Immigrant Settlement Patterns Research Articles

The making of a global neighbourhood in China

Global neighbourhood, as a new immigrant settlement pattern, has been confirmed to benefit residential diversity and civic engagement in the United States. Based on fieldwork in Yiwu City, the world’s largest small-commodity distribution centre, we examine the formation of a global neighbourhood in China as a new immigrant destination country. Through field observations and in-depth interviews with immigrant residents, social workers and restaurant owners, we identify several factors contributing to the neighbourhood evolution, including immigrants’ market-driven rational choice, the local government’s multi-faceted service and the bridging role of Chinese ethnic minorities. This Yiwu model suggests a new way to think about immigrant settlement patterns that deserves more attention from urban scholars. Moreover, the patterns we discovered reveal new immigrant settlement mechanisms outside the US context, which enriches the current literature on global neighbourhoods and new immigrant destinations.

The role of visa class in the location choices of immigrants in Australia at the regional and neighbourhood scales

Australia’s pro-immigration policies have played a vital role in national population growth, serving to address what would otherwise be chronic labour shortages and population ageing. While migrants to Australian have shown a clear preference for cities and tend to locate with co-ethnics, variations by visa class—employment, family reunification, and asylum—have yet to be fully explored. This paper aims to identify variations in settlement patterns of immigrants in Australia by visa types and the factors underpinning these choices, paying particular attention to ethnic networks and employment opportunities. We apply a series of negative binomial regressions to aggregate census data linked to visa status. At the suburb level, our results show the importance of the presence of compatriots in shaping the location choices of family migrants, with the exception of skilled and humanitarian immigrants from China, Malaysia and Thailand. At the regional level, skilled migrants, including skilled regional migrants, respond to employment opportunities to a greater extent than family and humanitarian migrants.

Immigrant settlement patterns, transit accessibility, and transit use

Public transit is immensely important among recent immigrants for enabling daily travel and activity participation. The objectives of this study are to examine whether immigrants settle in areas of high or low transit accessibility and how this affects transit mode share. This is analyzed via a novel comparison of two gateway cities: Sydney, Australia and Toronto, Canada. We find that in both cities, recent immigrants have greater levels of public transit accessibility to jobs, on average, than the overall population, but the geography of immigrant settlement is more suburbanized and less clustered around commuter rail in Toronto than in Sydney. Using logistic regression models with spatial filters, we find significant positive relationships between immigrant settlement patterns and transit mode share for commuting trips, after controlling for transit accessibility and other socio-economic factors, indicating an increased reliance on public transit by recent immigrants. Importantly, via a sensitivity analysis, we find that these effects are greatest in peripheral suburbs and rural areas, indicating that recent immigrants in these areas have more risks of transport-related social exclusion due to reliance on insufficient transit service.

Immigration, diversity and institutions

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between immigration and host countries' institutional quality, using international migration data for a sample of 130 countries over the 1990–2015 period. We employ two composite metrics of political institutions, encompassing multiple dimensions of governance. To reduce endogeneity concerns, related to immigrant settlement patterns, we employ pseudo‐gravity‐based instruments in a 2SLS setting. Overall, our findings withstand several robustness checks and suggest that immigration has a negative and statistically significant impact on the level of institutional development of the countries analyzed in this study. However, there is substantial heterogeneity, since the impact of migrants appears to be somewhat stronger in less developed host countries. Interestingly, these findings are entirely driven by migrants stemming from countries displaying low institutional development.

Foreign Language Curricula and the Influence of Immigrant-Origin Groups

Despite theoretical claims that assimilation is a multidirectional process, most studies assess the behaviors of immigrants and their children. The author departs from this tradition to ask whether immigrant-origin populations influence the availability of Advanced Placement Spanish and Chinese/Japanese language courses. Building on past work, the author treats foreign language programs as a marker of institutional change and a greater acceptance of immigrant culture. County-level data are pooled from the American Community Survey, the Common Core of Data, the Voting and Elections Collection (CQ Press), and the College Board between 2000 and 2017. The results indicate that Hispanic and Chinese/Japanese populations exert an influence on school curricula, but this relation varies depending on historical patterns of immigrant settlement. The author also finds that Spanish and Asian foreign language programs are most likely to be demanded in locations with highly educated populations. This article provides evidence that mainstream institutions can move toward immigrant and minority culture.

Investigating the Effects of Panethnicity in Geospatial Models of Segregation

Social systems are inherently complex and can be represented using agent-based modelling (ABM) methods. Based on the innovative work of Thomas Schelling, ABMs are used to represent, analyze, and forecast emergent spatial-temporal dynamics of residential segregation. Segregation is modelled by representing the complex dynamics between individual agents with various socio-demographic profiles who self-organize into spatial clusters of alike individuals. Agents are typically classified into broad panethnic categories such as “Asian” or “Hispanic”, however these categories group together individuals from a very large number of countries that are ethnically and economically distinct and thus have diverse settlement patterns. Therefore, the objective of this study is to implement an ABM that simulates the spatio-temporal dynamics of segregation that emerge from interactions between incoming immigrants who are classified at two different levels of aggregation. At the aggregate level, ethnic groups are defined based on typical broad panethnic categories. At the disaggregate level, the “Asian” category is further disaggregated. The ABM is implemented to simulate processes leading to segregation in the City of Toronto and Metro Vancouver using actual geospatial and census data. The simulated spatial patterns of segregation are compared with actual census data that records the real settlement patterns of immigrants of various ethnicities. In addition, the degree of segregation is quantified and compared with the degree of segregation measured from the actual census data. Results show that both the spatial patterns of segregation and the measure of segregation are significantly influenced by the level of aggregation of the various ethnicities. The presented research has the potential to contribute to policy-planning and decision-making by assisting city planners and policymakers in mitigating persistent residential segregation.

African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden

Reviewed by: African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden R. Joseph Parrott African Americans and Africa: A New History. By Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 266. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-300-19866-9.) Africa looms large in the imagination of many black Americans. Yet from 1619 to the present, the ways African diasporic identities have coexisted with American ones have been fluid and contested. Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden's expansive and readable African Americans and Africa: A New History explores the varied ideas, perceptions, and attitudes about Africa that have influenced African Americans and how these concepts shaped "what they called themselves historically" (p. 11). The result is a concise volume that serves as an introduction to the complex history of black identity in the United States and as a survey of the broad scholarship that opens doors for future research. Blyden is an ideal guide for this journey. As the child of an African immigrant and a black American, her family story frames her interrogation of the hyphenated African American identity. Blyden finds, rather than a narrative of rising or declining identification with Africa, that attraction to an oft-idealized ancestral homeland ebbed and flowed in response to domestic race relations. Survival and improvement were the primary goals, with African heritage providing a communal rallying cry. Dreams of returning to an Africa free of prejudice provided refuge during periods of fraught race relations, as evidenced in nineteenth-century colonizationism and Garveyism. Yet as these frequently debated examples demonstrate, rarely did black communities cohere around a single identity or mission. Blyden's strength lies in her ability to capture the diverse ways African Americans sought to "(re)connect with Africa" while negotiating their positions within United States society (p. 81). [End Page 681] This duality shaped African American perceptions of the African continent and its peoples. Enslaved persons adapted inherited traditions, and intellectuals from George Washington Williams to W. E. B. Du Bois drew on black heritage to inspire pride. Nonetheless, African American visions of Africa were filtered through the prism of the white-dominated media. Metropolitan, educated Africans who lived in the United States challenged negative stereotypes of a backward continent but could not overturn them. As a result, uplift and civilization remained components of African American internationalism until decolonization reversed the power dynamics of the black diaspora. Blyden thus highlights ideas of Africa as inspiration for both pride and projects in the United States, while illustrating the discrete cultural perspectives that have historically separated black Americans and Africans. Blyden provides a valuable synthesis using the latest scholarship to expand on her earlier work on transatlantic black identity in the nineteenth century. She is an excellent writer with an eye for the telling story or quotation, making the book ideal for classroom use. Experts on African American engagement with Africa will recognize much of the information, but Blyden does yeoman's work in unifying discrete historiographies to highlight comparisons and lasting trends across five hundred years of history. For example, the "mix of pride and hesitation" produced by African identification within the dominant white American culture becomes a repeating theme, which links the post-Revolution decades of the eighteenth century to the post–civil rights era of the 1970s and 1980s (p. 196). Yet Blyden is careful to avoid emphasizing a singular perspective, capturing both historical and scholarly debates on African American identity. My major critique is that this approach occasionally mentions historical and historiographical contradictions—inconsistent settlement patterns of recent African immigrants or Carol Anderson's reassessment of the NAACP during the Cold War—without exploring them in detail. Blyden could have more effectively intervened in these debates by analyzing or disentangling these seeming dichotomies within the longue durée of transnational identity politics and ambiguous diasporic relations, potentially pushing scholarship in new directions as a result. These quibbles aside, African Americans and Africa is an important book, which provides a much-needed and accessible primer on African American identity in a global context. R. Joseph Parrott Ohio State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

The Spatial Integration of Immigrants in Europe: A Cross-National Study

Throughout much of Europe, new waves of immigration have raised concerns about cultural fragmentation and disunity, interethnic conflict, and growing antipathy toward immigrants. Our goal is to provide evidence of uneven patterns of immigrant population distribution and residential integration, both within and between countries of the European Union. Our analyses focus on the spatial concentration of the foreign-born population in 27 countries and 1396 sub-regional areal units (called NUTS3), which in turn are nested within larger economic and cultural regions (i.e., NUTS2). Estimates of new forms of multiscale segregation (i.e., using the index of dissimilarity) are calculated from data drawn from Eurostat and a variety of other sources. Descriptive multivariate models of population concentration or macro-segregation center on key economic (i.e., GDP per capita), social (i.e., education), and ecological (i.e., urbanization) predictors of segregation within and between European countries. New forms of spatial segregation are expressed demographically in substantial regional heterogeneity among immigrants throughout Europe. Multivariate analyses indicate that immigrant-native patterns of population concentration and distribution vary widely between and within European countries with very different economies, demographic conditions, and histories of immigration. In almost all European countries, immigrants from outside of Europe are less spatially integrated with the native population than are immigrants from other countries within Europe. Differences in immigrant-native spatial integration are clearly reflected in the large numbers of immigrant regional “hot spots,” which are driven by public policy and idiosyncratic political considerations at the national and regional levels. Our comparative approach provides an overview of country-to-country differences in European immigrant settlement patterns and multiscale patterns of integration and segregation.

Indian immigration to Italy: concentration, internal mobility and economic crisis

ABSTRACT The spatial concentration of immigrants has become a concern for local administrations in most European countries, as it is perceived as an obstacle to their better integration in host societies. Indian immigration to Italy began in the 1960s, but large-scale immigration of unskilled labour from Punjab and Haryana (North-West Indian states) began during the 1990s. This influx was formed by young men who entered Italy in search of economic opportunities and then concentrated spatially in the economically active regions. In this paper, using the municipal registers of inhabitants (Anagrafe), the residence permits records and the 2011 census data, firstly, I made a spatial analysis (LISA) of the settlement pattern of Indian immigrants in Italy; second, I explored the internal mobility pattern (through a gravity model) of Indian immigrants compared to other immigrant groups during 2005–2015; and finally, I studied the impact of the recent economic crisis on Indian immigration.

The shaping of selection: Secondary migration, scale, and changing immigrant geographies

AbstractThe internal migration and settlement patterns of immigrants have long been of interest in assessing immigrant outcomes. Here, I use U.S. census microdata from 1940, 1970, and 2000 to analyse the changing relationships between secondary migration, immigrant concentration, and earnings outcomes. By simultaneous estimation of models for those who undertake internal migration and those who do not, the endogenous switching regressions employed here relate individual and place characteristics to earnings outcomes through the mechanism of selective migration. Investigating how these relationships change over time and between generations, as well as the differing relevance of overall mobility versus intercounty migration, contributes to theoretical perspectives on spatial assimilation and secondary migration. The critical finding is that immigrant concentration at destination is positively associated with wage outcomes for movers, although remaining in immigrant concentrations can have negative effects. Effects are more significant for those undertaking larger scale moves and more consistent over time. Women and less educated individuals who move show diminished earnings disadvantages. These findings suggest that it is useful to think about migration as a strategy through which immigrants respond to vulnerability and that the advantages or disadvantages of immigrant context are related to selective migration. Additionally, the characteristics experienced by a previous immigrant generation in situ suggest that the salience of immigrant geography emerges over time, as metros with high immigrant wages and educational levels continue to attract immigrants and their offspring decades later.

The Contribution of Skilled Immigrants to US Innovation in the First Half of the 20th Century

The first-half of the 20th century is characterized by mass migration from Europe to the US and rapid technological progress. Exploiting national immigration policy changes together with historical settlement patterns of immigrants’ across US counties, I estimate the effect of skilled immigration on local patenting rates. I find that counties that received more skilled immigrants had no impact on total patenting rates, but that this null effect masks a positive effect on the growing electrical and chemical fields and a negative effect on the traditional mechanical and textiles fields. Furthermore, I find that most of the effect is due to skilled immigration from Non-English Speaking Countries and from Countries with long patenting traditions. I offer a mechanism by which skilled immigrants act as ”Transmitters of Knowledge”, that is, they impact innovation primarily by introducing new knowledge that did not exist in their destination prior to their arrival.

Immigration and Neighborhood Change: Methodological Possibilities for Future Research

The recent settlement of immigrant populations into a wider range of geographies and communities across the United States raises new questions about the dynamics of residential segregation and complicates assumptions about how neighborhoods change—or don't—and why. While multiple theories attempt to explain the relationship between race/ethnicity, immigration, and neighborhood change, sociological examinations have been limited by the lack of systematic and frequently collected data. That is, the residential churn of neighborhoods, particularly in the market for rental housing where racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants predominate, often outpaces analysts’ ability to gather cross–neighborhood and cross–city data. In this essay we describe how online sources can help answer questions about race/ethnicity, immigration, and neighborhoods by providing large amounts of readily updatable data. An array of platforms designed to provide homeseekers with information about their housing options can also be used by sociologists for making claims about neighborhood change across multiple geographies. We review recent research that uses online data and describe an ongoing study by the authors that examines trends in the settlement patterns of immigrants and the rental housing market across the 50 largest MSAs in the United States. Online data sources can more accurately capture immigration and neighborhood processes, yielding better theories about the impact of immigration on neighborhood change.

South Asian Migration, Settlement, and Sociopolitical Incorporation on the North American West Coast

There are large South Asian settlements in the larger Vancouver region of British Columbia in Canada and in Northern and Central California (from Yuba City to Fresno) in the United States. While the early migration patterns of Sikhs and Hindus to these two areas were similar, they subsequently diverged and the South Asian settlements in the two regions now exhibit very different profiles. This resource paper summarizes and analyzes the literature on factors shaping the migration, settlement, and incorporation patterns of Asian immigrants in these two regions. I argue that the parallels in early South Asian migration patterns to the North American West Coast were due to similarities in the economic and social profile of these regions, Canadian and U.S. policies toward Asian immigrants, and easy movement between Canada and the United States. The divergence between the two regions took place over time largely as an outcome of changes in regional characteristics (e.g., the development of Silicon Valley), differences in the group characteristics and networks of Sikhs and Hindus, and an increasing divergence in Canadian and U.S. immigration regulations (e.g., differences in family reunification, refugee, and H1-B visa policies). The final section discusses how these settlement patterns have led to differences in the identity formation and sociopolitical incorporation of Sikhs and Hindus in the two regions.

Re-examining the relationship between Latino immigration and racial/ethnic violence

Whether immigration increases crime has long been a source of political debate and scholarly interest. Despite widespread public opinion to the contrary, the weight of evidence suggests the most recent wave of U.S. immigration has not increased crime, and may have actually helped reduce criminal violence. However, with recent shifts in immigrant settlement patterns away from traditional receiving destinations, a series of contemporary studies suggests a more complicated immigration-crime relationship, whereby Latino immigration is said to increase violence in newer immigrant destinations (but not in established destinations) and has varied effects for different racial/ethnic groups. With few exceptions, these more recent studies rely on cross-sectional analyses, thus limiting their ability to examine the longitudinal nexus between Latino immigration and violent crime. This study brings to bear the first longitudinal data set to test the relationship between immigration and racial/ethnic homicide in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2010. Results from bivariate longitudinal associations and multivariate fixed effects models are contrary to recent findings – Latino immigration is generally associated with decreases in homicide victimization for whites, blacks, and Hispanics in both established and non-established immigrant destinations, though these associations are not significant in all cases.

Immigrant entrepreneurs' access to information as a local economic development problem

Sociologists and geographers have examined immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States to discuss what types of industries immigrants enter, why some groups are more inclined to entrepreneurship than others, and how social networks influence business formation. But such analyses have generally not included considerations of how the larger geographic setting in which the immigrants operate—including the urban form, the built environment, and local economic-development efforts—affect entrepreneurial decisions. Meanwhile, immigrant settlement patterns have changed in recent decades, bringing groups of immigrants outside of larger cities and into suburban areas not accustomed to hosting immigrants. In such environments, a would-be entrepreneur might have even more difficulty accessing the information necessary to successfully start and maintain a business. This paper will survey previous literature on immigrant entrepreneurship, largely from sociology, geography, and planning, to argue that local economic-development resources, even when targeted at small business owners, fail to address the needs of immigrant entrepreneurs. Instead, these would-be entrepreneurs rely on their own personal networks and on co-ethnic community support institutions.

Panel Data Analysis of the Impact of Economic Freedom as Well as Economic Conditions, The Quality of Life, and Public Education Spending on U.S. Undocumented Immigrant Settlement Patterns

This study seeks to identify key factors influencing the geographic settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., with a particular emphasis on the impact of economic freedom, and to extend the OLS findings in previous related studies. Indeed, this study adds to the literature in several ways. First, it provides current insights into the link between the settlement patterns of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and economic freedom. Second, the study adopts a panel data-set and provides estimates using cross-section fixed-effects. Third, this study also endeavors to provide further insights into the impacts on the settlement patterns of undocumented immigrants of non-economic-freedom economic conditions, as well as the quality of life and spending on primary and secondary public education. The various state fixed-effects estimates provided in the present study yield several conclusions. In particular, according to these estimations, the settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants in the U.S is inversely a function of colder climates, higher crime rates, higher population density, and a higher cost of living. In addition, the interstate distribution of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. is positively a function of the annual per pupil outlays on public primary and secondary education; it is also positively a function of the degree of economic freedom, the principal focus of this study.

Traditions of Tolerance: The Long-Run Persistence of Regional Variation in Attitudes towards English Immigrants

This article builds on existing studies of the long-run persistence of geographical variation in tolerance towards other ethnicities. Using English data, the study tests whether the persistent characteristic is an attitude towards a specific ethnic group, or is an underlying cultural trait of which the attitude towards a specific group is just one expression. It finds evidence for the latter, identifying geographical variation in anti-immigrant sentiment in the twenty-first century that is correlated with patterns of immigrant settlement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, despite the fact that modern immigrant groups are quite different from those in the Middle Ages.

Role of the Residential Real Estate Market in the Ethnosocial Differentiation of European Capitals: London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and Moscow

The paper studies the modern spatial situation of ethnosocial stratification in three large European capitals – London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Moscow. For Moscow, it is especially important to reveal the dependence between prices of residential real estate and settlement pattern of immigrants, since the number of immigrants is increasing. Analysis has shown that prices of residential real estate are significantly differentiated within city borders and represent an important factor in spatial social stratification. The correlation between prices of residential real estate and the share of immigrants is the largest in Moscow and the smallest in Berlin. Differences are conditioned by the degree of social stratification, the specifics of immigration, the level of immigrant social protection, and the quality, cost, and other features of housing. The lower the social position of migrants, the larger a role ethnicity plays. On the whole, for cities with long-term immigration, the concentration of immigrants in districts with cheap housing is an indication of the social problems of these districts, and in districts with expensive housing, the concentration of immigrants is an indication of social growth and the successful adaptation of immigrants. In Paris, immigrants from poor countries settle, just like in London, in areas where prices and incomes are low and unprestigious jobs are available, creating ethnic ghetto-like enclaves. The number, share, and composition of immigrants, motives, duration of immigration, and features of the cities themselves make up the spatial specifics of ethnosocial stratifi cation. As immigrants adapt, the role of ethnicity decreases, which infl uences not only employment, income, and quality of life, but also place of residence within a city.

Give me sanctuary! The impact of personal freedom afforded by sanctuary cities on the 2010 undocumented immigrant settlement pattern within the U.S., 2SLS estimates

This study has endeavored to identify key factors that influenced the settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants among the 50 U.S. states as of the year 2010. The principal focus of the study is the potential impact of Sanctuary cities on the settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants, although both economic and environmental (weather) conditions are included in the analysis as well. The model is estimated by 2SLS both in linear form and semi-log form. Both estimation results imply that the state-level settlement pattern of undocumented immigrants was an increasing function of per capita personal income while being a decreasing function of the cost of living, colder climate, and greater humidity. More relevantly, the state-level settlement pattern of these immigrants was found to be an increasing function of the number of Sanctuary cities in each state. Among other things, then, the results in this study imply that the well-being of the undocumented immigrant population residing in the U.S. was positively affected by a greater number of Sanctuary cities and the accompanying personal freedom afforded by non-reporting of suspected undocumented immigrants to federal authorities.

Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict by Maud Mandel (review)

Reviewed by: Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict by Maud Mandel Daniella Doron Maud Mandel. Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. 272 pages. Hardcover $35.00. ISBN: 9780691125817. The issue of Muslim-Jewish relations in France took center stage in 2014, once again. As the 2014 war in Gaza unfolded in the Middle East, a video recording of pro-Palestinian protesters attacking a Jewish synagogue in the 11th arrondissement of Paris went viral. Newspapers across the globe reported on the modest but steady rise of French Jews immigrating to Israel, a trend commonly attributed to France’s purportedly inhospitable environment for Jews, and the rise of antisemitism amongst France’s Muslim youth. Cultural commentators in France and abroad advanced several explanations for the rise of antisemitism among French Muslim minorities, and the disconcerting tendency to attribute current events in Israel to diaspora Jewry. Some commentators pointed to the disadvantaged position of Muslim youth within French social and economic life, while others blamed age-old Muslim antisemitism, and yet others directly linked developments in France to the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. [End Page 211] Maud Mandel’s timely and superb historical study Muslims and Jews in France: History of a Conflict nuances these reductive explanations. French Jews and Muslims indeed have a shaky relationship that has devolved in recent decades, as evidenced in the antagonistic reactions to the 2014 events in Israel by both communities. Muslims and Jews in France seeks to explain how these two French minorities, who share multiple political concerns and by all logic should strike an alliance, have instead built a relationship characterized by mutual suspicion and enmity. But rather than reducing this conflict to timeless and intractable Muslim antisemitism or ephemeral events in Israel, Mandel attributes the current state of “conflict” to developments in North Africa and France between the 1948 war in Israel and the 1980s “right to be different.” Mandel’s argument is threefold: she argues that conversations amongst Muslims and Jews that were seemingly about the Middle East actually functioned as forums to voice dissatistfaction with French administrative and socio-economic inequalities; the particular dynamics of French decolonization in North Africa and immigrant settlement patterns in France were critical in helping shape the trajectory of future French Jewish and Muslims relations; and, finally, the framing of Muslim-Jewish interactions as necessarily polarized or as a binary relationship papers over the exceedingly complex social reality and the diversity of French Jewish and Muslim experience. Throughout the study, Mandel turns to the port city of Marseille to illustrate how French Muslims and Jewish individuals could live harmoniously side by side and yet all the while decolonization, events in the Middle East, and French minority politics could inflame tensions between the two communities. The book begins in Marseille in 1948 as war breaks out in the Middle East over the establishment of the State of Israel. Unlike elsewhere in France, the situation was especially heated because Marseille was both the new home of Algerian Muslim laborers and a hub for postwar illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine. Mandel argues that the events in Israel actually functioned as a “barometer of the country’s fluctuating and contradictory commitments to some of its most insecure citizens” (33). Postwar French Jews, who had been so recently stripped of citizenship, encouraged French administrators to support the State of Israel and ignore the stream of migrants and munitions passing through Marseille’s ports, while poor and disadvantaged Muslim laborers and pan-Arab nationalists, for their part, prodded the French state to stem the tide of illegal Jewish immigration but, just as crucially, to remain true to its stated commitment to equality of citizenship. The government’s ultimate willingness to turn a blind eye to Jewish illegal immigration brought into stark relief, for some politically active Algerian Muslims, the inequities inherent in the French system and their disadvantaged position. The second chapter turns to decolonization in North Africa, and perceptions about the migration of North African Jews to France and Israel. Though North African Jewish migration occurred in the larger context of European migration, Mandel argues that a specifically Jewish narrative emerged...