Grier's statement in Smith v. Turner, 48 U.S. 283, 461 (1849): “It is the cherished policy of the general government to encourage and invite Christian foreigners of our own race to seek an asylum within our borders, and to . . . add to the wealth, population, and power of the nation.” However, the 1965 reform and its successors diversified the immigrant stream and the nation, and current polls indicate that the majority of the US population now supports a generous and non-discriminatory immigration policy.

Channeling and Wages Among New US Immigrants from Mexico, India, and the Philippines

National — and local — conversations about immigration are often centered on immigrants’ integration into the US society. One factor that shapes immigrants’ integration is their pre-migration work experience, skills, and training and a series of studies have used “channeling” as a concept to identify immigrants who have worked in the same occupation and/or industry in the destination labor market as they had in the origin labor market, prior to migration. Using the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) and a simultaneous equation model (SiEM) approach, this article expands on this research by exploring the impact of channeling on wages for Asian Indians, Filipino/as, and Mexicans with lawful permanent resident (LPR) status. Contrary to prior findings on the effects of channeling within specific industries, we find that channeling is associated with lower, not higher, immigrants’ wages. The findings are robust to different definitions of channeling, as the negative effects of channeling hold within industrial sectors and occupational groups. Moreover, the results indicate that channeling is not exclusive to the Mexico–US migration stream, but instead may be a feature of various US-bound immigration streams, including those from India and the Philippines.

Mental health and neurocognitive disorder–related hospitalization rates in immigrants and Canadian-born population: a linkage study

ObjectivesMental health and neurocognitive conditions are important causes of hospitalization among immigrants, though patterns may vary by immigrant category, world region of origin, and time since arrival in Canada. This study uses linked administrative data to explore differences in mental health hospitalization rates between immigrants and individuals born in Canada.MethodsHospital records from the Discharge Database and the Ontario Mental Health Reporting System for 2011 to 2017 were linked to the 2016 Longitudinal Immigrant Database and to Statistics Canada’s 2011 Canadian Census Health and Environment Cohort. Age-standardized hospitalization rates for mental health–related conditions (ASHR-MHs) were derived for immigrants and the Canadian-born population. ASHR-MHs overall and for leading mental health conditions were compared between immigrants and the Canadian-born population, stratified by sex and selected immigration characteristics. Quebec hospitalization data were not available.ResultsOverall, immigrants had lower ASHR-MHs compared to the Canadian-born population. Mood disorders were leading causes of mental health hospitalization for both cohorts. Psychotic, substance-related, and neurocognitive disorders were also leading causes of mental health hospitalization, although there was variation in their relative importance between subgroups. Among immigrants, ASHR-MHs were higher among refugees and lower among economic immigrants, those from East Asia, and those who arrived in Canada most recently.ConclusionDifferences in hospitalization rates among immigrants from various immigration streams and world regions, particularly for specific types of mental health conditions, highlight the importance of future research that incorporates both inpatient and outpatient mental health services to further understand these relationships.

Working More and Making Less: Post-Retirement Aged Immigrant Women Care Workers in Canada

ABSTRACT Care work is typically undervalued and precarious. However, little is currently known about the financial outcomes of immigrant women care workers as they reach post-retirement age, or their access to effective social policy supports. Using Canada as a case example, this study analyzes the Longitudinal Immigration Database to compare the income trajectories of women aged 65–95 who entered the country via the Care Worker immigration entry class to immigrant women from two other immigration streams (one focused on higher skill economic contributions, the other on family reunification). Estimating a series of growth curve models (n = 28,775), results reveal that between 2007–2017, despite engaging in paid employment longer, Care Worker women were less able to make contributions to a private pension plan prior to retirement and more likely to depend on public pension benefits after reaching retirement age, relative to other immigrant women. Additionally, Care Worker women had lower predicted total income and experienced downward mobility during the post-retirement period. Together, the findings reinforce the importance of considering the financial circumstances of immigrant care workers as they age and highlight a need for renewed government investment in social supports to reduce inequalities tied to the gendered and racialized devaluation of low-wage caring occupations.

Myths and Realities of the Salt Lake Temple Foundation

Myths and Realities of the Salt Lake Temple Foundation

I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deli by Cate Thurston, Laura Mart, and Lara Rabinovitch

Reviewed by: I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deliby Cate Thurston, Laura Mart, and Lara Rabinovitch Sarah Bunin Benor (bio) I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deli. Curated by Cate Thurston, Laura Mart, and Lara Rabinovitch. Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California ( 04 14– 09 4, 2022). https://www.skirball.org/exhibitions/ill-have-what-shes-having-jewish-deli. Additional venues: New York Historical Society ( 11 11, 2022 – 04 2, 2023), Holocaust Museum, Houston, Texas ( 05 4– 08 13, 2023), and Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Skokie, IL ( 10 22, 2023– 04 14, 2024). "I'll have what she's having." This line evokes a memorable scene in When Harry Met Sally. It is also the title of a delightful, informative exhibit originating at the Skirball Cultural Center that explores the setting of that scene: the Jewish deli. The title seems to refer not only to the status of the deli within popular culture but also to the influence of Ashkenazi Jews on American society. At delis in urban areas around the United States, non-Jewish customers have demonstrated this influence, deciding, "I'll have what the Jews are having." One of the early panels introduces the exhibit's central narrative: "The Jewish deli is a community forged in food—a venue where families and friends gather, politicians campaign, and filmmakers, comedians, and musicians find inspiration. Although originally created by European Jewish immigrants to serve Jewish customers, delis have become a gathering place for Americans of many different backgrounds." The exhibit highlights this multicultural gathering through an impressive array of media: images of Nelson Rockefeller, Ted Cruz, and Tammy Duckworth campaigning in delis; publicity photos of Elvis Presley and Guns N' Roses in delis; and clips of deli scenes from film and television. Beyond the venue, the food itself has influenced American society. Visitors see mouthwatering images—and Japanese-style plastic models—of foods that Ashkenazi Jews introduced to America, from knishes to kugel, from matzah ball soup to pastrami on rye. A less obvious domain of cultural influence is language. Next to the food models is a glossary of Yiddishisms that have become part of American English—not only deli-relevant words like noshand fressbut also more general words like meshuggahand shayna punim. This placard highlights how deeply intertwined food, language, and culture are in the contributions of Jews to American society. I'll Have What She's Havingalso highlights the confluence of multiple culinary vectors. "Jewish delicatessen is a fusion food born of immigration. It combines regional food traditions from Central and Eastern Europe with available ingredients in the United States, resulting in an entirely new American Jewish phenomenon." An example is bagels, lox, and cream cheese. Originally part of the appetizing tradition, today [End Page 331]this sandwich is a staple of deli fare and, more broadly, Jewish (and American) brunch. The exhibit hints at the streams of immigration and historical developments that resulted in this delectable dish but does not have the space to discuss the socioeconomic factors and implications that Jeffrey Marx analyzes in his 2017 scholarly essay, "Eating Up: The Origins of Bagels and Lox," published in Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States. Instead, we are treated to a riveting 1979 video detailing the kneading, rolling, boiling, seeding, and baking of bagels in a Brooklyn bakery, immersing visitors in a particular historical moment of the bagel's development. This exhibit incorporates and builds on scholarship such as books by Hasia Diner ( Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, 2001) and Ted Merwin ( Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli, 2017). I'll Have What She's Havingtraces the history of the deli as it relates to waves of immigration, urban enclaves and suburbanization, technological advances in meat production, labor unions, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the current artisanal culinary aesthetic. It also presents an innovative section on delis owned and frequented by Holocaust survivors. Using examples from Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, the exhibit argues that these delis "provided a livelihood and purpose" for survivors...

8 More Than an Outcome of War: Adoptions from Asia to the United States

8 More Than an Outcome of WarAdoptions from Asia to the United States Kimberly D. McKee (bio) When adoptions from Asia to the United States began in earnest in the mid twentieth century, it's doubtful that the primarily white adoptive parents caring for children from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea saw themselves or their children as part of a broader immigration movement or as part of the growing Asian American population in the United States. Transnational adoptions operated outside of restrictive and racist immigration laws, allowing families to bypass immigration quotas as they brought home "their" children. Adoption agencies also instructed adoptive parents to "raise them as their very own" and, in cases of adoptions from Asia, underscored the assimilability of Asian children into white American families. These early adoptions paved the way toward reshaping the category of Asian American in similar yet distinct ways like mixed-race and mixed-ethnic Asian American families, even if adoptive parents of monoracial and mixed-race Asian children did not see themselves as raising Asian American children. To trace the earliest adoptions of Asian children, scholars often point to the first wave of Korean War orphans as laying the groundwork for not only South Korea's more than seven-decade-long participation in international adoption, but also establishing the transnational adoption of Asian children to the United States. Yet, Chinese children from Hong Kong also entered the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and preceding those adoptions were adoptions [End Page 247] of mixed-race Filipino children following the Spanish American War and mixedrace Japanese children following the Second World War.1 The history of Asian adoption thus tells the story of US militarism. It is woven into US empire and expansion, as US servicemen play a seminal role in transnational adoptions of mixed-race children. Adoption cannot, however, be seen only as an artifact of the past, not only because adoptions from Asia persist in the twenty-first century. Rather, the lingering effects of adoption tell a profoundly Asian American story. Catherine Ceniza Choy notes, "In Asian American studies, the word 'adoption' is increasingly significant for elucidating the breadth and depth of Asian American demographics, cultural expression, contemporary issues, and history."2 The interdiscipline must attend to the ways adoption indelibly shapes Asian American communities and histories of belonging, citizenship, and kinship. Korean adoptees were one of the largest immigration streams of Koreans to the United States in the mid twentieth century. In the mid-1990s, adoptions from China surpassed those from South Korea, and the mass movement of Vietnamese children as part of Operation Babylift in 1975 remains one of the more notable transfers of children to the United States in modern history.3 While these three countries are not the only nations sending Asian children for adoption, adoptees from Korea, China, and Vietnam are overrepresented in memoirs, documentaries, and scholarship on Asian adoption due to markedly lower rates of adoption from other Asian nations. When examining Asian adoptions, broadly, in the last two decades (1999–2019), adoptions from Asia represent 49 percent of all US international adoptions, with Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese adoptees representing 80.5 percent of adoptions from Asia.4 The shift from the adoption of mixed-race Asian children to monoracial Asian children in the early and mid twentieth century illustrates the intersections of adoption and capitalism. The markets of adoption injected much needed monies into national economies, while simultaneously alleviating the state from providing social welfare supports to support low-income, working-class families and single mothers. These adoptions also reflected the tiered nature of adoption economies, whereby Asian children were sought-after due to their "honorary white" status and assumptions about assimilability into American society, as well as the way antiblackness shaped adoptive parents' investments in certain children of color over others.5 In creating new family formations, these transracial, transnational families upended notions of family as predicated not only on genetic relatedness, but also race- and religion-matching as seen in previous iterations of domestic adoptions.6 These Asian adoptees thus found themselves negotiating what it meant to be Asian (American) in non-Asian families, as most of these adoptions...

Increasing the accountability of automated decision-making systems: An assessment of the automated decision-making system introduced in Canada's temporary resident visa immigration stream

States are increasingly turning to automated decision-making systems to increase efficiency in program and service delivery. While automation offers several desirable benefits, great care must be given to establishing and increasing the accountability of automated decision-making systems in the public sector. This paper focuses on accountability in automated decision-making systems in migration management. A key issue is what the impact of automated decision-making is on accountability in migration management? This paper seeks to explore this question by evaluating the accountability mechanisms established by the Canadian government in the use of automated decision-making systems to triage Temporary Resident Visa immigration applications. This paper begins with an explanation of the interaction between public administration and digital governance, with a particular focus on the human decision-making component of public administration and a review of accountability in the public sector. What follows is an explanation of how decision-making in Canada's Temporary Resident Visa Application stream traditionally occurs. A brief review of the Canadian Algorithmic Impact Assessment Tool introduces a thorough explanation of the Canadian government's Temporary Resident Visa (TRV) eApps Advanced Analytics Pilot to showcase changes between the traditional human decision-making process and the more recent experiment engaging automated decision-making in this particular immigration stream. The paper concludes by posing a question on what accountability amounts to for the Canadian government and whether the accountability measures introduced in Canada's TRV Pilot are sufficient.

Does Care Count for Less? Tracing the Income Trajectories of Low Status Female Immigrant Workers in Canada, 1993–2015

Canada has long relied on women from poorer countries to fill gaps in its paid care market. Yet little is known about the upward or downward trajectories of immigrant women who arrive intending to work in lower status jobs in care. Using a unique administrative dataset (the Longitudinal Immigration Database), the author estimates a series of growth curve models of employment income for 220,265 non-professional, non-managerial immigrant women working in Canada between 1993 and 2015. Results reinforce prior suggestions of a “care [wage] penalty”, as all intended care workers, besides nurse aides, fare worse over two decades in the labour market than comparable intended non-care workers. Yet entry class is also found to play a role. Women who arrive to Canada though the Live-in Caregiver Program--which has the explicit goal of providing in-home care for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities--have higher employment income than comparable immigrant women reporting the intention to work in homecare who entered via the family reunification and economic immigration streams.

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries: Notes from Chicagolandia

Latino Catholics and Parish Boundaries:Notes from Chicagolandia Deborah E. Kanter14 Parish Boundaries offers an engrossing, magisterial account of U.S. Catholic life in the twentieth century through the 1960s. In John McGreevy's capable hands, the history of parishes in Buffalo, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere makes for a surprisingly unified narrative about the ways that "black" and "white" came to the forefront of "the Catholic imagination."15 The book, however, only sparsely considered the experience of Latinos, a group poised today to become the majority of the Catholic laity. As we reflect back on McGreevy's work, I would like to draw upon my own work to invite us to dig deeper into how Latino Catholics fit into the Parish Boundaries story. As I began to research the history of Chicago's Mexican churches, McGreevy offered an indelible lesson in how a parish meant more than a church to local people. I shifted my attention from the church building and, when visiting, I prowled the entire block, spying the rectory, school, sometimes a gym, and always a convent. With the parish as my lens into ethnic identity and community formation, I wrote Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, which argues that Mexicans who settled in Chicago were fortunate to arrive in a multi-ethnic, Catholic city.16 In the 1920s, two national parishes were established to welcome the "Spanish speaking." When subsequent waves of Mexican immigrants and their children arrived in areas like Pilsen, they took over existing parish structures (built by European immigrant predecessors) and created more refugios. In more recent decades, arrivals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Guatemala, and beyond inherited a church shaped by the story that McGreevy tells, while also invigorating Catholic Chicago. Since the 1990s new Latin American devotions have emerged in the parishes, annual processions once again wind their way through city streets, and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Des Plaines, northwest of the city, welcomes [End Page 14] teeming crowds of the faithful.17 At the same time, Latinos also inherited an archdiocese in contraction, weighed down by huge, aging physical infrastructure that had been built for densely populated, ethnically diverse, Catholic neighborhoods. Step back a century. As Mexicans presented a new immigrant stream in Chicago and other Midwestern cities, social workers, landlords, bishops, teaching sisters, and priests all found themselves asking where these newcomers fit. What happened when Latin Americans and their children moved into a neighborhood, testing parish boundaries as fellow Catholics who were not Black, but not perceived entirely as white either?18 McGreevy devotes two pages to the postwar Latino growth in which he summarized that Euro-Americans proved more accepting of Latinos than African Americans. Based on secondary sources, he further surmised that Mexicans were relatively accepted, while Puerto Ricans in places like New York "faced more barriers." McGreevy contended, correctly I believe, that Euro-American parishes initially had tenuous ties with Spanish-speaking newcomers.19 In my own work, I found that Euro-American laity and clergy were not necessarily hostile to the new Mexicans in the pews, but the parishes hardly welcomed the new arrivals. In time, Catholicism offered common ground between Euro-American clergy and laity and their newer Spanish-speaking counterparts.20 The desire to maintain parish structures explains Euro-Americans' willingness to live with Mexican newcomers. Priests came to understand that Mexican Catholics could become part of the parish structure. If they developed loyalties to a fading Czech or Croatian parish, if they enrolled their children at the school, if they dropped a dollar into the weekly collection, the Mexicans would enable an aging parish to keep its doors open. Even so, these new parishioners often opted to attend Mass or Holy Week liturgies at a Spanish-speaking church. Chicago Catholic Charities reported in 1955 on the recent arrival of Mexicans in the majority Slavic Pilsen neighborhood. "Mexicans are still viewed as `invaders' by the older residents . . . However, the Mexican is considered a much lesser evil [End Page 15] than the surrounding Negroes."21 In the shadows of Spanish-speaking integration often lay the specter of "Negro invasion." The history of Latino Catholics offers a...

Transition to adulthood of refugee and immigrant children in Canada

AbstractThe majority of refugees are children and youth and their integration and life-course transitions are a research priority. This paper examines the timing of refugee children and youths’ entrance into the labour market and family formation (marriage/common law union and parenthood). It does so by examining how admission category, knowledge of a host country’s official languages, and age at arrival shape their transition to adulthood. Using data from the Canadian Longitudinal Immigration Database and Heckman selection estimation, the paper finds minimal variation in refugee children and youths’ entry into the labour market compared to children of other immigrant streams. It also finds that refugee children and youth start forming families at a younger age than children of economic class immigrants, but at an older age than family class children. The analysis also shows limited effects of knowledge of official language prior to arrival while age at arrival has a robust impact on their adulthood transitions. These findings shed light on the unique patterns of life-course transition among refugee children and youth and contribute to a better conceptualization of their experiences relative to children and youth of other immigrants.

The direct and indirect impacts of liberal immigration policies on the United States’ economy

Abstract Many studies have suggested that stringent labor protections and higher labor costs can limit foreign direct investment (FDI) in host countries. This would imply that the decisions of foreign firms are sensitive to the degree of flexibility in the labor market in the U.S. The U.S. has a steady stream of immigration, which has preserved the stability of the labor supply for the U.S. market. This makes the U.S. a good test case for the relationship between immigration and FDI because it is not only the largest host for FDI but also has the largest immigrant population in the world in absolute terms and is experiencing a significant reduction in labor supply and an increase in the minimum cost of labor. Utilizing a timeseries analysis of data from 1970 to 2016, this study suggests that expansive immigration policies directly increase FDI inflows in the U.S. and indirectly increase FDI inflows by lowering labor costs and securing a stable supply of labor.

Breaking the Taboo: Investigating the Complex History of Jews and the American Economy

Breaking the Taboo:Investigating the Complex History of Jews and the American Economy Rebecca Kobrin (bio) "History is useful" when thinking about America's economy, Ben Bernanke stressed to me as he leaned back in a swivel chair, looking considerably more relaxed than he was in 2008, when the world got to know him as the person responsible for keeping the American financial system afloat.1 For all the attention devoted then and since to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers—the proximate cause of the cascading crisis in 2008—few have recalled that firm's long history as a Jewish immigrant family business, founded by Bavarian Jews who immigrated to plantation Alabama 160 years ago. Indeed, the fact that a grandson of East European Jewish immigrants—who also hailed from the South—was at the helm of the governmental regulatory body responsible to address the crisis facing one of the oldest Jewish investment banks, speaks to the important, though yet to be fully understood role that Jews played in the 2008 crisis. This history will be written one day. But as this volume demonstrates, the earlier history of Jewish involvement in the American economy still needs attention. Tales of Jews' economic endeavors fill the pages of many American Jewish history books, but few have fully analyzed the "collective memory" conveyed of American Jewish economic life conveyed through these stories. As economist Robert Schiller recently pointed out in his work on "narrative economics": popular stories affect individual and collective economic behavior.2 How can we ascertain more precisely what factors and variables shaped Jews' encounters as they engaged, challenged, failed, reformulated, and reshaped the American economy? What has been the role of Jews in the historic development of different aspects of the American economy? Almost a decade ago this question prompted the editorial board of this journal to embrace the idea of devoting a special issue to Jews and the American economy. Despite the centrality of capitalism to the United States, and the fact that this country has been home to one of the globe's largest Jewish populations since the early twentieth century, the relationship between [End Page 393] Jews and American capitalism has been a somewhat avoided topic. Few scholars have devoted themselves to exploring how Jews have molded the development of America's economy, and, in turn, how the American economy's shifting paths have shaped Jews. How have Jews engaged with and integrated themselves into various niches and spaces of the US economy?? How did the particular economic development of the United States and its embrace of capitalism shape the lives of millions of Jews who have called it home? How did America's economy shape the practice of Judaism itself? And what can focusing on economic history teach us about Jewish history, or thinking about Jews illuminate about American economic history? Even as academic Jewish studies have expanded dramatically in the past half-century, these questions have not been interrogated to the degree they deserve. As Jerry Mueller notes, "the relationship of the Jews to capitalism"—or as I would say, Jews to American economic developments and practices—has "received less attention than its significance merits."3 To be sure, there were pioneers of the field, most notably, Nobel-prize winner Simon Kuznets. His groundbreaking 1975 article, "Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States," is still widely cited and assigned today. Indeed, the "data and rigorous analyses" of that article debunked many myths concerning East European migration, even as it laid down new frameworks to study group identity, immigration streams, and economic structures.4 Another economist, Arcadius Kahan, also collected data in the 1970s relating to Jewish labor in the United States in order to understand the encounter of Jews with the American economy. His insightful research on Eastern European Jewish immigrants and the American labor market before 1914 still influences how economists think about immigrant mobility in early-twentieth century America.5 The fact that scholars still return to and cite the studies these scholars produced in the 1970s speaks both to the importance of their findings and to the paucity of sustained scholarship on this topic written by [End Page 394] social scientists...

Experiences of Family Separation for Adults Who Immigrate Alone

This study explored lived experiences of migration and settlement for adults who migrated to Canada on their own and were separated from family and friends. A theoretical framework drawing on ecological theory and adult attachment theory was used to analyze data collected from exploratory, in-depth interviews with seven adults who arrived in Canada through a range of immigration streams. Themes previously identified in research on unaccompanied minors, refugees, and migrants with precarious status were found in this study to be experienced also by those who had arrived through other immigration streams. Participants described how they associated separation from various family members with negative experiences of emotional isolation, and both negative and positive experiences of social isolation. Participants discussed changes in relationships that occurred prior to migration and continued after arrival, particularly when separation was lengthy. Participants drew upon various personal and environmental resources to help mitigate negative impacts of social isolation, but were less effective in countering emotional isolation. The findings have implications for social workers working both with individual immigrants separated from family members and with immigrant families that have been reunited. In this paper, the author also suggests areas for further research and social work advocacy.

Spatial concentration patterns of South Asian low-skilled immigrants in Oman: A spatial analysis of residential geographies

Oman is a major recipient of South Asian labor immigrants, and correspondingly, the demographic statistics reveal that the non-Omani populations primarily are constituted of the Asians. This research examines whether the largest immigrant groups (Indian, Bangladesh, Pakistani and Sri Lankan) in Oman form residential clusters according to their work skills (higher and lower skills). The residential geographies of South Asian workers at the subnational administrative boundaries have been investigated in the current study. Empirically, the study employs the use of Location Quotients (LQ) and Entropy Index within the GIS environment to spatially analyze the immigrant residential distributions based on their work skills. Interestingly, the findings of this research confirm the primary influence of geography on the residential patterns of the low-skilled immigrants. Initially, Al-Batnah governorates constituted the main destinations of low-skilled Bangladeshis. Further, the research also highlights significant clusters of Indian and Pakistani high-skilled immigrants in urban residential communities within the Muscat governorate. In addition, the South Asian are found to be a relatively constant stream of immigrants to inhabit the Omani urban areas, with employments in various public and private economic sectors (e.g. educational, health, manufacturing, finance, business etc.). This concentration pattern of low skilled immigrants is attributable to the need to labor shortages of native populations in certain jobs. The research results also indicate that the rural and suburban communities of Al-Batnah coastal plain not only have a greater number of low skilled immigrants but also display equitable distributions of the four South Asian groups in the residential settlements. For policy makers, it is imperative to understand the spatial patterns of low and high-skilled immigrants in Oman, which exert several geographic, economic, social and demographic implications. The significant role of immigration in development necessitates the identification of the predominant destinations for immigrants. It has been observed that the immigrants are crucial to several sectors of Omani urban economy, and urban areas with a large number of immigrants are more likely to grow and expand faster. In addition, the immigrants’ laborers offer potential economic benefits to the host country, which include fostering entrepreneurial activities, small businesses and reducing wages, especially in unskilled jobs. Despite the negative impacts of immigration (e.g. losing national cultural and creating socio-spatial segregation), the diverse and distinctive locational patterns of immigrant groups in Oman contribute crucially to the socioeconomic development and immigration policy. Yet understanding of the spatial dynamics of immigration in structuring the Omani regions and its influences remains very limited. Thus, further research accounting for the different spatial and attribute ancillary data is necessitated.

Affecting Lives: How Winning the US Diversity Visa Lottery Impacts DV Migrants Pre‐ and Post‐Migration

AbstractUsual debates about the diversity visa (DV) programme revolve around the impact of DV initiated mass migration on African countries’ development, on whether the programme sufficiently diversifies U.S. immigrant streams, and on whether there is a tradeoff in immigrant quality for diversity. This article seeks to extend the focus of these debates by examining the impact of the diversity visa programme on DV migrants at the micro‐level pre‐ and post‐migration. Based on in‐depth interviews with sixty‐one diversity visa lottery winners from Ghana and Nigeria, the article examines how this immigration policy has become a contextual determinant of immigrant incorporation. It argues that an account of the impact of immigration policies on immigrants pre‐ and post‐migration must be added to theorization of state agency in shaping migration flows. It concludes with a discussion on ways the diversity visa programme can be modified to facilitate incorporation of DV migrants in the United States.

National Trauma and the Fear of Foreigners: How Past Geopolitical Threat Heightens Anti-Immigration Sentiment Today

This paper introduces a historical, macro-political argument into the literature on anti-immigration sentiment, which has mainly considered individual-level predictors such as education or social capital as well as country-level factors such as fluctuations in labor market conditions, changing composition of immigration streams, or the rise of populist parties. We argue that past geopolitical competition and war have shaped how national identities formed and thus also contemporary attitudes toward newcomers: countries that have experienced more violent conflict or lost territory and sovereignty developed ethnic (rather than civic) forms of nationalism and thus show higher levels of anti-immigration sentiment today. We introduce a geopolitical threat scale and score 33 European countries based on their historical experiences. Two anti-immigration measures come from the European Social Survey. Mixed-effects, ordinal logistic regression models reveal strong statistical and substantive significance for the geopolitical threat scale. Furthermore, ethnic forms of national identification do seem to mediate this relationship between geopolitical threat and restrictionist attitudes. The main analysis is robust to a wide variety of model specifications, to the inclusion of all control variables known to affect anti-immigration attitudes, and to a series of alternative codings of the geopolitical threat scale.

The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney

Reviewed by: The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare by Steven Mullaney Sean Lawrence (bio) Steven Mullaney. The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. x + 231. $35.00. Steven Mullaney's The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare opens with a striking image: the charnel house of old St. Paul's cathedral being emptied into a swamp on the Thames, forming the very land over which theatregoers passed to reach Shoreditch and the first Elizabethan theatre. As he immediately admits, however, "few, if any, would have been aware of what lay beneath their feet" (5). He nevertheless claims that this image, the move from the charnel house to the theatre, can serve as an emblem "more structured and less easily understood than an anecdote" of shifts in what he calls "the Elizabethan social imaginary" (4–5). This seems to mean that the position of the bones remained significant, even if nobody knew about them, as a sort of repressed memory. The book as a whole is driven by what Paul Ricoeur calls a hermeneutic of suspicion, which Mullaney distinguishes from skepticism. Indeed, Mullaney seems anxious to put "hermeneutic skepticism" in its place, declaring that it is "not an end in itself but the beginning of further inquiry" (119). He stresses the continued importance of the repressed, the suppressed, the erased, and even the forgotten to the Elizabethan mind. He explicitly refuses "to limit evidence to the explicitly articulated, reported, or theorized." He asks, indeed, "how can we know what an Elizabethan audience thought or felt as they watched, heard, and responded to any given performance?" and responds to his own question with "the blunt answer would be 'we can't'" (61). Nevertheless, he argues that theatre "could probe and feel and even touch some of the crucial integuments and sinews of the social body that had become disarticulated" (93). If we can't tell what the Elizabethans thought, however, we certainly can't tell where "the crucial integuments and sinews of the social body" would lie. An earlier generation of critics liked to talk about an Elizabethan mind or world picture which could only be avoided, E. M. W. Tillyard once remarked, by not thinking at all. Mullaney sees the early modern mind as still open to study, but under the name of "social imaginary," and only in its disjunctions and disarticulations. The object of his [End Page 107] study is not the ideas that drove Elizabethan thoughts, but the anxieties that drove Elizabethan emotions. He finds these anxieties ubiquitous, even when forgotten. Having abandoned the usual criteria for historical judgement, Mullaney may simply be finding what isn't there. He admits that few theatregoers would know that they were passing over bones from the charnel house, for instance. He fails to note in addition that, since London drew a steady stream of immigrants, many Londoners would have no relation to the dead of hundreds of years earlier. Rather than an active forgetting in "quite extreme and explicit pogroms against the past" (105), one might simply find that the past had already been forgotten, or was never much remembered to begin with, and hence its plastic representation in the charnel-house bones could become mere swamp-fill. Somebody in early modern England had to have demystified the representations of the past, or else they would be unable to undertake the work of destruction at all. Indeed, on page 10 Mullaney admits that "the campaign against charnel houses was limited in scope," though on the facing page he reverts to describing a "rage against the dead," which we are assured "was pervasive in unofficial as well as official forms." He borrows the phrase "rage against the dead" from one John Weever, who is now principally remembered for documenting funeral monuments eventually destroyed after his own death, as was his own: the rage against the dead that Weever polemically describes in order to justify his own practice seems to have had more effect after him than before him. Like Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World and, even more, Hamlet in Purgatory, Mullaney accepts the views of Catholic polemicists...