Do Perceptions Match Reality? Comparing Latinos’ Perceived Views of State Immigration Policy Environments with Enacted Policies

This paper explores assumptions made and measurement approaches in the nuanced pathway between enacted state immigration policies and the outcomes they affect in Latino immigrant communities. Scholars across a variety of fields have found that contemporary state immigrant policymaking is associated with outcomes in immigrant communities including political engagement, mental and physical health, access to education, and labor opportunities. In this paper, we explore questions of how state immigration policies produce these and other outcomes. Much of this literature relies on the assumption that members of the immigrant communities are aware of the state policies being enacted, yet few quantitative studies of the effects of state immigration policy contain measures of both policy and of perception. We seek to determine the extent to which Latino immigrants are aware of state immigrant policymaking to help determine whether state immigration policies are a valid approach to measure perceptions of the immigration policy environment in Latino immigrant communities. Additionally, we explore alternative measures of immigration policy. Our findings are particularly relevant to policymakers and immigration scholars as the contemporary political environment has helped to fuel anti‐immigrant sentiments and rhetoric contributing to Latinos’ perceptions of the state immigrant policy environment.     

Minority nations and attitudes towards immigration: the case of Quebec

Growing international migration constitutes a tremendous challenge for contemporary democracies, no more so than for minority nations. An important challenge for the latter is one of acceptance of immigration from the native‐born population, in a context in which immigrant can be seen as both a cultural and a political threat. In this article we ask what explains attitudes towards immigration in minority nations. More specifically, we seek to provide answers to these questions: What is the impact of cultural insecurity on attitudes towards immigration in minority nations? Is strong attachment to a minority nation associated with less positive attitudes towards immigration? And finally, are proponents of independence for minority nations more likely to favour a reduction in the level of immigration than those who oppose it? The article seeks to answer these questions by exploring the case of Quebec.     

From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860–75

The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845–50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.     

Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment and the Adoption of State Immigration Policy

Over the last two decades, the American states have become increasingly active in shaping U.S. immigration policies. One consistent predictor in studies of state immigration policies revolves around public opinion or mass political attitudes in the form of anti‐immigrant sentiment. Unfortunately, past research relies extensively on blunt demographic proxies or other alternative replacements to measure mass opinion. Through incorporating a direct measure of anti‐immigrant sentiment constructed from public opinion surveys, we uncover mixed results. In static models, anti‐immigrant sentiment predicts a state’s overall immigration policy restrictiveness or policy “tone”; however, mass opinion fails to consistently predict immigration restrictiveness in more dynamic models of annual policy change and total number of hostile policies. We theorize that state legislators are likely responding to mass opinion with immigration policy restrictiveness when citizens mobilize and demand accountability during times of heightened issue salience. However, during times of reduced salience among the populace the influence of anti‐immigrant sentiment wanes, and commercial and political elites are seemingly able to shift individual immigration policies in more accommodative directions. Anti‐immigrant sentiment can motivate state immigration policy restriction, but likely only during select periods of heightened issue salience and attentive, engaged citizenry.     

Jobs,crime, proximity and boats: explaining Australian public attitudes to immigrant numbers

Despite the importance of immigration to Australia, there is little systematic research on the causes of support among Australian citizens for increased, stable or decreased immigration. This paper advances our understanding of Australian public attitudes to immigration levels in the light of the established international literature on public opinion and immigration. Using 2013 Australian Electoral Study (AES) data, we show that, as in other countries, Australian citizens’ attitudes to immigrant numbers are partly driven by a combination of sociotropic economic considerations and perceptions of the socio-cultural impact of immigrants. In addition, we argue that political mobilisation has an impact on attitudes toward immigration that has not received sufficient attention. We demonstrate that citizens who accepted the Coalition's rhetoric on asylum seeker arrivals were more likely to want overall immigrant numbers reduced. Finally, we combine the individual level AES data with electoral district level data to test the impact of contact with immigrants on attitudes to immigrant numbers. Australians living in electoral districts with higher percentages of non-white immigrants are more likely to want lower immigrant numbers than those living in districts with fewer non-white immigrants.     

The Artless Art: Leadership and the Limits of Democratic Rhetoric

Persuasion is vital to the practice of democratic leadership, making speech and communication of fundamental importance. Yet, democratic citizens habitually suspect political rhetoric as being either deceitfully empty or dangerously subversive. Rhetoric is thus central in democracy while paradoxically appearing either useless or pernicious. A consequence of this paradox for democratic leaders is that they are forced to avoid fine oratory in favour of a rhetorical style that sounds un-rhetorical, seeming to be plain factually-informative speech. This unique democratic form of rhetoric, which we have called an artless art, seeks to instil trust and to avoid appearing to talk down to the sovereign people. It is both helped and rendered problematic by the media, the essential communicative means in modern society, whose current dominance presents ever-new challenges and opportunities to democratic leaders.     

The geography and economic sociology of recent immigration to Italy

This article provides an overview of the geography and economic sociology of recent immigration to Italy. Its main purpose is to offer a contextual framework for the mainly place‐ and nationality‐specific studies which follow and make up the main contributions to this special issue of the journal. Throughout our account, stress is laid on the regional diversity of the immigrant experience within Italy, and on the diversity of migratory types and nationalities which have entered the country over the last twenty‐thirty years. In the final part of the article we make a brief analysis of the Italian political response to the country's relatively new status as a receiver of large‐scale immigration.     

Cougar figures,gender, and the performances of predation

This article considers how nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of gendered identities. Specifically, I interrogate two gendered figures with which I was repeatedly confronted over the course of researching cougar–human relationships on Vancouver Island, home to what is estimated to be North America's densest population of cougars. The first figure, Cougar Annie, was a woman ‘settler’ on western Vancouver Island, reputed to have killed over 100 cougars in her lifetime and now celebrated as a strong, independent female. The second figure is a contemporary trope, an older woman who expresses interest in younger men, known in slang speech as a ‘cougar’. Both figures are intimately bound to a third figure, the animal cougar, Puma concolor, whose material–semiotic relationship to humans both performs and is performed by ‘cougars’ and Cougar Annie. Haraway's conception of figures as embodied and performative mappings of power is central to this article's discussion, which lies at the intersection of animal studies, more-than-human geographies, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Methodologically, I draw on interviews and archival research to trace the historical and contemporary specificities of these two figures – Cougar Annie and ‘cougars’ – revealing how they are informed by, and simultaneously produce, uphold, and perform, gendered understandings of the relationship between humans and cougars, predator and prey, humans and animals, and culture and nature.     

A Land and a People of Extremes – Ireland and the Irish in German Cinema

Irish film history has often been seen as a pragmatic “creative bricolage” that draws almost exclusively on images of Ireland and Irishness that have emanated from the cinema industries of the USA and the United Kingdom. Yet, Ireland has also featured in the film industries of other non-Anglophone countries and the images produced in these contexts also represent an element within the vast and extensive archive of Irish filmic images. This article writes the first chapter in the expansion of Irish film history by examining the depiction of Ireland and Irishness in German film. Ireland and the Irish, not unlike the Anglo-American gaze, are depicted as a people and a land of extremes marked by an intensity of emotion, nationalism, Catholicism and alcohol, while extremes of poverty and wild untameable landscapes also feature prominently.     

Latino immigrants and the renegotiation of place and belonging in small town America

This article compares the politics of place and belonging within two non-metropolitan communities—Woodburn, Oregon, and Leadville, Colorado—that have witnessed a significant increase in Latino immigration during the last fifteen to twenty years. Today both communities are approximately 50 per cent Latino, a demographic change that has reworked understandings of place identity and social belonging in each. Through a comparison of the two towns we seek to chart the unique regional political economic dynamics driving these changes, examine their spatial imprint, and interrogate how local context shapes the extent to which new arrivals are able to make effective claims to a sense of place and belonging despite hierarchies of race, class and ‘illegality.’ Assessing the differences between these two immigrant destinations provides insights into how sociospatial relations are crucial to analyzing immigrant–receiving society interaction, and contributes to scholarship on the uneven geography of immigrant incorporation in the contemporary USA.     

Immigration,the Celtic Tiger and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article addresses the puzzle of why Ireland has proved so open to immigration. It compares responses to immigrants in the Republic of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era and during the post-2008 economic crisis and finds no evidence of a political backlash during the latter period even though opinion polls suggest that opposition to immigration had increased and other evidence suggested that there had been an increase in racist incidents within Irish society. Nor did the resumption of large-scale emigration trigger political hostility to immigrants. The outcome of the 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which removed a constitutional right to Irish citizenship to the Irish-born children of immigrants, suggested that that nationalism still matters hugely and a latent tendency towards ethnic chauvinism amongst the host population. Yet, a decade after the 2004 Referendum it looked as if the old mono-ethnic sense conception of the Irish nation had been disrupted, at least a little bit.     

Bringing Back the (B)order: Post‐9/11 Politics of Immigration,Borders, and Belonging in the Contemporary US South

Abstract: Post 9/11, debates about borders, immigration, and belonging have reached a new intensity in the US South. The temporal overlap of growing immigration to the South since the late 1990s and growing nativist sentiment across the US since 9/11 has led southern communities to fuse new regional racial demographics to new national border anxieties. This convergence enables southern political elites to address the changing contours of local communities through recourse to national imperatives of border security, all the while avoiding an explicit language of race in a thoroughly racialized debate. In an analysis of recent political maneuvers in the South, this article examines what happens when debates about nation, community, and borders are relocated to southern spaces heretofore absent in discussions of immigration. It argues that legislative actions against immigrant populations in southern states are virulent and multi‐scalar border policings in which concerns about the social and cultural boundaries of southern communities, new racial projects across the South, and post‐9/11 immigrant anxieties across the US become inseparable. To conclude, it discusses the theoretical insight that this critical assessment of the South's new border projects offers vis‐à‐vis understandings of, and struggles against, exclusion, racism, and social injustice.     

The Role of Public Opinion in US and Canadian Immigration Policies

Considering that the United States and Canada are neighboring North American countries with fairly similar liberal democratic political cultures, their immigration policies are noticeably different. While US policies prioritize family reunification, Canadian policies favor labor demands and employability. This difference reflects the varying degrees to which the public influences their respective immigration policies. Examining contemporary immigration policies of the United States and Canada, this paper compares the role of public opinion in each, and argues that public opinion plays a more prominent role in immigration policies in the United States than it does in Canada. This observation is due in part to the partisan nature of the US political structure and to the cohesiveness among immigrants, particularly Latinos. Canada, in contrast, favors a policy of multiculturalism that empowers immigrant groups and limits individual groups’ capacity and inclination to dominate policy decisions.     

The Politics of Welfare Exclusion: Immigration and Disparity in Medicaid Coverage

The rapid growth of the immigrant population in the United States, along with changes in the demographics and the political landscape, has often raised questions for understanding trends of inequality. Important issues that have received little scholarly attention thus far are excluding immigrants’ social rights through decisive policy choices and the distributive consequences of such exclusive policies. In this article, we examine how immigration and state policies on immigrants’ access to safety net programs together influence social inequality in the context of health care. We analyze the combined effect of immigration population density and state immigrant Medicaid eligibility rules on the gap of Medicaid coverage rates between native‐ and foreign‐born populations. When tracking inequality in Medicaid coverage and critical policy changes in the post‐PRWORA era, we find that exclusive state policies widen the native‐foreign Medicaid coverage gap. Moreover, the effect of state policies is conditional on the size of the immigrant population in that state. Our findings suggest immigrants’ formal integration into the welfare system is crucial for understanding social inequality in the U.S. states.     

4. TECHNOPOLITICS IN THE ARCHIVE: SOVEREIGNTY,RESEARCH, AND EVERYDAY LIFE

This article explores the place of the archive in the context of land claims research. This essay develops a critical approach to identity technopolitics with the aim of helping historians working with indigenous communities to ask new kinds of questions about the relationships and subject positions opened up by archivization and the myriad other technologies of land claims research. Since researchers first began preparing for the Canadian case, Delgamuukw’ and Gisday'wa v. The Queen, four decades ago, the immense stores of documentary evidence generated for the trial have given ground to numerous new claims and conflicts. Tracing the experiences of one prominent Gitxsan historical researcher who has leveraged his own archive and expertise to build genealogies for hundreds of individuals, I explore the intimate disappointments and impossible obligations that indigenous historians must mediate.     

Placing immigrant identities

In this afterword to our special issue on immigrant identity and place, we explore the importance of place and context in forming immigrant identity, as well as the various ways in which immigrants make places. Discussions of immigrant adaptations often just consider reception at the national scale, whereas immigrants move into particular cities and towns. This article details some of the different ways that immigrants interact with their places, how the process of immigration introduces hybrid identities, and the differences in the immigrant experience by gender, status, and color.     

Secularization of immigration policy vs. religion's influence on integration: Israel's non‐Jewish Jews' immigration in a comparative perspective

This article deals with the complex relationship between religion and immigration in Western countries, with an emphasis on Israel. The main argument it presents is that the legal procedures of immigration, i.e. laws relating to the acquisition of civil status, have undergone dramatic secularization, while religion's influence is expressed in the social and cultural aspects of the integration of immigrants belonging to religious minorities. This division reinforces the classical theory of secularization, as the formal boundaries of nations are not subject to religious affiliations, but it also supports the theories of competition and complementation between religion and secularism in the social sphere. The tension in the Israeli case between the immigration, naturalization and integration of non‐Jewish Jews, who are part of the extended Jewish population that is not defined by religious parameters, confirms this thesis. The immigration of hundreds of thousands of non‐Jewish Jews' under the Law of Return based on ethno‐national‐secular parameters is an ultimate expression of the secularization of Jewish nationality. On the other hand, the state's encouragement of non‐Jewish immigrants to convert to Judaism so that they can better assimilate into Jewish society signifies the importance of religion in the social integration aspect.     

The place of immigration in studies of geography and race

This paper argues that geographical research on immigration and geographical research on race and racism in the USA must be explicitly connected. Geographic processes such as globalization and urban development already link immigration with race and racism and suggest a need to conceptualize research agendas around immigration and race in relation to each other. Not only are racialized groups spatially connected in many neighbourhoods, cities and regions of the USA, but they are also linked through policies structured by the state at various scales and narratives produced about subordinated and racialized groups. In making this argument, I attempt to highlight work in geography, in related social sciences and in ethnic studies that demonstrates the necessity and usefulness of this approach. Geographers are uniquely positioned to illuminate how the construction of space, place and scale overlaps with the construction of racial-ethnic and immigrant identities and with racism itself. The paper argues that these and other research questions also benefit from linking race and immigration to gender, as some feminist geography and feminist studies have done. Likewise, ethnic studies offer a wealth of theoretical, methodological and empirical insight into linking immigration, race and racism in geographical work.     

Playing for Ireland in foreign fields: the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish nationalism in America

With a few exceptions, the existing scholarship on the relationship between the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Irish nationalism has largely overlooked the experiences of the Irish diaspora. This article seeks to redress this neglect by exploring the ways in which Irish nationalism has historically been produced, reproduced and contested amongst members of the GAA in the USA. In light of their status as focal points of Irish immigration and as centres of Gaelic games activity in America, the article focuses on the cities of Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It draws on extensive archival and interview research conducted in each locale since 2000 and reveals that while intensely politicised and ethnic versions of Irish nationalism have historically weaved their way through US branches of the Association, since the mid-1990s there have been a number of socio-economic and political developments both in Ireland and in America that have seen the GAA begin to articulate a more civic, less ethnically bounded version of Irish nationalism.     

The Implications of Immigration Federalism for Non-citizens’ Rights and Immigration Opportunities: Canada and Australia Compared

This article explores the development of immigration federalism in Australia and Canada (expressed through the establishment of state/provincial/territorial immigrant selection programs) and its implications for immigrants’ rights and immigration opportunities. Given the very limited scholarship on the issue, and the lack of previous comparative studies on immigration federalism in Australia and Canada, our research is exploratory by nature. Our finding is that provincial/state/territorial programs offer some advantages to prospective applicants (such as increased immigration opportunities), but, at the same time, raise a number of concerns (such as an increased dependence on employers). As our study reveals, the costs and benefits of immigration opportunities under state/provincial/territorial programs differ for skilled and low-skilled workers, whereby the latter are given only limited access to permanent residence, and on more onerous conditions than skilled workers. Drawing on these findings, we identify areas in need of further research and policy response.