Diverse Muslims in a Racialized Landscape: Race,Ethnicity and Islamophobia in the American City of Milwaukee,Wisconsin

Studying the racially and ethnically diverse Muslim minority population in any US city must take into account the racialized landscape prevailing in the city. Milwaukee is a highly racially segregated city, where residential patterns have been shaped by decades of immigration by various ethnic and racial groups, and by restrictions on residential housing, as well as industrialization, deindustrialization and suburbanization. This paper presents findings of an ethnographic research along with the results of a household survey of Muslims in Milwaukee in the context of Milwaukee's urban landscape. Muslims in Milwaukee are racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse. Their patterns of residence and of worship suggest the influence of not only segregation and the typical patterns of ethnic immigration but also clustering and dispersal. Patterns of residences also show the influence of not only Muslim leadership and organization but also of the racialized landscape of the city. Our survey provides a portrait of a community negotiating racial and ethnic differences and solidarities.     

西部六城市流动人口调查综合报告

自中央实施"西部大开发"发展战略以来,在西部省区基础设施和许多行业的大量投资吸引了大量来自东部和邻近农村的流动人员。我国西部是少数族群聚居区,在发展过程中各民族之间存在相互协作的广阔空间,也存在发展机会和利益分配方面的相互竞争关系。为了调查和分析近年来西部的人口流动及其对当地族群关系的影响,我们在西部六个重要城市开展了流动人口的问卷调查。本文以这次问卷调查的数据为基础,系统地分析了西部大城市中流动人口的基本特征、就业状况、收入与消费情况以及他们与当地居民之间的交往。这些量化分析的研究成果,将便于我们进一步深入分析"西部大开发"过程中人口流动对当地经济建设、社会生活和族际交往所带来的影响。     

Islam in urban spaces: The residential incorporation and choices of Muslims in Lisbon

This paper examines processes of residential settlement and incorporation of Lisbon's Muslims arriving first in the post-colonial period and later as international labour migrants. Issues related with Islam in the city are under-researched and seen as unproblematic in Portugal due to lower levels of segregation and the contemporary narrative of Portuguese tolerance. Based on an analysis of the spatiality of Islam in the metropolitan area and the individual accounts of 102 Muslims, this paper explores processes of incorporation, residential choice and belonging. The fragmented mosaic of Muslim settlement in local communities shows the role that religion can play alongside culture in creating spaces of belonging producing multiple experiences of the city. In three different localities—the inner city, an inner suburb and on the urban margin—I investigate the ways in which the cumulative action and agency of Muslim migrants over time transform local spaces and emerging structures for consecutive migrants. This paper argues that urban diversity and temporality provide a lens through which to reconceptualise the traditional choice and constraint debate to better understand the complexity of minority residential patterns and their outcomes.     

Slippery discrimination: a review of the drivers of migrant and minority housing disadvantage

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to identify housing disadvantages faced by migrants and ethnic minorities; the legal, policy and market forces that shape them; how they have developed over time; how they are manifest nationally and locally; and how they are being responded to locally by those concerned with mitigating them. The paper thereby intends to provide a foundation to inform future research and policy and to engage with local actors to develop ways of overcoming migrant housing disadvantage and challenging discrimination. The paper finds that the interplay of legal changes, which have increasingly differentiated migrants since the 1940s, and shifting housing markets, has driven exclusion of migrants and minorities such that considerable disadvantage is revealed by analysis of census data. However, attention to local specificity provides evidence of positive responses. Examples are presented in relation to access to affordable housing, enactment of homelessness duties and community actions. Methodologically, this paper highlights the importance of simultaneous consideration of migration and ethnicity as markers of difference and exclusion, and the potential of co-production approaches for socially meaningful research concerned with inequalities.     

Migrants’ class and parenting: the role of cultural capital in Migrants’ inequalities in education

Although scholars consistently show that class-specific parenting, influenced by the resources parents have due to their socio-economic position, is one of the most important factors for children’s different life chances and outcomes as adults, migrants’ parenting is usually analysed with a focus on their ethnicity or country of origin. Building on cultural perspectives on class, this study demonstrates that migrant parents are differently endowed with institutionalised and embodied cultural capital, which shapes their parenting and therewith their children’s educational opportunities. Specifically, parents differ in their trust in school authorities, the way they define their own role in shaping their children’s education, and their self-esteem and confidence in assessing their children’s abilities and performance. This study is based on the accounts of parents who migrated from Poland to Germany and shows that due to their class position, middle-class parents possess robust forms of cultural capital that they can transfer to their children in the context of migration. This finding makes a case for the relevance of class in the context of migration and thereby adds an important perspective to the study of migrants’ inequalities in education, which tends to focus on ‘ethnic’ differences between migrants and ‘natives’.     

‘I'm not like all these Ecuadorians’. Promises and dilemmas of immigrants’ selective ethnicity appropriation

This article revisits my translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian immigration to Italy, building on the notions of ethnicization and selective ethnicity appropriation. The salience of an ethnic dimension, in the daily lives of the migrants I met, is explored with regard to collective identification, alignment with co-nationals and interactions with natives. By de-constructing migrants’ ethnicity from within, a range of expectations and strategies towards the receiving society emerges. While processes of ethnicization affect them in cognitive, discursive and practical terms, immigrants selectively draw from their ethnicity patterns, as their previous identities and lifestyles interact with the mainstream overseas. Their ethnicity – as a shared repertoire of habits, ways of life and common sense ideas, supported by a communal identity and background – can be purposefully negotiated in several respects, as they strive to negotiate better life conditions overseas. Why this occurs, under what conditions, and producing what effects, are the questions to be approached in this article. As I shall argue, ethnicity-related attitudes and behaviours raise opportunities and dilemmas both for migrants’ incorporation overseas and for their transnational connections.     

Renovating ethnic identity on Restaurant Makeover

Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular Canadian reality series broadcast on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as well as the Food Network Canada. In each episode, dining experts are hired by struggling restaurateurs (often ethnic) to ‘spice up’ the existing menu, ‘modernize’ the décor and, by extension, ensure the welfare of the (immigrant's) family. While the series is not explicitly directed at ethnic restaurants, it seems to be increasingly interested in ‘non-white’ establishments (i.e., Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc.). This participation in culinary multiculturalism may be symptomatic of wider political changes in immigration and ‘diversity’ in Canada. Based on the authors analyses of specific episodes this paper argues, firstly, the growing interest in ethnic cuisine on Restaurant Makeover can be read as a (neo)liberal response to an emerging conservative ‘multicultural’ agenda that recognizes migrants predominantly as laborers (as opposed to citizens) and, secondly, that behind its rehearsal of liberal benevolence is a skewed set of power relations that authorize the experts’ (re)construction, cultivation and containment of ethnicity.     

Im/mobile highly skilled migrants in Qatar*

Most studies on the mobility of highly skilled migrants have been examined with a framework of global talent mobility and under conditions of neoliberal governance and economic globalization. In this study we challenge the notion of the hypermobile knowledge worker. Utilizing mixed methods, we examine the factors that attracted highly skilled migrants to Qatar and the conditions under which they might leave in the future. Rather than finding a group of footloose migrants attracted primarily to high-wage jobs, a lack of taxation or amenities, and with multiple alternative locations of residence, we find that highly skilled migrants exist on a spectrum of immobility. More significantly, this immobility depends on the migrant’s region of origin. For Asian and Western migrants immobility is attributed to the Kafala system or employer sponsorship, which hinders occupational and spatial mobility and ties workers to their sponsors. Arab highly skilled migrants are especially affected by lack of security and stability in their home countries, which makes these workers involuntarily immobile. The former group seem to be willing to accept a reduced level of agency and mobility for high income, whereas for the latter security and stability are more fundamental to their decision to come to Qatar.     

Immigrant life satisfaction in Europe: the role of social and symbolic boundaries

The cross-national investigation of immigrant subjective well-being remains an understudied field, especially with regard to the link between institutional settings and individual outcomes. We approach this gap by investigating the role of policies regulating immigrant integration for life satisfaction. Immigrants’ status and life chances depend on the inclusiveness of integration policies in forms of rights given to immigrants in the receiving country. These policies differentiate immigrants from natives: exclusionary integration policies understood as social boundaries should result in lower levels of well-being. We also consider an alternative policy type (i.e. multicultural policies) as well as symbolic boundaries (i.e. natives’ attitudes towards immigrants). We distinguish between national citizens, EU citizens and third-country nationals (TCNs). Results based on up to five rounds of data from the European Social Survey indicate that in terms of life satisfaction only TCNs profit from inclusive integration policies. Furthermore, while political multiculturalism does not play a role, we find that EU migrants appear more susceptible to the negative impact of natives’ anti-immigrant attitudes. Policy-making is more important for TCNs, while a migrant-friendly opinion climate is more important for EU migrants. These findings are robust to controlling for unobserved time-constant country heterogeneity via country fixed effects.     

Do Mexicans flee from violence? The effects of drug-related violence on migration decisions in Mexico

This paper attempts to identify the existence of displacement in Mexico caused by drug-related violence. We identify two types of migrants: (i) migrants moving from nonviolent to violent states, driven by better economic opportunities and less expensive cost of living at destination and (ii) migrants moving from violent to nonviolent states: they still migrate even if the cost of living at destination is more expensive and economic opportunities are lower. Our hypothesis is that for the second type, migrants are fleeing from violence, and are willing to sacrifice economic opportunities in order to gain safety. For instance, when migrants move from nonviolent to violent states, they demand a salary 25% greater in order to increase the odds of migration in 10%. On the contrary, when migrants move from violent to nonviolent states, they only demand an increase in their salary of 15%.     

Multiple belongings: transnational mobility,social class,and gendered identities among Polish migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

Using ethnographic research in Norway and in Poland, this article focuses on the dynamics of multiple belongings of Polish migrants. It explores their experiences of belonging in relation to social class, gendered identities, and their different strategies of transnational mobility between Poland and Norway. By approaching belonging ‘from below’, we posit that it is a dynamic, processual, and socially and culturally constructed attachment to places, times, and communities, which includes experiential, practical, and affective dimensions. Considering the importance of questions of belonging and home-making in migrants’ lives, always contextually produced and read through performative reiterations, we focus on migrants’ daily routines and migratory practices, and argue that belonging is a multifaceted process, which takes on diverse forms and meanings of ‘who’ belongs to ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Following intersectional perspective, the article aims at problematizing dependencies between mobility, gender, class, and migrants’ multiple belongings, and thereby, enhancing the understanding of the notion of belonging and its embeddedness in the inter-related social, cultural, economic, and political realms.     

关于城市民族问题的研究评述

20世纪90年代以来,城市民族问题日益显现,学界对此问题的研究也逐渐增多.本文将从城市民族问题、城市民族关系、城市民族工作等三个方面,对近些年的城市民族问题研究予以评述,提出笔者的一些想法.     

Un/Free mobility: Roma migrants in the European Union

ABSTRACT

This special issue showcases work that theorises and critiques the political, economic, legal, and socio-historical (‘ethnic’ or ‘cultural’) subordination of the European Roma (so-called ‘Gypsies’), from the specific critical vantage point of Roma migrants living and working within and across the space of the European Union (EU). Enabled primarily through ethnographic research with diverse Roma communities across the heterogeneous geography of ‘Europe’, the contributions to this collection are likewise concerned with the larger politics of mobility as a constitutive feature of the sociopolitical formation of the EU. Foregrounding the experiences and perspectives of Roma living and working outside of their nation-states of ‘origin’ or ostensible citizenship, we seek to elucidate wider inequalities and hierarchies at stake in the ongoing (re-)racialisation of Roma migrants, in particular, and imposed upon migrants, generally. Thus, this special issue situates Roma mobility as a critical vantage point for migration studies in Europe. Furthermore, this volume shifts the focus conventionally directed at the academic objectification of ‘the Roma’ as such, and instead seeks to foreground and underscore questions about ‘Europe’, ‘European’-ness, and EU-ropean citizenship that come into sharper focus through the critical lens of Roma racialisation, marginalisation, securitisation, and criminalisation, and the dynamics of Roma mobility within and across the space of ‘Europe’. In this way, this collection contributes new research and expands critical interdisciplinary dialogue at the intersections of Romani studies, ethnic and racial studies, migration studies, political and urban geography, social anthropology, development studies, postcolonial studies, and European studies.     

The transnational career aspirations of France’s high-achieving second-generation Maghrebi migrants

This article examines the mobility aspirations of France’s high-achieving second-generation Maghrebi migrants. Drawing on in-depth, open-ended interviews with students and graduates of grandes ecoles, prestigious higher education institutions, it delves into the career trajectories they intend to embark on beyond the French borders. Three distinct mobility projects are envisioned by the respondents. While some contemplate intensifying their ties with their parents’ homeland, others envisage moving to a ‘third space’ in which they have commonly lived during their studies and established strong connections. Another group of informants seek to set up hyper-mobile careers spanning multiple global-cities. The article suggests that the threat of discrimination and the desire to defy the nation-based assimilationist rhetoric frame the desire to set up transnational pathways. It further disentangles the role of educational resources, social capital in the places envisioned, as well as gender processes in informing these distinctive ways of engaging with the transnational among second-generation migrants. Lastly, the article examines the specific trajectories of respondents who intend to remain in France.     

From diversity to conviviality: intra-EU mobility and international migration to Denmark in times of economic recession

ABSTRACT

This article explores differences among EU and non-EU migrants in accommodating to the Danish flexicurity labour and welfare regime during times of economic crisis. We build our findings on a quantitative survey followed by semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with EU and non-EU migrants who moved to Denmark during the recession period (2008–2013). We argue that the lack of multicultural policies triggers individualised strategies of accommodation rather than ethnic or national group base integration, favouring a more homogenous group of high-skilled and educated group of workers and students of postgraduate/higher education, whom we describe as a ‘flexicurity diversity group’. Through patterns of conviviality, individual socialisation is based here on common interests, needs and lifestyles and not on pre-defined ethnic and/or cultural traits. The transition from diversity to conviviality that is initiated by this group remains however incomplete in light of the unequal opportunities and the differentiated scheme of rights that apply to EU and non-EU immigrants. Danish flexicurity has thus not had the desired inclusive effects but discriminates in terms of facilitating easy access to the labour market for all, and ‘securing’ social benefits and offering rights and protection only to the privileged group of EU migrants.     

Multi-ethnic public sphere and accessible ethnic media: mapping online English-language ethnic media

The multi-ethnic public sphere requires a functioning media system that facilitates intercultural dialogue across communities. As producers of multi-ethnic voices, the role of ethnic media is important in this debate. However, studies so far have focused on ethnic media’s role within their respective communities rather than their role within broader society. Equally, theoretical debates on ethnic media as independent spheres focus on speaking by and listening to minority voices without consideration of the necessary conditions that need to be in place in order to enable these voices to be heard. This study advances Charles Husband’s notion of the ‘multi-ethnic public sphere’ by using a notion of an ‘intercultural media system’ that considers both availability and accessibility of ethnic media for a broader audience as a necessary condition to enable listening. Drawn from New America Media’s NAM National Ethnic Media Directory, the study provides a case study on the ethnic media sector in the U.S. by mapping accessible ethnic media, that is, ethnic media that produce content in English or bilingually online. The findings suggest the existence of a substantial base of accessible ethnic media with a growing interest in serving audiences beyond their respective communities.     

Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Housing and Mortgage Lending Markets: A Quantitative Review of Trends, 1976–2016

We examine trends in racial and ethnic discrimination in U.S. housing and mortgage lending markets through a quantitative review of studies. We code and analyze as a time series results from 16 field experiments of housing discrimination and 19 observational studies of mortgage lending discrimination. Consistent with prior research, we find evidence of a decline in housing discrimination from the late 1970s to the present. Our results show that this trend holds in both the national audits sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and in non-HUD studies. The decline in discrimination is strongest for discrimination that involves direct denial of housing availability, for which discrimination has declined to low levels. The downward trend in discrimination is weaker for measures reflecting the number of units recommended and inspected, and significant discrimination remains for these outcomes. In the mortgage market, we find that racial gaps in loan denial have declined only slightly, and racial gaps in mortgage cost have not declined at all, suggesting persistent racial discrimination. We discuss the implications of these trends for housing inequality, racial segregation, and racial disparities in household wealth.

     

再论"族群"概念与解决民族内部矛盾的路径

自从族群概念在20世纪60年代引入中国以来,族群与民族、族群意识与民族意识已经成为民族研究的主题。在本文中,笔者尝试着再次对“民族”与“族群”概念、民族意识与族群意识进行了回顾与分析;接着对美国和我国所采取的族群政策的变化进行了一番仔细比较分析;对解决族群矛盾提出了一些建议,认为只有淡化“族群意识”,加强各族群之间的文化认同,遵循族群发展的自主性和客观规律才能较好地解决我国的族群问题,维护社会稳定。     

Gender differences in labour market integration trajectories of recently arrived migrants in the Netherlands

This study investigates gender differences in recently arrived migrants’ labour market activity and occupational status both shortly after arrival and with increasing length of stay. We examine the role of education, household composition and traditional gender role values by estimating multi-group multilevel models based on three waves of the New Immigrants to the Netherlands Survey. In line with findings regarding gender gaps in labour market behaviour, recent female migrants are less active on labour market than their male counterparts, and we observe a clear motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium on the number of hours worked. Men and women show only marginal differences in their occupational statuses. Changes over time do not differ between men and women, indicating persistent gender inequality in labour market attainment. Moreover, interesting differences between the nationalities were found. Polish migrants show the highest activity levels and lowest occupational status, also when compared to Bulgarians. Spanish migrants hold the highest occupational statuses. Recent Turkish migrants seem to be better integrated and show fewer gender differences than the more established Turkish minority in the Netherlands.