A sense of an ending: late-generation ethnicity and Irish America

Irish America today is at a stage of “late generation ethnicity,” designating an ethnic formation that reaches back many generations in the US and is not being significantly replenished from the country of origin. This is not necessarily a terminal state of ethnic affairs, but it is a transitional one, and the analytical challenge is to identify and understand the features and implications of “lateness,” what the sense of an ending means in the Irish American case. This essay will explore this question, drawing on field study among Irish communities in Chicago, and also consider some of the differences in worldview among Irish-Americans, particularly as these pertain to matters of immigration reform and undocumented Irish in the US.     

Between the cosmopolitan and the parochial: the immigrant gentrifier in Koreatown,Los Angeles

This paper questions the currently lopsided relationship between the cosmopolitan and the parochial, in which the former is favored both conceptually and empirically. In response, we propose a relational framework for bringing them into conversation, simultaneously recasting and re-animating longstanding debates via three framing devices – the process of relationality/territoriality, disposition, and spaces of encounter – embedded in and through the subject of the immigrant-gentrifier in Koreatown, Los Angeles, itself a novel category that has hitherto eluded systematic research. We present the results of 25 interviews of Korean immigrant-gentrifiers and 10 key informant interviews. The results constitute a parochial critique that emerges as a series of conflicted paradoxes but also productive tensions: between an ostensibly transnational process compromised by a profoundly homegrown, parochial set of investors and outlooks; between a set of dispositions that seek inner-city diversity and density, yet simultaneously sheltered from its spillover costs; and spaces of encounter marked by a gap between the promise of truly open spaces and the reality of guarded and self-segregated ones. Ultimately, this paper does double duty – conceptually rebalancing the cosmopolitan-parochial relationship, but in doing so empirically elevating the emergence of the understudied immigrant-gentrifier category.     

Immigration,race and local media: Smethwick and the 1964 general election

In 1964, a small industrial town on the outskirts of Birmingham gained a reputation worldwide as Britain’s most racist town. The Conservative Party’s candidate, Peter Griffiths, bucked national trends in the General Election by winning a seat in Smethwick with a large majority, following a fiercely anti-immigrant campaign. Smethwick’s immigrant population was no larger than that of neighbouring towns, posing the question why such intense anti-immigrant feeling emerged at a local level? This article addresses the impact of local and regional media on public perceptions of immigrants in Smethwick during and immediately after the 1964 General Election, arguing that the local newspaper, the Smethwick Telephone, and ATV Today, ITV’s regional news programme for the Midlands, fuelled hostility and helped legitimise Griffiths’ campaign. By investigating the media’s influence at a local level, we can gain a greater understanding of the development of racial prejudice in British communities and the complex history of twentieth century media. This article further develops the work of Wendy Webster, Sarita Malik and Gavin Schaffer, who examine the framing of immigration by a range of national media forms but overlook the vital role of local and regional reporting in this process.     

Nation and reproduction: immigrants and their children in population discourse in Italy

Italian society is undergoing significant demographic changes: on one hand, the widespread decrease in birth rates and extended life expectancies lead to a substantial aging of the population; on the other hand, rising immigration rates constitute an important factor behind the renewal and growth of young population segments. According to conventional disciplinary divisions, such changes are the established domain of demography; however, it mainly draws on ethno‐national categories to investigate them. In reference to the Italian context, this article specifically highlights the way national demography employs forecasts and value judgments derived from a qualitative and selective definition of population to address the marked increase in children born to foreign parents. By examining the reproductive behaviours of migrants in Italy, the article thus offers a wide‐ranging reflection on the social boundaries that shape the formation of an ‘other’ generation.     

Migrant bodies and the materialization of belonging in Sweden

Immigration and transnational adoption are both manifestations of the pervasive dislocations that characterize the contemporary era. Each illuminates as well the double movement of assimilation and internal exclusion through which racisms that are a heritage of colonialism are expanded and reactivated in the metropolitan centers of western Europe and North America. In this process, race is spatialized, different forms of migrant bodies are produced, and familiar logics of belonging that link person to place are transformed. The differential politics of adoption and immigration in late twentieth-century Sweden shed light on this process of racialization and the affective economies through which it is realized, as that nation pursues a multicultural project in which ‘Swedishness’ becomes ‘the measure of everything.’     

The ‘Linchpin for Success’? The problematic establishment of the 1965 Race Relations Act and its Conciliation Board

The 1965 Race Relations Act was the first legislation directed towards outlawing racial discrimination and racial incitement in Britain; but it has been almost universally criticised as weak, narrow and ineffectual. This article focuses on an area not adequately discussed in the existing literature—the debate about, and impact of, replacing initial criminal sanctions with American-styled conciliation and civil remedies, and subsequent creation of conciliation machinery. It argues that the protracted process of forming this Board had a greater impact upon the Act’s success than has been previously acknowledged, as it demonstrated the bipartite lack of desire to address the politically unpopular issue of race and immigration, thus creating further disillusionment towards the British state. Rather than being the ‘last step’ in such legislation, as desired by many at the time, its weaknesses and limitations stimulated criticism and increased political action, leading to subsequent broader legislation in future years.     

Negotiating race and religion in the West Midlands: narratives of inclusion and exclusion during the 1967–69 Wolverhampton bus workers’ turban dispute

This article considers the 1967–1969 Wolverhampton Transport turban dispute in the context of increased anxiety over immigration to the area and Wolverhampton South West MP Enoch Powell’s April 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. We trace the narratives of the dispute through letters to the Editor in local newspaper The Express & Star, and argue that the letters column was a site of community construction for writers and readers, which elevated the issue from a trivial industrial dispute to a symbol around which the deep anxieties of race and nation coalesced.     

Immigrant hosts and intra-regional travel

ABSTRACT

A large number of tourism-related experiences involve a personal relationship between a visitor and resident host. As immigration continues to be an increasingly integral experience for many people and communities, and advances in technology make relationship maintenance more accessible, the traditional distinctions of travel types based on ‘pleasure’, ‘visiting friends and relatives’ (VFR), and even ‘business’ become blurred and detrimental to conceptual understandings for large numbers of tourism experiences and their impacts. The purpose is to explore the experiences of immigrants with intra-regional travel when they host VFRs. Constructionism was used as a guiding epistemology in this narrative analysis. The research co-constructed narratives with nine participants in Toronto, Canada about their hosting and intra-regional travel. The hosting experience is powerful, linking old and new worlds, and challenging traditional discursive tourism binaries such as home and away. The experience of intra-regional communities through side-trips with VFR guests added additional context where the host was in a non-routine place on vacation, with a guest who brings expectations of participating in leisure, but in a place that has cultural links to the participant's ongoing integration and connection to the broader sense of Canadian culture. Hosting both inspired intra-regional travel, and enhanced the memorable co-construction of meaning associated with the experience as links and distinctions to the culture of origin were more easily made due to the co-presence of their guest. Implications for integration, place making and marketing are discussed.     

生态移民区旅游劳工移民转移研究——以宁夏镇北堡镇为例

宁夏银川市镇北堡镇作为全国生态移民的典型地区,毗邻镇北堡西部影视城,地处银川西线黄金旅游长廊腹地,是贺兰山东麓旅游带上具有一定规模的旅游服务中心。在移民区后续发展中,旅游劳工的转移研究有着重要的意义。在对旅游劳工的概念进行界定的基础上,分析了影响镇北堡镇旅游劳工转移的政策、经济、劳动力转移成本、城镇"拉力"四大因素,指出了旅游劳工转移面临的主要问题,并从区位、职业、空间尺度三个方面探索了镇北堡镇旅游劳工转移方向,提出了促进该区域旅游劳工合理转移的一些措施。