ABSTRACT This article examines the grassroots mobilization of Latinx immigrant food vendors—loncheros and hotdogueros—in Phoenix, Arizona, who overturned a citywide food truck ban between 1999 and 2001. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork, and archival sources, it explores how vendors legalized stationary food vending and reshaped urban space in the Southwest. While scholarship on street vending often focuses on large cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, few studies consider the Southwest or cases in which vendors influenced city policy. Vendors drew on the history of the Pochteca—Aztec merchants whose trade spanned the U.S. Southwest and Mexico—to assert historical and cultural belonging. They formed Unión Pochteca Vendedores Ambulantes LLC, first as a political association and later as a cooperatively run commissary. Situated within scholarship on Latinx urbanism, racialized illegality, and immigrant politics, this historical ethnography demonstrates how immigrant-led organizing continues to shape cultural, political, and regulatory debates today.

Botswana has relied on migrant skilled labour since gaining independence in 1966. Migrant skilled labour was recruited worldwide, contributing to Botswana’s socio-economic development trajectory. Consequently, Botswana was classified as a developmental state and an upper-middle-income economy by the 1990s. Using immigration politics to frame the debate, this research argues that migrant skilled labour was instrumental to Botswana’s political and socio-economic development, albeit creating systemic challenges. It contends that some of Botswana’s key economic sectors are controlled by some immigrants who exert undue influence on Botswana’s political leadership and economic policies, while also igniting xenophobic sentiments from indigenous communities. The research further maintains that Botswana has securitised immigration and indiscriminately declared immigrants who are not politically connected as prohibited. In conclusion, this research proposes immigration laws and policies that are inclusive and balance the interests of indigenous people, the state and immigrants.

This article examines how U.S. immigration and citizenship policies reconcile the tension between capital's demand for exploitable labor and the state's project of racialized national membership, and argues that Trump's second-term agenda pushes this compromise toward breakdown. Drawing on Lisa Lowe's theorization of the capital–state contradiction, the paper traces how laws from the Naturalization Act of 1790 through Chinese exclusion, national origins quotas, and post-9/11 security regimes constructed racialized immigrants as indispensable workers yet perpetually foreign and deportable. It then analyzes the second Trump administration's efforts to undermine birthright citizenship, expand travel bans and racialized refugee preferences, generalize deportability, and normalize emergency authority, showing how these measures collapse boundaries between immigration enforcement, citizenship, and ordinary law. The article concludes with implications for Korean immigration debates, offering the U.S. experience as a cautionary example of how racialized exclusion destabilizes both economy and democracy.

ABSTRACT Building on ethnographic fieldwork in welfare hearings in French‐speaking Belgium, this article explores how judges decide between irregular migrants claiming social assistance and the public welfare administrations refusing such claims. Investigating these cases helps to analyze how members of the bench establish truthfulness and ponder the social and political consequences of their decisions. In these contexts, irregular migrants, despite being the more disadvantaged party to the case, regularly win against the state. At the theoretical level, this article provides a counterpoint to two general trends in sociolegal and migration studies. First, it nuances the idea that judicial proceedings generally tend to further or reproduce inequalities by showing how courts can, under certain conditions, help uphold migrants' rights against the state. Second, it highlights the importance of law and formal institutions in the governance of precarious migrants.

ABSTRACT Although former Republican President Donald Trump has been criticized for being xenophobic and racist, surveys and election results show that Latinos are increasingly shifting politically rightward. Such shifts contradict assumptions about race, ethnicity, and immigration politics, puzzling analysts and laypeople alike as to why non-White immigrant voters would support Trump. In this article, I draw upon 66 original interviews with US Latinos to break through scholarly and popular “puzzlement” about US Latino politics. To learn how Latinos navigate the cultural dynamics of political projects, we must talk to Latino voters and reconsider deep-seated, common, and flawed assumptions about this ethnoracial group. I find the following: (1) Latinos have come to directly and negatively associate Latino conservatism with Trumpism, (2) Latino Republican voters actively work to reconcile the perceived contradiction between being Latino and voting Republican, and (3) ethnoracial and political identities are contested within Latino families.

Abstract Over the last decade, the Scottish Government have pursued a positive, highly visible immigration politics, despite Scotland lacking formal immigration powers and being enveloped within a United Kingdom that has simultaneously pursued an increasingly securitised approach. With securitisation intensifying globally, coupled with a rise in, and political success of, anti-immigration parties and actors, this article investigates the question of why the Scottish Government has pursued a desecuritising approach – a neglected strand of (de)securitisation studies that principally focuses on the how . We draw on insights from ontological security studies to investigate the Scottish Government’s desecuritisation activity between 2014 and 2024, demonstrating that, whilst there are rationalist-materialist explanations, desecuritisation was not inevitable. Instead, by exploring the relationship between immigration and the construction of the Scottish self at the ontological level we can more fully understand the drivers behind desecuritisation. Pursuing a desecuritised immigration politics is shown, first, to support the Scottish Government’s core autobiographical narrative about who ‘Scotland’ is (open, welcoming, and internationalist), and second, through nurturing a Lacanian fantasy, to be affectively rewarding. Last, the article contributes to the (re)conceptualisation of linearity and temporality in (de)securitisation studies, showcasing contemporary-orientated desecuritisation moves dovetailing with moves aimed at an institutional ‘future-proofing’ of desecuritised immigration governance.

ABSTRACT Scholars widely agree that the Populist Radical Right (PRR) ‘owns’ the immigration issue, but not enough is known regarding how this ownership is created and maintained. Previous studies analyzed the frequency with which parties emphasize immigration in their discourse, but often neglect the content of such discourse and typically focus on party manifestos issued during election periods, precluding deeper understanding of how PRR parties maintain their ownership of immigration between elections. To address these gaps, this study examines the frequency and framing of immigration discourse from three PRR parties whose ownership of the issue is undisputed, National Rally, Brothers of Italy, and Vox. We use both quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques to examine the entirety of these parties’ Telegram profiles from 2020 to 2024. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we find that immigration is not frequently addressed in parties’ ‘everyday’ discourse; instead, it is strategically invoked in relation to exogenous news events, which are used to legitimize the party’s competence and contrast it with its opponents’ alleged incompetence. These findings stand to influence both how we understand PRR parties’ impact on the issue arena, as well as scholarly understanding of the dynamics of issue ownership more broadly.

Abstract Concern that immigration worsens crime problems is prevalent across Western publics. How does it shape electoral politics? Prior research asserted a growing left–right divide in immigration attitudes and voting behavior due to educational realignment. In contrast, I argue that leftist voters are more conservative on immigrant crime than leftist parties, which can drive highly educated progressives (so‐called “cosmopolitans”) to right‐wing parties. I demonstrate this voter–party mismatch using survey data from 14 Western European countries linked with expert ratings of party positions. A panel survey from Germany further shows that concern about immigrant crime increases vote intention for the center right among voters of the Greens—the party of leftist cosmopolitans. A conjoint experiment among German voters replicates this defection effect and shows that it persists even if the center right stigmatizes immigrants or adopts conservative sociocultural issue positions. Repercussions of immigration can in fact drive leftist cosmopolitans to the right.

ABSTRACT This paper brings immigrant politics in the settlement service industry into a conversation of pluriversality by proposing an onto-epistemological reading of participant interviews with migrant youth in Windsor Essex, Canada in order to question the individualised, imperial, neoliberal, Eurocentric and colonising assumptions with which we conventionally understand migrant youth resilience. This article offers a decolonial challenge to the epistemic logic and ontological dominance of Western world that has shaped research on migrant youth. This has implications for rethinking ‘resilience’ as the term of reference for migrant youth relationality and for encountering racialised migrants more reciprocally. This paper takes resilience to be a process of emerging and enacting care and reciprocity with the self, beings and non-beings.

The complex history of South Africa, which is anchored on colonialism, apartheid, Afrophobia and xenophobia, has incubated and hatched the politicisation of immigration. Premised on the foregoing contextual background statement emanating from the local people’s frustration and aggression, this qualitative desktop and critical discourse analysis study examined the Afrophobic and Xenophobic racialised narratives on immigration in South Africa. This study examined the language and narratives used by key political actors, such as politicians, policymakers, and media outlets, to instigate and legitimise racialised hostility narratives against immigration. This study established that the politicisation of immigration in South Africa stems from racialised narratives, which perpetuate Afrophobia and xenophobic behaviours with the political actors’ endorsement. The findings demonstrate that political actors use political rhetoric to create a sense of crisis and urgency around immigration. The study aids in understanding the interplay between racialised political rhetoric on electoral politics and immigration policy in South Africa. This study’s implication is promoting an inclusive and equitable immigration policy that brings harmony amongst the local and immigrant populations. Finally, the study recommends that policymakers and practitioners should focus on developing pragmatic-based immigration policies as a panacea to the underlying causes of xenophobia and Afrophobia in South Africa. Keywords: Politicisation of Immigration, Racialised Discourse, Electoral Politics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Xenophobia, South Africa

Motivated political reasoning is a central phenomenon in political psychology, but no scholarly consensus exists as to its cause. In one influential account, motivated political reasoning is caused by goals to control emotional states. This explanation is often assumed, but has rarely been tested empirically. It implies, I argue, that individual differences in how people control their emotions (i.e., in emotion regulation strategies) should influence outcomes caused by motivated political reasoning, such as perceptual divides over politically relevant facts. I hypothesize such perceptual divides to be negatively associated with emotional acceptance and positively associated with cognitive reappraisal-two key emotion regulation strategies. I test these hypotheses in the specific context of reasoning about facts related to immigration politics in Denmark using a mix of experimental and cross-sectional survey data from three nationally representative samples of the Danish voter population (total N=4186). In the specific context of the present study, the results do not support the often-assumed idea that motivated political reasoning is driven by efforts to regulate emotions. These findings raise important questions about the conditions under which emotion regulation might play a role in motivated political reasoning.

This article explores the academic contributions of political immigrants from Southern Azerbaijan (Iran) who settled in Soviet Azerbaijan following the collapse of the National Government in December 1946. Triggered by mass repression under the Pahlavi regime, this emigration—estimated at 50,000 individuals—marked a significant political and ideological displacement. While many immigrants integrated into various sectors, a distinguished group pursued higher education and became involved in scientific research and academic life. The study presents a systematic review of doctoral and candidate dissertations defended between 1946 and 1970 by these immigrants across disciplines such as Iranian studies, linguistics, literature, political science, medicine, and natural sciences. By documenting the intellectual output and institutional roles of these émigrés, the article highlights the cultural and scientific legacy of a suppressed movement that transformed into a scholarly force in exile. The article also sheds light on the second and third generations of immigrant scholars who continued this academic tradition in the 1970s and 1980s.

Abstract We present the Immigrant Political Choice Nexus model to theorize immigrant associational mobilization focusing on three components: precarity as a primary determinant of the incentives to mobilize; relative precarity and the comparative advantage of immigrant resources that determine the primary target of mobilization; and the local organizational environment in the destination country to understand the level of mobilization. Our model seeks to explain why we see varying levels of mobilization, across time and geographic location, even within immigrant groups with the same nationality. A key contribution of this model is to clarify the strategic decision-making calculus of immigrants as they sit at the intersection of their home and host states. We advance the research agenda on immigrant political participation by incorporating both homeland and destination country immigrant mobilization and by bringing forced immigrants into a common theoretical framework with voluntary immigrants to clarify the demand side of the mobilization equation.

ABSTRACT Several European governments are confronting both high public debt and ageing populations. Policymakers will confront the unpopular choices of austerity, increasing immigration, or continuing to let debt increase. Because these outcomes are studied in isolation, the relative popularity of these interlinked policy options is still unknown. To gain insight into these trade-offs, we examine how the Italian public responds to alternative paths to debt reduction and test if citizens prefer austerity over immigration or are willing to relax opposition to immigration to avoid the material consequences of austerity in a constrained multidimensional setting. Our first experiment reveals that information about immigration’s fiscal benefits increases support for pro-immigration policies and improves attitudes toward immigrants. Next, using a conjoint design, we show that citizens prefer parties that reduce debt through immigration rather than austerity and that are more willing to accept increased immigration than ignore rising public debt. These findings provide insights into the interaction between fiscal policy, immigration, and austerity amid economic and demographic challenges, suggesting that sociocultural concerns can bend to material interests when voters are confronted with these alternative approaches to fiscal sustainability.

ABSTRACTIn a Europe where contestation over migration and European integration has become increasingly connected, Ireland seems to be an outlier. Whereas European integration has been a politicised issue in Ireland, not least in the context of four consecutive referendums on EU treaties in the early 2000s, politicisation of immigration has traditionally been low in Ireland. But while previous studies suggest that this has also been the case during EU referendums, the debates on the Treaty of Nice seem to be an exception. Ireland's status as an outlier in Western Europe and the variation across referendums makes the Irish referendums an ideal case for exploring the relationship between politicisation of migration and European integration. This article examines and explains to what extent and how migration has been discursively linked to European integration in the four Irish EU referendums in the period 2001–2009. Based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of political claims in Irish newspapers, I argue that pre‐existing national discourses on migration and European integration, which have been predominantly positive in Ireland, have generally hindered the mobilisation of anti‐immigration sentiments against the EU. The Nice II referendum is an exception, highlighting how not even Ireland is immune to such politicisation. My analysis shows how domestic radical right actors played an important part in mobilising such linkages, but also how the responses of other actors contributed to making migration a more salient issue. The article offers novel empirical insights into the politicisation of migration in Ireland, and also advances our general understanding of the dynamics behind the politicisation of migration in relation to European integration.

본 연구에서는 포용적 이민정책을 통해 내국민과 이민자 간 갈등을 최소화함으로써 사회통합을 유지 및 발전시키고 있는 스웨덴의 이민자 정치참여에 대해 살펴보고자 했다. 이를 위해 이민자 정치참여에 대한 이론적 논의를 고찰하고, 스웨덴 이민자의 참정권 부여에 대한 역사적 배경에 대해 알아보았다. 그리고 이민자의 정치참여를 위한 정책체계와 현재 정치참여 현황에 대해 살펴보고, 이민자의 정치참여를 독려하기 위해 실시중인 투표권 프로젝트를 소개했다. 투표권 프로젝트는 스웨덴 내 여성 이민자들의 정치참여를 돕기 위한 프로젝트로 전 세계적으로 스웨덴에서 유일하게 시도 되었으며, 시행 기간은 짧지만 소기의 성과를 이룬 것으로 평가되고 있다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 이민자가 점차 증가하고 있는 한국 사회에 대하여 스웨덴 사례를 통해 다음 두 가지 시사점을 도출하였다. 첫째, 국가적 차원에서 사회통합을 위한 이민자 정치참여를 독려할 필요가 있다. 둘째, 이민자들을 위한 다양한 민주주의 교육 및 특화된 프로그램을 개발하여 정치참여 수준을 높일 필요가 있다. 셋째, 장기적인 관점에서 이민자의 정치참여에 대한 대국민적 논의가 필요하다.

Bootlegged Aliens: Immigration Politics on America’s Northern Border by Ashley Johnson Bavery (review)

There are three things roiling politics in these times: the rise of Right-wing, religiously inflected authoritarian nationalisms; the political economy of debt and austerity; and struggles over the politics of immigration, race, and gender (or “gender ideology”). This is not new, but it is arguably intensified in this moment, from Trumpism to Bolsonarismo to Orbanism. This paper analyses how this conjunction works through certain kinds of reproductive governance that attempt to instantiate white, heterosexual nuclear families — including the criminalization of abortion and contraception, and the taking of the children of poor people and placing them in foster care or adoptions.

Historically, the representations of immigrants and ethnic minorities from Eastern Europe in American cinema have been shaped by perspectives external to their own communities. From the “hunkies” of the first half of the 20th century to the working-class heroes of the Vietnam War and the political immigrants of the (post-)Cold War era, the film industry has recorded the gradual integration of Eastern European immigrants into “white” American society. As far as self–representation is concerned, distinctive voices stemming from Eastern European communities have generally been associated with the white ethnic revival cycle of films, marked by a nostalgic return to ethnic identities in an era of “symbolic ethnicity.” However, a new generation of filmmakers from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics could bring about a renewed perspective, as demonstrated by James Gray, of Jewish-Russian descent, and Kirill Mikhanovsky, who immigrated from Russia in the 1990s. This article suggests that Eastern European self‑representations may contribute to current understandings of assimilation and whiteness in American cinema in subtle, yet powerful ways.

Moral and Immoral Whiteness in Immigration Politics. By Yalidy Matos. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 256p. $99.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.