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This article examines the means by which Israel has sought to fulfill the contradictory goals involved with maintaining contacts with emigrants while simultaneously sustaining a national mission that asserts Jews can only achieve fulfilment, security, and self-determination by residing in their own country. It describes three successive approaches by which Israel and the larger global Jewish community have addressed the challenges associated with Israeli emigration. These are condemnation, pragmatic acceptance, and the assent of the Israeli American Council.

Among the largest Jewish migrant populations in Western societies during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Israeli emigrants live and work with native-born Jews, achieve impressive records of social and economic mobility, raise families, and acquire citizenship. Yet they commonly reject the assimilationist narrative emphasized by local coreligionists, socialize almost exclusively with other Israelis, frequently describe their intentions to return home and often do so. Generally educated and white, their reluctance to join the host society reflects their national identity rather than discrimination. Initially stigmatized by both Israel and the Jewish communities in points of settlement, Israeli émigrés’ presence abroad is now increasingly tolerated for political, economic, and cultural reasons. This article describes Israeli emigrants’ experience and examines how they try to reconcile conflicting identities associated with the country of origin and host society.

Prior to the 1980s, Israel’s national ideology discouraged emigration and entrepreneurship among its citizens. Yet, by the late 1990s, Israeli emigrants were one of the leading immigrant nationalities in Silicon Valley. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork, a literature review, and perusal of social media, I explore the origins of Israeli involvement in high-tech activities and the extensive linkages between Israeli emigrants and the Israeli high-tech industry. I also summarize the patterns of communal cooperation that permit emigrant families to maintain an Israel-oriented way of life in suburban communities south of San Francisco, and I compare these patterns with those of Indians, a nationality engaged in the same pursuit. I conclude by considering the impact of infotech involvement on Israeli immigrants and on the U.S. economy.

Matthew Heins, The Globalization of American Infrastructure: The Shipping Container and Freight Transportation (New York: Routledge, 2016), 222 pp., $145 (hardback)Lesley Murray and Susan Robertson, eds., Intergenerational Mobilities: Relationality, Age and Lifecourse (London: Routledge, 2017), 194 pp., 14 illustrations, $145 (hardback)Sebastián Ureta, Assembling Policy: Transantiago, Human Devices, and the Dream of a World-Class Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 224 pp., 22 illustrations, $39 (hardback)Yuk Wah Chan, David Haines, and Jonathan H. X. Lee, eds., The Age of Asian Migration: Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility, vol. 1 (Newcastle on Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 450 pp., £54.99Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, eds., Transnational Mobilities in Early Modern Theater (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) 320 pp., 22 illustrations, $117 (hardback)Ruth Oldenziel and Helmuth Trischler, eds., Cycling and Recycling: Histories of Sustainable Practices (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 256 pp., 18 illustrations, £67 (hardback)Margo T. Oge, Driving the Future: Combating Climate Change with Cleaner, Smarter Cars (New York: Arcade, 2015), xv + 351 pp., $25.99 (hardback)Thomas Birtchnell, Satya Savitzky, and John Urry, eds., Cargomobilities: Moving Materials in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2015), 236 pp., 16 illustrations, $148 (hardback)Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, Snowpiercer 1: The Escape, trans. Virginie Sélavy (London: Titan Comics, 2014), 110 pp., $19 (hardback)

The chapter examines the dynamics of contemporary forced migration initially through the lens of various well-established theoretical approaches. It considers the utility of theories in the context of the lived realities of forced migrants within what is defined here as a ‘circumscribed liminality’. Here migrants are described as experiencing an enigma of arrival in locations such as Malta where they are held and ‘processed’ as asylum seekers while seeking a passage to destinations in mainland Europe. A crucial determinant of migrant journeys are shifting laws and policies and practices based on states of exception that offer, or foreclose, various avenues of access for migrants seeking to reach a chosen destination. They may thus find themselves in protracted situations in liminal spaces such as ‘The Jungle’ in Calais and asylum seeker centers in Malta. To address the complexities of contemporary forced migration, an integrated theoretical approach is developed encompassing considerations of the deservingness of migrant groups.

This essay examines the experience of international students in American universities, providing basic data on their numbers and economic impact. Accompanying photographs document international students’ participation in Globalfest, an annual event that celebrates their enrollment at Michigan State University.ᅟ

In recent years, a growing literature has suggested that self-employment is a viable means of solving economic problems for a wide range of groups who are subject to poverty, discrimination and other disadvantages. Yet African Americans have not developed an ethnic economy large enough to solve many of their economic problems. To explore the question, this paper reviews three of the most common explanations for black Americans’ low rates of entrepreneurship: the cultural/psychological perspective, the ethnic enterprise perspective and the critical race approach. While the first two are widely accepted, neither approach identifies black Americans as a racial group, instead defining them as a cultural or ethnic group. Accordingly, neither apprehends the full impact of racial inequality in limiting black Americans’ entrepreneurial opportunities. Following a discussion of race-based obstacles to entrepreneurship, the paper concludes that the critical race view provides the most convincing explanation ...

The many undocumented immigrants present in the US, together with the growing popularity of entrepreneurship as a job-creation strategy, have enhanced both the number and acceptance of self-employed undocumented immigrants in US society.

Shortly before the US entry into the Second World War, an experimental newspaper called PM was created in New York City. While the paper lasted less than 8 years, it produced many important innovat...

This article uses photo-elicitation interviews to explore Arab Americans’ reactions to a collection of photographs documenting ethnic community events in Detroit. Its goal is to gain insight into processes of identity construction that have occurred since 11 September 2001. Drawing on fieldwork and a review of journalistic and scholarly literature, the article examines connections to panethnic identity in respondents’ views of local geography, communal diversity, simultaneous involvement in United States and Arab culture, and understandings of racism.

While a growing body of literature addresses the experience of migrant women’s involvement in self-employment, this work has focused on relatively few groups and has emphasized gender to the neglect of other contextual factors, such as family, class and ethnic resources, structures of opportunity and the nature of migrants’ relations with networks in countries of origin and settlement. In this article, I draw on multi-sited ethnography to explore Vietnamese, Russian-speaking Jewish, and Israeli women immigrants’ patterns of self-employment. Results suggest that contrary to being an end in itself, in most cases self-employment is simply a strategy that immigrant women engage in to obtain income while coping with an array of opportunities, impediments, and obligations framed by the structure of opportunities and disadvantages as well as transnational concerns.

As recently as the late 1970s and 1980s, a broad consensus in both Israel and US Jewish communities asserted that Israel should be the primary destination for Jewish migrants. Hebrew terms like yordim (those who go down) and noshrim (dropouts) stigmatized “Jewish communal deviants” who chose to settle outside of Israel. Moreover, whether they established themselves in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles, Jewish migrants were expected to cooperate with the religious, economic, political, cultural, and national agendas created for them by their host communities. While migrants had their own preferences about resettlement, they had limited ability to act on them. However, by the mid-1990s, a series of political, economic, ideological and demographic developments had transformed the status and treatment of Jewish migrants. The United States had received hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants, either in competition with, or from, Israel. The American Jewish community, in consort with migrant activists and Israel itself, extended an array of social, economic, and religious services to Jewish migrants. And in both Israel and the United States, migrant populations increasingly selected their own patterns of national, political, linguistic, cultural, and religious identity—conforming to the agendas of host communities only in ways that they themselves chose. The net effect of these recent transformations has been to greatly enhance the autonomy of Jewish migrants. In this, we see a movement away from nationally-bounded forms of Jewish identity within Israel, the United States and other settings, and their replacement with flexible and less geographically fixed forms of Jewish identification. This article draws on in-depth interviews with Jewish migrants and resettlement staff to discuss recent transformations among Jewish migrants in the United States. It reviews some of the causes of these changes and considers their impacts. It concludes that skilled Jewish migrants with access to multiple places and ways of settlement have a great deal to offer the American Jewish community, but also considerable freedom to decide how and where they will live. Such factors transform established understandings of American Jewish life and need to be considered by scholars and policy makers involved in Jewish population research.

Sociologist and photographer Steven Gold documents the public use of the Michigan Capitol building. He writes, “The Michigan Capitol continues to provide a space where attention is devoted to issues and events of broad public concern.”

The debate over immigration continues to be one of the most politically charged policy issues in the United States (US). Given the charged nature of this topic, it is vitally important to have reliable data on not only the number of US foreign nationals but also the characteristics of this extremely heterogeneous group – a population comprised not only of immigrants but also of refugees. There exist a small number of data sources for informing policy and practice at the national level. However, such data are often lacking for smaller geographical areas. This paper describes a recent effort to generate serviceable data on the immigrant and refugee population for a medium-sized metropolitan area in the US. The objectives of this research were twofold. Our first goal was to provide local stakeholders with information to assist them with resettling and obtaining funding for immigrants and refugees. The second aim was to develop better techniques for tabulating diverse refugees and immigrants in a medium-sized community. By comparing and contrasting three data sources – that is, refugee services, public schools and a local health plan – we are able to generate estimates of the local refugee and immigrant population. During the period from 2005 to 2007, we estimate the total number of immigrants and refugees in the community to be somewhere between 10,938 and 13,282. Although perhaps a bit on the high end due to methodological assumptions, these estimates seem plausible, based on previously cited figures for the region. While such estimates are valuable, a number of shortcomings related to the data prevent us from painting a more complete picture of these populations. We conclude this paper with a number of recommendations that will assist others in planning research designed to inform migration policy and practice in medium-sized metropolitan areas.

Facing a near-death experience naturally pushes people to re-examine their basic moral values. During the recent global economic melt-down, calls to solve the concomitant ‘moral’ crisis come in from all fronts. The presumption is that we need business ethics courses to teach our business students to learn to take the moral high-road; we need ethics pledges and codes of ethics to teach business students to do the right thing. But in reality, what impact can a business ethics class have on business people in the real world of tough choices and intense competition? It is my contention that if we look at the teaching of business ethics from the traditional Foundational Platonic perspective, we over-promise and under-deliver. By contrast, a Post- Foundational perspective gives us a pragmatic and viable picture of business ethics pedagogy that can make a real difference.

This paper links the work of Sebastiao Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado's biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology's record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastiao Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

As one of the most influential commentators on the role of modern philosophy, Richard Rorty’s work impacted all areas of philosophical inquiry, including business ethics. Rorty’s post-foundational approach to “moral imagination” can inform how we teach business ethics in a diverse and philosophically eclectic manner. A summary of Rorty’s critique of philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics will be followed by a discussion of the implications for a critical pedagogy and the pragmatic use of an expansive philosophical lexicon in a business ethics course.

David Stoll suggests that because contemporary immigrants are non-European, uneducated, poor, and uninterested in joining the moral community of American society, their presence threatens national unity, obscures citizens’ obligations to one another and will shortly change the US into a minority–majority society. Drawing from historical accounts and statistical evidence, this article asserts that immigrants provide American society with social, economic and demographic benefits. Moreover, while pundits have long predicted that immigrants with national origins distinct from those of natives will transform American life to its detriment, the record reveals the US has been able to incorporate diverse nationalities to the benefit of immigrants and the native-born alike.

The current era of international migration is marked by unprecedented numbers as well an especially wide range of origins and characteristics. Jews, a group noted for their high levels of education, geographic dispersion, and multiple engagements in social, political, cultural, economic, and religious life, reflect many of these trends as they continue to enter the US.

Purpose Since the widespread adoption of the concept, transnational theorizing has attended to inequalities with regard to legal status, education, travel, and access to capital to understand the experience of migrant populations. This issue has become especially pertinent in recent years, as a growing body of journalistic and scholarly attention has been devoted to a new group of transnationals who work as entrepreneurs, professionals, and financiers involved in high tech and other cutting-edge economic activities. Regarded as among the world’s most powerful engines of economic growth and innovation, these entrepreneurs enjoy unprecedented levels of income, state-granted privileges (including permission to work), and access to elite institutions. Because of their level of resources, some observers contend that this group represents a fundamentally new category of immigrants distinct not only from labor migrants but also from merchants, professionals, and technicians. Methodology/approach To better understand their experience, this chapter draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research to compare two groups of Israeli immigrants living in Western societies: high-tech entrepreneurs and enclave entrepreneurs. Focusing on their economic and collective lives, it identifies similarities and differences among the two. Findings Conclusions suggest that the mostly male high-tech migrants do enjoy incomes, contacts, and access to travel that far exceed those available to labor and skilled migrants. Moreover, infotech immigrants are not dependent upon contacts with local co-ethnics that are vital for the survival of most other migrant populations. However, the communal, identity-related and familial concerns of infotech migrants are not completely amenable to their considerable resources. Accordingly, as they address these matters, their experience reveals significant similarities to those of migrants bearing a less privileged status. Research implications Collective, familial and identificational issues play central roles in shaping patterns of work and travel among high-tech transnational entrepreneurs. As such, these issues deserve continued attention in studies of global migration and work. Originality/value Research is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study of Israeli enclave and infotech entrepreneurs.

Visual techniques offer much to the study of international migration. Benefits include collecting information about topics of study, generating rapport and easing communication with respondents, comparing groups, refining theoretical analysis, sharing findings, and teaching about results. This chapter offers basic guidelines to assist those studying migration with the use of visual techniques. While much of the discussion focuses on visual sociology, the article also refers to other academic disciplines and approaches to visual representation.

The agricultural economy in the United States has relied heavily on migrant farmworkers and, in particular, on Latinos. However, migrant families remain one of the most disadvantaged groups in the United States. This research focuses on a subsample of migrant families of Mexican origin (n= 13), who participated in the Rural Families Speak multistate study. Qualitative findings described numerous challenges that Mexican-origin migrant families continue to experience. Results were also illustrative of the resilience of migrant families, which is influenced by specific Latino cultural values and is reflected in the successful adaptation of these families to the challenges associated with a migrant lifestyle.

Los Angeles, où vivent environ 26 000 Israéliens auto-identifiés, est une des plus dynamiques communautés d’émigrants israéliens. Cela inclut une économie ethnique très active et un grand nombre d’institutions tournées vers les besoins des émigrants. Le climat méditerranéen de la ville, son importance comme centre de media, les caractéristiques socio-économiques des immigrants, la diversité des communautés juives contribuent à la réussite sociale de ces émigrants et aux bonnes relations entre les migrants israéliens et leurs co-religionnaires américains. Cet article reposant sur des enquêtes de terrain examine les motivations de départ vers Los Angeles et les conditions de vie des immigrants israéliens. Il s’achève par une caractérisation du transnationalisme israélien, processus par lequel les Israéliens de Los Angeles maintiennent les liens sociaux, économiques et identitaires entre la Californie du Sud et leur pays d’origine. Los Angeles, which is the home to approximately 26,000 self-identified Israelis, is one of the most dynamic Israeli emigrant communities. It includes an active ethnic economy and a variety of immigrant-oriented institutions. These are sustained by a number of factors, including the city’s Mediterranean climate, economic characteristics, visibility as a media center, diverse Jewish community, and good relations between Israeli emigrants and American co-religionists. Based upon in-depth interviews and fieldwork, this paper discusses Israelis’ reasons for moving to Los Angeles and their social, economic and communal lives. It concludes by identifying Israeli transnationalism, a process whereby Israelis in LA maintain ongoing social, economic and identificational links between Southern California and their country of origin.

In recent years, scholars have worked to understand the persistence of racial inequality in societies characterized by the condemnation of explicit racism, growing diversity, and anti-discrimination policies. Many theorists generally agree about the multiple dimensions of racism and challenge assertions about the incipient colourblindness of the current context. However, they also disagree about the nature of the racial hierarchy in the USA. One approach continues to emphasize a bipolar model, with blacks at the bottom and whites on top, as sufficient to explain diverse patterns of inequality. An alternative formulation sees racialization as contextual, yielding a less stable and more complex ranking system. This article summarizes both positions and concludes that while the bipolar model continues to present useful insights, a more nuanced understanding of racial inequality is achieved when the bipolar approach is replaced by one that comprehends the multiple and even contradictory nature of racial disad...

Drawing on the author’s research with three migrant populations—Jews from the former Soviet Union, Vietnamese, and Israelis—this article offers several suggestions for integrating photography into fieldwork studies. Visual methods are shown to be useful for learning about the research context, generating rapport with respondents, analyzing findings, and sharing research with students and colleagues. Examples show how photography contributed to the understanding of migrant communities, entrepreneurs’ use of coethnic and outgroup labor, and gender patterns.

Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe have been the paradigmatic case of successful assimilators in many Western countries. They have actively identified with the nationality and culture in points of settlement, had little propensity to return to the country of origin, and overcame discrimination to attain levels of educational, economic, and cultural prominence exceeding those of the native-born elite. While identifying with the host society, Jewish migrants have at the same time retained political, familial, residential, religious, and cultural characteristics that distinguish them from other middleclass members of the host society (Glazer and Moynihan; Lipset; Sowell; Steinberg; Gold and Phillips, “Mobility”; Hyman; Waterman and Kosmin).