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After release from immigrant detainment centres in the United States, a select group of unaccompanied immigrant children enter a community-based programme known as 'post-release services' (PRS) because of an identified vulnerability. Despite the name, post-release services do not confer actual services – only a referral for them. We use an intersectional lens to examine the tension for service providers within PRS policy between the rights of the child and the stigma and increasing criminalisation of being undocumented. This paper is based on document analysis of all public federal documents on unaccompanied children, ethnographic fieldwork in four PRS serving sites in the US, and interviews with 20 unaccompanied children, 17 sponsors, and 13 employees of the government subcontracting agency. Drawing on these unique data sets, we consider how age and legal status intersect in shaping the implementation of services for unaccompanied children and subsequent outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1990, a temporary-to-permanent pathway was established for highly skilled workers admitted to the United States under non-immigrant programmes. This paper argues that this policy shift has allowed employers to play a crucial role in the immigration of highly skilled workers, thereby creating labour-market institutional selection that gives a salary advantage to highly skilled temporarily admitted workers retained in the US. Through analyses of the salary differentials among admission-category groups, the paper finds that the salary advantage is based on recruitment from Western countries, adjustment from temporary to permanent status after a second employer screening, working in the information technology sector and the private sector, holding a supervisory position, or having a skill-matched job, all of which are consequences of institutional selection rather than individual self-selection. The results also reveal a difference between those admitted from abroad and those recruited from graduating foreign students in US higher-education institutions, which suggests a distinction between overseas and domestic hiring. Policy implications for the US and other receiving countries are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to improve our understanding of migration–development links by comparing the Mexico–US and Morocco–EU cases. Despite significant differences, Mexico and Morocco share a common geopolitical location on the global South–North migration frontier and a common position as prime reserves of low-cost, low-skilled migrant labour for the US and the EU. The analysis highlights the large extent to which Mexican and Moroccan migration is determined by business cycles and political-economic and labour-market transformations in the US and the EU. Mexican and Moroccan migration patterns and trends show striking similarities. Persistent economic gaps and migrant networks partly explain why, despite recruitment freezes in Mexico (1964) and Morocco (1973) and increasing border controls, migration has endured through family and irregular migration and a diversification of migration origins and destinations. Simultaneously, economic liberalisation and labour-market transformations in origin and destination countries have increased supply and demand for casual and informal labour in the service sector, agriculture and construction. In spite of surging remittances and the considerable contributions of Mexican and Moroccan migrants to improved living standards in origin areas, migration cannot overcome structural development obstacles and deeply ingrained political and economic inequalities in Morocco and Mexico. In fact, migration may deepen such inequalities and deflect the attention away from states' failure to create favourable conditions for equitable development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 60 years, the United States has accepted some two million refugees for resettlement. Standard opinion polls suggest that the American response to these refugees has been mixed. Yet, despite much ambivalence about particular refugees and where they may belong in the grid of American social and cultural categories, the notion of refuge and the imperative toward support and welcome to refugees endure. As an extended example, this paper considers press treatment of refugees in Richmond, Virginia during the last quarter of the twentieth century—before security concerns and surging numbers of illegal immigrants irrevocably changed the nature of American immigration. Unlike the ambivalent response that emerges in national opinion polls and some other venues, in this case the construction of refugees is neither negative nor ambivalent, but is instead solidly positive. This positive construction extends across a broad range of racial and national-origin groups and is conditioned by a peculiarly American notion of how refugees relate to broader American categories, particularly that of 'immigrant'. In this local story from the United States lies a broader tale of how refugees are woven into the existing social and cultural categories of the countries in which they resettle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the strategy for controlling ‘unwanted’ immigration that has been implemented by the US government since 1993, and suggests explanations for the failure of that strategy to achieve its stated objectives thus far. Available evidence suggests that a strategy of immigration control that overwhelmingly emphasises border enforcement and short-changes interior (especially workplace) enforcement has caused illegal entries to be redistributed along the south-west border. The evidence also suggests that the financial cost of illegal entry has more than quadrupled; that undocumented migrants are staying longer in the United States; that migrant deaths resulting from clandestine border crossings have risen sharply; and that there has been a surge in anti-immigrant vigilante activity. Consequences predicted by advocates of the concentrated border enforcement strategy have not yet materialised: there is no evidence that unauthorised migration is being deterred at the point of origin; that would-be illegal entrants are being discouraged at the border after multiple apprehensions by the Border Patrol and returning home; that their employment prospects in the US have been curtailed; or that the resident population of undocumented immigrants is shrinking. It is argued that a severely constrained employer-sanctions enforcement effort that has left demand for unauthorised immigrant labour intact is the fundamental reason why steadily escalating spending on border enforcement during the last ten years has had such a weak deterrent effect. Reasons for the persistence of a failed immigration control policy are discussed, and alternatives to the current policy are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore how race, class, and migration influence Latino household wealth, and uncover important implications for the close 2016 US presidential election outcome in Florida. I follow over 11,000 homeowners in the Orlando area of Orange County, Florida from 2004 to 2016. To proxy for immigrant incorporation, I leverage matched voter registration records and direct observation of borrower identification – driver's license, green card/passport, or undocumented identification. Documented immigrants appear least vulnerable to foreclosure; multivariate analyses show that Latinos with undocumented identification are most vulnerable. Foreclosure and negative equity predict decreases in voter activity among Latino Democrats and Latino Independents, respectively, but not among Latino Republicans. I confirm this pattern at the precinct-level using data on all Orange County voters. Across Florida, county-level Latino foreclosures and lagging home prices correspond to a decline in the Democratic presidential vote from 2012 to 2016. My analysis reveals the mechanisms that erase Latino home equity and how the loss of wealth may have played a role in flipping Florida from a blue state to a red state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When discussing immigration on the campaign trail in 2016, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump used the term 'bad hombres' to criticise immigrants, and in particular Latino men. Using a novel dataset of images accompanying immigration news stories in three major news magazines from 2000–2010, we examine the extent to which press coverage helped set the stage for this sort of racialised and gendered association. We find overwhelming support for the 'bad hombres' hypothesis, demonstrating that in comparison to the true demographics of immigrants in the U.S., press portrayals significantly over-represent Latino men and under-represent all other immigrant groups. Our results are particularly important in light of research demonstrating that individuals' political attitudes are influenced by the perceived 'target group,' or beneficiary, of a given policy, as well as scholarship demonstrating the media's role in fostering a sense of 'Latino threat.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drivers can be understood as forces leading to the inception of migration and the perpetuation of movement. This article considers key drivers of migration and explores different ways that they may be configured. We modify existing explanations of migration to generate a framework which we call push-pull plus. To understand migration flows better, analysts could usefully distinguish between predisposing, proximate, precipitating and mediating drivers. Combinations of such drivers shape the conditions, circumstances and environment within which people choose to move or stay put, or have that decision thrust upon them. In any one migration flow, several driver complexes may interconnect to shape the eventual direction and nature of movement. The challenge is to establish when and why some drivers are more important than others, which combinations are more potent than others, and which are more susceptible to change through external intervention. Drawing on Afghan and Somali movements featuring 'mixed migration', the article concludes that proximate and mediating drivers, rather than those in the structural and precipitating spheres, appear to offer greater potential for intervention. To be effective, though, migration policy should be understood not simply as a stand-alone lever, but within the wider political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that a closer inspection of the historical trajectories and the evolving micropolitics of hometown associations (HTAs) expands our understanding of how community development is practised across borders. Drawing from six years of ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork carried out in the Dominican Republic and the United States, focusing on the experience of three Dominican HTAs, the evidence presented demonstrates how working dynamics and decision-making responsibilities between internal, international, and non-migrant HTA members shift over time, and identifies the organisational strategies employed to achieve transnational cooperation for community development. The ethnographic data also highlight and explain how communal legacies based on home country agrarian traditions laid the groundwork for future transnational development practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on the Indian diaspora domiciled in the U.S.A. largely portrays the group as educated, highly skilled migrants in pursuit of theirAmerican Dream, without critically engaging with the regionally particularised migration trajectories that predispose only certain groups to become skilled migrants from the global South to the North. Migration studies bracket skilled migrants as those who make rational choices and choose formal routes to migrate whereas unskilled migrants often rely on informal channels of kinship or ethnicity to migrate. Unsettling this proposition, in this article, based on an ethnographic study of the high-skilled Telugu professionals in the U.S.A. and their families living in Coastal Andhra, India, I show how aspirational and topographical migration pathways from Coastal Andhra to the U.S.A. are created and sustained through networks of kinship, caste and endogamous transnational marriage alliances. These high-skilled migrants (doctors, engineers and scientists) from the dominant castes have successfully manoeuvred spatial mobility and social upward mobility by utilising ‘caste capital’ within a transnational social field. Moreover, decades of migration from the dominant castes have shaped a caste-inflected transnational habitus among its members who see migration of their youth to the U.S.A. as desirable, and at times, also inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many immigrant-receiving countries have implemented increasingly restrictive policies that include tighter border controls, more temporary worker permits, an increased threat of deportation, and greater restrictions on the ability to acquire permanent residence and to petition for family members. Thus, family separation seems to be built into new immigration policies, and long-term and indefinite separations are not the exception. In this article, I examine the case of the largest Central American immigrant groups: Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans. Many of these immigrants are neither fully ‘undocumented’ nor ‘documented’, but often straddle both statuses as a result of having received a series of temporary permits over a period of more than a decade. This legal instability profoundly influences parenting across borders among these immigrants—both the relations between parents and children who are separated, and the links between these immigrant families and the different institutions in the host society. The experiences of Central Americans present a special opportunity to reflect on the effects of current immigration regimes on families separated across borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the immigration attitudes of those in societal and ethnic minority groups have been well documented, the attitudes of immigration activists on specific issues have seen little systematic study. This article reports the findings of surveys on US immigration and trade-liberalisation policy conducted with members of the civilian border-patrol Minuteman group, and border humanitarian groups such as Samaritans and No More Deaths. Previous surveys have found relatively high levels of support for the Minuteman effort in US border states. This study finds significant divergence on actual attitudes between such activists and non-activists, the majority of whom in both groups reside in Arizona, the border state with the highest reported traffic of unauthorised immigrants. Survey findings also suggest that the relationship between attitudes toward immigration and trade liberalisation is more complex than has been presumed. The specific provisions of liberalisation agreements, in particular those on labour and the environment, can play a major role in determining support for them, including support from those with strong attitudes on related issues such as immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominance of South Asians in the Dunkin' Donuts franchise industry in the American Midwest can be explained with reference to many of the classic theories of niche formation - the desire of immigrants for self-employment, contribution of family members, access to cheap labour and informal funding, and group solidarity. But its unique trajectory of rapid growth and success owes as much to the selective nature of US immigration policy. Its origins lie in the post-1965 immigration of skilled professionals who first bought into the business. It grew as a result of the legitimate use of the family reunification law which permitted the early immigrants to sponsor less-educated relatives and employ them in the business. However, the labour of unauthorised immigrants and continued chain migration of family members have contributed most significantly to the profitability of the businesses, and enabled South Asians to continue to dominate the field. The participation of South Asian women, as family members, wage labour and entrepreneurs, has been important to the success of the niche. However, the escalating cost of investment, high turnover, and new restrictive immigration policy after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 are factors that, paradoxically, both strengthen and threaten the niche. Those who are already owners and operators are the only ones who can afford to buy more stores, but the wages for the workers are so low that South Asian employees are constantly looking for a way out. The future of the niche thus depends on the continued favourable interplay of social, cultural, economic and political factors that spawned the niche in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern with the prospects and experience of the ‘new’ second generation now stands at the top of the immigration research agenda in the United States. In contrast to the past, many immigrant offspring appear to be rapidly heading upward, exemplified by the large number of Chinese, Korean, Indian and other Asian-origin students enrolled in the nation's leading universities, some the children of workers, others the descendants of immigrants who moved straight into the middle class. On the other hand, knowledgeable observers tell us that the offspring of today's poorly educated immigrants are likely to experience a very different fate. In their view, post-industrial America is an inhospitable place for low-skilled immigrants and their offspring, as the latter are likely not to be integrated into the mainstream but acculturated into the ways and lifestyles of their underclass neighbours. We advance an alternative perspective, not captured by these two opposing views: namely, that the children of recent immigrants will follow in the footsteps of the offspring of Italian or Polish labour migrants of the turn of the last century, gaining incorporation into working-class America. Using samples of the Current Population Survey (CPS), we evaluate these hypotheses, comparing job holding and job quality patterns among the descendants of immigrants and their native counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experience of Albanian political asylum-seekers in the United States in the broader context of shifting asylum law and procedures. A brief survey of Albanian immigration to the United States is followed by an examination of the long road to residence status. Issues discussed range from motivation to practical considerations of routes to the United States and the process of applying for political asylum; also included is a brief overview of the changes in the system in light of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The article concludes that the system for Albanians and others is overly litigious, occasionally flawed, often arbitrary and extremely expensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]