“They Are Clipping Our Wings”: Health Implications of Restrictive Immigrant Policies for Mexican-Origin Women in a Northern Border Community

We examine racialization processes experienced by women of Mexican origin in a northern border community during a protracted period of restrictive immigrant policies that have disparately affected Mexican-origin communities, and consider pathways through which these experiences may affect health. This grounded theory analysis draws on interviews conducted in 2013–2014 with 48 first, 1.5, and second generation Mexican-origin women living in Detroit, MI. Racialization processes blurred boundaries between Latinas/os, immigrants, and undocumented immigrants. Racialized policies and interactions required women to negotiate shifting and often precarious social and political terrain. We describe racializing markers used by agents of multiple institutions to assess the legal status of women and members of their social networks, shaping their access to the resources over which institutional agents held power. Specifically, we consider the dynamic mechanisms by which multiple legal, social, and employment institutions exacted immigrant policing and bureaucratic surveillance. These include: (1) interior and border immigration enforcement agents’ active surveillance of residents; (2) local law enforcement officials’ assertion of authority over driver’s licenses and contact with immigration officials, often in traffic-related encounters; (3) Secretary of State clerks’ discretion in assessing legal status and issuing driver’s licenses and state IDs; (4) social welfare agents’ scrutiny of citizenship status in determining access to nutritional, economic, and medical resources; and (5) employers’ exploitation of these structural vulnerabilities to justify unfair treatment of immigrant workers. We theorize several mechanisms, by which these processes affect health, including: stigmatization; hypervigilance; and restricted access to health-promoting resources.     

A ‘master status’ or the ‘final straw’? Assessing the role of immigration status in Latino undocumented youths’ pathways out of school

Previous research on undocumented youth and young adults in the United States asserts that immigration status is a ‘master status’, wherein undocumented status overshadows the impact of other social locations. Drawing primarily on interviews with 45 Latina/o undocumented immigrant youth who stopped out of school, I assess whether the ‘master status’ explanation accurately characterises how immigration status shapes undocumented youths’ pathways out of school. Using an intersectional lens, I argue that multiple social locations disrupt educational pathways and set the stage for immigration status to emerge as the ‘final straw’ that pushes undocumented youth to leave school. Specifically, I show how race, class, gender, and first-generation college student status heavily shape undocumented youths’ educational journeys. I find that their resistance to these other forms of marginalisation is weakened by the emerging salience of undocumented status as a severe, relatively insurmountable legal barrier. I highlight the process through which these multiple social locations work together to lead undocumented youth to stop out of school. I contend that using an intersectional lens enhances understandings of how multiple social locations intersect and interact over time to marginalise immigrants.     

Creating a Rebuttable Presumption of Profiling in Cases of Alleged Profiling of Muslims and Other Minorities in Canada

This paper addresses the subject of profiling in the Canadian context both in the narrower and broader senses. It discusses the close connection between wider discretionary power and profiling; the need and justification of rebuttable presumptions and its constitutional basis and discusses possible ways to end profiling in line with the contextual analysis of equality under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The paper proposes for the shift in the burden of proof away from a victim of profiling to the law enforcement authority—in an alleged case of profiling—in the context of a search, or an arrest, of a Canadian Muslim or member of other minorities by police and other law enforcement authorities, and demonstrating that such search or arrest was not motivated by race, religion, or ethnicity. Thus creating a rebuttable presumption of profiling against the law enforcement authority when they use their discretionary power in search or arrest of a member of a racial, religious, or ethnic minority group. A member of Canadian law enforcement authority against whom profiling is alleged can rebut the presumption by proving that race, religion, or ethnicity was not a factor in using their discretionary power to stop, search, or detain the alleged victim of profiling.     

The legacy of Derrick Bell and Latino/a education: a critical race testimonio

In this article, we trace Bell’s influence in our lives from graduate students to teacher educators and engaged scholars, and note how we have always read Bell alongside and inseparable from Latino/a Studies and Latina/Chicana feminist thought. We highlight the powerful and fruitful tensions of these interconnections in addressing our curricular struggles and innovations, professional identities and scholarly trajectories. We address Bell’s theory of interest convergence to discuss the tensions and possibilities of personal ‘success’ in the academy by interweaving our testimonios with Critical Race and Latino Critical Race (LatCrit) scholarship in Latino/a education. Latina feminist scholars have re-worked the Latin American tradition of testimonio as a way to link individual stories to a collective story of Latina/o racialization in the US, and to epistemological racism in the academy. Our collective story centers the intersections of race with indigeneity, class, citizenship, language, gender and sexuality. We begin from the earliest influence of Bell’s counterstorytelling method for examining Latino/a students’ racializing experiences in higher education and move through other critical race work in Latino education that both directly and indirectly addresses Bell’s scholarship as these intersect with our intellectual journeys. Finally, we offer a story of the complex legacy of Bell’s anti-subordination and social justice scholarship for intellectual alliances, coalition building, and inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary engaged scholarship.     

试论美国对墨西哥移民政策的钟摆化

特朗普执政后,美国对墨西哥移民政策越发紧缩。回顾美墨之间的历史,美国对墨西哥移民政策一直呈现钟摆化。表现为美国政府在该问题上的立场钟摆化、法案钟摆化和执法模式钟摆化,导致了一系列墨西哥族裔在美国认同危机和两国关系的恶化。钟摆化对墨移民政策有很多的负面影响,基于三种不同的假设,未来美墨之间在墨西哥移民议题上仍会采取合作大于对抗的模式。美国为了避免对墨移民政策的钟摆化带来的失衡结果,追求稳定连续的措施和对墨友好合作才是解决之道。     

Immigration Through Marriage: A Case Study of Bangladeshis in Toronto

People living in developing countries want to migrate to developed countries because of increasing economic disparities. They are attracted to migrate because of material affluence, economic prosperity and political stability of the developed world. Canadian immigration laws restrict immigration for people of different social classes in developing countries like Bangladesh and, therefore, it becomes attractive for both Bangladeshi men and women to migrate to Canada through marriage. How restrictive is the Canadian immigration policy in limiting international migration? How does individuals’ immigration or citizenship status in Canada transform them into desirable brides or grooms? What are the expectations of immigrant brides and grooms? How is marriage used as a strategy to immigrate to Canada? I focus on Bangladeshi immigration to Canada and argue that both Bangladeshi men and women are interested to migrate to Canada through marriage due to restrictive Canadian immigration policies.     

‘Are you gonna show this to white people?’: Chicana/o and Latina/o students’ counter-narratives on race,place, and representation

This article explores the recurring narratives on race, place and representation that emerged in the talk of Chicana/o and Latina/o sixth-graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles, California. Discourse analytic methods are used to closely examine how these narratives were constructed within the contexts of everyday classroom interactions. Drawing on the notion of counter-storytelling from critical race theory, the article highlights how these sixth-grade students articulated counter-narratives about who they were and what their community was like – often in direct opposition to what they perceived as white people’s stereotypical assumptions and misperceptions. It is argued that these narratives constitute a powerful and sophisticated critique of dominant narratives that frame working-class Chicana/o and Latina/o students in racist and pejorative terms. The article ends with a discussion of implications for understanding youth agency and the politics of representation.     

The social quarantining of migrant labour: everyday effects of temporary foreign worker regulation in Canada

Low-wage migrant workers in wealthy nations occupy an ambiguous social and legal status that is inseparable from global economics and politics. This article adds to the growing and diverse literature on temporariness in labour and citizenship by reviewing Canada’s internationally recognised ‘model’ programme, the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Specifically, we present research on a small but rapidly growing peripheral pocket of workers in Nova Scotia, a less populated and more economically depressed province. Interview with former SAWP participants demonstrate how the uncertainty characterising the legal, immigration, and employment status of seasonal agricultural workers is socially practised and individually experienced. In particular, we show how specific elements of current migrant labour regulation have everyday effects in organising and delimiting non-work dimensions of migrant workers’ lives. In attending to the spatio-temporal dimensions of migrant workers’ lives we develop the concept social quarantining as a characteristic feature of former workers’ experiences ‘on the contract’.     

中国古代少数民族妇女法律地位论析

文章主要从习惯法角度,对我国古代少数民族妇女的法律地位进行了初步探讨,根据各少数民族受汉族的影响程度,说明并不是所有民族的妇女在法律上都毫无地位可言,从而使人们更全面地了解我国古代少数民族的具体状况。     

Incongruent migration categorisations and competing citizenship claims: ‘return’ and hypermigration in transnational migration circuits

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarly interventions propose that the principle of jus nexi (effective connections) or jus domicile (domicile) should replace birthright or birthplace considerations when assigning citizenship status and political membership. Nonetheless, both views privilege notions of territorial presence and the ideal of political community. This paper focuses on Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada to metropolitan cities in China. The dual citizenship restriction enforced by China means those that naturalised in Canada have relinquished their right to Chinese citizenship. Should they be considered returnees, immigrants or transnational sojourners in their ancestral homeland? It is this incongruence in migration categorisations compared to migrant life-worlds that this paper aims to examine. The paper also highlights the interface of competing claims to citizenship in the context of Chinese internal migration and new (African) immigration in China, as well as the returnees’ own transnational migration across the lifecourse. It argues that the ordering mechanisms that characterise normative conceptions of citizenship focus on isolated types of migration trends whereas what confronts us more urgently are intersecting migration configurations that underline the incongruence of migration categorisations and the complexity of competing citizenship claims spatially and temporally.     

Reclaiming ourselves through Testimonio pedagogy: reflections on a curriculum design lab in teacher education

This article details one teacher preparation course centering Latin American Testimonio narratives of struggle/survival amid structural oppression for use in secondary curriculum. As our class of predominantly Latina/o students and two Latina instructors engaged Testimonio pedagogy, we fashioned a hopeful alternative to our own experiences of intergenerational oppression. While research indicates that the experiences and histories of pre-service Teachers of Color lend pedagogical strength and critical consciousness to teacher education, three Latina pre-service students highlight the ways in which Testimonio became more than a pedagogical approach. Testimonio’s collectivity, resistance, hope, and assertions of voice and dignity moved through them not as educators first but as (great-grand)daughters of oppressed though still-resilient People(s). Testimonio emboldened these Latina pre-service educators to recognize and validate their own inherited multiliteracies, (re)claim their connectedness to land, and articulate their visions for more equitable schooling. This work advances research into the essentiality of engaging race and ethnicity in K-12 and teacher education curriculum and pedagogy.     

The ecology of immigrant naturalisation: a life course approach in the context of institutional conditions

Traditionally, immigrants’ propensity to naturalize is attributed to individual characteristics and the origin country. Recently scholars increasingly recognise that naturalisation decisions do not take place in a vacuum: they are conditioned both by the individual life course of immigrants, such as the age at migration and family situation, as well as the opportunity structure set by citizenship policies of the destination country. Yet it is less clear what impact specific policy changes have, and to whom these changes matter most. In this paper we address these questions by analysing citizenship acquisition among first generation immigrants in the Netherlands in light of a restriction in citizenship policy in 2003. We employ unique micro-level longitudinal data from Dutch municipal population registers between 1995 until 2012, which allow us to track naturalisation among different immigration cohorts. We find evidence that indeed naturalisation is part of a larger life course trajectory: immigrants who arrive at a younger age in the Netherlands naturalise more often and so do immigrants with a native partner, or a foreign-born partner who also naturalises. Policy also matters: migrants naturalise later and less often under more restrictive institutional conditions, especially migrants from less developed and politically unstable countries of origin.     

Hiding within racial hierarchies: how undocumented immigrants make residential decisions in an American city

In the United States, the residential segregation of Latinos from whites has persisted but has fallen between Latinos and blacks. Demographers offer the size of the Latino population that is undocumented as one potential explanation for these patterns. However, little work has examined undocumented immigrants’ first-hand accounts of residential decision-making. Drawing on interviews with undocumented-headed, Latin American-origin families in Dallas, Texas, we explore how lacking legal status relates to residential selection. We find that some undocumented families perceive certain neighbourhoods to be ‘off-limits’, not only because of financial constraints, explicit legal impediments to their tenure, or individual racial preferences, but also because they perceive them as high-risk: Most sample households agree that law enforcement patrols areas with white majorities in order to exclude Latinos and, specifically, the undocumented. As a strategy to minimise the perceived risk law enforcement poses to their families’ stability, some undocumented families in the study report opting into neighbourhoods with Latino majorities in order to ‘blend in’, whereas others describe feeling safe in neighbourhoods with black majorities where they can ‘hide in plain sight’. We demonstrate how undocumented families’ perceptions of law enforcement in neighbourhoods with differing racial compositions may partly underlie trends in residential selection and stratification.     

The Impact of Perceived Discrimination and Immigration Policies Upon Perceptions of Quality of Life Among Latinos in the United States

This study examined the impact of enforcement of US immigration policies and perceived discrimination on perceptions of quality of life for Latinos in the US. Data for this study were drawn from the 2007 Pew Hispanic Center survey of 2,000 Latino adults living in the US. Multinomial logistic regressions indicated that participants who had higher levels of perceived discrimination and who were personally affected by US immigration enforcement also perceived the following: (1) life was more difficult now for Latinos than in the past; (2) higher levels of fear of deportation for themselves or a loved one; (3) the lives of Latino children will be worse in the future; and (4) a lower quality of life for themselves. Female participants and participants with more years in the United States, and higher levels of linguistic acculturation generally had fewer issues regarding immigration policies or had a more positive outlook for Latinos in the United States.     

Theorising the power of citizenship as claims-making

I advance a conceptual approach to citizenship as membership through claims-making. In this approach, citizenship is a relational process of making membership claims on polities, people and institutions, claims recognized or rejected within particular normative understandings of citizenship. Such a conceptual shift moves scholarship beyond typologizing—enumerating how citizenship is (or is not) about status, rights, participation and identity—to identifying the mechanisms through which claims on citizenship have power. This framework requires a relational approach and attention to dynamics of recognition within contexts of structured agency. Immigrants and their children can make claims to modify the normative content of citizenship, affect recognition evaluations and change the allocation of status and rights. But they are also constrained by legal structures, a society's institutional practices, and prevailing public perceptions. Citizenship as claims-making may require a reassessment of boundary approaches and a turn to metaphors of positionality, as well as more serious commitment to mixed-methods research. The stakes of understanding citizenship's power, as practice and status, are especially high right now. Yet based on existing scholarship, it is not entirely clear how much citizenship matters, in what ways, for whom, or why. This is the challenge for future scholarship.     

The Modern Colonial Politics of Citizenship and Whiteness in France

While there is no blatantly racist discourse among the French political class per se, the modern politics of citizenship in France is rooted in France's racialized colonial legacy. Upon critical examination, contemporary French political discourse and policy implementations indeed speak to France's colonial past. The concept of ‘otherness’ is situated at the centre of French political discourse, and is manifested in constructions of whiteness. ‘Otherness’ has created a double standard for legal non-European immigrants compared with French and European citizens. The politics of integration and assimilation are founded on the ideological backdrop of universality, which falsely represents French society in colour-blind terms. This is evident in both moderate and extremist political party rhetoric in regards to new policies of immigration, citizenship and nationality. We contend that the contemporary political discourses in France closely resemble the colonial period in spite of (and precisely because of) France's historical amnesia. In this article, we explore the redefinition of French citizenship as an expansion of whiteness as rooted in the concept of ‘otherness’. In so doing, we contextualize the contemporary discourse of inclusion, exclusion, citizenship, and whiteness on the backdrop of France's colonial legacy.     

Internal migration and citizenship in India

Immigrants and the process of incorporation can elucidate what it means to be a member of a national citizenry and sociopolitical community. However, relatively little scholarship has focused on the potential of internal migration to highlight citizenship outcomes. This article presents fieldwork from Mumbai and Kolkata to show that citizenship status, rights, and belonging are more restrictive for Indian citizens who are internal migrants than for those who are not. It argues that development factors alone are insufficient explanations for citizenship outcomes in India, and shows that internal migrants experience a lesser citizenship status and curtailed citizenship rights because they are migrants rather than because of their impoverishment or because of the limited capacity of the state.     

Nativity and citizenship status affect Latinos’ health insurance coverage under the ACA

ABSTRACT

The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to increase health insurance access for the over 47 million uninsured people in the U.S.A., among whom ethnoracial minorities had the highest uninsured rates before the ACA. Studies have shown that Latinos have had the greatest improvements in health coverage under the ACA, but many may be at a significant disadvantage, specifically due to their nativity and immigration status, as the ACA explicitly excludes unauthorised immigrants from most of its provisions. Using the 2015 Latino National Health and Immigration Survey, a nationally representative sample of Latinos (n?=?1493), we find that variation in health insurance access among Latinos can be traced to immigration status. This study finds no differences among U.S.-born versus foreign-born Latinos in the likelihood of being uninsured in 2015. However, among foreign-born Latinos, unauthorised immigrants are five times more likely than naturalised citizens to be uninsured and less likely to visit a primary care provider or clinic, even after controlling for other factors including language, income and education.     

Muslim Women in Australia,Britain and the United States: The Role of “Othering” and Biculturalism in Identity Formation

When Muslims migrate to Western countries, they bring their identity and culture with them. As they settle in their host countries, some Muslims encounter structural inequality, which is often revealed through media representation, unequal labour market status and racial profiling. Through the dynamics of structural inequality, some Muslim women remain doubly disadvantaged. Within their ethnic/religious community, Muslim women are expected to follow their cultural traditions and in the wider society their overtly Muslim appearance is often questioned. The discussion of identity formation in this paper is based on interviews with Muslim girls and women in Australia, Britain and the United States, aged between 15 and 30 years. Though the cultural and political contexts of these three countries are different, the practice of “othering” women have been similar. Through their life stories and narratives, I examine the formation of the participants’ identities. It was found that for many of these women their sense of identity shifted from single to multiple identities, thus revealing that identity formation was a flexible process that was affected by a variety of factors, including the relevance and importance of biculturalism in the women’s identity formation.     

Moving citizens: citizenship practices among Polish migrants in Norway and the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Following post-EU-accession migration, Poles currently form the largest group of foreign nationals in Norway and the second largest group of foreign born residents in the United Kingdom. Given the considerable volume of new arrivals, there is a growing literature on Polish migration to both countries; however, there is little comparative research on Polish migration across different European settings. By exploring how Polish migrants reflect on the possibilities of settlement or return, this paper comparatively examines the effects that permanent and ‘normalised’ mobility has on Polish migrants’ self-perception as citizens in four different cities. In addition to classic citizenship studies, which highlight the influence of a nation-state based institutionalised citizenship regime, we find that transnational exchanges, local provisions and inter-personal relationships shape Polish migrants’ practices of citizenship. The resulting understanding of integration is processual and sees integration as constituted by negotiated transnational balancing acts that respond to (and sometimes contradict) cultural, economic and political demands and commitments. The research is based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with a total of 80 respondents, conducted in two British and two Norwegian cities that experienced significant Polish immigration, Oslo, Bergen, Bristol and Sheffield.