Family conflict and future concerns: Opportunities for social workers to better support Chinese immigrant caregiver employees

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the experiences of Chinese immigrant caregiver employees (CEs) residing in Southern Ontario, Canada. Qualitative analysis of participant interviews with thirteen Mandarin Chinese immigrant CEs revealed family conflicts due to cultural differences and an intergenerational gap between CEs and their care recipients. CEs also had future concerns in regards to their own health and the lack of long-term care facilities that offer cultural services for immigrant seniors. These findings provide an opportunity for social workers to collaborate with other service providers to provide ethno-specific and culturally sensitive health, community. and employment services to immigrant ethnic minority CEs.     

“I Can Provide for My Children”: Korean Immigrant Women’s Changing Perspectives on Work Outside the Home

Whether immigrant women’s introduction to paid labor empowers them with greater autonomy or exacerbates their oppression has been debated variously in the scholarship on gender and migration. In this paper, the author examines Korean immigrant women’s perspectives on work outside the home after migration. Based on in-depth interview data, the paper emphasizes Korean women’s own interpretations of work and motherhood, and highlights the ways in which they define and redefine work in relation to other aspects of their post-migration experiences. The analysis finds that income producing work is not empowering in and of itself, but contingent upon other post-migration challenges such as economic downward mobility and women’s changed roles as working mothers. Furthermore, women’s perception of work fluctuates over time. The findings suggest that paid work should not be simply interpreted as an empowering change, but the linkage between work and other aspects of immigrant women’s post-migration realities needs to be more closely examined.

华人移居澳大利亚初探

华人在澳大利亚的社会经济和历史发展上曾有过重要的贡献。追溯华人移居澳大利亚的历史 ,可靠的文字记载是公元前 592年。但大批华人移居澳大利亚 ,则是在 184 0年之后。大批中国南方省份的劳工为澳大利亚的金矿、铁路铺设和农业种植业的飞速发展作出了巨大贡献 ,但同时也受到了欧洲移民者的不公平种族歧视待遇。“白澳政策”几乎盛行了一个世纪。第二次世界大战后 ,情况逐渐好转 ,华人地位也在显著提高 ,特别在 1972年中澳建交后 ,华人逐步溶入澳大利亚主流社会 ,成为澳大利亚众多移民后裔中的优秀组成部分。     

Improving the parental self-agency of depressed Latino immigrant mothers: Piloted intervention results

Segmented assimilation theory posits that uneven rates of intergenerational acculturation—the process by which immigrants and their children learn the language and normative lifestyles of a new culture—can be detrimental to the parent-child relationship. This paper presents results on parental self-efficacy from an intervention study—Vida Alegre [Happy/Contented Life]—for depressed immigrant mothers that includes a three-session module based on Gottman & DeClaire (2001) concept of emotional bidding. Using a mixed-methods design, this study examines whether exposure to the intervention increased parental self-efficacy. Outcome data from the Parenting Self-Agency Measure (PSAM) administered at three points in time—pre-test, post-test, and 3 months follow-up—was analyzed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks Test. Constant comparative analysis was used to code 3 focus groups and 10 post-treatment interviews. Results indicate a significant increase in parental self-efficacy between pre-test and post-test. An analysis of mixed methods results further highlights the importance of tailoring interventions to help immigrant parents reinterpret their child's communications to strengthen family relationships.     

Fear management: How child protection workers engage with non-citizen immigrant families

Drawing on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample of 24 child protection workers in the northeastern United States, we analyze how workers engage with non-citizen immigrant families. Confirming findings from previous scholarship on immigrants' fears when interacting with Child Protection Services (CPS), workers reported encountering different fear factors—the organizations, events, or people that instill fear in immigrant families. These included fear of deportation, fear of CPS workers as the people who remove children, and fear of CPS as a potentially repressive government agency. We also found that workers seek to minimize or leverage these fears in the engagement process—we refer to this process as fear management. Most of the workers interviewed seek to minimize immigrant families' fears, and we show that they employ four strategies to do so: providing knowledge, brokering services, doing dignity and status work, and learning culture.     

Making precarious immigrant families and weaving the Danish welfare nation-state fabric 1970–2010

This article explores the making of immigrant families as precarious elements in the governing of the population’s welfare within the Danish welfare nation-state since the 1970s. The emphasis is on how immigrant families became a problem of welfare governing, and what knowledge practices and welfare techniques emerged as problem-solving responses. The article analyses a diverse set of national and local administrative documents advancing a polyhedron of intelligibility by which the authors discover how problem-solving complexes responsive to immigrant families change and sediment, and ultimately, weave the fabric of a Danish welfare nation-state faced with non-Western immigration after the economic boom in the late 1960s.     

The public view of immigrant integration: multidimensional and consensual. Evidence from survey experiments in the UK and the Netherlands

Despite the growing interest in immigrant integration in a wide range of scholarly literature, there is less interest in how integration might be understood by the public. Using a survey-embedded conjoint experiment in the Netherlands and the UK, we ask the public what they think constitutes successful immigrant integration. We show that the public has a multidimensional view of integration, which goes beyond a simple preference for cultural assimilation. We discover that there is a remarkably stable hierarchy of preference of integration outcomes, which is a matter of wide spread consensus in both our countries among different social groups and people with different attitudes on immigration. Using the British data we also show an integration penalty for immigrants of non-white origins. Our article places public opinion of immigrant integration at the heart of a rapidly expanding research agenda into the social and political impacts of immigration.     

Immigrant women and housing issues: a symbolic magnifying glass for social and cultural changes in Italian civil movements*

In recent decades, social movements have expanded their range of action, adopting a more global perspective. Although many studies have been made of varied national and transnational movements, it still remains a little-studied field that involves the participation of immigrants, especially women, in social movements in Italy. These movements involve various problem areas. The thematic focus of our research is the housing, at the national level, and our chosen case study regards the situation as it presents itself in Rome. At a time when there seems to be less public interest in economic, social and cultural rights in favor of a broader interest in individual rights, studying the role of immigrant women in the participation of foreign communities in social movements for housing rights can encourage and support a renewed attention to this area, also because of the changing social composition of the resident population, and the emergence of old and new forms of poverty, of which the incoming immigration flows are one of the main causes. As we can see, the figure of the immigrant transforms the housing problem into a problem of co-habitation, or even better, of co-existence.     

More than just shopping: Ethnic majority consumers and cosmopolitanism in immigrant grocery shops

This paper explores ethnic majority consumption practices in immigrant economies. Drawing on recent debates on cosmopolitanism, we focus on the question of how the use of immigrant shops by members of the ethnic majority is intertwined with the erosion and/or the (re)production of symbolic boundaries. We conducted 31 in-depth interviews and 15 go-alongs with consumers in immigrant grocery shops in Vienna. Our findings show how consumption is based upon and shaped by the various ways consumers attribute meaning to the shops, the products on offer as well as their shopping experiences. We identified five different types of consumption: consuming nostalgia, consuming patronage, consuming change, consuming alterity and consuming diversity. However, we only consider the latter two as cosmopolitan consumption in a narrower sense. We show that within these types, the expression of openness towards ‘the other’ constitutes a form of cultural capital displayed by members of the privileged classes. The article argues in favour of a more comprehensive understanding of consumption practices in immigrant economies. This encompasses that not every act of shopping in immigrant businesses is cosmopolitan and that research is called to consider that the various types of consumption effect boundaries along ethnicity and class in manifold ways.