Nation Of Immigrants Research Articles

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 ed. by Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu and María Cristina García (review)

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 ed. by Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu and María Cristina García (review)

Self-employment as an Alternative to Labor Market Bifurcation: The Role of Human and Ethnic Social Capital

The article examines the role of self-employment in a post-industrial labor market bifurcated between high paying-jobs in the profession and low-paying jobs in the services and construction. In the context, self-employment emerges as an alternative to pour wages and unemployment among both native and immigrant workers. The analysis shows that self-employment is not homogenous between “survival” enterprises yielding minimal income and incorporated firms whose owners earn incomes significantly above their wage-earning counterparts. We examine these differences among whites, blacks, native born and major immigrant nationalities. We examine determinants of earnings and self-employment and find that both are significantly influenced by human capital factors but that, controlling for them, significant differences exist among ethnic groups. These are attributed to differences in social capital linked to ethnic networks. The paper illustrates these differences with examples from the immigrant economic literature and discusses the implications for individual and collective economic achievement.

Assessing the effects of immigrant status on placement in juvenile detention

ABSTRACT The United States hosts more immigrants than any country in the world and has been referred to as a nation of immigrants. While there has been a persistent focus on immigration in America, the focal point has typically been on the criminality of those who have migrated to the US. Overtime, negative rhetoric in the media and politics has stereotyped immigrants as criminals. Despite these negative perceptions, there is a dearth of literature on how immigrants are processed in the criminal justice system. Most research thus far assessing this relationship is limited to adult defendants, while paying little to no attention to how immigration status impacts juvenile justice outcomes. To add to the limited body of knowledge on immigrant status and court processing, this study uses a limited sample of adjudicated youth from the Pathways to Desistance study (N = 414) to explore how immigration status impacts dispositional outcomes in juvenile court. In comparison to non-immigrant youth, we find that first-generation immigrant status is positively associated with receiving an incarcerative sanction (i.e., detention). However, no significant effects were observed for second-generation immigrants. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.

Nativist Nation

Nativist Nation Lucy E. Salyer (bio) Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2019. 432 pp. Images, Notes, and index. $32.00. Amanda Frost, You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021. 248 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Julia Rose Kraut, Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 352 pp. Notes and index. $37.00. The 2016 presidential election brought Donald Trump and his shrill, anti-immigrant rhetoric to the White House, providing a bully pulpit and a megaphone for nativist forces that had been clamoring for more draconian policies. Trump unleashed vitriolic attacks on immigrants and foreign-born Americans of all statuses and nationalities but reserved special antipathy for Black and Brown immigrants. Trump promised to “take the shackles off” immigration agents and to “build the wall”—both physical and legal barriers—to stem what he called an “invasion” by “bad” people. Deeds followed words. Moving remarkably swiftly, Trump issued the controversial travel ban (a.k.a. “Muslim Ban”) within a week of his inauguration and adopted an aggressive deportation campaign to expel undocumented immigrants. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy led to record-high detention rates and the separation of migrant children from their parents, some of whom have still not been reunited. By the time Trump left the White House in 2021, his administration had enacted an astounding 472 administrative changes “that dismantled and reconstructed many elements of the U.S. immigration system.”1 The 2016 election sparked diverse reactions: many onlookers were startled and appalled by the nastiness and the outright racism of Trump’s attacks while his supporters thronged to his message, as he dared say boldly and loudly what many conservatives felt. Erika Lee, in her new book America for Americans, expresses her own “constant astonishment and dark humor” as well as her “righteous anger and helplessness” in response to Trump’s campaign (p. 5). [End Page 368] Many critics believed that Trump’s anti-immigrant sentiment broke with the United States’ cherished image as a “nation of immigrants,” reviving outdated and disreputable views that had fallen out of favor decades ago. But as these three books—Lee’s America for Americans, Amanda Frost’s You Are Not American, and Julia Rose Kraut’s Threat of Dissent—reveal, Trump’s “Make America Safe Again” and “America First” slogans echoed a long line of cries throughout the nation’s history, demanding “America for Americans.”2 In sum, we’ve been here before. Lee, Frost, and Kraut all construct their studies around the same fundamental paradox: Is the United States a “nation of immigrants” or a nation against immigrants? On the one hand, Lee notes that the U.S. has received more than 80 million immigrants over the past 200 years and “historically led the world in resettling refugees.” It remains the “world’s largest immigrant-receiving country in the world.” Lawful permanent residents, observes Frost, benefit from liberal naturalization laws allowing them to become citizens 5 years after their arrival. Frost also remarks that the Constitution raises a broad umbrella over a diverse society, the First Amendment “protecting the rights of ethnic, religious, ideological, and racial minorities to live as they prefer.”3 On the other hand, the United States has continually defined itself in opposition to “foreigners,” employing a variety of methods to cull and separate those deemed a threat to “real Americans.” In one of the great opening lines of a book, Aristide Zollberg, in A Nation by Design (2006), observed that the United States has been “a nation of immigrants, to be sure, but not just any immigrants.”4 That observation, in itself, is not new. There is a rich literature on the history of anti-immigrant movements, with John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1988) providing the classic account. Higham and other scholars tended to view nativist movements as episodic, arising in times of national crisis. Writing a new epilogue for the 2002 edition of his classic work, Higham conceded that...

Translation as crisis (mis)communication for culturally and linguistically diverse communities

Abstract Australia claims to be “the most successful immigration nation” in the world. With language services being a daily necessity, the country has a well-established translator accreditation system. To prepare for crises, Australia has also published multiple official documents with clearly laid-out management plans. All these factors seem to have contributed to Australia’s successful fight against the first two COVID-19 waves in 2020 and 2021. However, the country’s crisis communication has actually experienced constant failures to reach its culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. Taking the Australian state of Victoria as a case study, this article examines the inadequacy of COVID-19 related translation services and analyses its impact on CALD communities. Based on analysis through the lens of the 4-A principle (namely, availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability), the article argues that crisis translation is a specialised area, and any effective crisis communication in multicultural contexts needs to consider language experts as an essential part of the crisis response team.

Immigrants, Ethnic Lobbies and American Foreign Policy

The United States is so obviously an immigrant nation that this fact is assumed to be significant for the contuct of its foreign policy. This article examines the assumption and whether the recent change in immigration patterns away from Europe and towards Asia as the point of origin may portend a significant shift in the orientation of U. S. foreign policy. This article also describes the effect that immigration groups and ethnic lobbies have had on U.S. foreign policy in the past, extrapolating generalizations from earlier experiences that may apply to the latest group of immigrants.

“You Can Watch a Documentary”: Representation and Intersectionality of Immigrants to the United States in Documentary Film Genre

Immigration and immigrants’ stories have been fictionalized, reported in the news without necessary contextualization, and reported in research, most often regarding media images ascribing to signs decodable for meanings and interpretations of the outside world. This study uses documentary reports as alternative angles of immigrants’ stories in the U.S., covering the period between 2016 and 2020. The study draws from B. Nichol’s claim that in documentaries, "facts become evidence when they are taken up in discourse; and that discourse gains the force to compel belief through its capacity to refer evidence to a domain outside itself” (p. 33); and on Dyer’s typography of representation. Theoretically, it utilizes intersectionality to analyze immigrants’ representations in the documentaries Immigration Nation and Living Undocumented. Findings show that the documentaries represent undocumented immigrants as a burden. The documentaries over-represent Latinos as "illegal" and "undocumented." Paradoxes riddle the U.S. immigration outlook. Despite undocumented immigrants’ contributions to American society, they remain in the shadow.

Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Tales

Charles Godfrey Leland and His Magical Tales

Morocco: Immigration Nation: Aid, Control, and Border Politics in Morocco, by Lorena Gazzotti (book review)

Immigration Nation: Aid, Control, and Border Politics in Morocco, by Lorena Gazzotti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 256 pages. $110.

The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling ImmigrantsOne Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965

The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling ImmigrantsOne Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965

Nationalism in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’: Race, Ethnicity, and National Attachment

Abstract This paper compares nationalist attitudes among Whites, Latinos, and African Americans. The research on nationalism and national attachment draws varied conclusions about how race and ethnicity structure such attitudes; some find that Whites have the strongest views, while others see more similarities than differences. Using the General Social Survey of 2014, we examine three separate dimensions of nationalism: American nationalism, American national identity, and American national pride. We test for differences across race and ethnicity as well as how such attitudes structure opinions about immigrants. Despite some expectations in the literature that views might vary by group, we generally find (albeit with some complexities) “minimal effects” of race and ethnicity. Latinos, Blacks, and Whites agree with the three nationalism measures at similar levels, despite the very different national histories of each group. This is consistent with work finding “a great deal of consensus on the norms, values, and behaviors that constitute American identity” (Schildkraut 2007. “Defining American Identity in the Twenty-First Century: How Much “There” Is There?”.” The Journal of Politics v69 (3): 597–615, 605). In addition, while nationalism is associated with immigration opinions, such effects are predominantly among Whites and African Americans and relatively weak for Latinos.

Book Review: Immigration Nation: Aid, Control, and Border Politics in Morocco

Book Review: Immigration Nation: Aid, Control, and Border Politics in Morocco

분열된 영혼? 포스트-트럼프 시대 미국 정체성 서사 경쟁

The United States is a quintessential case, demonstrating that a nation is a narrative product, a place of competition and negotiation among multiple national biographic stories. As an immigrant nation lacking primordialist elements, including blood and land, anyone who reveres universalist creeds enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution can be American, which often makes the question, who are “we the people,” truly subversive and highly-charged. In fact, how to construct national boundaries and to define the national identity has been a central topic in the history of US politics. In this regard, this research initially seeks to situate the Trump era in the historical context of US political thought by analyzing the two competing narratives, liberal and illiberal, on the American self. Next, several cases in the period of 2019-21 are explored to understand how the battle for the soul of America was unfolded during the pandemic turbulence. Lastly, after describing the persistent crisis of US democracy in the Biden years, we search for ways to overcome the current identity crisis by developing a new common national narrative and achieving a 3political revolution.

Is the Nation of Immigrants Punishing Its Emigrants: A Critical Review of the Expatriation Rules Revised by the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004

The thesis of this article is that the revised U.S. tax expatriation provisions fail to correct the most important defects of the prior U.S. tax expatriation regimes. Under the new rules, expatriating U.S. citizens and resident aliens subject to the U.S. tax expatriation rules can still avoid U.S. tax on items properly taxable by the U.S. On the other hand, they remain subject to U.S. tax on income that should fall outside of U.S. tax jurisdiction.During the last forty years, the U.S. has undertaken several attempts to capture what it sees as its rightful share of the income and gain of tax-motivated expatriates. In carrying out this policy, Congress developed a set of alternative U.S. tax rules applicable only to tax-motivated expatriates, subjecting them to an alternative method of U.S. taxation. From the perspective of the U.S., the necessity for an alternative method of taxation arises because of the bifurcated structure of the U.S. tax system, applying one set of rules to U.S. persons and another, generally more favorable set of rules to nonresident aliens. The U.S. imposes residence-based taxation on U.S. persons, subjecting them to U.S. income tax on their worldwide income, to U.S. estate tax on their worldwide estates, and to U.S. gift tax on their worldwide gifts. On the other hand, the U.S. imposes source-based and business-based taxation on nonresident aliens, subjecting them to U.S. income tax on U.S.-source passive and business income, and to U.S. estate and gift tax on U.S. situs property. In both situations, income is subject to U.S. tax only upon the occurrence of a recognition event. The divergence in the scope of the two tax regimes creates a situation in which the U.S. tax liability of an individual calculated under one tax regime could be markedly different from the individual's U.S. tax liability determined under the other tax regime, with nonresident alien status generally rendering the less "taxing" result. The financial benefits of nonresident alien tax status may encourage wealthy U.S. persons to expatriate and be taxed by the U.S. as nonresident aliens. The challenge posed by expatriation is especially acute because it involves moving from residence-based taxation to source- based taxation, potentially causing some unrealized gain to escape U.S. tax as certain gains are not subject to U.S. tax under source-based taxation.

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in An Age of Restriction, 1924–1965

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in An Age of Restriction, 1924–1965

Perceived discrimination and mental health of South American immigrants in Chile: the mediator role of the self-esteem in four nationalities

ABSTRACT Most international immigrants have mental health problems because of perceived discrimination. This research aims to analyze the possible mediating role of self-esteem in the impact of perceived discrimination on the mental health problems of the four most extensive South American immigrant nationalities in Chile. It involved 772 immigrants who have been living in this country for longer than a year. The results indicate that self-esteem would play a mediating role in two nationalities. We conclude by considering the importance and implications of self-esteem as a variable for intervention from social work in the immigration field.

Multilingual Literature of the United States

Like the Russian Federation, the United States is a multilingual, multicultural society. A nation of immigrants and indigenous peoples, it has produced a rich body of literature in dozens of languages in addition to English that scholars have only in recent decades begun to pay attention to. Of particular note are texts in Spanish, Yiddish, Chinese, French, Hebrew, German, Arabic, Norwegian, Welsh, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Vietnamese and numerous American Indian languages. In this paper we observe the most significant texts of multilingual American literature. The corpus of literary works shows us, that despite Americans pervasive and enduring xenolinguaphobia - aversion to other languages - the United States, like other large countries, is a heterogeneous amalgam. Ignoring the variety of works written in languages other than English impoverishes the national culture and handicaps serious readers.

The Mexican threat: the construction of a new enemy. A brief analysis of Samuel Huntington´s representation of Mexican immigration to the United States.

American political scientist Samuel Huntington argues that, before being a nation of immigrants, the United States is a nation of English settlers who defined the core values of American national identity during the colonial era of the 17th and 18th

Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing in Multicultural Australia: A Collaborative Regional Approach.

Migrant communities are often under-served by mental health services. Lack of community engagement results in missed opportunities for mental health promotion and early intervention, delayed care, and high rates of untreated psychological distress. Bilingual clinicians and others who work with these communities lack linguistically and culturally appropriate resources. This article reports on the implementation and evaluation of a community-based group mindfulness program delivered to Arabic and Bangla-speaking communities in Sydney, Australia, including modifications made to the content and format in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The program was positioned within a stepped-care model for primary mental health care and adopted a collaborative regional approach. In addition to improved mental health outcomes for face-to-face and online program participants, we have documented numerous referrals to specialist services and extensive diffusion of mindfulness skills, mostly to family members, within each community. Community partnerships were critical to community engagement. Training workshops to build the skills of the bilingual health and community workforce increased the program’s reach. In immigrant nations such as Australia, mainstream mental health promotion must be complemented by activities that target specific population groups. Scaled up, and with appropriate adaptation, the group mindfulness program offers a low-intensity in-language intervention for under-served communities.

Review: The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman

Review: The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman