Recent Immigrant Communities Research Articles

Developing a comprehensive understanding of elder abuse prevention in immigrant communities: a comparative mixed methods study protocol

IntroductionOlder adults are the fastest growing age group in Canada. Elder abuse has significant individual and societal implications, so it is critical to address. While interest in this topic is...

‘It still matters’: The role of skin colour in the everyday life and realities of black African migrants and refugees in Australia

This article looks at the everyday life and realities of some of Australia's most recent immigrant communities, by shedding light on the experiences of black Africans in Queensland. Particularly, this article examines the experiences of black African migrants and refugees living in South East Queensland, to better understand how race, skin colour and immigration status interact to shape their everyday lives and social location in Australia. Data were collected from 30 participants using qualitative research methods. The theoretical approach employed synthesises concepts from identity, blackness, race and racism, whiteness and critical race theory. The subjective experiences of the participants interviewed indicate that skin colour still matters in determining life chances for black Africans in Australia. While the empirical focus is specific to Australia, this article contributes to the research literature in valuable ways, both from a theoretical perspective and in terms of a comparative contextualisation of racism.

Is dense codeswitching complex?

In this paper the question is raised to what extent dense code switching can be considered complex. Psycholinguistic experiments indicate that code switching involves cognitive costs, both in production and comprehension, a conclusion that could indicate that code switching is indeed complex. In recent immigrant communities, code switching would potentially be even more complex, because of the instability of the sociolinguistic situation. However, speakers of the Dutch–Turkish immigrant community perceive of code switching as the ‘most comfortable’ way of talking. In this paper it is argued that in dense code switching there is no actual switching between languages involved. Some neurolinguistics models have been proposed in this line (e.g. Green and Li, 2014). It is assumed there that speakers draw from two separate linguistic systems. However, if dense code switching would really involve drawing from two complete linguistic systems, it would indeed be complex, not only in terms of processing costs, but also in terms of structure. In this paper it is argued that dense code switching may be better conceived of as a new ‘code’ in its own right, to which elements of both languages contribute. This new code may also contain innovative features that cannot be traced back to the contributing languages. This code may not necessarily be conventionalised (as is e.g. the case with so called Mixed Languages), but it may have some implicit norms or rules that make the code predictable. In this paper it is explored what such a code may look like. To this end digital code switch data from a bilingual Dutch–Turkish internet forum is discussed. It is argued that naturalistic data continue to be an important source of information about underlying processes of language production, and that digital data has certain advantages compared to oral data when it comes to uncovering patterns. The data reveal predictable patterns, both in a structural as well as a socio-psychological, and a discourse organisational sense. It is proposed that these patterns are, apart from contact effects, also shaped by universal mechanisms and sociolinguistic factors.

Excavating the “Who” and “Why” of Participation in a Public Archaeology Project

AbstractSwede Hollow Park, in St. Paul, Minnesota, was originally inhabited by immigrants to St. Paul. Despite an engaged surrounding neighborhood, the park and its history are not widely known. The park was recently the site of a public archaeology project, providing an opportunity to explicitly examine who participated and why, as a means of assessing the success of public education. The project team used surveys and informal interviews as assessment tools for analyzing the demographics and motivations of the participating public. Understanding demographics and motivations is an understudied aspect of public archaeology and yet is crucially important in influencing how archaeologists interact with the public, frame their research questions, and create learning objectives. This information has the potential to help create more inclusive public archaeology projects (for example, drawing in more recent immigrant communities as well as descendants) and to indicate where more work needs to be done to accommodate diversity (in our case, understanding the homeless as stakeholders). It also can help clarify whether archaeologists can, or should, prioritize site, method, or narrative when engaging with the public, or whether the public should choose.

Review Essay: Music and Diaspora

In its early decades as a self-identified field of study, ethnomusicology (following in the footsteps of cultural anthropology) championed musical traditions in their indigenous (or at least longstanding) contexts, but diasporic musics were hardly excluded. Scholars as different as Alan Lomax and Charles Keil wrote extensively about Afro-American musics; studies of more recent immigrant communities dotted the pages of major journals; a series of edited collections (Nettl 1978; Porter 1978; Jairazbhoy and DeVale 1984) brought the study of ethnic communities in North America to the forefront; and, of course, the “marginal survival” of ballads from the British Isles preserved in Appalachia had been at the center of earlier studies in folk music. In 1991, the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies came into being. Editor Khachig Toloyan’s introductory essay included the following oftquoted statement:

Self-management, health service use and information seeking for diabetes care among recent immigrants in Toronto

Our objective was to explore self-management practices, health services use and information-seeking for type 2 diabetes care among adult men and women from four recent immigrant communities in Toronto. A structured questionnaire was adapted for the Canadian context and translated into 4 languages. A total of 184 participants with type 2 diabetes-130 recent immigrants and 54 Canadian-born-were recruited in both community and hospital settings. Recent immigrants were significantly less likely than the Canadian-born group to perform regular blood glucose and foot checks and significantly more likely than the Canadian-born group to be non-smokers, participate in regular physical activity and reduce dietary fat. Recent immigrants were significantly less likely than the Canadian-born group to use a specialist, alternative provider and dietician and less likely to report using dieticians, nurses and diabetes organizations as sources of diabetes-related information. Important differences were observed by sex and country of origin. Findings suggest that diabetes prevention and management strategies for recent immigrants must address linguistic, financial, informational and systemic barriers to information and care.

Perceived Discrimination and Its Association With Psychological Distress Among Newly Arrived Immigrants Before and After September 11, 2001

We compared the evolution of perception of discrimination from 1998 to 2007 among recent Arab (Muslim and non-Muslim) and Haitian immigrants to Montreal; we also studied the association between perception of discrimination and psychological distress in 1998 and 2007. We conducted this cross-sectional comparative research with 2 samples: one recruited in 1998 (n = 784) and the other in 2007 (n = 432). The samples were randomly extracted from the registry of the Ministry of Immigration and Cultural Communities of Quebec. Psychological distress was measured with the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25. The perception of discrimination increased from 1998 to 2007 among the Arab Muslim, Arab non-Muslim, and Haitian groups. Muslim Arabs experienced a significant increase in psychological distress associated with discrimination from 1998 to 2007. These results confirm an increase in perception of discrimination and psychological distress among Arab Muslim recent immigrant communities after September 11, 2001, and highlight the importance this context may have for other immigrant groups.

Emerging voices: experiences of underrepresented Asian Americans

While a growing number of popular and scholarly works focus on Asian Americans, most are devoted to the experiences of larger groups such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian Americans. As the field grows, there is a pressing need to understand the smaller and more recent immigrant communities. Emerging Voices fills this gap with its unique and compelling discussion of underrepresented groups, including Burmese, Indonesian, Mong, Hmong, Nepalese, Romani, Tibetan, and Thai Americans.Unlike the earlier and larger groups of Asian immigrants to America, many of whom made the choice to emigrate to seek better economic opportunities, many of the groups discussed in this volume fled war or political persecution in their homeland. Forced to make drastic transitions in America with little physical or psychological preparation, questions of why am I here, who am I, and why am I discriminated against, remain at the heart of their post-emigration experiences.Bringing together eminent scholars from a variety of disciplines, this collection considers a wide range of themes, including assimilation and adaptation, immigration patterns, community, education, ethnicity, economics, family, gender, marriage, religion, sexuality, and work.

Review: The World in Canada

THE WORLD IN CANADA Diaspora, Demography, and Domestic Politics David Carment and David Bercuson, editors Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. 256pp, $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-7735-3297-7)As the co-editors, David Carment and David Bercuson, suggest in their introduction, the purpose of this book is to survey the recent changes in Canada's ethnic mosaic and assess the impacts of those changes on foreign policy (4). In the chapters that follow, the focus appears to be on recent immigrant communities and the Quebecois, while older minority communities such as First Nations and Ukrainians are missed out. They admit to an assumption of linkage politics, the notion that a porous domestic-international divide ensures that foreign policy elites must to some extent adapt their goals to reflect their constituents' opinions (5). Long-term demographic change within at the very least constrains future foreign policy goals.The first chapter immediately confounds the reader. Taking the Canada as small-power thesis to an extreme, Adam Chapnick argues that the question of the prime minister's on Canadian foreign policymaking is largely irrelevant because the office's occupants have rarely had a measureable impact on international affairs (16). He supports this extreme position with dubious claims, for instance by arguing that the Canada-US free trade agreement lacks significance for anyone in the long run. Regardless of the veracity of his revisionist thesis, the reader must ask how this piece is relevant to the rest of the collection. Indeed the basic claim that Canadian policy is insignificant threatens to undercut the whole purpose of the book.A better introduction to the collection is the second chapter, Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon's overview of immigration to and its on Canadian foreign After a brief description of the major immigration trends, she surveys the foreign policy interests of recent immigrant communities, including attitudes towards a more liberal immigration and refugee policy and ties to home countries. She also assesses their potential for influence through the electoral process and NGOs.In the first half of chapter 3, Andrew Harrington, Stewart Prest, and Per Unheim present interesting case studies of the criminal connections between Jamaica and Haiti and their respective diasporas in Toronto and Montreal. They argue that criminal deportation and illegal immigration have fostered a transnational conduit between and the Caribbean for drugs and criminal gangs. This study is the most information-intensive in the collection (as its large number of footnotes attests) and may provide readers with data they would not otherwise encounter. The authors then shift focus to show how this transnational conduit might be used to alleviate the chronic poverty and instability in the diasporas' home countries. But this approach then begs for a similar analysis of the conduit's on the Canadian state.J.L. Granatstein wants to discuss this in chapter 4, Multiculturalism and Canadian foreign policy. He poses a series of provocative questions: does a policy of multiculturalism lead inevitably to foreign policy pacifism and neutralism? What happens when dual loyalties conflict? What duties do immigrants have to their new state? How active can they remain in the politics of their state of birth (up to and including terrorism)? These are important questions and could be debated on their own moral grounds. But Granatstein reverts to the old dichotomy between national interests and values and argues that only the former should determine foreign The frailness of this bifurcation is evident in the fifth national interest he enumerates - work with like-minded states for the protection and enhancement of democracy and freedom - which is clearly value -laden (80). (Granatstein' s five national interests are very similar to my own scheme except that mine keeps the ideological one - the projection of a national identity - generic and requires no dichotomy between values and interests. …

Locating public libraries in a multicultural city: A spatial mismatch?

Locating public libraries in a multicultural city: A spatial mismatch?