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.     

Latinos and Environmental Justice: Examining the Link between Degenerative Policy,Political Representation,and Environmental Policy Implementation

The theory of social construction and policy design is insightful for exploring the circumstances in which the allocation of policy benefits and burdens is attributed to the feed‐forward effect of degenerative policy that institutionalizes bias and reinforces the prevailing categorization and embedded social meaning regarding target populations. However, this theoretical framework has not been broadly adopted to analyze the environment‐related phenomena. With a nationwide, block‐group‐level sample, this study examines the extent to which degenerative policies pertaining to immigrants influence state agencies' environmental regulatory outputs for predominantly Latino communities. Results show that in the states with moderately to most restrictive immigrant policy and high levels of Latino representation in legislatures, the rigorousness of government agencies' compliance monitoring activities decreases for Latino neighborhoods of environmental justice concern, as states' policy stance toward immigrants becomes more unfavorable. More Latino elected officials do not bolster policy implementation efforts for the vulnerable communities or offset the backlash effect of immigrant policy.     

(Re)creating places and spaces in two countries: Brazilian transnational migration processes

Brazilian immigration to the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon that gained momentum in the 1980s in unprecedented numbers. Today an estimated 1.2 million Brazilians live in the United States. Brazilians (re)create transnational places and spaces through social, cultural, and economic practices, within the immigrant receiving communities of Marietta, Georgia, and Framingham, Massachusetts, in the United States. They also incorporate and add new elements to their livelihoods in the respective sending communities of Piracanjuba, in the state of Goiás, and Governador Valadares, in the state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil. How are these Portuguese-speaking Brazilian immigrants shaping and (re)creating new places and spaces? In what ways and spheres do transnational exchanges affect two places of destination in the United States and two places of origin in Brazil after migration occurs? Using multiple methods, which include in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper addresses these questions by evaluating the changes incurred by migration. I use a framework perspective that is largely from outside the Latino/Hispanic context. Migration processes are just as much about those who leave Brazil for the United States as it is about those who return to Brazil (i.e. returnees) and what happens to those respective receiving and sending communities in both countries.     

Rethinking Security: Perspectives from Arab–American and British Arab Activists

Abstract: In this article, we analyse the experience of securitization from the perspective of Arab–American and British Arab activists. Based on interviews with over 100 activists in both countries, we explore the ways in which Arab immigrant communities have experienced the enhanced security measures taken by governments. Our respondents describe the ways in which these measures have increased feelings of fear and insecurity within their communities. They emphasized how immigration, border and surveillance technologies lent a pervasive sense of insecurity to daily life. At the same time, they argued for the importance of the legal rights of citizenship in anchoring a sense of security in and belonging to British and American society.     

Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net: A Framework for Analysis and Effects on Educational Attainment

Across states, there is substantial variation in the degree to which immigrants and their children are offered public assistance. We present a theoretical framework for analyzing the effects of policy decisions about immigrant inclusion. We apply the framework to investigate the effect of the state safety net on educational attainment. We focus on the years following welfare reform in 1996, when states gained considerable autonomy over welfare policy, including decisions about the eligibility of immigrant residents. Leveraging state‐level data from before and after reform, we estimate a difference‐in‐difference model to identify the effect of variation in immigrant inclusivity on educational attainment. We find that when states broaden the inclusivity of the social safety net to immigrants, young Latinos are more likely to graduate from high school. This effect is present beyond the group of Latino residents who receive additional benefits, suggesting that policy decisions about immigrants spill over to broader communities and communicate broader messages about social inclusion to racial and ethnic groups. We find similar patterns among Asian youth, but not among black and non‐Hispanic white youth. We conclude that immigrant inclusion has consequences for the life prospects of the growing population of youth in high‐immigrant ethnic groups.     

Country report: The ambiguities of social and cultural geography in Greece

This paper contributes to debates on the empirical and conceptual potentials of anti-essentializing notions such as ‘thirdspace’ with the aim to open new epistemological and political grounds. Based on the findings of ethnographic research, I critically examine two spatial strategies (the deliberate creation of an ethnic neighbourhood, and the securing of a community centre) that Latin American immigrants in Toronto, Canada, developed to appropriate urban space and lay claims to equal rights. The case of Latin Americans' struggle for belonging in Toronto serves to reflect on how and why new immigrant groups today (re)construct collective identity spatially. I argue that immigrants strategically essentialize their identities in and through place in order to make themselves visible and their voices heard. Ethnic places represent sites of resistance and creation where immigrants construct their own subjectivities while also redefining dominant notions of inclusion and citizenship. Although locally grounded, these new immigrant identities remain fluid and engage with multiple forms of exclusion

[The] situation is simply sad; the [Latin American] community … is one of the most orphan communities … in [Toronto] … [We] don't even have a place where to dig our own grave basically. If there is need to get together … a meeting … there is no place. We have to be looking for a basement … for a recreational centre to give us a room … If there is a social or cultural event, we do not have a place where … we can present what we have … [It] is sad and it is a reality. (Cesar Palacio, city councillor candidate to Toronto's 2003 municipal elections, interview, 2 May 2003, translated from Spanish)     

Borders and belongings in Nordic feminisms and beyond

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with feminist grassroots groups and women’s organizations in a Nordic context, this article aims to explore how feminist enactments shape multiple layers of spatiality and belonging. I analyse autoethnographic reflections from two feminist events, both taking place in Malmö in June 2014. Rather than understanding Nordic feminisms as a stable object, I follow in this article the initiative of decolonial scholars to analyze how feminist communities are shaped by affects, enactments and inhabitations which both ‘speak back’ to located conditions and transgress beyond them. I use phenomenology in my engagement with the material and employ a palimpsestic reading mode to trace the multi-layered constructions of spatiality and belonging in feminist performances, identifications and affiliations. As affective value shaped the effects of surfaces or borders of bodies and spaces, theorizations on affect helped me to grasp how complex forms of belonging became entwined with particular performances of geography and history.     

美国华人移民家庭的代际关系与跨文化冲突

本文旨在研究美国华人移民家庭的代际关系与跨文化冲突问题。作者通过对其本人在洛杉矶和纽约两大华人移民社区所进行的田野调查、个人访谈和实地观察所收集的实证资料的系统分析,着重探讨矛盾重重的华人移民家庭中父母与子女如何处理复杂的、不断变动的家庭关系以及移民父母如何选择轻重缓急的策略,并依靠社区的力量来确保下一代的健康成长。     

U.S. Latina/o Muslims Since 1920: From “Moors” to “Latino Muslims”

This article provides a historical overview of the development of the U.S. Latina/o Muslim community. U.S. Latina/os have been converting to Islam since the 1920s. Early converts were primarily found in African‐American‐majority Islamic communities, though there were some others who entered Islam through ties to Muslim immigrants. In both cases, the U.S.'s racist social system had brought the two communities together. In New York City during the 1970s, however, a group of around a dozen Latina/o Muslims felt that neither the African‐American‐majority nor the immigrant‐majority communities sufficiently addressed Latina/os' particular culture, languages, social situations, and contributions to Islamic history. To correct this, they created the first known U.S. Latina/o Muslim organisation, the Alianza Islamica, a group which fostered a “Latino Muslim” identity. Since that time, due to the growing numbers of U.S. Latina/o Muslims, as well as a tendency to foster ties with Latina/o Muslims in countries outside of the U.S., U.S. Latina/o Muslims are more and more adopting the “Latino Muslim” identity, which is now being promoted by several organisations and prominent leaders.     

White environmental subjectivity and the politics of belonging

In a society dominated by a colorblind approach to racial difference, racial categories are often viewed as unchanging and constructed in a time past. This article examines the making of racial categories and subjectivities in everyday perceptions and portrayals of place and belonging related to environmentalism. It examines the ways in which middle-class white people, who engage regularly with Latino immigrants, simultaneously construct the racial category of ‘white’ and affirm their own belonging in Boulder, Colorado through an exclusionary discourse of environmentalism. In Boulder, immigrants and non-immigrant Latinos are often portrayed as unaware of environmentalism, not interested in environmentalism, and/or too busy or poor to participate in environmentalism. In interviews, white residents of the city reproduce discourses of privilege and exclusion through environmental discourses and reinforce their own white environmental subjectivity as the norm. The insider/outsider division established through environmental discourse in Boulder is a specific example of how exclusion is enforced through the racialization of ‘natural’ spaces and environmental activities and how environmentalism itself is an important articulation of difference.     

Experiencing virtual places: insights on the geographies of sim racing

Virtual spaces have emerged as everyday life spaces in contemporary societies. Very quickly, they have gained a cultural role in the daily life of their users, as these new territories gain their own communities, ideologies, and spatializations. However, little is known about how place is experienced in these different realms. This study seeks to understand place experience in virtual spaces, taking the sim racing virtual spaces as a case study and endeavoring to build a bridge between theory and empirics. This study uses ethnographic methods, which included a year-long participant observation period and a set of 20 in-depth interviews with users, in order to understand their narratives of the virtual geographies of two sim racing videogames: Gran Turismo and rFactor. The results of the study show that spirit of place, place ballets, and sense of place exist just as well among users of virtual spaces—despite the particularities of these new territories and their remaining tensions.     

Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering,community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border

This paper explores the politics of community making at the India–Bangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclave—a sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exceptionality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitors—narratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the complicated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the India–Bangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging community—to articulating who belongs and why—as are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations.     

Crown, corporation and church: the role of institutions in the stability of pioneer settlements in the Canadian West, 1870–1914

The agricultural settlement of western Canada took place within the framework of a complex socio-economic system produced by Canadian national institutions: the Crown, corporations and churches. The interaction of these Canadian institutions with institutions introduced to western Canada by immigrants played an important role in determining the long-term stability of immigrant rural communities. Whether an immigrant group achieved long-term stability or suffered social disintegration depended on the degree to which immigrant and host institutions werecongruentordissonant. The interaction of social and economic institutions is examined through the settlement experiences of five diverse groups that settled in western Canada before 1914: the Mennonites, Doukhobors, Jews, Mormons and Ukrainians.     

Survive but not thrive? Geographical strategies for avoiding absolute homelessness among immigrant communities

This article seeks to unpack why certain immigrant communities manage to avoid absolute homelessness, emphasizing how survival strategies embedded in immigrant community space may be deployed in both advantageous and disadvantageous fashions. Bangladeshis in Greater London and Central Americans in Los Angeles County were compared, based on the fact that they are similarly vulnerable immigrant communities in terms of poverty and segregation, yet have successfully avoided the streets and/or shelters. Key strategies included the beneficial clustering of non-profits and overcrowding strategies within immigrant community space, although Bangladeshis differed substantially in terms of more state support for their community space. The implications for the study of race and survival are offered.     

The fruits of migration: Understanding the ‘longue dureé’ and the socio-economic relations of the Early Transcaucasian Culture

The appearance of the Early Transcaucasian Culture (ETC) across large portions of the Near East in the 3rd millennium BC is commonly cited as one of the best archaeologically documented and broadly studied cases of a prehistoric migration. This study uses the ETC to develop a model of what happens when migrants move into regions that are already inhabited by emerging or complex societies. In particular, this study focuses on how immigrant populations can integrate themselves into indigenous communities in a physical, socio-political and economic sense, and how a migrant group’s identity can be constructed and maintained alongside these indigenous communities.     

Transnationalism and Migration: Locating Sociocultural Practices Among Mexican Immigrants in the United States

This review examines recent scholarship on new Mexican immigrant communities in the United States. Organizing their analyses around transnationality, both as analytical principle and as actual condition, these authors establish how immigration flows are changing sending and receiving societies equally, in the case at hand, the United States and Mexico. These analyses should be read as culturally specific to Mexican communities. Critically examining U.S. society as a context contributing to the resignification of these sociocultural experiences is essential for a keener understanding of the impact global processes exert on them, locally and translocally.     

Urban foraging and the relational ecologies of belonging

Through a discussion of urban foraging in Seattle, Washington, USA, we examine how people's plant and mushroom harvesting practices in cities are linked to relationships with species, spaces, and ecologies. Bringing a relational approach to political ecology, we discuss the ways that these particular nature–society relationships are formed, legitimated, and mobilized in discursive and material ways in urban ecosystems. Engaging closely with and as foragers, we develop an ethnographically grounded ‘relational ecologies of belonging’ framework to conceptualize and examine three constituent themes: cultural belonging and identity, belonging and place, and belonging and more-than-human agency. Through this case study, we show the complex ways that urban foraging is underpinned by interconnected and multiple notions of identity, place, mobility, and agency for both humans and more-than-human interlocutors. The focus on relational ecologies of belonging illuminates important challenges for environmental management and public space planning in socioecologically diverse areas. Ultimately, these challenges reflect negotiated visions about how we organize ourselves and live together in cosmopolitan spaces such as cities.     

Deserving Welcome? Immigrants,Christian Faith Communities,and the Contentious Politics of Belonging in the US South

This article examines articulations of merit and deservingness in relation to immigrants in the US South. In a context of pronounced anti‐immigrant sentiment, scholars have rightfully focused on state practices that marginalize immigrants. Yet xenophobia and exclusion are but one set of responses to immigrants. Societies also construct immigrants as meritorious figures: hard workers, entrepreneurs, and upholders of family values. The figure of the “good immigrant”, like that of the “bad immigrant”, is routinely produced and reproduced in social settings that are not obviously political, including churches. Christian faith communities in the US South, we show, offer the potential for a politics built around inclusive understandings of belonging. But Christian universalism is in constant tension with nationalist ways of thinking and acting. Whether they praise immigrants for their virtues or criticize them for their shortcomings, congregants and pastors tend to cast immigrants in the role of foreign Other.     

Immigrant businesses,place-making,and community development: a case from an emerging immigrant gateway

Immigrant businesses have become an increasingly important component in the US economy. However, very few studies have systematically examined the role of immigrant businesses in community development, except for some cases in established immigrant gateways such as New York and Miami. In this study, we explore how immigrant businesses are shaping physical, cultural, social, economic, and political landscapes in their local communities in the emerging immigrant gateway of Charlotte, North Carolina. Focusing on the case of a multiethnic retail corridor, we find that, as active place-makers, immigrant businesses have transformed deteriorating and abandoned street fronts into vibrant and well-frequented urban environments conducive for further development. Through a systematic approach to understanding the place-making process of immigrant businesses, findings from this study call for more in-depth integration of immigrant and ethnic economies in local policies and planning strategies for neighborhood revitalization. These findings are particularly pertinent in the context of the continuous ethnic diversification of our neighborhoods and cities.     

Towards a nuanced understanding of health‐supportive place using composite research methods

Chronic non‐communicable diseases comprise a major challenge for health in contemporary Australia and across the globe and, while various factors are at play, personal choices in behaviour and lifestyle are significant. The physical make‐up and ongoing management of the places where we live positively and negatively influences these lifestyle choices and subsequent health outcomes. However, responses—in research, policy, built environment design, construction, and management—frequently fail to recognise the intricacies of this people‐place‐behaviour nexus largely because those responses are highly focused and empirical. Rather, the health‐supportive environments needed to address the current chronic disease epidemic also require additional—networked, nuanced, and intuitive—understandings. Responding to that need, the study described in this paper took a comprehensive view of what constitutes a health‐supportive built environment. We detail the composite methods employed—built environment audits, interviews, and focus groups—all of which are available for use by others in similar situations. Then, using two case study examples, we reflect upon how our methodology revealed otherwise hidden aspects of the extent to which the study sites supported or hindered health‐supportive behaviours and responses. These results suggest intervention actions for policy makers and practitioners that will help them respond to the complex needs of communities in creating a health‐supportive environment.