Transnational political practices and the receiving state: Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands

This article examines how the social and political contexts in receiving countries affect the transnational political practices of migrants and refugees, such as their mobilization around political events in their homeland. The case study explores the political participation of Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands in its full complexity, that is in both the immigration country and in homeland politics. The findings suggest that transnational political practices should not be reduced to a function of the political opportunity structures of particular receiving countries for two main reasons: (a) more inclusive political structures, which provide for more participation and co‐operation on immigrant political issues, may at the same time, and for that very reason, serve to exclude dialogue on homeland politics; (b) homeland political movements may draw on a different range of resources than their immigrant political counterparts, including those outside the local political institutional context.     

Voting here and there: political integration and transnational political engagement among immigrants in Europe

In this article, I examine voting patterns in origin and receiving country national elections among immigrants in Europe. The existing scholarship on transnational political engagement offers two competing interpretations of the relationship between immigrant integration and transnational engagement, which I classify as the resocialization and complementarity perspectives. The resocialization perspective assumes that transnational political engagement gradually declines as immigrants become socialized into the new receiving society. Conversely, the complementarity perspective assumes that immigrant integration increases transnational political engagement. I test these competing perspectives with survey data collected between 2004 and 2008 for 12 different immigrant groups residing in seven European cities. The analysis examines how immigrant political and civic participation in receiving countries affect their proclivities to vote in homeland elections. I also analyse the effects of receiving and origin country contexts on immigrant voting behaviour in homeland elections. While my findings support both the resocialization and complementarity perspectives, they also highlight the ways in which a set of origin‐country contexts shape immigrant propensities to engage in transnational electoral politics. I observe a degree of complementarity among immigrants with resources who are motivated and eligible to participate in both receiving and origin‐country elections.     

THE TRANSNATIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF IMMIGRANT POLITICS: Insights from a Comparative Study of Migrant Grassroots Organizing1

Greater global interconnectedness produces a transformation in the ways in which groups constitute and interpret the boundaries of community formation and political practice. This article considers the ways in which a group engages (or not) with the possibilities for transnational identity formation and border‐crossing politics granted by the changing structures of the global order. A comparative analysis identifies similarities and differences in the patterns of community formation and political engagement of Salvadoran migrants settled across different urban centers of North America. Variations in the territorial orientation and scales of immigrant political practice are explained by the national and city‐level contexts of immigrant reception, the institutional opportunity structure in which migrant groups are embedded, and the nature of relations between migrants and their migrant and nonmigrant institutional interlocutors in places of settlement and their country of origin.     

Post‐urbanism,Incorporation, and Migration

This paper explores an emerging pattern of migration currently being written by the new wave of Mexican migrants in New Haven, Connecticut, a city with little to no history of Mexican migration. Using New Haven as a case study, this paper argues that local conditions shape immigrant experiences and thus frame the process of social and economic incorporation. By contrasting first‐wave Italian migration and contemporary Mexican migration, we demonstrate that urban conditions both foster and impede the social and political integration of immigrant groups. Our analyses demonstrate that the presence of established ethnic communities pose challenges and benefits to the political and social incorporation of Italians and Mexicans in their respective urban eras. Moreover, we find that contemporary immigrants are entering settings that are more racialized and economically distinct than that of their first‐wave immigrant predecessors.     

Immigration Policy: Methods of Economic Assessment1

This article outlines a set of economic criteria to assess an immigrant‐receiving country's immigration policy from three perspectives. These three perspectives include the resident population, the immigrant, and the sending country viewpoints. An expanded version of Julian Simon's financial transfer model, which includes employment and capital externalities, is developed to assess the efficacy of an immigration policy from the resident's viewpoint. Next, Chiswick's earnings “catch‐up” model is expanded in an employment dimension to create an assessment criterion for the resident immigrant population. Finally, a comprehensive reverse transfer criterion is outlined to provide an assessment criterion for sending regions. These criteria are then applied to selected European and North American immigrant receiving countries.     

The discursive construction of learning in a multiethnic school: perspectives from non‐immigrant students

This paper provides data from individual interviews conducted with 15 and 16 year‐old non‐immigrant students from a highly multiethnic secondary urban school in Barcelona, Spain. In this school, mixed classrooms (immigrant and local) and small linguistically heterogeneous working groups are frequent in the mathematics lessons. The focus is on the non‐immigrant students’ perspectives on the notion of learning. Findings show that these students interpret certain whole‐class and small‐group interactions among local and immigrant students as not constitutive of learning. In particular, I explore some of the meanings associated with the representation of the multiethnic classroom as a conflictive place for learning.     

Chinese Immigrant Entrepreneurship in Italy’s Coffee Bars: Demographic Transformation and Historical Contingency

Since the Economic Recession in the late 2000s, many neighbourhood coffee bars in Northern and Central Italy have been taken over by Chinese immigrants. This article investigates why neighbourhood bars, which are thought to be at the heart of Italian urban culture, have become a new business niche for Chinese immigrants in spite of overwhelmingly anti-immigrant discourse. By elucidating the political economy of Italy's coffee bar industry and restructuring of its Chinese ethnic economy, it shows how the formation of this new immigrant business niche is a form of historical contingency embedded in a set of structural transformation processes. The broader purpose of the article is to contribute to an understanding of the structural mechanisms of embedded immigrant entrepreneurship and immigrants’ economic incorporation, as well as to debates on the roles of immigrants in the new urban economy and related local cultures of a multi-ethnic European nation-state.     

Native Friends and Host Country Identification among Adolescent Immigrants in Germany: The Role of Ethnic Boundaries

Many studies find that high shares of native friends are positively related to immigrant youths' identification with the host country. By examining various immigrant groups together, these studies imply that having native friends matters in the same way for the national identification in different immigrant groups. In contrast, we argue that the extent to which having native friends affects immigrants' national identification depends on both immigrant group characteristics and the receiving context, especially on ethnic boundaries and related group differences in perceived discrimination and the compatibility of ethnic and national identities. Analyses based on data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany that are representative of 15‐year‐old adolescents in secondary schools indeed reveal pronounced group differences: While national identification of ethnic German repatriates as well as of adolescents of former Yugoslavian and Southern European origin is related to the share of native friends, as hypothesized, we do not find this association for immigrants of Turkish and Polish origin. Our finding underlines the importance of theoretically as well as empirically accounting for group differences.     

Are immigrants and natives perfect substitutes in production?

This article discusses whether immigrant and native labor are perfect substitutes in production when conventional measures of skill and demographic characteristics are held constant. The ratio of immigrant to native labor and the ratio of immigrant to native earnings are studied in 5 major immigrant receiving countries with other variables held constant. Countries included are 1) the US and Britian, where the foreign born are only about 5% to 6% of the adult male labor force; 2) Canada and Australia, where they are about 20% and 30%, respectively; and 3) Israel, where the foreign born are about 3/4 of the Jewish adult male labor force. The relative earnings of adult male immigrants and the adult male native-born sons of immigrants are found to be lower when the labor supply of immigrants is greater. The estimated elasticity of substitution between immigrant and native labor is high, but significantly less than infinity. Workers who are relatively more intensively in the favorable self selection characteristics of immigrants are not perfect substitutes for workers relatively more intensive in country-specific skills. As immigrants increase in the labor force, their relative earnings tend to fall, although the decline is small. Economies have sufficiently flexible markets and develop institutional arrangements to mitigate the relative fail in immigrant earnings as their relative supply increase.     

Change and Continuity in Australian International Migration Policy

Almost half Australia's population are an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. This paper traces changes in Australia's immigration policy over the postwar period and relates them to changing global and national developments. While Australian postwar immigration policy changes are similar in many ways to those in other “traditional” migration countries there are a number of distinctive elements. The effectiveness of those policies in achieving government goals is assessed and it is concluded that most objectives of policy have been successfully achieved. Nevertheless there are a number of challenges which Australian policy makers face over the next decade.     

Residential segregation in Australian cities: a literature review

"In this review of literature dealing with the postwar immigrant experience in urban Australia, some of the key interpretations of residential segregation are assessed. The article focuses on studies which have examined ethnic clusters formed by southern Europeans in Sydney and Melbourne and more recently by Indochinese refugees. Much of the analysis to date has been based on measuring static residential patterns rather than social interaction, and the need to question the significance of ethnic concentrations which sometimes characterize the early stages of immigrant adaptation is suggested."     

Israeli immigrants in the United States: The question of community

Despite their possession of many social advantages such as high levels of education, familiarity with Western, urban culture, Caucasian appearance, relative economic security and ties to an established, co-ethnic community, much literature on Israeli immigrants in the U.S. depicts them as plagued by social and psychological alienation to the extent that they are incapable of creating viable ethnic communities. This paper uses field work and photography collected within the Israeli immigrant population of Los Angeles to critically examine the assertion that Israeli immigrants in the U.S. are much less organized than would be predicted by recent theories on immigrant adaptation and community formation. Based on this research, we argue that while Israelis are ambivalent about their presence in the U.S., they have created a variety of communal activities involving entrepreneurship, religion, culture, politics and leisure.     

1.5 Generation Internal Migration in the U.S.: Dispersion from States of Immigration?1

The issue of immigrant spatial concentration and the possibilities for immigrant dispersion through migration features in at least three interrelated debates about immigration. First, the ethnic enclave literature centers on the question of whether spatial concentration improves or harms the economic well‐being of immigrants. Second, spatial assimilation theory links immigrant relocation away from residential enclaves to socioeconomic gains. Although framed at an intra‐urban scale, we suggest that similar assimilation logics infuse thinking and expectations about immigrant settlement and spatial mobility at other scales. And third, immigrant clustering links to anxieties about the threats posed by non‐European origin newcomers to the traditional cultural fabric of the nation. In the current wave of immigration, research on questions of settlement geography and spatial mobility has so far been restricted to the first generation. But as the current wave of immigration matures there is a growing population of adults who are the children of immigrants. This article investigates the migration behavior of these adult children, specifically the 1.5 generation, seeking to answer the question of whether they will remain in the states in which their parent's generation settled or move on. It also assesses whether the out‐migration response of the 1.5 generation in states of immigrant concentration is similar to that of their parent's generation or the U.S.‐born population.     

Ethnic Concentration and Nonprofit Organizations: The Political and Urban Geography of Immigrant Services in Boston,Massachusetts

This article considers the geographic distribution of nonprofit organizations serving immigrants across municipalities within the Greater Boston area in an effort to identify variations in the levels of assistance available to major foreign‐born populations in the region. The analysis relies on data from the Census and the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Results suggest that geographic context matters, including immigrant settlement patterns, racial heterogeneity, and fiscal and institutional characteristics of towns and cities, in shaping availability of nonprofit resources to immigrants. These findings highlight large socio‐spatial disparities in immigrant services and challenge the wisdom of devolving responsibility for such assistance to local governments and ultimately nonprofits, as new entrants settle in larger numbers in areas previously unaffected by immigration and ill‐prepared to address immigrant needs. The research contributes to debates on the rescaling of immigrant policy and service provision and literature on the geography of integration by engaging with scholarship in urban and political geography.     

“Leaving Home Ain't Easy:” The timing and pathways of young immigrants’ home-leaving transitions

Leaving the parental home to live independently has long been a marker of one's transition to adulthood and a sign of immigrant adaptation to the host country. The timing and pathways of home-leaving are important for both the housing trajectories of young adults and the overall housing demand of immigrant receiving areas. However, young adults—immigrants or not— have increasingly been delaying this transition, opting instead to stay in the parental home for an extended period of time. In this paper, we conceptualize home-leaving as a decision made over time—influenced by individual, family, and contextual factors—and use panel data collected in the 2011 and 2017 Canadian General Social Survey (GSS). Through both a Cox proportional hazard model and a competing risk model, we examine the timing of exit from the parental home, the determinants of this exit, and the variable rates of independent household formation across immigrant, non-visible, and visible minority groups. We find, although the relationship is not always linear, generational status, as well as race and ethnicity, play an important role in not only the timing, but also the destination of home leaving, while age at arrival is particularly salient for racialized immigrant groups. Young immigrants of visible minority background are generally less likely to leave their parental home, even though immigrants to Canada are selected for their ability to succeed in Canada.     

Development of a Culturally Specific Career Exploration Group for Urban Chinese Immigrant Youth

A rapid increase in the number of Chinese immigrants and the specific challenges faced by low‐income Chinese immigrant youth attending urban schools warrant culturally sensitive school‐based interventions and services. However, research and services are limited for this population because of cultural biases in traditional career theories and the “model minority” myth suggesting that Asian students are excelling. The authors developed and implemented a culturally specific career exploration group for low‐income Chinese immigrant youth to address their career concerns with respect to multiple social and cultural factors and to provide social support. Implications for future program development and research are provided.     

Immigrant Retail Entrepreneurship and Urban Black Population Size in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

Building on the idea that immigrant merchants often operate in black consumer markets, this study tests the hypothesis that late nineteenth-century European immigrants’ highest odds of retail enterprise in the United States were in cities with the largest black populations. Regression analyses of census data show that the positive association between the odds of retail enterprise and percent black was strongest for men from European immigrant groups and especially strong for men of Polish and Russian ancestry, many of whom were Jewish immigrants. The analyses reveal that the association between the odds of retail enterprise and percent black was not significant for native white or black men. The findings accord with the proposition, derived from theories of middleman minorities and ethnic queuing, that immigrant retail entrepreneurship is most strongly associated with black population size for recently arrived immigrant groups that are often socially or spatially close to urban black communities.     

The Past is Ever Present: Transnationalism Old and New – Italian and Mexican Immigrants in the US

The paper focuses on what is old and what is new in transnationalism by analyzing extraterritorial attempts of the Italian and Mexican governments. During the large southern/ eastern European immigration to the US from 1890 to the 1920s, Italian immigrants reached 24 percent of the immigrant wave. Mexican documented and undocumented immigrants from the 1980s until 2010s made up 30 percent of the immigrant wave almost a century later. Transnational immigrants live in a country in which they do not claim citizenship rights and claim citizenship rights in a country they do not live in. Therefore migration and immigrant policies challenge both sending and receiving states. Foreign governments are limited in the policies and practices that they can enforce. A comparison of state policies from Italy and Mexico challenges the fact that transnationalism is significantly different and new.