Immigration Boom Research Articles

The role of immigration in a deep recession

This paper studies the impact of pre-Great Recession immigrant inflows on the labour market during a recession. It develops a random search model of the labour market featuring vacancy persistence, endogenous return migration, and wage rigidity. Consistent with the Spanish data, some immigrants in the model leave the country during the recession, freeing up jobs for natives. Yet, differences in match-quality draws between immigrants and natives also impact firms’ job creation decisions. The return-migration channel positively affects natives, while job creation effects are negative in the calibrated Spanish economy. I find that immigrants mitigate the impact of the recession and enhance natives’ welfare. During the recession, the native unemployment rate would have been 2 percentage points higher in the absence of the pre-crisis immigration boom. Return migration plays a key role, with short- and medium-run impacts on the native unemployment rate 6 times larger than all other channels combined.

Explaining the Impact of South-South Migration: Evidence from Chile’s Immigration Boom

Explaining the Impact of South-South Migration: Evidence from Chile’s Immigration Boom

Socio-spatial analysis of migrant school students according to Bourdieu's capitals in Santiago de Chile (2017–2020)

Chile has experienced a substantial immigration boom in the last 10 years. The urban areas of this nation present high levels of residential segregation, represented in its main city, Santiago. This article presents results of an exploratory analysis of the relationship between residential segregation, immigration rate by educational institutions and changes in school performance. Based on the generation of clusters characterized by cultural, social, economic and symbolic capital, an analysis of the changes in school performance in those schools that received the greatest number of migrants is generated.

A Case Study of Multicultural Education Curriculum in Japanese Middle School

In the context of globalization, Japan has gradually moved from a single ethnic group to diversity due to historical factors such as the immigration boom and economic development. This change also calls into question the traditional form of education in Japanese society, which is unable to adapt to the current society where multiculturalism coexists, and where the trend toward diversity in Japan has become inevitable as the world continues to globalize. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to discuss the reflection on how to solve the social problems of multicultural impact. In this study, we analyzed the implementation of multicultural education in schools and the difficulties encountered, and discussed measures to solve the problem based on interviews and research conducted in middle schools in Hamamatsu City, using multicultural education as the main research topic and analyzing the research conducted by Japanese scholars and experts.

Spanish across Domains in the United States: Education, Public Space, and Social Media by ed. Francisco Salgado-Robles and Edwin M. Lamboy

Reviewed by: Spanish across Domains in the United States: Education, Public Space, and Social Media by ed. Francisco Salgado-Robles and Edwin M. Lamboy Antonio Martín Gómez Salgado-Robles, Francisco, and Edwin M. Lamboy, editors. Spanish across Domains in the United States: Education, Public Space, and Social Media. Brill, 2020, Pp. 402. ISBN 978-90-04-43322-9. Spanish across Domains in the United States. Education, Public Space, and Social Media is a more than welcome addition to the increasing number of edited works that examine the current state of Spanish as a minority language across the most representative regions in the United States. Divided into three portions, the sixteen contributions of this volume reflect the most up-to-date uses of Spanish not only in traditional educational settings, but also in contexts such as the linguistic signage of several urban centers, or the innovative uses that the Hispanic youth employ to affirm their identities in social media. After a general introduction in which the editors discuss the various factors that affect the overall use of minority Spanish at home and in the public domain, a first set of studies dealing with the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language is presented. In chapter 1 Sara M. Beaudrie and Sergio Loza examine the current efforts in Arizona to avoid language shift as a consequence of the restrictive educational policies that prevent Latino students from developing their biliteracy skills. Devin L. Jenkins describes in chapter 2 the solid state of Spanish in Colorado: although the Mexican immigration boom has recently slowed, the community language is not likely to disappear in the near future, as is evidenced by the strong bilingual educational offerings. Similarly, Kim Potowski explores in chapter 3 the vitality of Mexican and Puerto Rican communities in the city of Chicago, which over the years have merged into new identities that demand dual language schools and heritage language programs across all educational levels. In chapter 4, Manel Lacorte, Elisa Gironzetti and Evelyn Canabal-Torres concentrate on the Spanish taught in the Washington metro area, a community that enjoys a favorable climate towards Hispanic cultures yet lacks adequate language programs that can effectively address the needs of these students. In chapter 5, Inmaculada Gómez Soler offers a thorough review of the state of Spanish [End Page 159] as a heritage language in Tennessee, a state that has experienced an increase in Hispanic speakers in recent years but still lacks the adequate resources to provide effective instruction to heritage language learners. The next studies are devoted to linguistic landscaping, the examination of the languages used in public signs which in turn reflect the sociology, literacy and anthropology (among other aspects) of bilingual communities. In chapter 6, Aaron B. Roggia examines the signage of Oklahoma City, whose emergent Hispanic community shows strong cultural and linguistic maintenance while also embracing the receiving culture. María Cecilia Colombi, Daniela Cerbino and Marta Llorente Bravo examine on chapter 7 the languages of instructions, advertisements, and information brochures in California, refuting the assumption that the more acculturated the Hispanic consumer is, less relevant the minority language becomes. In chapter 8, Elena Foulis and Glenn Martínez investigate the imagination, dreams, and desires behind the visual representations of “La Villa Hispana,” a community revitalization project in Northeast Ohio, whose signage reflects a desire for cultural representation rather than economic improvement. Chapter 9 focuses on a Hispanic neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Amanda Dixson and Angela George found that despite its size, Spanish was still present in at least 2% of the advertisements, place names, and notices, evidencing the emergence of Hispanic communities in the area. Steven Alvarez examines in chapter 10 the Spanish used in the “Valle del Bluegrass” library in Kentucky, an example of a welcoming community that allows for acceptance and trust especially among bilingual youth groups, and validates the identities of historically discriminated communities. The third group of studies analyzes how bilingual youth use Spanish in social media. Patricia MacGregor-Mendoza and Gabriela Moreno examine in chapter 11 the Instagram posts of eight young adults from Southern New Mexico, who use this online environment as a space to express the languages, images...

A Diminished Roar: Winnipeg in the 1920s by Jim Blanchard

Reviewed by: A Diminished Roar: Winnipeg in the 1920s by Jim Blanchard Robert Wardhaugh Blanchard, Jim –A Diminished Roar: Winnipeg in the 1920s. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2019. Pp. 294. What place and time could be more exciting than Winnipeg in the 1920s? While this question may seem to drip with sarcasm, there is more to it than first meets the eye. Only a generation before, as immigrants poured in and industrialization took hold, this city was heralded as "The Gateway to the West" and more impressively "The Chicago of the North." The rhetoric of boosterism prophesied the heights that Winnipeg would reach. But as Jim Blanchard highlighted in his preceding books, Winnipeg 1912 (2005) and Winnipeg's Great War (2010), the path forward was fraught with obstacles that threatened to derail the path to progress and prosperity. Instead, the Manitoba capital slid into a period of decline that would last decades and dash the dreams of boosters. A sharp recession in 1910 ended the short-lived golden era of the West. The onset of the Great War in 1914 ripped at the very fabric of society, and by 1918, it was clear that the Prairie cities, with Winnipeg at the forefront, had not profited from federal wartime contracts. By 1919, soldiers returned from the trenches to find a city tumbling back into the grips of recession, broiling with labour conflict, and suffering under a global pandemic. Welcome to Winnipeg in 1920. This book is Jim Blanchard's third in his series on the history of Winnipeg. It follows the traditional path of Canadian historians in taking a decade approach to the chronology following the end of the Great War. But as Blanchard makes clear in the book's title, Winnipeg did not experience the "Roaring Twenties." In truth, neither did the rest of Canada. This decade descriptor is more suitable to the experience of the United States. The 1920s was a difficult decade for Canada. And nowhere was this more evident than in Winnipeg. The topic of this book is important and timely. While the tides of nationalism and regionalism have again ebbed with Canadian historians, the focus on the local remains prominent. And Winnipeg, despite its contemporary reputation, has a fascinating history. Meanwhile, the so-called interwar period continues to receive scant attention, with the twenties playing the role of the forgotten sibling next to the "Dirty Thirties" and the Great Depression. This book has the potential of killing two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, Blanchard only manages to maim the bird. A Diminished Roar provides a traditional approach to Winnipeg's history. It is a top-down perspective from the view of the disappointed city elite whose dreams of Winnipeg's greatness are repeatedly dashed. The reader is led on a journey through the bitter aftermath of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, an atmosphere roiling with class antagonism but one in which the business elite, symbolized by the Citizens' Committee of 1000, has clearly emerged victorious. While we get a sense of the anger simmering just beneath the surface, through detailed accounts of battles waged in city council and for the position of mayor, Blanchard makes no attempt to tell the story of Winnipeg's infamous North End or its racial, ethnic, and class cleavages. Instead, the story is decorated with mini-biographies of the "great men" who came mainly from southern Ontario in an attempt to make their fortunes but were instead met by the disappointment of a declining city. The Métis [End Page 183] and Indigenous nations had been pushed from the margins of the dominant story by 1920 and Blanchard leaves them in the shadows. Winnipeg's kaleidoscope of ethnicity so recently created by the western immigration boom from 1896 to 1910 is likewise ignored. The reader learns in considerable detail about the elite's struggle to construct Winnipeg's commercial edifices, boulevards, parks, highways, and festivals, but learns little of the daily struggles, concerns, and aspirations of its average citizens. While Winnipeg may have boasted one of the most progressive and effective women's movements, resulting in the province being the first in Canada to win the right to vote...

Juegos culturales cooperativos como medio inclusivo en la enseñanza secundaria

La escasez de valores existentes actualmente en la sociedad es una de las principales preocupaciones que como docentes debemos afrontar. Por otra parte, el gran auge de la inmigración que hoy acontece, provoca aún más discrepancias para la relación con nuestros iguales, provocando dentro de la materia de Educación Física el aislamiento y la falta de adaptación por parte del alumnado de otras culturas que día a día crece con más fuerza en los centros escolares, influyendo negativamente dentro y fuera del marco educativo. El principal objetivo de esta experiencia didáctica es conocer mediante juegos las culturas de los cinco continentes, incidiendo en las características y necesidades de nuestro alumnado, dando autonomía para la adquisición de responsabilidades y fomentando la cooperación como elemento fundamental para la consecución de valores sociales. Para ello, se desarrolló una Unidad Didáctica de Juegos Culturales Cooperativos, donde el alumnado mediante el trabajo por grupos diseñó una sesión y la presentó al resto de sus compañeros sobre un continente específico. Las conclusiones a destacar, una vez finalizada la puesta en práctica de esta Unidad, son la mejora en las relaciones interpersonales del alumnado y el beneficio físico y social que estas actividades llevan consigo.

Spain after the Immigration Boom: Socio-Economic and Political Perspective

Spain after the Immigration Boom: Socio-Economic and Political Perspective

Tracking a Changing America across the Generations after Immigration

The post-1960s immigration boom and contemporary demographics have elevated generation-since-immigration as a category that is central to analysts and, more generally, to Americans as they make sense of their place in the world around them. This makes the collection of data on immigrant generations imperative if surveys are to keep up with how the nation’s people think about themselves and each other. A clear portrait of contemporary assimilation, and indeed American progress, depends on possessing the right tools to paint such a portrait. That means that surveys must enable researchers to identify respondents’ generation, particularly the third generation of the post-1965 immigration wave.

Nueva república, nuevo horizonte, nuevo porvenir: las migraciones colombianas hacia Chile, 1990-2016

As a result of the great economic growth in Latin America throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the development of migrations towards certain destinies inside the region experienced a significant upturn comparable with the massive migration waves in the nineteenth century. Chile stands out due to its growing immigration boom, as the destiny of numerous people migrating from other South American countries, including Colombia. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to understand the nature and development of the phenomenon of Colombian migration to Chile, as a matter of high importance in the main immigration situation in the last 15 years. It is our hope that the reader will be able to understand the real dimension of this phenomenon as an agent that directly affects the new transformations of Colombian migration abroad.

Política de inmigración y los efectos de los ciclos económicos en la reunificación familiar en España

En este trabajo se analiza la influencia de las políticas de inmigración y de la Gran Recesión en la reunificación familiar en España. Tras el auge inmigratorio (2000-2008), las migraciones por motivos familiares han contribuido a mantener flujos de entrada significativos a lo largo de la crisis en España. Sin embargo, tanto la propia crisis como las políticas inmigratorias -como la necesidad de visado- afectan a este tipo de inmigración. Con datos de la Encuesta de Población Activa (EPA), esta investigación considera casos de inmigrantes primarios llegados a España de los cuatro principales países de origen (Ecuador, Colombia, Rumanía y Marruecos) y concluye, en primer lugar, que condiciones más estrictas para visitar el país -en particular, la exigencia de visado- frenan la reunificación matrimonial. La razón puede deberse a que durante el auge de la inmigración muchos inmigrantes secundarios llegaban a España como turistas. En segundo lugar, la Gran Recesión frenó la reunificación para todos los países considerados, excepto Ecuador, y su influencia negativa es mayor para las mujeres inmigrantes primarias, algo lógico pues la crisis eliminó empleos típicamente masculinos. En tercer lugar, y contrariamente a las expectativas que asignan al inmigrante secundario unos vínculos con el empleo comparativamente reducidos, la investigación muestra que la coincidencia de la reunificación con una profunda crisis económica y de empleo ha llevado a inmigrantes secundarios femeninos a la actividad laboral, aumentando la oferta de trabajo familiar, con el fin de mantener el consumo y / o las remesas, en lo que parece ser un “efecto trabajador añadido”.

The Immigrant-native Student Educational Achievement Gap in Greece using PISA 2012

Starting in the 1970s Greece, a traditional emigration country, experienced an immigration boom, with the majority of immigrants being Albanians and co-ethnic Greeks from the ex-Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries; by 2012 the share of students in Greek schools with immigrant background exceeded 10%, having tripled over a decade. While in most countries immigrant students perform worse than natives in international assessments, there is considerable between-country heterogeneity. Using PISA 2012 for Mathematics and Reading achievement and a multilevel analysis, I find that Greece belongs to a small group of countries in which there is no evidence of an immigrant disadvantage for either first- or secondgeneration immigrants. The differences in achievement found in the raw data can be easily be accounted for by differences in socioeconomic background, school track, as well as differences in between-school quality.

NETWORKS AND SELECTION IN INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION TO SPAIN

We offer fresh evidence on the effect of migrant networks on two essential aspects of migration: (1) the total scale of migration and (2) the skill composition of migration. Our analysis is for the remarkable case of Spain, which experienced a full‐blown immigration boom from the mid‐1990s up to the Global Financial Crisis. To accommodate flexible substitution patterns across alternative migrant destinations, we use a three‐level nested multinomial logit model. We find a strong positive network effect on the scale of migration and a strong negative effect on the ratio of high‐skilled to low‐skilled migrants. Simplifying restrictions on the structure of cross‐destination substitutability are rejected by the data. (JEL F22, J61)

Variations in mesothelioma mortality rates among migrants to Australia and Australian-born

ABSTRACTBackground: Australia’s use and consumption of asbestos occurred at the same time as its immigration boom. Our objective was to investigate mesothelioma death rates among migrants and Australian-born between 1981 and 2012.Methods: Australian national mesothelioma deaths from 1981 to 2002 and 2006 to 2012 together with national censuses from 1981 to 2011 were extracted and combined. Directly standardised rates and negative binomial regression were applied examining differences in mesothelioma death rates with regard to country of birth.Results: Migrants from the UK and Ireland, Italy and Germany had significantly higher mesothelioma death rates than Australian-born; lower rates were observed among migrants from other countries.Conclusions: Our findings suggest there may have been differences in occupational health and safety between foreign and Australian-born. Because of changes in the demographics of migrants to Australia since the 1970s and changes in occupational circumstances over time, further comparisons of occupational-related health outcomes between foreign and Australian-born could identify potential occupational inequalities that may still exist today.

The Study Area

The Study Area

The social construction of Latino childhood in the New South

Childhood in the United States, and in the American South more particularly, has several well-known and popularized constructions, typically divided by social class and ethnic identity. More specifically, Southern childhood is constructed as an either white or black experience, with one’s social world being extremely ethnically segregated in either case. Over the last several decades, as a post–North American Free Trade Agreement immigration boom has brought several generations of Latinos into the American South (in part because of these shifting demographics, the area is now often called the “New South”), this bifurcated popular conceptualization of childhood has been disrupted by the growing presence of Latino children in Southern schools and communities. Building upon Vygotsky’s premise that identity (including ethnic identity) is constructed through a cultural–historical lens, we here use the nascent literature on Latino education in the New South to outline an initial construction of Southern Latino childhood.

Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel by Michael Perfect (review)

Reviewed by: Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel by Michael Perfect David Thomas (bio) Michael Perfect. Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism: Diversity and the Millennial London Novel. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Pp. xi, 221. £55.00. Michael Perfect’s Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism begins with an engaging analysis of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. Perfect’s careful reading of the event showcases many of the strengths of his study of the millennial London novel. As the ceremony’s huge cast of players traversed the grounds at the newly built Olympic Stadium, Danny Boyle’s spectacle recalled the Isles’ pastoral history in a flurry of round dances and grandstanding oratory, only to strip the reveries away with sudden and emphatic force. Perfect writes, “as smokestacks [rose] dramatically from the ground, … Boyle’s ceremony seems to suggest, London must have seemed like the capital of hell. How, it wondered, did the city go from being the capital of hell, to the capital of a modern, multicultural nation?” (2). Keeping this particular question in mind, Perfect’s introduction delivers an informed and nuanced review of the social and literary legacies of the Windrush Generation. Perfect’s brisk transition from the 2012 London Olympics to the first days of large-scale immigration into the United Kingdom is mediated by the historical coincidence that London last hosted the games in 1948, the year the Empire Windrush first docked in Tilbury, an event that marked the beginning of Britain’s postwar immigration boom. The book’s opening vignette is aptly chosen. Like Boyle’s ceremony, Perfect’s monograph offers a critical yet broadly affirmative reading of the contemporary moment. We can be fairly sure that a considerable distance separates the “capital of hell” from the capital of this “modern, multicultural nation” (2). Or can we? In Perfect’s reading of the millennial London novel there is always a little room for doubt. Indeed, his argument rarely fixes on a hard and fast political position, preferring, instead, to showcase the diversity of perspectives on millennial London that British writers have offered. Contemporary Fictions of Multiculturalism is fundamentally concerned with the characteristic particularities of each writer’s vision. According to Perfect, schematic readings of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, and Hanif Kureishi have tended to mistakenly conflate their distinctive and conflicting accounts of contemporary London. This tendency is, in part, a product of ascribing undue significance to “authorial ethnicity” (200). This widely practiced mode of appraisal ostensibly leads readers to interpret authors as representatives of minority experience, judging their works’ “authenticity” accordingly (201). Perfect’s account “attempts to resist” this [End Page 187] approach (200). He also argues that the trope of the immigrant as “powerless victim” has bedevilled contemporary London’s literary field (200). Works such as Brian Chikwava’s Harare North have largely failed to find an audience because readers remain stubbornly attached to postcolonial clichés and averse to narratives that complicate or critique the established tropes. In one of the book’s strongest chapters, Perfect returns to Smith’s millennial blockbuster, White Teeth, arguing that the novel has been misleadingly compared to Rushdie’s superficially similar “big, multigenerational” metropolitan novels (77). In contrast to the complex indeterminacies and contingencies explored in Rushdie’s fiction, White Teeth is “a very calculated attempt to celebrate a very particular brand of multiculturalism; one that it seeks to familiarise” (79). This particular brand of multiculturalism turns out to be “one in which, specifically, a confluence of white Britishness … with Britain’s non-white, postcolonial immigrant communities … affords a vision of a new millennium in which tensions between those groups might begin to be consigned to the past” (95). It is, indeed, hard to imagine Rushdie engaging in such an affirmative form of political forecasting. As Perfect draws to his conclusion, he notes that the optimistic multiculturalism that had sustained White Teeth’s outlook has grown a little thinner on the ground in recent decades. Doubtful that such novels belong entirely to the past, however, Perfect still finds it “encouraging that, in recent years, a number of novelists have sought to question the degree to which London’s ethnic...

The Gaps between Us: Multilingualism and Immigration in Alfian Sa’at’s Cook a Pot of Curry

This essay examines the role of English, multilingualism, translation, and Singapore’s local creole Singlish in Alfian Sa’at’s play Cook a Pot of Curry (2013). The play is set against a backdrop of Singapore’s National Population and Talent Division’s proposed plan to expedite population growth by granting permanent resident status to between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand individuals per year. Alfian captures the anxiety felt by many Singaporeans in anticipation of the immigration boom. Using a multilingual rhetoric characteristic of certain forms of Singaporean theatre since the 1980s, he challenges the Anglo-centric model of Singaporean identity that serves as a central theme in much of this modern anti-foreigner sentiment. Multilingualism and Singlish, Alfian proposes, might offer a means toward intercultural understanding and a way in which “the gaps between” Singaporeans and their foreign neighbors might be bridged.

Employment and Occupational Mobility among Recently Arrived Immigrants: The Spanish Case 1997–2007

The objective of this paper is to analyse occupational mobility among immigrants in Spain in two distinct stages: (1) comparing the immigrants’ first job in Spain with their profession in the country of origin and (2) comparing their current occupational status with the occupational status of the first job they held in Spain. We focus on immigrants who arrived in Spain during the “immigration boom” that took place between 1997 and 2007, using data from the 2007 National Survey on Immigration. For our analysis, we use occupational mobility tables and multi-variable models with occupational mobility as a dependent variable. Our results show that we can better understand the initial access of migrants to the Spanish labour market from the perspective of labour market segregation: for each gender, a particular sector/occupational level (construction and cleaning, respectively) played such a dominant role that it determined almost entirely the observed mobility pattern. We find some (upward) mobility opportunities after such initial strong segregation, which increased with length of residence; however, our results suggest that, even in this case, it is mostly limited to men and associated with the construction boom that finished abruptly in 2007.

The Musical Routes of the Spanish Black Atlantic: The Performance of Identities in the Rap of Frank T and El Chojín

On account of the immigration boom at the turn of the 21st century, the various ways in which cultural production in Spain has engaged with and been shaped by residents born overseas and the issue of ethnic difference now comprise a significant field of academic study. In this paper, I examine the self-representation of artists of African origin on the Spanish rap scene. To this end, I draw on and adapt Paul Gilroy's conceptual space of the “black Atlantic” and Simon Frith's understanding of the musical performance of identities in an analysis of the work of the two most prominent black Spanish MCs, Frank T and El Chojín. In view of their exclusion from dominant notions of what it is to be Spanish (as they detail in several of their lyrics), these two rappers construct alternative identities in dialogue with the international black diaspora by borrowing and sampling from African-American and African musical styles and voices.