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Following China’s rise as an economic powerhouse, the country’s immigrant population has quickly increased and diversified, leading to an increase in romantic relationships between foreign and Chinese citizens. This article analyzes the racialization of belonging and citizenship of Chinese nationals born into Chinese-foreign families living in China. Drawing on data gathered through analyzing online debates and media reports, supplemented by interviews and fieldwork observations, the article investigates how discussions about the identity of vloggers, pop stars, and athletes of mixed Chinese-foreign descent shed light on rising Chinese racial nationalism at a time when China has become a destination for international migration and a new frontier for racial knowledge production. We argue that this process is characterized by a tension between China’s emergence as an immigrant society and the hardening boundaries of its national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rejoinder to the critical reviews of The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies by Janine Dahinden, Sara Wallace Goodman, Paul Statham, and Willem Schinkel. The Integration Nation lays out a manifesto for critical migration studies, that builds on a critique of the mainstream literature and its normative linear notions of immigration, integration and citizenship. Two readers see the argument and its conceptualization of the field as almost self evident, while two read it as a frustrating provocation that elicits a strong, critical reaction. The rejoinder responds to these reflections, and reiterates the book's goal of laying the foundations of a new political demography. Conventional thinking on international migration, minorities and diversity, it argues, sustains the colonial power of advanced liberal democracies in the North Atlantic West, built on vast global inequalities in citizenship status, and mechanisms of selection, extraction, exclusion and effacement of non-national populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaphors are a feature of public immigration discourse, with "undesirable" immigrants referred to as invasions, influxes, and floods both in the press and by politicians. Within Australia, such metaphors date back to the arrival of Chinese immigrants during the gold rushes (1850s), reoccurring with every large-scale arrival of non-white immigrants. Enacting racialized immigration restrictions was one of the foundational acts of the new Australian nation (1901), with whiteness enshrined as fundamental to national identity within the White Australia policy. Yet despite the abolition of the policy in the 1970s and the shift to multiculturalism, increasing non-white immigration has been accompanied by an intensification of negative immigration metaphors. I argue that this is because metaphors which construct racialized immigrant Otherness simultaneously flag ethnonationalist understandings about what it means to be Australian by implicitly centring (Anglo) whiteness as the defining feature of Australian national identity in a way no longer explicitly possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention has been devoted to the salience of nationalism in crisis times. At the micro-level, people often talk about the nation when they perceive established social norms as disrupted. Yet, the role of individual agency in reproducing nationalism in such contexts has been underexplored. Everyday nationalist practices are understood as following an unreflective adoption of nationalist ideology. This article challenges this perspective and proposes approaching nationalism as an "engaged ideology". This means attending also to people's active reflection on nationalist principles. A discussion of in-depth interviews from Russia provides an empirical illustration. I show how interviewees deliberate over the continuity and progress of the nation in making sense of uncertain times. The discussion highlights the interaction of ideology and agency in everyday nationalism. In doing so, it opens new avenues for exploring connections between nationalism and crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore identity formation among adolescents, using the first wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study in Norway (CILS-NOR). The results show that immigrant origin youth gradually adopt a stronger self-identity as Norwegians, regardless of regional origins and religious affiliation. However, while adolescents of European immigrant origin report that others see them as being even more "Norwegian" than they identify themselves, children of immigrants from Africa and Asia report that others see them as being far less "Norwegian" than how they identify themselves. Non-recognized national identity – the product of an asymmetrical relationship between self-identity and ascription – is most common among well-established minority groups, and we show that both ethno-racial origins and religious affiliation are major hurdles for acceptance. Ethnic identities associated with the parental homeland, which are closely related to religion, are more stable, and only very weakly related to the formation of a national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although immigration is the domain of the federal government, recently there has been a movement to introduce anti-refugee legislation in state legislatures across the country. In 2017 and 2018 there were 86 anti-refugee state-level bills introduced to limit refugee resettlement in the US. We examine public testimony from South Carolina's 2016 anti-refugee bill, S-997. Building upon the literature on racist nativism, we find those who sought to eliminate refugee resettlement reconstructed the meaning of a legal status, refugee, to be synonymous with Brown, Muslim, Terrorist, Third World, by presenting these population categories as unified in a legal status in opposition to the white, Christian, civilized, United States. We show how even those who supported refugees and refugee resettlement engaged in and supported the logic of white Christian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing parties' media representations in the context of France's 2010 legal ban of Islamic facial coverings and Québec's (rejected) Charter of Values in 2013, this paper foregrounds the neglected role that party competition plays in shaping the construction of nationhood in public debates around immigrant religious practices. Our findings show that in these debates, political parties aim to maintain their distinct identities by generating a particular universalism, in which purportedly "universal" values, such as gender equality, are imbricated with particularistic images of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis within which Brexit occurred with a specific attentiveness to race and racism. Brexit and its aftermath have been overdetermined by racism, including racist violence. We suggest that the Leave campaign secured its victory by bringing together two contradictory but inter-locking visions. The first comprises an imperial longing to restore Britain's place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist subjugation. The second takes the form of an insular, Powellite narrative of island retreat from a "globalizing" world, one that is no longer recognizably "British". Further, the article argues that an invisible driver of the Brexit vote and its racist aftermath has been a politicization of Englishness. We conclude by outlining some resources of hope that could potentially help to negotiate the current emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life stories of mobile individuals provide us with unique perspectives on the condition of modern societies. This article aims to establish the link between narrative accounts of mobility and the conceptual framework of migration studies. Drawing on autobiographical narrative interviews with 91 transnational individuals, this article presents three categories of mobility narratives, emphasizing the specific narrative form and socio-cultural discourse within which they are embedded. It is argued that the perception of power relations underpinning social experiences that can be observed in three distinct narrative archetypes: the story of the guest, trader and explorer. These empirically derived categories aim to systematize the conceptual framework for studies of individual agency and social relations in cross-border mobility contexts and contribute to the debate on methodological nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any notion of political belonging is highly contested. Ultimately though, the political body of a society is shaped by contestation of two modes of belonging: civic and communal. In Australia, the relationship between these two modes of belonging has been negotiated through political conflicts, not least in reference to immigration, since the early years of European settlement. This article traces the trajectory of these conflicts by analysing political memories, specifically those of Australia Day commemorations, to engage with the underlying tension that constitutes the country's political body. Engaging with the long-standing civic/ethnic debate, it is argued that the actual relationship between civic and ethnic/communal belonging, rather than any separate references to them, is crucial to the specific constitution of sovereign political bodies, their particular form of social and political conflicts, and the ensuing implementation of policies, not least regarding migration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the motivations for how and why national Tamil identity becomes so desirable for politically active Tamil parents in Norway. What leads them to socialize their children into an embodied understanding of what it means to be Tamil – closely related to the Tamil Tiger discourse and practice? The article discusses how private practices of relatedness become technologies of nationhood, and vice versa. I argue that in their transnational lives, the children's Tamil identity offers a way for the politically active parents to ease nostalgia for their own childhoods and a way to create a meaningful life for themselves and their children in a transnational context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although it has been highlighted by several authors that the notion of diaspora has become a politicized identity discourse, little is known about how it becomes a banal part of migrants’ everyday lives. Based on a theoretical understanding of banality, the article focuses on the interaction of the banal and the non-banal within this context of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghanaian independence in Berlin in 2007. It is argued that diasporic nationalist rituals are spaces of intersection between politicized and banal spheres of social life. By enacting and institutionalizing particular forms of interaction that are ‘banalizing’ dissent and conflict among migrants the examined series of public rituals contributed to give life-worldly relevance to the otherwise questionable and contested identity category of diaspora. In this sense, the primary product was not group formation but the banalization of diasporic nationalism as a category of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last decade or so, the comparative study of nationalism has produced a large number of cogent critiques of classifying nations according to how ethnic or civic they are. In fact, these critiques have been so convincing that many scholars today seem to agree that any mention of the words ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ is unwarranted. This is unfortunate, because the distinction still offers a useful heuristic device to compare and classify different nation-building practices. This article analyses naturalization policies in twenty-six Western immigrant-receiving democracies in order to show that the distinction constitutes a valuable analytical tool to explore how different countries deal with newcomers. The naturalization policy index developed in this article proves to have a high degree of face validity, to be a good predictor of actual naturalization practices, and to match up well with previous classifications of ethnic and civic nation-building practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I address the impact of neoliberalism and the attendant techniques of financialization on multiculturalism in Canada through ethnographic research at a non-profit, multicultural heritage institution. I consider how the workers at this non-profit maintained their solidaristic, pre-neoliberal conception of multiculturalism even as they experimented with a sociality dominated by market exchange. Even as worker subjectivity was transformed at the institution by dramatic budget cuts and the necessity for project-based contracts, ‘volunteerism’, entrepreneurialism, and flexibility, neoliberal discourse also opened new imaginative possibilities for the MHSO. Through extensive community networks the organization has been able to survive, if precariously, without dramatic changes to its pre-neoliberal programming which asserts a social democratic, pluralist ethos. Therefore, I argue in this article that we need to attend to the limits of neoliberal effects on the situated and historically distinctive way multiculturalism has been put into practice around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the nationalization of foreigners in Los Angeles, California in the twenty-first century. The author discusses the meaning of "Americanization," and asserts that foreigners in the U.S. clearly undergo a transformation into Americans, so far as to support the bounding of their new national identity and community, to the extent that they feel future immigration should be controlled. Topics of discussion include the immigrants' views on language policies, immigration regulation, cultural plurism, and nationalism.

The most significant event in the politics of immigration in the Republic of Ireland has been the 2004 Referendum that removed 'jus soli' constitutional rights to citizenship from Irish born children of immigrants. Constitutional definitions of Irishness narrowed at a time when the composition of Irish society had broadened significantly through immigration. The Referendum coincided with restrictions on welfare rights and entitlements upon migrants from the new EU member states. Irish citizens voted overwhelmingly in favour of government proposals for 'commonsense citizenship' aimed at removing 'loopholes' in the Constitution and the Good Friday Agreement which defined all those born on the island of Ireland as Irish. An asylum 'crisis' had become politicised in the late 1990s but by 2004 asylum seekers had become a very small proportion of overall immigration. The Referendum institutionalized a populist distinction repeatedly drawn by Irish politicians and media between nationals and non-nationals. At the same time racialised hostility towards asylum seekers and their Irish born children was mobilised in support of the Referendum. A government campaign in support of the Referendum emerged alongside ones by immigrant organizations aimed at promoting political responsiveness to immigrant voters and the inclusion of immigrants in Irish political parties. The Referendum coincided with the 2004 local government elections and campaigns by immigrant organisations to promote political responsiveness to immigrant non-citizens (including asylum seekers) entitled to vote in local government elections. This article draws upon a study of Irish political parties which identified an institutional inability among these to engage with immigrant communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational mobility became one of the more important processes in recent years in Poland. This has led to the intensification of intercultural contacts and, in consequence, to intermarriages. It is difficult to assess how widespread this phenomenon was in the communist days but it was certainly quite marginal. Assumedly, intercultural contacts and transnational marriages will grow in number with the deepening of European integration and the increase in the scale of international migration. My hypothesis that bi-national persons treat their social and cultural duality as the source of social and cultural capital was confirmed only partially. More often bi-national and bi-cultural origin are a difficult burden, a stigma rather than a social capital in the individual's life or within his/her social perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The controversial notion of "transnationalism" has generated new insights into international migrants' on-going ties with their communities of origin, but its problematic conceptualization and vague usage in empirical studies needlessly inhibit the transnational perspective's utility. Understanding the political and economic incorporation of migrants in both their communities of origin and destination is facilitated by disaggregating the types of political borders, types of nationalism, and levels of identification that have been conflated in the framework of "transnationalism". I demonstrate the analytic value of these distinctions by using them to interpret evidence from a six-month ethnographic case study of an immigrant labour union in Southern California. A theoretically coherent typology applicable to both the case study and other migration settings provides a framework for explaining how institutions assimilate migrants into U.S. and local politics while simultaneously promoting cross-border ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Kohn's definition of a more "liberal, civic Western" and "illiberal, ethnic Eastern" nationalism has been highly influential in providing a framework for our understanding of different types of nationalism. This article challenges the Kohn framework as idealized and argues that it did not reflect historical reality and is out of step with contemporary theories of nationalism. Its continued use also ignores the evolution from communist to civic states that has taken place in central-eastern Europe during the 1990s. The assumption that Western nation-states were always "civic" from their inception in the late eighteenth century is criticized and a different framework is proposed that sees Western states as only having become civic recently. In times of crisis (immigration, foreign wars, domestic secessionism, terrorism), the civic element of the state may continue to be overshadowed by ethnic particularist factors. The proportional composition of a country's ethnic particularism and civic universalism has always been in tension and dependent not on geography but on two factors: the historic stage of the evolution from ethnic to civic state and nationhood and the depth of democratic consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elastic, adaptable and vibrant, minorities often stretch across state borders in ways traditional concepts of states and nations fail to acknowledge, let alone theorize. The discourse of transnationalism helps to dislodge the study of minorities from the analytical straight-jacket of the state. The concept of 'trapped minority', developed herein from an analysis of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, adds to this debate. A trapped minority is a segment of a larger group spread across at least two states. Citizens of a state hegemonized by others, its members are alienated from political power. Unable to influence the definition of public goods or enjoy them, its members are at the same time marginal within their mother nation abroad. My use of the concept of 'trapped minority' offers a critique of Smooha's rationalized concept 'ethnic democracy' (1990) and of Yiftachel's ethno-regionalism (1999a, after Hechter and Levi 1979), a critique that helps to re-frame and critique the Oslo-Wye process of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation and is relevant to similar situations elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the preliminary results of an ongoing research project on US-bound Colombian migration from the cities of Cali and Pereira. The project identified a dense web of economic, political, and socio-cultural transnational relations connecting migrants and their places of origin. These relations are heterogeneous and differentiated; what some scholars refer to as transnational communities are, in fact, fragmented by class, regionalism, ethnic cleavages and dominant stereotypes of Colombians as drug traffickers. We observed a complex transnational field of action, but not the formation of a transnational community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As have a growing number of political leaders of emigrant-sending countries, Haitian government officials and immigrant leaders have envisioned Haiti as a transnational nation-state. This article explores the ways in which the vision of Haiti as a transnational nation builds upon the experiences, needs and aspirations of both persons living in Haiti and those who have settled in the United States. Using a concept of 'transnational social field', we examine how family obligations and the experiences of immigration are understood through a language of blood and descent that links individuals to broader concepts of a transnational homeland. Rather than celebrating transnational connections, this essay concludes by warning that the ideologies which undergird 'long distance nationalism' are problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the many challenges facing the new South Africa is the need to build a national identity and community distinct from the racial, ethnic and cultural cleavages of its apartheid past. This analysis examines the contemporary nation-building project with a specific focus on immigration. Since the first all-race elections in April 1994, South Africa has reportedly experienced a massive influx of illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries. In the absence of a racialized `other', these immigrants have become scapegoats for the country's current social, economic and political ills. At the same time, immigrants and immigration provide content for the discursive construction of the country's national identity. as politicians, the media, government officials and disgruntled citizens define who is properly `South African', by focusing on, or identifying, who is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a comparative study of the racialization of migrant labour. Taking the USA 1990-1925 and Britain 1948-1962 as studies, we can-studies, we examine the role of the state in constructing migration in 'race' terms and shaping the conditions under which certain categories of migrant workers participate in the Labour market. We focus on debates over immigration and citizenship policy because these are key moments in the 'race making' process and the construction of national identities. Through an investigation of government discourses surrounding restrictive legislation in both countries, we argue firstly, that notions of `race' nation and national identity are political constructs that require constant policing and refurbishment. Secondly, we contend that the state plays a key role in the racialization of population through immigration and nationality controls. Thirdly, the racialized nature of immigrants in regulation both structures the way in which migrants are situated within the labour market and valorizes notions of `race' difference. Despite significant differences in the way in which these processes developed in the USA and Britain, comparative analysts points to important similarities in both social formations the reconstitution of national identities was articulated through concepts of `race', in which colour remained a key signifiers of difference. Through immigration and nationality laws, governments ranked human populations into hierarchies of assimilability, in which some groups were regarded more likely to `fit in' than others. Once racialized in this way, migrant workers found themselves allocated to particular areas of the labour market and confined to particular positions within the labour process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a historical and comparative analysis of post-imperial migrations of ethnic unmixing. It examines the post-Soviet migration of ethnic Russians to Russia in the light of the migrations of other once-dominant 'new minorities' engendered by transitions from multinational empire to incipient nation-states: Balkan Muslims during and after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, Hungarians after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and Germans after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the German Kaiserreich. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on citizenship and the nation-state in France. Today's debate about citizenship in France has emerged from the discussion on immigration in the 1980s. Citizenship has traditionally been linked to nationality in France, recent moves to forge a new citizenship, including not only French nationals but all those established in France have therefore demanded a dissociation of citizenship rights from nationality. This demand is part of a wider reappraisal of the entitlement to rights in France. The institutional structures distinguishing nationals from foreigners established largely in the second half of the nineteenth century during intense industrialization, colonial expansion and the construction of French national identity are still important determinants of inequalities in France today. New social movements that ignore these structural/ideological practices, traversing the state and civil society, tend to idealize the space of resistance to inequality and exclusion. It is only by reappraising historical construction of exclusions in the national state that a new concept of citizenship will be able to emerge.

The article documents the evolution of the debate in French politics during the 1980s about the issue of immigration. Increasing centrality of immigration as an issue in French political life led decision-makers to insist on the symbolic dimension of legislation and on the enunciative effect of measures adopted. It identifies a number of distinct periods, and describes for each of them the influential events, the parameters of the political debate and the content of the main legislation enacted. Additionally, it is demonstrated how the debate over immigration has evolved into a debate about the nature and obligations of French citizenship in a context where young Franco-Maghrebis have become autonomous and influential political actors. The presence of long-term residents of immigrant origin has provoked new political claims, as a result, the debate within French society has focused on questions such as the definition of the social contract and plural citizenship, following from the political demands of a second generation of bi-national Franco-Maghrebis. The second generation has rooted its activities in local associations and has raised problems such as the negotiation of collective identities and the dissociation of nationality, citizenship and local voting rights. Thus, two centuries after the French Revolution, there is a new debate in France about different definitions of citizenship.

The history of Malay nationalism traces a path from secular issues before World War II to religious issues in the post-independence period. Before the war, Malay nationalists were concerned with the encroachment upon their freedom by British colonialists and non-Malay immigrants. The establishment of Malay political power after the war effected important economic changes, creating new class-divisions in Malay society. These divisions provide a basis for the rise of Malay religious nationalism. Reactions of the non-Malay population to these changes were expressed as non-Muslim religious revivalisms. The role of the state in regulating religious movements through a process of ethnic rationalization cannot be understated. The recent proliferation of writings on nationalism suggests a continuing interest in a phenomenon that defies its predicted demise by theorists of modernization. The aim of this article is to analyze the interaction of the state, religion and nationalism in Malaysia.