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Through in-depth interviews and observations, I have begun to explore the meanings and implications of female coming-of-age rituals for the lives and experiences of the immigrant individuals, families, and communities who celebrate them in the United States. In particular, I ask: What can Filipino American debutantes and Mexican American quinceañeras tell us about the individuals, families, and communities who organize and participate in them? And, what can studying quinceañeras and debutantes reveal about how actors can transform ?culture?? This paper-in-progress explores how debutantes and quinceañeras are sites for the production of multiple and intersecting identities, including gender, race and ethnicity, class, and age, and can therefore help us better understand immigrants, the fastest growing proportion of the US population; as well as the processes by which by which we are shaped into gendered, racialized, socioeconomic, and national beings; and/ or how we might be able to change the conditions that disadvantage certain beings over others. Preliminary findings discussed include debutantes and quinceañeras as immigrant strategies for trying to survive and transcend ?multiple liminalities,? and experiences of limited economic and social mobility. Also discussed is the hypothesis that quinceañeras and debutantes are methods of culturally socializing younger generations, especially young women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature researching the drivers of highly skilled migration (HSM) often prioritizes labor market returns to education and downscales the importance of public welfare. This paper develops an innovative empirical strategy that allows us to see how a selection of pull factors attracts temporary and long-term educated migrants in Europe. To do so, we built a unique longitudinal contextual dataset merging information from the European Labor Force Survey (2000-2014) with selected Eurostat and OECD country indicators. Country fixed effect time series allow us to concentrate on cross-country effects. Our evidence suggests that returns to education attract temporary HSM and long term stayers equally. However, it is also shown that public welfare and taxation operate differently for these two groups and do not deter long-term residents. Our paper proposes revisiting the assumption that HSMs are mere income maximizers. As we argue, long term HSM may well be attracted by generous welfare setups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare services given to minorities are important to investigate in current times of polarization and anti-immigration discourse. This paper aims at understanding bureaucrat's perceptions towards migration and migrants. While previous research mostly focuses on discrimination in access to services, this paper attempts to add a dimension of understanding on how the current discourses of polarization can be related to bureaucrat's emotional uncertainty. A sample of 130 open-end responses that were part of a nation-wide survey directed towards bureaucrats from two of the main Swedish welfare institutions was analyzed with Atlas.ti using directed content analysis. Ontological security, the security of being and sense of order, served as the theoretical embarkation point for the paper. Some of the main patterns that emerged were responses reflecting feelings of threat due to migration but also frustration about existing societal structures not capable of accommodating trends of migration. Bureaucrats demands of assimilation of migrants was a way to mark boundaries, establish superiority and increase their own feeling of security. Majority group respondents also expressed views of welfare chauvinism and racialized expressions about migrants reflecting a debasement of migrants in order to increase ontological security. Simultaneously, expressions of experienced racism by bureaucrats belonging to a minority group reflected feelings of exclusion and ontological insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will the level of immigrants' transnational ties with their home countries ultimately decrease as they assimilate to the host society? This paper examines how immigrants' cultural transnational ties have changed over time and whether it is associated with their cultural assimilation. The first and second round of New Immigrant Survey (NIS), which contain responses from firstgeneration immigrants who became permanent residents in the years 2003 and 2004 were included in the analyses. Immigrants' level of cultural transnational ties were measured in three different ways: the frequency of reading newspapers, hours of watching TV, and hours of listening to the radio in their native language. The findings of this paper show that immigrants' cultural transnational ties with the home country have a U-shape; it decreases from pre-migration to the year of becoming permanent residents, but recovers about 5 years later. The analyses of logistic regression suggest that immigrants' cultural assimilation (hours spent consuming English-language newspapers, TV, and radio) is positively associated with their cultural transnational ties. On the other hand, immigrants' general assimilation, such as English proficiency and years in the U.S., were negatively associated with their cultural transnational ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how young asylum seekers in Germany acquire and live with uncertain legal statuses--or liminal legality. It dovetails with recent debates in the sociology of migration critiquing dichotomous conceptualizations of legal and illegal migration, showing ethnographically how migrants experience the continuous legal borderline along which they actually live. While scholars have examined the consequences of liminal legality, uncertain legal statuses usually remain a black box. Attempting to fil this gap, I examine the actual mechanisms and decisions that create an uncertain legal status. I show that liminal legality results not only from the multiple possible outcomes of an asylum plea, but also from Germany's dichotomous cultural notions and legal applications of identity--age, nationalethnic origin, and unaccompaniment, in this paper--that do not fit migrants' more complex and less legible situations. The paper develops the term frictional identities to capture the fabricated, messy, and provisional identities that migrants acquire in their interactions with state bureaucracies. In contrast to other studies on the identification of asylum seekers, I avoid the one-sided portrayal of the state verifying and assigning migrants' identity by considering both state bureaucrats' and migrants' stakes and strategies in the negotiations about the identity categories migrants are admitted to. Empirically, the paper draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Germany conducted since 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is predicated on scholar activism. Principally, it seeks to represent unaccompanied minors' (UAMs) narratives as a form of resistance. Working within a framework in which knowledge is understood as a vehicle for social action, and through the adoption of cocreation of an epistemological model, the paper challenges representations that portray unaccompanied minors as passive victims. The paper represents the lives, the views and experiences of UAMs as caught between international and humanitarian ideals and nativist populism. In its discussion of methodological approaches utilised in this study, the paper gives recognition to the sociology of childhood within a framework of scholar activism and child narratives. Based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews and focus groups with 50 UAMs from Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal, Tunisia, and Bangladesh, this paper helps plug an important gap in the literature in the context of child well-being as related to this group of children. This study is part of a 25-nation research network focused on children's subjectivities around child well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost two decades, U.S. public health researchers have been baffled by findings that seem to suggest that Mexican immigrants experience better physical and mental health outcomes-despite their lower socioeconomic status-than their U.S.-born counterparts. Researchers have been particularly intrigued by these patterns because epidemiological research has established a consistent and robust relationship between socioeconomic status and health, and first-generation Mexican immigrants have, in general, poorer socio-economic profiles than their second-generation counterparts. This paper examines the assumptions behind the socio-cultural explanations of the "Latino/a or Immigrant Health Paradox" through the narratives of 40 first- and second-generation Mexican immigrant women. The paper proposes a revision to the acculturation approach to incorporate an understanding of the racialization processes that Mexican immigrants and their descendants contend with as they integrate into the US. In particular, the paper examines how Mexican immigrant women negotiate their ethnic identities within the racial structure of the U.S. and learn about their location as a "minorities" in the U.S. This analysis sheds light on the racialization processes that immigrants confront as they attempt to "become American" (Waters, 1999). The paper concludes with a discussion of how these racialization processes might translate into health and wellbeing. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two seemingly contradictory aspects of the relationship between religion and ethnic identity among Gujarati Hindus and Jains in New York and London, two major sites of settlement for Gujarati immigrants. On the one hand, various Hindu and related sectarian movements in India have been globalizing by spreading to many parts of the Hindu diaspora, and creating the possibility for expansion and inclusiveness through universalist religious claims. On the other hand, ethnic and religious identity among many of these Gujarati Hindu and Jains becomes specific and exclusive. These simultaneous phenomena create contradictions between Indians' call for multiculturalism as immigrants in foreign societies and the exclusiveness of their identity developed through social networks that tend to promote Hindu nationalist ideologies. The paper examines three cases in order to illustrate the varying ways in which Gujarati Hindus and Jains represent and are represented by Hinduism and Hindu nationalism in the US and Britain, and the way in which those representations are an integral part of who is Gujarati in those contexts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is widely known that many group differences are lost beneath encompassing racial terms such as Asian American, less attention is given to differences within any one specific ethnic group: the intra-national ethnicity dimension. Thus, this paper seeks to further understand the 1.5 and second-generation incorporation process by examining the intra-national ethnicity of children of immigrants from one nation, Viet Nam, and unfolding the experiences of two of its many sub-ethnic groups - the Vietnamese and the Chinese-Vietnamese. This paper explores the following questions: What differences, if any, exist between these two sub-ethnic groups? What are some ethnic identity and adaptation patterns and outcome for the children of the immigrants of this particular intra-national ethnic group (Chinese-Vietnamese vs. Vietnamese)? The purpose of this paper is to incite discussion and provide preliminary findings in this propose field of research. Findings from this study show that variances exist within this particular intra-national ethnic groups vis-à-vis ethnic identification and educational attainment. However, further research is necessary to explain the causes and consequences of these adaptation distinctions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the numbe of deaths of immigrants by the structure of civil society in five countries -- France, UK, US, Netherlands and Germany. It focuses on the density of non-profit organizations in civil society, and their connections to important legislative and executive sections of the state. The basic thesis is dense networks of immigrant and community groups connected to the state will prevent ethnic violence, while weak connections between ethnic grouups and the state will cause violence. The paper could be called 'why riots broke out throughout France in the last few years, and not in similarlly situated countries.' Part of the reason for weak civil society has to do with a very strong state that can operate on its own without groups, and the constitutional structure that allows it to do so. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their impressive patterns of economic mobility and generally successful adaptation into Western host societies, Israeli emigrants frequently express ambivalence about their presence on foreign soil. However, recent events may challenge this outlook. During the 1990s, Israel's significant demographic and economic growth, relatively peaceful relations with neighboring countries and increasingly globalized economy had the effect of lessening the stigma on going abroad. Then, since the fall of 2000, Israel has been rocked by the Al Aksa Intifada as well as a major recession. These events have made life more difficult for Israelis. Accordingly, conditions of the last five years can be seen as altering Israelis' motives for emigration and simultaneously shifting the probability of return among those already overseas. While a topic of interest in its own right, the experience of Israeli emigrants since late 2000 also offers a natural experiment for evaluating how theories about migrant transnationalism consider the consequences of specific events upon relations with citizens abroad.This paper relies on in-depth interviews and other data sources to explore Israeli emigrants' views about remaining in host societies versus returning to Israel since late 2000. In so doing, it considers how emigrants evaluate potential benefits, costs and feelings of identification associated with residence overseas versus Israel. The paper also seeks more general insights into how relations between migrants and the country of origin are altered when events affect political and economic conditions in the country of origin. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Declining fertility rates and high levels of immigration predict dramatic demographic transformations in post-industrial societies. Such trends are especially advanced in North America, where large minorities of people have arrived from non-European countries within the last several decades. What impacts these demographic shifts will have on Canadian society is an interesting question. Research on the integration of immigrants has focused primarily on economic aspects of social experience, on the assumption that economic success predicts and precedes integration of all kinds. Political integration of immigrants has received far less attention. One series of questions concerns the kinds of political shifts we can expect as a result of the presence and/or the political participation of these most recently arrived immigrant groups. This paper concerns itself with research that asks the more preliminary questions of whether and how fast political integration is occurring and what predicts or explains this. My objectives in this paper are two-fold: to compile a list of factors influential in political integration to guide the collection of empirical evidence , and to identify a theoretical and methodological strategy best suited to accommodate both qualitative and quantitative insights and findings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to initiate a discussion about the political capital of Salvadoran immigrants. In this vein, I attempt to present the reader with: a) an overview of the political science work, which has dealt extensively with Latinos' political participation, while also commenting on the limitations engendered by the lack of sociological insights in this area and b) discuss the sociological perspectives stemming from the concepts of political opportunity structure and transnationalism as they relate to the immigrant political experience. The final part of this paper will consist of a proposal that attempts to study the political mobilization of Salvadorans. I argue that El Salvador induced a political migration that is consequential for Salvadoran immigrants residing in the United States. Additionally, the U.S.-El Salvador relations play an integral part in the Salvadoran political experience and structure Salvadorans claims-making processes. These factors make this an interesting group to study and, unlike other scholars who have investigated the social and economic aspects that affect the lives of Salvadorans, I attempt to address their political capital and investigate the political participation of Salvadorans in our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that dominant approaches to Mexican immigrant construction workers obscure the nature of workplace discrimination. In defining the problems of occupational risk, health and safety specialists emphasize Mexican immigrant workers' deficiencies. In contrast, workers emphasized workplace discrimination and legal vulnerability. This paper argues that health and safety specialists' outreach to Mexican immigrant workers not only obscure experiences of discrimination and vulnerability, but also facilitate structural inequality. These perspectives were particularly evident and "hazardous" in the case of a post-disaster New Orleans as Mexican immigrants working in cleanup and recovery work found themselves physically and symbolically injured by a broader political discourse to "Bring New Orleans Back." ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the findings from my Determinants of School Success study-a qualitative comparative analysis of six elementary schools in low-income, immigrant neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Despite having similar neighborhood profiles in terms of socio-economic factors, three of these elementary schools have high standardized test score achievement in literacy and numeracy, and the other three low scores. Utilizing in-depth interviews and participant observation in these schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, I explain the factors that promote or hinder academic achievement. These include the successful implementation of curriculum, basic-needs, training, literacy, and other programs as well as programs that address the basic needs of students. The research also uncovers some of the deleterious consequences of education funding cutbacks in the province of British Columbia. Finally, I consider some of the theoretical implications of these findings in terms of the debates in sociology of education, segmented assimilation theory, urban poverty, and stratification. The paper concludes that high academic achievement in literacy and numeracy is possible to achieve in public schools serving low-income, immigrant urban populations, if the government provides the resources for teachers and students to succeed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will begin by briefly discussing the implications for socio-economic mobility made within the segmented assimilation model, as this paper's main focus will be second generation immigrant males' downward mobility. However, it will be argued that in order to understand the downward mobility of second generation immigrant males, segmented assimilation must go beyond accounting for gender as merely a variable. Only through an assessment of the ongoing process by which race, class and gender are simultaneously constructed can the socio-economic mobility of racial minority second generation immigrants be understood. This paper will trace race-gender experiences which impact second generation immigrant males' life chances through the spheres of the labor market, school, and the neighborhood. It will be argued that second generation Black immigrant males' lack of educational attainment/occupational prestige should be analyzed in conjunction with literature that identifies the educational system and concentrations of poverty in the inner city as obstacles for native Black males' upward mobility. Notions of oppositional culture are used by the segmented assimilation paradigm to explain the downward mobility of second generation immigrant males, although such conceptualizations inaccurately portray Black males' resistant and reproductive agency. The results of this paper will thus have implications for the manner in which the term 'oppositional' is drawn upon to explain the transmission of long-term and inter-generational poverty among Black males. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate how social capital influences migration, this paper builds on Portes (1998) and proposes a framework that decomposes social capital into resources (information about or assistance with migration), sources (prior migrants), and recipients (potential migrants). Analysis of multi-level, prospective, longitudinal data from 22 rural villages in Thailand shows that probability urban migration increases with the amount of available resources, yet the magnitude of increase depends on the diversity of resources, exposure to sources, as well as recipients' characteristics and the strength of their ties to the sources. A simulation analysis explores the implications of these results for future migration patterns. The findings suggest that even small discrepancies in the diversity of resources and exposure to sources of social capital lead to striking differences in migration outcomes over time. Ignoring these discrepancies result in biased predictions of future migration patterns. The paper concludes that distinguishing among resources, sources and recipients provides a unifying framework to combine a variety of hypotheses typically tested in isolation, and improves empirical predictions as well as theoretical understandings of the effect of social capital on migration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to establish the distinctiveness of contemporary immigrant integration in rural communities. The combined characteristics of immigrants and rural communities lead to the exclusion of immigrants from access to public goods and markets for certain goods leaving them reliant on informal and contingent sources of employment, housing, and the full range of needed goods and services. Consequently, the immigrant experience in rural America is likely to be more diverse and variable than that in urban ethnic enclaves. For this reason the sociology of rural immigrant integration must emphasize context specificity. The paper begins with an overview of contemporary immigration trends and then goes on to examine the distinctiveness of immigration to rural America. We elaborate a conceptual frame to guide research on the integration of immigrants into the social and economic life of rural communities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past thirty years, a substantial number of individuals across the Vietnamese diaspora have created various forms of "transnational families" as one manifestation of Vietnamese emigration. I identify Vietnamese transnational families as families whose core members (at least one son, daughter, sibling, or parent) are located in at least two or more nation-states. Transnational family members are crucial actors as matchmakers in the recent formation of a transpacific marriage market linking women in Vietnam and overseas Vietnamese men who primarily live in Western countries. This paper focuses on the significance of transnational matchmakers and matchmaking activities in processes of marriage arrangements. In the larger project, I found that most couples involved the "unmarriageables"-low wage men and highly educated women (in their own national contexts), a topic I cover elsewhere. Unlike cases involving the unmarriageables in my study, this paper examines the anomalous case of the ideal "traditional" arranged marriage whereby a man marries "down" and a woman marries "up." The implication I make is that notions of tradition and particularly traditions along gender lines are often preserved because of the interplay between kinship politics and the decisions of individual couples to "bargain" with patriarchy within complicated "geographies of power" across the diaspora. This paper uses ethnographic data from three years of fieldwork between 1997 and 2000. In addition to participant observation, I conducted a total of 189 interviews with overseas Vietnamese men, their wives in Vietnam, and kin networks of transpacific married couples. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes data from surveys on transnational household economies, family units which have migrants in the US remitting funds back to their relatives in Mexico. The twofold goals of this paper are to analyze this data using social scientific theories and to contribute to the fields of migration and economic sociology. The data comes from ethnographic work and ethnosurveys done in New York and in the Mixteca region of the Mexican state of Guerrero, in the towns of Huamuxtitlan and Tlapa in 2004. This paper seeks to explicate transnational household economies, the contexts in which they occur, and to articulate these bi-local household economies. The analysis starts by reviewing the growing importance of remittances and the relevant literature on migration. We will contrast our findings with common theories and conceptions about migration. A methodology appendix and some of the quantitative data obtained from the ethno-surveys and recommendations for non-profits are also available in sister papers. This study focuses on a relatively recent migrant community, one which offers an excellent site both to study the kinds of processes that interest us. The Mixteca region of Guerrero has a great deal of recent emigration, which means that a disproportionate percentage of its migrants are remitting to their families. The migrant destination, New York City, offers a good community infrastructure on which to build and remittances exemplify another kind of international capital flow in the middle of the global capital of the financial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the design of the first full cohort of the NIS, including the sampling design, language design, and questionnaire content. It also provides the first results based on the baseline round, which was in the field June 2003 to June 2004. Thus, this paper provides not only new substantive results based on the first large probability sample of a cohort of new legal immigrants, but also exposition of key features of the survey which will be useful to researchers when the public-use data become available after July 2005. Substantive results to be highlighted will enable drawing a portrait of new legal immigrants, including language, religion, marriage, transfers (including remittances), and transnational activities, within a framework attentive to selectivity mechanisms, U.S. immigration law, and origin-country conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relative importance of the school-level factors such as school racial/ethnic composition and income composition in their effects on Latino adolescents' academic achievement. Although previous research suggests that academic achievement is a function of both individual and family level characteristics, no prior work attempted to isolate the effects of race and class as both individual student's characteristics and factors of school composition. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) data, the paper examines the effects of school racial and ethnic composition, income composition, ethnicity, immigrant generational, socioeconomic status on the aggregate measure of academic achievement, while controlling for individual (e.g., sex, age) characteristics. These longitudinal data possess a hierarchical data structure in the sense that the individual level factors are viewed as nested within the school-level factors (school racial and ethnic composition effects moderated by school friendship segregation). Hierarchical linear modeling is used as an appropriate statistical procedure for nested data. The findings indicate that it is the income composition of the school, but not the race and ethnic composition, that is negatively related to the academic achievement of Latino adolescents. The poverty level of schools they attend with other students from poor families places many disadvantaged Latinos (apart from their individual economic status) in double jeopardy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the Sichuan province data drawn from the 1995 Chinese One Percent Population Sample Survey, this paper confirms the previous studies on migration in China and shows that the return migrants are not better off as well as the active migrant or nonimmigrant households. The return migrants are more likely to select negatively while the active migrants is selected positively. The result of this study indicates that the return migrants may face difficulty to maintain the good quality in housing condition than the active migrants or nonmigrants. This may cast some doubt at the conclusion made in the previous study that states the return migrants richly convey human capital to the community of migrant. Moreover, our paper indicates that the positive selection of the return migrants reported in the other study is not the case for the return migrants in China. On the other hand, the tendency of better condition of housing of active migrants household implies the transformation of remittance to the investment for housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This papers wants to advance the idea that the process of acculturation/assimilation among Latinas/os is much more complex than it appears at first glance. What I do in the paper is to present my research on the difficult negotiation of gender identities on the U.S.-Mexico border to show that complexity. My position is at odds in relation to scholars like Samuel Huntington, who portrays the process of acculturation consisting of an immigrant who partakes a hundred percent of his or her original culture, who comes to the United States and, step by step, is replacing (or not replacing in Huntington's case) such a culture by American culture. I hope my paper will show that this picture forgets several things. First, that people do not have only one identity "the immigrant," but several, such as the "male or female immigrant," "child or adult immigrant," "heterosexual or homosexual," etc. Second, that people do not have "one culture," such as "Mexican culture," but the term culture hides the fact that people have several cultures, in plural, with different degrees of "Mexicanization" in the case of my field work site, the border. Third, that their process of Americanization (or lack of) is uneven in relation to the different identities and the different cultures they have, to the point that a person who has lived in the U.S. for, let's say, twenty years, can be described as being bilingual and bicultural in several respects, but totally monocultural (either totally "Mexican" or "American") in other respects. I illustrate these possibilities using my research on gender on the U.S.-Mexico border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore processes of identity formation in a community of transnational Mexican migrants. We analyze a Pre-Hispanic secular dance ritual unique to the people of one municipio in southern Puebla that is practiced in both the Mexican and U.S. contexts. We see the dance as a metaphor for the transnational community that exists between these distant locales, and we see it as an important cultural vehicle and strategy for consolidating identity and membership as well. We make the argument that, with its introduction to transnational migrant communities in the United States, we are witnessing a new era in the history of this living ritual. The cultural processes of identity formation embodied in the dance are open, fluid, and contested as the ritual is constantly being reinterpreted. We find evidence of this in disagreements over meaning, interpretation and performance. Our analysis is based on ethnographic research we have been conducting in this transnational community over the past three years. We have generated data through participant-observation, formal and informal interviews, and visual sociological methods. In this paper we weave together these various, and sometimes quite divergent, narratives and apply a sociological interpretive frame to them in an effort to better understand the construction of transnational identity through this public dance ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the attitude towards immigration in various European countries and the research paper which includes several theories. Xenophobia and the expressions of institutional racism is a concern in several European nations where laborers were imported from several underdeveloped countries. The paper indicates that Southern European countries are appropriate units of analysis to study the different inter-group relationships. Several theoretical approaches related to immigration are presented including individual level theories of anti-immigrant sentiment.

This paper examines patterns of self-identification among immigrant day laborers on the street corners of San Francisco, focusing in particular on the ways in which they seek and affirm dignity in the face of rampant stigmatization, ever-present uncertainty and poverty. Drawing upon interviews and ethnographic data, it presents evidence that many who work in this informal labor market maintain a sense of dignity and claim their moral worth by fashioning themselves as entrepreneurs, jacks-of-all trades and/or role models, taking pride in the seemingly unparalleled autonomy this work affords them as well as in the skill and work ethic their work purportedly exemplifies. These findings challenge popular perceptions about immigrant day laborers as well as existing scholarship on the relationship between work and dignity among the urban subproletariat. This paper furthermore argues that attempts to affirm this dignified status come all too often at the expense of others. Many of these street corner day laborers engage in a variety of practices of social distancing and differentiation, deflecting stigma onto other "undesirables" who share the same social space and joining in the dominant discourse of denouncing those who undeservingly profit from social assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a dimension of intergenerational conflict among children of Korean immigrants in the U.S. In the classical immigrant story, intergenerational conflict stems from differences of culture experienced by parents and their children. In particular, this culture gap has been reported greater in Asian immigrant homes. Is the a preventive factor of the generational culture gap? Using 151 survey questionnaires administered in 2003 to grown children of Korean immigrants who lived in the following states: California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, this paper tests whether or not ethnic cultural continuity is a preventive factor of parent-child conflict in Korean immigrant homes. The result shows that there is a strong connection between the maintenance of ethnic culture and the diminished level of intergenerational conflict. This suggests that young adult Korean Americans who have built ties to ethnic experience are unlikely to develop a serious level of parent-child conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares the socio-economic attainment of contemporary Chinese immigrants from Australia and the United States. These two nations, along with Canada, house the largest number of foreign born Chinese. The paper uses data from the 1996 Australian census (1 percent CURFs) and from the 2000 US census (5 percent and 1 percent PUMs) to examine four economic outcomes: labor force participation, unemployment, occupational status and income. Results suggest considerable intra-national differentials, differentials that are similar in both the US and Australia. Persons from the PRC incur large economic penalties that are rarely explained by their characteristics. Those from Vietnam incur large gross penalties but more often than not these are due to their characteristics. On the other hand, persons from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia reap both gross and net advantages. Finally, looking across the dependent variables, irrespective of birthplace, most Chinese immigrants do relatively better in the US than in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examins Korean Evangelicals in the context of racial formation and geopolitics. I show that Korean evangelicals in the United States employ a far-reaching Evangelical Christian worldview to articulate their position as major actors on the world stage. Buoyed by the development of capitalism and democracy in South Korea, Korean evangelicals consider themselves uniquely qualified to carry out the mission of world evangelization. By positioning themselves as akin to white Christian missionaries, immigrant Korean Christians articulate their location in a global racial hierarchy?somewhere below whites, more fortunate than the notoriously non-Christian Japanese, and much better off than the ?unreached people? in the Third World. Their religious worldview, I argue, influence the process of racial formation, understood in this paper as a matter of ?both social structure and cultural representation.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas the Punjabi taxi drivers included in this research experienced racism in American society, they often expressed racism toward other racial minorities in the United States, particularly African Americans and Hispanics. This pattern of simultaneous expression and experience of racism by Asian Americans, the broader racial category within which Punjabi/Indian immigrants are classified, has been attributed to the group?s ?model minority? construction. While as ?model minorities? Asian Americans are constructed as hardworkers with good cultural values that have enabled their success, their experience of racism points to their position as racial subordinates in American society (Gotanda, 1995; Prashad, 2000, 2001). In this paper, I examine the extent to which the experience and expression of racism by a group of Punjabi immigrants in New York City fits the ?model minority? construction of Asian Americans. I also discuss whether it is important to reconfigure the ?model minority? construction of Asian Americans to better understand the experiences of those Asian Americans of lower socioeconomic background. The data for this paper is based on semi structured interviews conducted with forty Punjabi taxi drivers in the metropolitan area of New York. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores two oppositional binaries for Latino immigrants in the U.S.; first, in terms of religiosity, where Latin Americans are assumed Catholics, while "Americans" are most often understood as Protestants, and second, through sexuality, where Latin American sexual behavior is often contrasted to identity based U.S. gay and lesbian social movements. This paper engages in the intersectionality of religion, migration, ethno-racial politics, and sexuality with Latin Americans in the U.S., and attempts to respond to the foundation of those oppositional practices. Much literature on migration, Latinos, and religion is used in order to discuss these points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a working paper, whose purpose is to explore some current theorization of the border and to examine its workings on the lives of real people. I hope, by the end of this paper, to have explored the notion of the border in a more general context, and in the specific context of the border between Burkina Faso and Côte d?Ivoire. This focus of my Master?s thesis is Burkinabè migrant laborers experience of their migration, labor and conflict in Côte d?Ivoire, and I must have a sense of the border before I can proceed with my analysis. Balibar, in his most recent collection of essays Politics and the Other Scene, has begun to focus more explicitly on theorizing the border. To do this, he takes as a point of departure the notion that the border is much more complicated that most of us allow. He writes that we need to correct a representation of the border that seems natural, but is nonetheless manifestly false, or in any case too simple: the representation that makes the border the simple line between two territorial entities?.? Rejecting any simple definition of the border, like the proverbial ?line in the sand,? he takes a postmodernist stance, and asserts that the border has no essence that can be valid in all places and times. So, what is a border then? I would argue that this not the question that we need to ask. The real question that is at hand is ?How does the border work?? Only by answering this question first can we start to develop an understanding of the meaning of the border, or of what it is. In this paper, I explore some qualitative data gathered in interviews with Burkinabè migrant laborers in their home villages, and begin to understand the border as a process of negotiation between supplication and resistance which is enacted again and again as a Burkinabè travels to and from his or her work site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on differences in economic strategies between immigrant and non-immigrant families in Los Angeles. It asks whether immigrant and native families differ in how they combine a variety of resources, including work earnings, public assistance, shared housing with kin, and other sources of economic support. In addition to describing the combinations of resources immigrant and non-immigrant families use, the paper asks whether these two groups differ in the short-term stability of their economic strategies. I ask what individual and family characteristics, other than immigration status, account for differences in the combinations of resources that families use and the stability of these strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare the determinants of return for Puerto Rican, Dominican, Nicaraguan, Costa Rican and Mexican migrants in the U.S. using data from the Mexican and Latin American Migration Projects (MMP/LAMP). We estimate discrete-time, event-history models using Generalized Estimation Equations to calculate the likelihood of return of migrant household heads to their countries of origin in year t while controlling for a variety of individual-, household-, and macro-level characteristics in t-1. The main theoretical foundation of the paper lies on the tenets of the New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM). The countries being compared present a fair degree of variation in theory-relevant traits such as the existence of well-functioning markets, the costs of (re-)migration, and familial structures. This study is thus an attempt to further test the theory regarding return in order to find its limits/qualifications while discussing how other theoretical frameworks could enrich the NELM approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The context of globalization facilitates the construction of social relations that transcend national boundaries. Based on the argument that diaspora provides a framework for understanding immigration processes within the dynamics of globalization, this paper explores the ways diaspora extends our understanding of immigrant communities. As a type of community, diaspora communities illustrate three-way relationships that include the homeland or country of origin, the host society or country of residence, and the larger diaspora community that extends over a number of nation-states. In this paper, I take the Lebanese diaspora in New York, Montreal, and Paris to illustrate that diaspora illuminates the understanding of global social networks and ties that are related to immigrant groups. Following a brief theoretical discussion of diaspora, this paper focuses on the analysis of Lebanese immigrant forms of attachment. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in three cities, this paper illustrates the forms of solidarity shared by Lebanese immigrants. First, the multiple forms of belonging that Lebanese immigrants have ? to their homeland, host society, and larger diaspora ? emphasize that immigrants share ?vertical connections? that exist simultaneously. The paper follows to illustrate the forms of global solidarity that members of the Lebanese immigrant community seek and maintain. Given their experience with migration, Lebanese immigrants believe that they are more capable of bridging the particular interests that are based on national or ethnic attachments and the universal ones that are not tied to a territory or a nation-state. That is, as immigrants consciously discard traditional forms of attachments to the homeland, they are propelled to advance universal legal and civil causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to answer what effect does migration have on conditioning the extent, shape, and nature of Mexican immigrant women-based networks. Taking advantage of unique data set that link comparable samples of Mexican women undertaken in sending and receiving communities, this paper examines the effect of migration and women?s socio-demographic attributes on predicting networks structural characteristics such as network size, kinship composition and social interactions. Descriptive results show that immigrant women were more socially and physically isolated compared to women sampled in Mexico. Immigrant women had smaller networks, were more spatially dispersed, and visited less frequently compared to women?s networks in the Mexican sample. While socio-demographic factors appear to be important in predicting network structural characteristics, these factors did not seem to explain differences across samples. That is, the estimated effects of these socio-demographic factors within sample are quite similar across both US and Mexico samples, suggesting that migration status might play a significant role in determining differences in women?s networks across samples. The next analytical step is to examine if group differences (across both samples) in women?s networks can be attributed to migration status. I plan to further the analyses by decomposing the difference in network types and test whether this difference can be attributed to migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses gender role negotiations among Dominican women and men in Providence, Rhode Island, a secondary enclave of Dominican immigrant settlement that has not been examined sociologically. The central analytic question guiding the original ethnographic research study from which this paper is drawn is: How do gender processes, roles, and statuses shape Dominicans? participation in the labor market and the domestic sphere, and how does participation in these institutions affect gender identity and behavior? Previous studies have suggested that as Dominican women?s wages rose relative to men?s, women?s authority and status within the family would rise, as indicated by, for example, men?s increasing contributions to household labor. The literature also has intimated that women?s new household power represented a challenge to persistent cultural norms of patriarchy. Very recent revisions in the literature suggest instead that Dominican women?s productive roles and men?s relative displacement in the new global economy may provoke modifications to household labor or household decision making, while fundamental gender role constructs remain firmly in place. This paper focuses analytically on this new theoretical orientation, which has roots in the race-class-gender debates of the last two decades. Data from the larger study support the more nuanced, approach, in which analysis of immigration processes is performed within conjunctions of social status (i.e., race, gender, and class) and social institutions (e.g., labor force, family, education). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on second generation South Asians women and their experience of the conflict between American and the traditional gender ideology of their native culture. Using the framework of segmented assimilation and the outcome of selective acculturation, it specifically addresses the gendered aspects of the assimilation experience, especially where the gender role expectations and gender ideology of the immigrant?s native culture contrast sharply with mainstream American society. The data for this paper is from a qualitative study that employs in depth interviews of 60 second generation South Asian men and women, using a life narrative approach. The findings of the study suggest that the phenomenon of selective acculturation places an added burden on South Asian women who are expected to achieve academic and career success while maintaining obedience and passivity in their family and personal life choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper speaks to the intriguing and the well-documented phenomenon in which the health of Mexican immigrants deteriorates with subsequent generations in the U.S., despite improvements in their socio-economic status. It examines the role that embeddedness in transnational networks might play in providing health-promoting resources to immigrant women and their descendants. In particular, it discusses preliminary findings on the transnational experiences of first- and second-generation Mexican women, based on qualitative in-depth interviews with residents of a predominantly Mexican neighborhood in a large midwestern city. In that regard, this paper (1) describes the types of transnational social interactions women engage in and the meaning these interactions have for them; (2) examines how transnational social interactions shape the construction of ethnic identities and provide cultural and social resources to immigrants and their descendants; and (3) discusses the ways these processes may affect the health of immigrants. In doing so, it contributes to the literatures on immigration and health as well as those on transnationalism and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foreign born population has resurged to numerical prominence in the U.S. For the first time since 1870, the first generation has even grown to outweigh the second generation. Sociological theory of immigration has not kept pace with this revival, instead placing disproportionate weight on the second generation. The paper identifies key biases that shaped the literature in the past, including a focus on acculturation as the sole meaning of assimilation and a focus on the end state of completed assimilation instead of the ongoing process. Also impacting the literature was a lack of data that forced resort to broad categorizations of generation, and the declining size of the first generation diverted attention to the second generation. The paper presents data covering a 150-year period to show the changing importance of the first generation. It then addresses the question of how much assimilation has occurred within the first or second generation, using nine different indicators that tap dimensions of acculturation, economic incorporation, and social integration. On most, save acculturation, the first generation demonstrates rapid assimilation, paving the way for improved well-being of their children, the second generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the historical role of the Catholic Church in integrating waves of immigrants in Canada, the United States and France in the 20th century. In my dissertation, I argue that examining how the Catholic Church responds to a particular conjuncture, such as large-scale immigration, can lead to new institutional forms within the Catholic Church that then disseminate into other areas of political and social life of civil society. This paper explores how, in the 20th century, the Catholic Church?s response to waves of immigrants led to different types of social, political and pastoral institutions in the United States, Canada and France. For each country I study, I examine how the National Catholic Bishops? Conferences have attempted to present guidelines about the issues immigration presents for the Catholic Church and for society as a whole. I also explore how the Catholic Church has set national guidelines for ministry to immigrants, and how these guidelines demonstrate particular views about how immigrant integration should take place. When migrating across national borders, an individual is required to change his citizenship. However, the Catholic Church is a universal institution, and so its members are automatically part of the church in the new place where they migrate. Although immigrants? membership in the Catholic Church cannot be questioned, how they exercise this membership is likely to differ after migrating. Are immigrants expected to assimilate, adopting the culture of the host society Catholics? How has ethnic plurality in the Catholic Church been conceptualized? How have policies been developed by the Catholic Church to implement concepts of assimilation or pluralism in its own institutions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the global labor market in international shipping and the differential incorporation of seafarers from the Philippines. Although globalized for over 600 years, and dependent on transnational labor for centuries, international merchant shipping has long been characterized by its intense racial divisions of labor. Today, it is a curious fact that nearly 30 percent of all workers at sea - some 300,000 seafarers - are from a single country: the Philippines. The paper first traces the forces that have funneled Filipinos into the bowels of so many ships yet have also prevented them from advancing into their commanding heights. It focuses specifically on the role of the Philippine state, and how, in its attempt to harness the resources of the Diaspora, has helped construct the Filipino seafarer as both pliant cheap labor and nationalist hero. Second, the analysis turns to seafarers themselves and how, as "suspended migrants" - away from home, but lacking a locally embedded workplace - they constitute their own identities within the transnational communities, hierarchies and spaces of the ocean-going ships. The paper engages critical theories of segmented labor markets, ethnic niches,immigrant identities, and data from two months of participant observation in the Philippines to present one of the first close studies of Filipino seafarers and their rise in international shipping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries ushered in a new stage in Cuba, stage which Fidel Castro himself called "a special period." In this period, we have witnessed the emergence of a civil society in Cuba -- independent institutions of professionals, attempts at restructuring the labor unions, independent media, several calls for a plebiscite to usher in elections, and a religious revival of all the churches. This new civil society is fragile, but nonetheless real. An important part of that newly emergent civil society is the role that a much stronger and vigorous Catholic church plays today in Cuba, role that was strengthened by the Pope's recent visit. At the same time, the '90s and the present have also been a period of massive emigration out of Cuba. The question that frames this paper, then, is what role the church plays today in this new, massive Cuban exodus -- whether it is a hindrance or a help to Cubans making the difficult decision to leave or stay in Cuba; and what role the church plays among those who never left Cuba as well as among those in exile. The data for this research come from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Cubans who left Cuba recently, as well as participant observation and field work in both Miami and Cuba. The paper shows that the church in Cuba has played multiple roles: providing spiritual sustenance, especially after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; helping Cubans in the island solve the myriad problems of every day living amidst a profound economic crisis; giving refuge to those who have become profoundly politically disaffected; challenging the communist state by insisting on the necessity for democracy in all societies; sustaining identity as Cubans return to the devotions of the past, though in the new context of crisis at present; promoting human rights and helping to build a democratic future by training young people to become the leaders of... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the questions of why people help others and how expectations for a personal return factor into decisions to help. Attempts to explain helping phenomenon are often construed as some type of altruism where the actor expects no return for her good will or as some type of reciprocal relationship where the actor receives back directly from the other or from someone along a "chain" of generalized exchanges. Using data I collected from a Haitian immigrant community, I analyze how actors' helping exchange networks are formed through cognitive processes of connecting what may otherwise appear to be unrelated instances of help given and help received. This is best captured in the oft-heard phrase "what goes around comes around." While other kinds of exchanges are certainly evident in this community, I focus my attention on how people make such cognitive connections between acts of goodwill and benefits received, and thus how people socially construct their own personal helping exchange networks. While this paper provides details unique to immigrants, and to Haitians in particular, I attempt to bring out elements that are generalizable to other populations as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which immigrants develop primary relations with members of the majority group has traditionally formed the keystone of classical assimilation theory. However, lack of data has led most empirical examination of this idea to rely on the study of patterns of spatial assimilation focusing on the foreign-born and not the later generations of immigrant groups. This paper compares the level of racial and ethnic homogeneity in strong ties between the foreign-born and native-born of two immigrant groups in Los Angeles County. It finds that the native-born of these groups have a significantly higher proportion of interethnic and interracial ties, but that these differences are largely confined to the native-born living outside ethnic enclaves and in wealthier areas. It further finds that for those of Mexican origin, the foreign-born have a higher proportion of strong ties with neighbors than with people living farther away. The paper discusses the implications for new theories of assimilation or incorporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common model of labor market incorporation among immigrants in the United States analyzes earnings as a function of standard human capital variables, such as age, education, language competence, and employment experience in the host society. Yet, whether this model is applicable in other countries, where immigrants encounter different labor market conditions, is unclear. Drawing on data from a comparative study of immigrant labor in the United States and Japan, this paper estimates multivariate models of wage determination among samples of foreign workers in San Diego County, United States and Hamamatsu, Japan. In addition to the usual human capital variables, our models also incorporate social capital variables. Social capital variables are rarely introduced in US wage determination arguments; however, such variables may contribute to earnings in the US and may also prove important abroad. Findings reveal important variations in the explanatory power of individual-level, human capital and group-level, social capital from one national context to the other. In San Diego, human capital variables have a greater effect on foreign workers' wages, while social capital variables do not. In contrast, social capital significantly increases workers' wages in Hamamatsu, while human capital does not. The paper draws on data from ethnographic studies in Japan and the US to suggest explanations for these divergent results. More generally, the paper illustrates the importance of a comparative framework that considers the context of reception (host societies) in determining labor market outcomes for immigrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the transnational, ethnic, and religious identities adopted by the children of former Soviet Jewish immigrants and refugees. For the children of immigrants who did not make the decision to uproot and transplant themselves, the question of identity is particularly vexing, with important consequences for their futures, as well as the host society?s. In this paper, I apply a micro-level analysis to the question of the evolving social identities and affiliations of 1.5 and second generation refugees based on in-depth interviews conducted in 2001 with five subjects in the Pacific Northwest. While the ?immigrant? identities of the second generation FSU Jews can be explained to a limited extent by the segmented assimilation model, further analysis of the subjective understandings of religious minority refugees who departed a complex and disintegrating multi-national system for a multicultural society that includes diverse co-ethnics raises new questions and suggests new conceptual insights. In this paper, I use the case of the FSU 1.5 and second generation to explore the concept of identity strategy, and its relation to the process of sorting out ethnic affiliations after ethnic un-mixing. The objective is to understand the ways these young people combine and deploy their own first-hand home-country memories, inherited home-county memories, a more official diasporic/co-ethnic narrative of collective destiny, with their everyday interactions in multicultural America both to construct affiliations and to create external boundaries between themselves and others. I suggest that identity strategies for the 1.5 and second generation are characterized by a multi-layered and evolving interconnectedness between ?foreigner? and ?co-ethnic,? with regard to the ways they mark boundaries among themselves, and between themselves, their parents, and members of other groups including American Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper attempts to establish a new theoretical framework to examine the assimilation process of immigrants based on subcultural analysis, which entails taking an approach using the dual dimensions of class and ethnicity. I propose an ideal type, the gModel Asian,h to focus attention on the issues posed for classical theories of either assimilation or exploitation by the existence of economically successful racial minorities. Combining the insights of Robert E. Park and Pierre Bourdieu, in the paper, I argue for a more subtle approach to ethnic assimilation by examining (1) the actorfs subjective interpretations, especially as regards perceptions of racism or discrimination, (2) the transformation of rigid class divisions and class/ethnic conflicts, and (3) increasing complexity in cultural makers of social status within the contemporary, globalizing context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the conditions under which states restored legal immigrants' rights to welfare, combining quantitative and qualitative evidence. We build on race-centered theories of welfare state development, but go beyond a black-white analysis. We argue that states' generosity towards legal immigrants depends on the relative political power of Latino and Asian immigrants. Consistent with our argument, our regression analysis indicates that states were more likely to restore legal immigrants' rights to welfare when foreign-born people, most of who were Asian or Latino, made up a larger share of the population. We also found that states were more likely to restore legal immigrants' welfare rights when they were already spending a larger portion of their state budget on welfare and per capita income was higher. Our paper also provides detailed case studies of the campaigns to restore legal immigrants' welfare rights in three states, all of which involved considerable coalition work among ethnic, welfare, and immigrant organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]