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During the early fourteenth century, perhaps thousands of migrants arrived atop the windswept landscape of Perry Mesa, in central Arizona. They built large massive room blocks strategically overlooking the access routes onto the mesa rim. A key to understanding the migration process is documenting the number of antecedent residents on the mesa and their settlement distribution. Different migration processes are implied if the mesa top was virtually vacant, moderately settled, or densely clustered immediately prior to the migrants’ arrival. Unfortunately, documenting the antecedent settlement pattern has been largely stymied by poor temporal control, which has left the antecedent remains largely invisible archaeologically. To fill the chronometric gap, Scott Wood (2014 Antecedents II: A Progress Report on the Origins of the Perry Mesa Settlement and Conflict Management System. Paper prepared for Fall 2012 Arizona Archaeological Council Conference; publication of proceedings pending) has recently described ceramic signatures for different time periods. In this paper, we test the validity and utility of Wood's Early Classic and Late Classic signatures. We then apply the dating refinements to better reconstruct the Perry Mesa migration process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the fit of the intersectionality framework for understanding transnational lives. The data for this paper is drawn from my research on South Asian migrants to America and their children, the 1.5 and 2nd generation. I focus on these highly educated migrants and their children and their efforts to maintain meaningful family ties and live religions in a context that spans the USA and selected South Asian countries. I use this data to assess whether the intersectionality approach is able to explain lives that span 'real' and 'virtual' social worlds. I show that the intersectionality approach needs to be deepened to capture simultaneous experiences of privilege and marginalisation across national and transnational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]