The nine essays in Asian North American Identities explore how Asian
North Americans are no longer caught between worlds of the old and the new, the east
and the west, and the south and the north. ...Moving beyond national and diasporic
models of ethnic identity to focus on the individual feelings and experiences of
those who are not part of a dominant white majority, the essays collected here draw
from a wide range of sources, including novels, art, photography, poetry, cinema,
theatre, and popular culture. The book illustrates how Asian North Americans are
developing new ways of seeing and thinking about themselves by eluding imposed
identities and creating spaces that offer alternative sites from which to speak and
imagine. Contributors are Jeanne Yu-Mei Chiu, Patricia Chu, Rocio
G. Davis, Donald C. Goellnicht, Karlyn Koh, Josephine Lee, Leilani Nishime, Caroline
Rody, Jeffrey J. Santa Ana, Malini Johar Schueller, and Eleanor Ty.
The Good Immigrants Hsu, Madeline Y
2015, 2015., 20150427, Volume:
127
eBook
Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast,The Good Immigrantsconsiders immigration from ...the perspective of Chinese elites-intellectuals, businessmen, and students-who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness.
The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act.
Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei,The Good Immigrantsexamines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.
Explanations of naturalization and jus soli citizenship have relied on cultural, convergence, racialization, or capture theories, and they tend to be strongly affected by the literature on ...immigration. This study of naturalization breaks with the usual immigration theories and proposes an approach over centuries and decades toward explaining naturalization rates. First, it provides consistent evidence to support the long-term existence of colonizer, settler, non-colonizer, and Nordic nationality regime types that frame naturalization over centuries. Second it shows how left and green parties, along with an index of nationality laws, explain the lion's share of variation in naturalization rates. The text makes these theoretical claims believable by using the most extensive data set to date on naturalization rates that include jus soli births. It analyzes this data with a combination of carefully designed case studies comparing two to four countries within and between regime types.
The immigration patterns of the last three decades have profoundly changed nearly every aspect of life in the United States. What do those changes mean for the most established Americans-those whose ...families have been in the country for multiple generations?The Other Side of Assimilationshows that assimilation is not a one-way street. Jiménez explains how established Americans undergo their own assimilation in response to profound immigration-driven ethnic, racial, political, economic, and cultural shifts. Drawing on interviews with a race and class spectrum of established Americans in three different Silicon Valley cities,The Other Side of Assimilationilluminates how established Americans make sense of their experiences in immigrant-rich environments, in work, school, public interactions, romantic life, and leisure activities. With lucid prose, Jiménez reveals how immigration not only changes the American cityscape but also reshapes the United States by altering the outlooks and identities of its most established citizens.
With its emphasis on early modern emissaries and their role in England's expansionary ventures and cross-cultural encounters across the globe, this collection of essays takes the messenger figure as ...a focal point for the discussion of transnational exchange and intercourse in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It sees the emissary as embodying the processes of representation and communication within the world of the text, itself an 'emissary' that strives to communicate and re-present certain perceptions of the 'real.'
Drawing attention to the limits and licenses of communication, the emissary is a reminder of the alien quality of foreign language and the symbolic power of performative gestures and rituals.
Contributions to this collection examine different kinds of cross-cultural activities (e.g. diplomacy, trade, translation, espionage, missionary endeavors) in different world areas (e.g. Asia, the Mediterranean, the Levant, the New World) via different critical methods and approaches.
They take up the literary and cultural productions and representations of ambassadors, factors, traders, translators, spies, middlemen, merchants, missionaries, and other agents, who served as complex conduits for the global transport of goods, religious ideologies, and socio-cultural practices throughout the early modern period.
Authors in the collection investigate the multiple ways in which the emissary became enmeshed in emerging discourses of racial, religious, gender, and class differences.
They consider how the emissary's role might have contributed to an idealized progressive vision of a borderless world or, conversely, permeated and dissolved borders and boundaries between peoples only to further specific group interests.
Anti-immigrant sentiment reached a fever pitch after 9/11, but its origins go back much further. Public rhetoric aimed at exposing a so-called invasion of Latino immigrants has been gaining ground ...for more than three decades-and fueling increasingly restrictive federal immigration policy. Accompanied by a flagging U.S. economy-record-level joblessness, bankruptcy, and income inequality-as well as waning consumer confidence, these conditions signaled one of the most hostile environments for immigrants in recent memory. In Brokered Boundaries, Douglas Massey and Magaly Sanchez untangle the complex political, social, and economic conditions underlying the rise of xenophobia in U.S. society. The book draws on in-depth interviews with Latin American immigrants in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia and-in their own words and images-reveals what life is like for immigrants attempting to integrate in anti-immigrant times. What do the social categories "Latino" and "American" actually mean to today's immigrants? Brokered Boundaries analyzes how first- and second-generation immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean navigate these categories and their associated meanings as they make their way through U.S. society. The authors make clear that today's Latino immigrants are brokering boundaries in the context of unprecedented economic uncertainty, repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and a heightening fear that upward mobility for immigrants translates into downward mobility for the native-born. Despite an absolute decline in Latino immigration, immigration-related statutes have tripled in recent years, including many that further shred the safety net for legal permanent residents as well as the undocumented. Adapted from the source document.
Japan is currently the only advanced industrial democracy with a fourth-generation immigrant problem. As other industrialized countries face the challenges of incorporating post-war immigrants, Japan ...continues to struggle with the incorporation of pre-war immigrants and their descendants. Whereas others have focused on international norms, domestic institutions, and recent immigration, this book argues that contemporary immigration and citizenship politics in Japan reflect the strategic interaction between state efforts to control immigration and grassroots movements by multi-generational Korean resident activists to gain rights and recognition specifically as permanently settled foreign residents of Japan. Based on in-depth interviews and fieldwork conducted in Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Osaka, this book aims to further our understanding of democratic inclusion in Japan by analyzing how those who are formally excluded from the political process voice their interests and what factors contribute to the effective representation of those interests in public debate and policy.
Immigrant integration in federal countries Joppke, Christian; Seidle, F. Leslie
Immigrant integration in federal countries,
c2012, 20120601, 2014, 2012, 20120101, Volume:
2., 2
eBook
Immigrant integration has become a prominent issue in contemporary political debates and public policy analysis. The objective of facilitating newcomers' participation in the economic, social, and ...political life of receiving societies presents particular challenges in federal countries. The multidimensional nature of immigrant integration means that policies and programs often become issues of multilevel governance. In federations with one or more national minorities, newcomers can alter the linguistic balance and affect subnational communities' efforts to obtain greater autonomy. This volume analyzes immigrant integration policies and the implications for governance in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. Leading experts review recent developments in their respective countries and current public policies and programs in three categories: selection/admission, economic and social integration, and civic and political integration (including naturalization). These analyses show that the integration of immigrants is an ongoing process that extends beyond the initial years of settlement in a new country, involving the actions of different governments, non-governmental organizations and others. By examining a range of policy and governance issues from the perspective of federalism, this volume fills a gap in the literature on immigrant integration. It will interest not only academics and researchers but also political representatives and public servants concerned with these important topics.
