Everyday Restriction: Central American Women and the State in the Mexico‐Guatemala Border City of Tapachula

Media coverage and emerging scholarship have brought increasing international attention to the urgent humanitarian crisis facing Central American transmigrants as they navigate landscapes of violence in Mexico. While stories of Central American immigrants who remain in Mexico are largely absent from this coverage, there is arguably a “Central Americanization” occurring on the southern border through this permanent settlement. Central Americans choosing to establish themselves in the border state of Chiapas do so in a socio‐spatial and political context defined by the introduction of “progressive” state‐ and national‐level migration policies on the one hand and the persistence of discrimination and violence on the other. We know little about the implementation of these policies on the ground, namely how they are applied and the impacts they have on the immigrant experience in Mexico. To begin to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the experiences of Central American immigrant women living in the Mexico‐Guatemala border city of Tapachula. Employing a feminist geopolitical lens, which encourages conducting research and analysis at diverse scales, it examines their everyday interactions with low‐ to mid‐level representatives of the Mexican state as they seek to avail themselves of their legal and social citizenship rights, and the impacts of these interactions on their livelihoods. This article argues that low‐ to mid‐level officials’ actions reveal the importance of a form of extra‐official, subtle, yet pervasive regulation through which immigrant women are denied rights they are entitled to, inducing negative impacts to their livelihoods, which I term everyday restriction.     

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.     

Experiencing ‘Illegality’ as a Family? Immigration Enforcement,Social Policies,and Discourses Targeting Mexican Mixed‐Status Families

Mexican mixed‐status families have been front and center in embroiled national debates about the place of undocumented immigrants and their citizen family members in this country. These families face unique obstacles, including possible family fragmentation caused by deportation, challenges to birthright citizenship, and they are often targeted by anti‐immigrant elected officials and political pundits that perpetuate a racialized discourse that casts even citizen children in these families as an abomination of US citizenship. Therefore, “illegality” may be a familial experience that can be endured by citizens and non‐citizens alike. Despite their unique vulnerabilities, researchers know very little about how mixed‐status families experience belonging in the country while managing possible tensions and inequalities shaped by immigration status. In this article, I review the research on punitive immigration enforcement and the scholarship on social policies and discourse targeting mixed‐status families. I conclude by reviewing new directions in sociological research and suggest avenues for research that may examine mixed‐status families' subjectivities, belonging, and negotiations of family relationships.     

Mexican immigration and the port-of-entry school

The results of an immigrant student census in a California port-of-entry school district are used to describe the educational backgrounds of Mexican immigrant students and to distinguish types of Mexican immigrant students by school entry patterns. Interviews with recently arrived Mexican immigrant parents reveal the educational and occupational expectations they hold for their children in the US. The study findings are used as a basis for raising policy questions and generating research issues. The most notable observation from the study is that the children of Mexican immigrants in La Entrada do not migrate once they are in school. Parents may be migrating back and forth between the US and Mexico, but children once in La Entrada do not leave the school to return to school in Mexico. The study suggests that the parents of immigrant students do not know how the US educational system works but they are interested in helping teachers educate their children.     

Who Claims Dual Citizenship? The Limits of Postnationalism,the Possibilities of Transnationalism,and the Persistence of Traditional Citizenship1

The dynamics of globalization, especially international migration, challenge traditional frameworks of citizenship and prompted scholars to develop new models of membership: transnationalism and postnationalism. All three‐the traditional, transnational and postnational‐explicitly or implicitly address the controversial topic of dual citizenship, or multiple membership. Lack of statistical data, however, has made it difficult to adjudicate between these models or to undertake a broad empirical assessment of dual citizenship, either over time or between people from different countries and socioeconomic backgrounds. This article outlines the testable implications of traditional, transnational and post‐national frameworks and evaluates these hypotheses using a unique statistical data source that asked respondents to report multiple citizenship, the 1981, 1991 and 1996 20% Canadian census samples. The data offer little evidence that immigrants adopt a strict postnational view of citizenship, but they reveal the possibilities of transnationalism and the continued relevance of traditional frameworks. Over time, we observe a rapid increase in the aggreate level of reported dual citizenship from 1981 to 1996. We also find that those with higher human capital, rather than the economically marginalized, are more likely to embrace dual citizenship. After controlling for individual attributes, important contextual or group effects nonetheless remain: self‐reports of dual citizenship vary significantly by birthplace and are higher if an immigrant lives in Quebec. Since naturalization levels seem to rise in tandem with reports of dual citizenship, this research suggests a certain paradox: while multiple belonging     

Low-status work consequences on immigrant workers' organization: the cases of five immigrant groups in Athens

The article centres on the repercussions low-prestige work has on the collective organization and representation of immigrant workers. This micro-sociological analysis focuses on the cases of Egyptian, Albanian, Bangladeshi, Palestinian, and Philippine immigrants in Athens and how the frame of their work and their employment affects their participation in their immigrant work associations. Evidence from in-depth interviews proves that the majority of immigrants do not claim established workers' rights and do not seek membership in any unions. On the contrary, they rely on a network of friends and relatives for support and develop individual behaviours and alternative solutions to achieve survival and protection.     

Uncovering European Union Immigration Legislation: Policy Dynamics and Outcomes

The member states of the European Union (EU) have recently experimented with constructing a common immigration policy. This gives rise to an important and fascinating question: what happens to immigration policy once it is no longer made in national capitals? Have national governments been able to retain ultimate control over the field of EU immigration policy? Or do we see slippage towards supranational power, with the Commission, Parliament, and Court of Justice expanding their influence? If EU institutions have gained power, do they use this power to defend the rights and freedoms of immigrants against restrictionist national governments? Using participant interviews (listed in Appendix I ) and documentary analysis, I analyse negotiations over three EU immigration laws: the directives on family reunification, long‐term residence, and economic migration. I assess whether national preferences are implemented in these directives, or whether supranational institutions have moved policy away from national preferences, potentially expanding immigrant rights and freedoms.     

Paths to citizenship? Public views on the extension of rights to legal and second‐generation immigrants in Europe

This study uses variations in the legal-institutional frameworks of citizenship to explore cross-nationally public views about granting equal rights to legal immigrants and citizenship status to second-generation immigrants in 20 European countries. We link the literatures on citizenship regimes and attitudes toward immigrants to construct a conceptual model that is tested using ISSP data from 2003 and a set of matching contextual measures. Results from hierarchical linear regression analyses indicate that (1) opposition to the extension of rights to legal immigrants is augmented by shorter periods of required residency for naturalization and (2) granting citizenship status to second-generation immigrants is not sensitive to whether a regime consents or not to citizenship by birth. Net of individual and contextual controls, the findings also show that resistance to the expansion of rights to legal immigrants is higher in countries consenting to dual citizenship. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that Eastern European respondents do not differ significantly from their Western counterparts with respect to extending rights to either category of immigrants. These results are discussed in reference to the diversity of citizenship regimes in Europe and in light of the existing debates on harmonizing immigration policies.     

Hispanic Americans: comparative considerations and the educational problems of children

This paper presents an overview of the diversity in character among the various Hispanic-American subgroups. The author compares the following subgroups historically and demographically: Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Mainland Puerto-Ricans, and "other" Hispanics. As a group, Hispanic-Americans lag far behind the majority population in any array of standard educational measurements. 40% of Hispanic-American students leave school before 10th grade. Children of "immigrant" minorities, such as Chinese, Japanese, and South and Central Americans, tend to do better in school than "caste-like" minorities, such as Black Americans, Mainland Puerto-Ricans and Mexican-Americans in the US. The author discusses several models which explain why Mexican and Puerto-Rican Americans fail in American schools at such high rates: 1) culture of poverty, 2) the various schools emphasizing "discontinuity" between the minority Hispanic and the majority culture, and 3) the psychosocial approach. Features which differentiate immigrants from caste-like minorities include 1) caste-like minorities were incorporated into the society against their will, whereas historically, immigrant minorities choose more or less freely to leave their country to enter a new social order; and 2) immigrants may anticipate or fantasize that in the future they will return home to enjoy the fruits of their hard work in the foreign land. 2 factors alleviate the longterm effects of the hardships and discrimination immigrants face: 1) the levels of discrimination became less evident as accents disappeared and names were Anglicized; immigrants develop a dual frame of reference, enabling them to evaluate their current reality against the reality of life back home; and 3) hard work in the new land will at the very least benefit the children in the future. Factors which veto the Mexican immigrant case as a heurstically "paradiomatic" immigrant minority include: 1) many Mexicans still resent the loss of 1/3 or Mexico's territories to Anglo colonists, 2) Americans still treat Mexican immigrants as a "case-like" minority despite the fact that they are immigrants, and 3) many of the "immigrants" lack official immigrant status.     

Does Citizenship Status Matter in Canadian Agriculture? Workplace Health and Safety for Migrant and Immigrant Laborers

This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health‐care access. We find that both groups engage in precarious work, with consequences for their health and safety, including immigrant workers with citizenship. Nevertheless, migrant guest workers are subject to more coercive forms of labor discipline and a narrower range of social protection than immigrants. We argue that while formal citizenship can mitigate some dimensions of precariousness for farmworkers racialized as non‐white, achieving a more just, safer food system will require broader policies to improve employer compliance and address legislative shortcomings that only weakly protect agricultural labor.     

Overlooking/Looking Over Neoliberal Immigration: Amnesty Policy in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’

In the self-proclaimed ‘nation of immigrants’, a struggle for power plays out in US immigration law. This article examines such a struggle in the context of rising neoliberalism. As president Ronald Reagan set out to revolutionize America with the deregulation of the economy, privatization, and the globalization of capitalist democracy, pundits claimed that the country was experiencing a Mexican illegal immigration crisis that pivoted on Mexican women's fecundity and abuse of social services. Yet along with punitive provisions, the first US law to directly address undocumented migration, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) included an amnesty programme widely praised as a democratic watershed for the undocumented. Consequently, ‘multicultural’ immigrant men and women seemed to be embraced, while in the same breath disciplined through discourses of respectability and criminality that secured both a pool of cheap immigrant labourers and minoritized citizens. More specifically, two strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse that circulated around amnesty during the law-making process affectively (and effectively) framed America as the globally exceptional guarantor of democratic rights, inclusivity, and equal access to economic opportunity for citizens. On one hand, discourse that welcomed and celebrated an abstracted immigrant subject who was free to succeed on the basis of individual hard work was coded as the epitome of Americanism. On the other hand, discourse that welcomed explicitly racialized and gendered immigrants who were free to succeed on the basis of their hard work was coded as emblematically American. In this case respectable tokens of multiculturalism (i.e. immigrants of colour and especially immigrant women of colour who upheld traditional family values) evidenced American inclusivity. This article argues that both strains of ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse naturalized a relationship between citizenship, freedom, and free markets and thus powerfully masked the exploitative social relations key to neoliberal economic arrangements.     

Theorizing and Analyzing Citizenship in Multicultural Societies

I argue that sociologists have directed insufficient attention to the study of citizenship. When citizenship is studied, sociologists tend to concentrate on just one facet: rights. I elaborate four conceptual facets of citizenship. I link two—citizenship as rights and belonging—to theoretical elaborations of multiculturalism. Considering multiculturalism as a state discourse and set of policies, rather than a political or normative theory, I outline linkages between multiculturalism and two additional facets of citizenship: legal status and participation. Over the last 15 years, the idea of multiculturalism has come under withering criticism, especially in Europe, in part because it is claimed that multiculturalism undermines common citizenship. Yet countries with more multicultural policies and a stronger discourse of pluralism and recognition are places where immigrants are more likely to become citizens, more trusting of political institutions, and more attached to the national identity. There is also little evidence that multicultural policies fuel majority backlash, and some modest evidence that such policies enlarge conceptions of inclusive membership. By studying claims‐making and the equality of immigrant‐origin groups, we see that the participatory aspect of citizenship needs to take center stage in future work in political sociology, social theory, social movements, immigration, and race/ethnicity.     

The Politics of Home: Dual Citizenship and the African Diaspora1

In recent decades, more countries have started to recognize dual citizenship. Although overlooked in the literature, Africa is part of this trend with more than half of its governments now permitting their nationals to naturalize elsewhere while retaining home country rights. Why have some African countries embraced dual citizenship for emigrants, while others have not? We examine demographic, political, and economic data broadly across the continent and identify few clear patterns. We then explore the cases of Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya, finding that dual citizenship policies are driven as much by politics as they are by economic or security concerns.     

Undocumented Migration to the United States and the Wages of Mexican Immigrants

Prior work has documented the remarkable decline in the real wages of Mexican immigrant workers in the U.S. over the past several decades. Although some of this trend might be attributable to the changing characteristics of the migrants themselves, we argue that a more important change was the circumstances under within Mexican immigrants competed for jobs in the U.S. After 1986 a growing share of Mexican immigrants was undocumented, discrimination against them was mandated by federal law, and enforcement efforts rose in intensity. We combined data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) with independent estimates of the percentage undocumented among Mexicans living in the U.S. to estimate a series of regression models to test this hypothesis. Controlling for individual characteristics helps to explain the decline in the wages of immigrants, but does not eliminate the trend, which is only explained fully when the percentage undocumented is added to the model. A key date is 1986, confirmed by a Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analysis, when undocumented hiring was criminalized and undocumented migration revived after IRCA's legalization programs ended. As the percentage undocumented rose to new heights in the face of employer sanctions, immigrant wages fell below what we would have observed under the former policy regime. Using newly available data from Warren and Warren (2013), we examined how variation in the percentage undocumented by state and year from 1990 through 2009 affected immigrant wages and confirmed a strong negative effect, but the addition of an interaction term to the model indicated that the negative effect was confined largely to undocumented migrants, whose wage penalty rose from 8 to 18 percent as the percentage undocumented rose from its observed minimum to maximum.     

艰难开始 前途未知(英文)

最近几年,西班牙已经成为移民率最高的欧洲国家,其中许多移民有中国国籍。大多数人在八十年代移民到西班牙,他们有很多故事可以分享。     

Self‐Employed Mexican Immigrants Residing along the U.S.‐Mexico Border: The Earnings Effect of Working in the U.S. versus Mexico1

This study uses U.S. census data from the year 2000 to analyze the earnings of Mexican immigrants along the U.S.‐Mexico border while accounting for the location in which they work. The empirical results indicate that Mexican entrepreneurs who live in U.S.‐border cities but primarily operate in Mexico accrue a significant earnings premium over their entrepreneurial and salaried counterparts working on the U.S. side of the border, even after controlling for differences in observable characteristics. This work‐location earnings gap widens when focusing on Mexican business owners lacking U.S. citizenship. It follows that policies which reduce trade and labor flows across the U.S.‐Mexico border may inadvertently dampen the entrepreneurial activities of foreign‐born residents in U.S.‐border cities.     

Italian Immigrants and the Mexican Nation: The Cusi Family in Michoacán (1885–1938)

This article considers the trajectory of the Cusi family, a family of Italian immigrants in Mexico. After arriving in the 1880s, the family accumulated significant land, which was later expropriated under redistributive policies of the 1930s. The Cusis' class status, however, does not explain this expropriation entirely, and this article turns to the family's Italian heritage to explain it more fully. In doing so, it tracks the perception of the Cusis over a 50-year span and points to the shifting boundaries of the Mexican nation. Finally, it analyses a memoir written by a member of the Cusi family as a response to those shifting boundaries and an effort to claim a place in the nation.     

In Search of a Better Life: The Experiences of Working Poor Immigrants in Vancouver,Canada

We utilized data from 72 in‐depth interviews with immigrant hotel and hospital support workers employed in the service sector of Vancouver, Canada to analyse migration decisions and subsequent experiences after arrival. We found that migrant social networks were centrally important, both as a stimulus for migration and in shaping post‐arrival experiences. At the same time, the working conditions faced by immigrants after arrival, such as low pay and long work hours, resulted in serious challenges. While some struggled with multiple jobs to make ends meet, others felt their economic circumstances prevented them from even bringing their children to Canada. In some cases, children were returned to their country of origin. Features of low‐wage service sector jobs also limited the time available for participation in community life. The findings both support and advance recent theoretical contributions about the incorporation of immigrants in the United States and Canada. As immigrants frequently face occupational downgrading and are channelled into low‐wage service sector jobs, the conditions of work and social policies are important for their post‐arrival experiences and incorporation. Going beyond traditional conceptions of citizenship in the immigration literature, some respondents acted through their union and community organizations to attempt to change society and improve their fortunes. While some sought social justice through political activism, others used their limited family and community life time to reterritorialize values from their countries of origin. Part of their activism was transnational, such as sending remittances to help loved ones back home, but other involvement included participation in organizations with the aim of promoting social justice or improving life in their new country. The experiences of immigrant service sector workers in Vancouver suggest a need for greater emphasis on the role of both immigrant and non‐immigrant specific social and labour policies for understanding immigrant incorporation in North America.     

Transnationalism and American Exports in an English‐Speaking World1

Investigating the relationship between immigration, middleman minority status, transnationalism, and U.S. foreign trade, the authors assembled a census‐based data file that contains aggregate‐level variables for 88 foreign‐born groups by national origin between 1980 and 1990. They regressed immigrant characteristics and immigration volume upon time‐lagged import/export statistics from the same 88 nations between 1985 and 1995. Results show the independent influence on exports of immigrant entrepreneurship, transnationalism, and middleman minority status. But these variables, exhaustively derived from the existing literature, had no effect on U.S. imports; they only affected exports. The authors propose that the discrepancy between imports and exports arises because of the dominance of English as a world business language. In this situation, foreigners need no help from immigrants when they export to the United States; but native‐born, monolingual Americans need the help of bicultural immigrants when they export. The empirical results suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs enhance the United States' exports and thus reduce the United States' balance of payments deficit.     

Investigating the link between migration and civicness in Italy. Which individual and school factors matter?

This paper investigates the link between migration and civicness using data on cognitive skills and civic competences collected from a sample of 2747 eighth-graders in Italy. Contrary to the abundant evidence of migrant/native gaps in educational and occupational attainments in the country, this study finds no migrant-specific gap on civicness development. Children of immigrants achieve lower levels of civic knowledge than natives, but differences disappear once social background and, particularly, cognitive test scores are equalized across groups. Moreover, no differences are found, on average, between natives and children of immigrants with respect to institutional trust. However, at the top tail of the civic knowledge distribution, children of immigrants display less trust than natives. This result, coupled with their greater openness towards immigrants’ rights, suggests that immigrants’ children attach great importance to the inequality in rights concerning the immigrant population in the country and, as a reaction, participate more actively in the community. Insignificant or positive associations between the proportion of immigrants’ children in the classroom and natives’ civicness are found. Finally, fairness in student–teacher interactions is found to improve students’ civicness development, suggesting that, besides citizenship education, also the school climate plays a vital role in enhancing children's civic competences.