From Filial Piety to Religious Piety: Evangelical Christianity Reconstructing Taiwanese Immigrant Families in the United States1

While current scholarship suggests that immigrant religion reproduces ethnic traditions, this article suggests that religion can also challenge and transform ethnic traditions. Like other immigrants from Confucian cultures, Taiwanese immigrants find that their Confucian family traditions are difficult to maintain in the United States. The immigrant church is an important community institution that offers new models of parenting and family life. This article discusses how through the influence of evangelical Christianity, the immigrant church reconstructs Taiwanese immigrant families by (i) shifting the moral vocabulary of the family from one of filial duty to religious discipleship; (ii) democratizing relationships between parents and children; and (iii) consecrating the individuality and autonomy of children. These new models of family life both reproduce and alter Taiwanese traditions in the United States. Religion mediates and shapes immigrant cultural assimilation to the United States.     

Linking Practitioners' Attitudes Towards and Basic Knowledge of Immigrants with Their Social Work Education

Based on a survey of 1,124 social workers in the United States, this article examines how practitioners' attitudes towards immigrants and their general knowledge of immigration varied according to the content of their social work education. Although the majority of practitioners reported receiving coursework on practice with immigrants, this showed no effect on their attitudes or knowledge. In contrast, coursework on immigration policy predicted more favorable attitudes towards immigrants. Considering the mounting anti-immigrant sentiment and retrenchment of immigrants' rights in the United States, the results suggest the need to further explore what course work content is needed to prepare social workers for the current needs of the field. We argue that social work education must expand upon existing cultural competence models of practice with immigrants, to better prepare social workers to address the deepening social exclusion of undocumented immigrants in the United States.     

Culture of the Labor Movement and Work in the United States

With the resurgence of union organizing during the 1990s, a new scholarship about the labor movement has emerged, documenting and explaining this new social movement unionism. Literature on the culture of work is well developed while, generally speaking, in the scholarship about the labor movement, culture is an underdeveloped analysis. In this article, we look at the culture of market fundamentalism as the dominant way of thinking and explaining work and labor in the United States. Market fundamentalism has emerged at the same time that women and immigrants have become much more numerous among U.S. workers, and they have brought with them new cultural emphases at work and among unions. In response to market fundamentalism and with the activism of women and immigrants among others, unions have transformed their own culture toward social movement unionism and have pushed for a new culture of work.     

Working with Immigrant Children and Their Families: An Application of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory

The influx of multicultural and multiethnic immigrants to the United States following the liberalization of immigration law in 1965 has resulted in a high representation of children who reside with immigrant families. As these children are approaching early adulthood, their encounter with various ecological systems is likely to be shaped by their cultural differences and the diversity of family settings. Drawing on the insights of Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, this article highlights the critical function that family social ecology plays in how children of immigrants will fare over their adolescent life course. By providing a comprehensive picture of how immigrant family process takes place, this article suggests how understanding the ecology of immigrant families can help strengthen social work service delivery.     

Brazilian immigration to North America

"This article is a comparative study of Brazilian immigration to Canada and the United States. Analysis of recently collected data in Toronto, Ontario and in a medium-size U.S. community facilitated the examination of the adaptation and adjustment experiences of a new group of immigrants to North America. This article begins with a discussion of the origins of this recent immigrant group and its rapid expansion. Next, it focuses on the labor force activities of Brazilian immigrants and compares and contrasts their experiences in the United States and Canada. A final section examines social adaptation in North America by exploring linguistic and cultural dimensions. This article closes with a section on the future aspirations of these immigrants."     

The "amnesty" aftermath: current policy issues stemming from the legalization programs of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act

"The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) created two one-time only legalization programs affecting nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants. Legalization has produced important changes among immigrants and in immigration policy. These changes include new patterns of immigrant social and economic adaptation to the United States and new immigrant flows through family ties to IRCA-legalized aliens.... This article combines data from a longitudinal survey of the IRCA-legalized population with qualitative field data on current immigration issues from key informants in eight high-immigration metropolitan areas. It reviews the political evolution and early implementation of legalization, the current socioeconomic position of legalized aliens, and changes in the immigration ?policy space' resulting from legalization."     

城市外籍人口管理研究——以广州为例

中国巨大的发展成就吸引越来越多的外国人来到中国,这种趋势既是外籍人员趋利行为的结果,也是中国更多融入国际劳动力市场的表现,外籍人口问题将逐渐从社会边缘性问题向社会重大问题转变,广州的非籍人口问题就是这种转变的初现端倪,中国崛起必将迎来外籍人口问题的挑战。从美国民族融合的历程看,老移民把自己看作正统美国人,从维护自身利益出发,以偏见和歧视对待新移民,力图强迫新移民按照他们的要求进行"美国化",这种做法使种族矛盾越演越烈,历经多年仍然余毒未消。预见到我国外籍人口问题的发展趋势,有必要反思美国的移民社会融合教训,结合具有代表性的广州外籍人口问题,把广州在推进外籍人口社会融合方面的探索和创新上升到国家战略试点的高度予以重视,从经济融入、社会融入、文化融合、结构融合和身份认同的角度入手,探索符合中国经济社会状况的外籍人口社会融合的方式。     

Omnivorousness as the bridging of cultural holes: A measurement strategy

Recent research and theory at the intersection of cultural sociology and network analysis have converged around the notion of cultural holes: patterns of cultural choice that position the person as a bridge not between other persons but between cultural worlds. This is an approach that promises to open up new vistas in our conceptualization of the relationship between social position and cultural taste, but that so far lacks operational grounding. In this article, I draw on Breiger’s (1974) formalization of the idea of the duality of persons and groups along with classical formalizations of brokerage for sociometric networks (Burt 1992) to suggest that the “cultural ego network” of a typical survey respondent can be reconstructed from patterns of audience overlap among the cultural items that are chosen by each respondent. This leads to a formalization of the notion of omnivorousness as relatively low levels of clustering in the cultural network: namely, omnivorousness as cultural network efficiency. I show how this metric overcomes the difficulties that have plagued previous attempts to produce ordinal indicators of omnivorousness from simple counts of the number of cultural choices, while providing novel substantive (and sometime counter-intuitive) insights into the relationship between socio-demographic status markers and patterns of cultural choice in the contemporary United States.     

Assessment of issues facing immigrant and refugee families

This article identifies the different problems immigrants and refugees face in the United States, especially socioeconomic and psychosocial concerns that often relate to the experience of migration. Traditional familial roles and responsibilities are frequently challenged, exacerbated by sociocultural differences and inadequate understandings between the new arrivals and the host country. Essential in assessments of immigrant and refugee families is evaluating resources for social, economic, and cultural integration; discriminating between realistic and unrealistic expectations; evaluating families' problem-solving abilities; exploring family functioning within the context of heritage; identifying the transferability of work skills; and gauging families' learning capabilities and motivation for adaptation.     

A Comparison of the Integration Experiences of Two African Immigrant Populations in a Rural Community

Abstract

Most U.S. migration research compares very distinct groups, such as Mexicans and Asians, and virtually ignores the small, but growing number of African immigrants. In contrast, this study describes and compares the integration experiences of two Black, East African refugee populations in a small town in the Midwestern United States. We demonstrate that Muslim Somalis and Christians from southern Sudan encounter similar structural obstacles to social and economic integration, but that their religious affiliations lead to sharply different opportunities and cultural strategies. This paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for social work practice and the potential role of social workers as cultural brokers between new immigrant groups and the general public.     

Immigrant socioeconomic mobility in the United States: Mechanisms of inequality and the role of ethnic capital

We review recent social science research on the socioeconomic mobility of immigrants to the United States by focusing on the educational, occupational, and income attainments among immigrant adults, the first‐generation, and the educational attainment of their children, the New Second‐Generation. Existing research has identified significant inequalities in educational attainment between second‐generation Asian and Latinx immigrant groups. Researchers have also highlighted the importance of ethnic capital for mobility, but we find that they have largely proceeded with the assumption that co‐ethnic ties are easily available as a benefit for immigrants upon resettlement. We propose that future research on immigrant socioeconomic mobility should incorporate conceptual insights from economic and cultural sociology as well as use comparative ethnographic research designs to directly observe how ethnic capital operates to challenge or reinforce patterns of socioeconomic inequality.     

A model of cultural competency in social work as seen through the lens of self-awareness

Providing effective cultural competency training to social work students is a social work education struggle. This qualitative study, conducted in the United States, addresses this challenge by examining social work educators’ teaching methods for cultural competency by focusing on the self as a part of culture and racism as a part of dominant culture. The findings reveal that the social work educators emphasize the role of self-awareness and cultural awareness in teaching cultural competency. However, they prefer to use multiculturalism, a 1960s ideology, to teach cultural competency and do not invest in teaching anti-racism. These findings shed light on teaching cultural competency and have practical implications in social work education.     

Estimating Self‐Selection of Immigrants: Comparing Earnings Differentials Between Natives and Immigrants in the US and Israel

Immigrants’ economic assimilation in host countries is determined by patterns of self‐selection on both – observed attributes (mainly human capital) and unobserved attributes of the immigrants from their source countries. In the present study immigrants’ economic assimilation in the United States and Israel are compared. More specifically, the study compares the impact of immigrants’ unobserved characteristics on their earnings in both countries by applying a model for decomposing difference in differentials. It makes use of United States and Israeli decennial census data for comparing self‐selection patterns on unobserved attributes of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union (FSU) who arrived in the United States and Israel during the 1970s. The results indicate that FSU immigrants who chose the United States have significantly higher levels of unobserved earnings determinants than those who chose Israel. These results are discussed in light of migration theories.     

Origins and destinies: Immigration to the United States since World War II

Contemporary immigration to the United States and the formation of new ethnic groups are the complex and unintended social consequences of the expansion of the nation to its post-World War II position of global hegemony. Immigrant communities in the United States today are related to a history of American military, political, economic, and cultural involvement and intervention in the sending countries, especially in Asia and the Caribbean Basin, and to the linkages that are formed in the process that open a variety of legal and illegal migration pathways. The 19.8 million foreign-born persons counted in the 1990 U.S. census formed the largest immigrant population in the world, though in relative terms, only 7.9% of the U.S. population was foreign-born, a lower proportion than earlier in this century. Today's immigrants are extraordinarily diverse, a reflection of polar-opposite types of migrations embedded in very different historical and structural contexts. Also, unlike the expanding economy that absorbed earlier flows from Europe, since the 1970s new immigrants have entered an hourglass economy with reduced opportunities for social mobility, particularly among the less educated, and new waves of refugees have entered a welfare state with expanded opportunities for public assistance. This paper seeks to make sense of the new diversity. A typology of contemporary immigrants is presented, and their patterns of settlement, their distinctive social and economic characteristics compared to major native-born racial-ethnic groups, and their different modes of incorporation in—and consequences for—American society are considered.     

Social remittances: migration driven local-level forms of cultural diffusion

"Many studies highlight the macro-level dissemination of global culture and institutions. This article focuses on social remittances--a local-level, migration-driven form of cultural diffusion. Social remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities. The role that these resources play in promoting immigrant entrepreneurship, community and family formation, and political integration is widely acknowledged. This article specifies how these same ideas and practices are remolded in receiving countries, the mechanisms by which they are sent back to sending communities, and the role they play in transforming sending-country social and political life." The data concern migrants from the Dominican Republic to the Boston area of the United States.     

The future of marriage and hispanics

At least two important demographic changes will occur in the United States in the future: the growth of the Hispanic population and the growth of the second and third generations among Hispanics. We argue that the expansion of the Hispanic population is unlikely to slow the retreat from marriage, despite the pronuptial cultural orientations of some groups of immigrants and their native‐born coethnics. On the contrary, the second‐ and third‐generation descendents of immigrants will join in the retreat from marriage as a result of their exposure to the cultural and economic environment of the United States, as well as changes in the countries from which their immigrant parents originate. Sources of uncertainty about this scenario are noted.     

Growing up Without Status: The Integration of Children in Mixed‐Status Families

Over the past three decades, a central new challenge confronting millions of children of immigrants has emerged: growing up in a mixed‐status family in which at least one member lacks legal authorization to live and work in the United States. A body of recent research argues that unauthorized immigrant status is the fundamental determinant of integration for unauthorized immigrants, with intergenerational consequences for their U.S.‐born children. We discuss the immigration and other policies that create the particular social context within which unauthorized immigration status becomes so detrimental for integration. Specifically, we focus on federal and state policies that undermine the very factors thought to protect children and support the integration of new generations of Americans: families and social networks, economic resources and opportunities, and health. We conclude with recommendations for future research.     

The Marital Status of Recent Mexican Immigrants in the United States in 1980 and 19901

Using Public Use Microdata Samples, we analyze the temporal marriage patterns of recent Mexican immigrants in the United States, and relate these patterns to socioeconomic and political events, such as U.S. immigration reform, increasing returns to skill, and rising incentives for unattached Mexicans to migrate during the 1980s. Our findings indicate that recent Mexican immigrants (particularly men) were less likely to be married within five years of migrating in 1990 than their counterparts had been in 1980. An empirical extension further suggests that the relative endogamy odds among Mexican immigrants who migrated to the United States by 1980 increased during the next decade. Such demographic changes may affect policies involving issues such as education, welfare and retirement.     

Beyond 3×1: Linking Sending and Receiving Societies in the Development Process

In this paper, I explore the possibilities of linking and expanding existing sending and receiving countries' initiatives that mobilize immigrants to participate in the development process of their countries of origin in such a way as to advance two main goals of such initiatives: (1) to multiply their developmental impact in sending regions; and (2) to help increase the social and political capital of immigrants and immigrant associations, so as to facilitate both their role in the development of their countries of origin and also their integration in their host societies. In the paper, I will study the Mexican 3×1 programme and Spain's co‐development model and explore the ways in which programmes such as these could be ideally linked and implemented, in diverse contexts, in a way that is advantageous to both sending and receiving societies. The paper is based on research conducted over the past 9 years with Mexican immigrant associations in the United States; on interviews with Mexican government officials in Mexico and the United States; and on interviews conducted in 2008 and 2009 in Spain.