The role of contextual factors in the electoral resurgence of extreme right-wing forces in Spain: The case of Andalusia

Up until the end of 2018, extreme right-wing parties and their anti-immigration discourse, now a common occurrence in other European countries, had not appeared on the Spanish political scene. However, in December of that year, the Spanish extreme right-wing party VOX reversed this trend and made significant electoral gains in the Andalusian regional elections. This phenomenon has led us to analyse, in this study, the role played by contextual factors (i.e., out-group size, territorial concentration of the immigrant population, demographic change in settlement locations, aggregated educational level and unemployment rate among the receiving society) in the rise in the number of VOX voters. To achieve this, VOX's results from all the polling stations in Andalusia contained in its 5946 census tracts were analysed. At the same time, each census tract was associated with its demographic, economic and educational data, and their relationship was analysed using a multilevel analysis with Mplus. The results show that the presence of economic immigrants is indeed associated with a higher percentage of VOX voters in Andalusia. However, despite this general trend, those census tracts with a high territorial concentration of Maghrebi immigrants are associated with a lower percentage of support for this extreme right-wing party. The opposite is found for Romanian immigrants. Moreover, areas with larger percentages of people with a high level of education influenced greater support for VOX. Thus our findings suggest the traditional explanations for the increased support for extreme right-wing parties in northern Europe do not provide clear patterns that can be extrapolated to Andalusia.     

Mixed messages & bounded rationality: The perverse consequences of real ID for immigration policy

Policies concerning undocumented immigrants are inevitably ambivalent, creating uncertainty and confusion in the implementation process. We identify a clear example of this ambivalence —U.S. law setting standards for determining the credibility of asylum seekers—that resulted in an increase in asylum grants despite policymakers' intention to make it harder for individuals to obtain the status. We argue that this law, The REAL ID Act of 2005, sent mixed messages to immigration judges (IJs), street-level bureaucrats who implement immigration policy. It increased IJ discretion, but set vague limits. We theorize that IJs, behaving in a bounded rationality framework, use their professional legal training as a short-cut and look primarily to the courts for guidance. Our evidence supports our argument. After the passage of the REAL ID Act, IJ decision-making is more closely aligned with the preferences of their political and legal principals, and, in the final score, the federal circuit courts are the winners.     

Immigration and Refugee Crises in Fourth-Century Greece: An Athenian Perspective

Abstract

The fourth-century B.C. was a period during which a large number of Greek cities were affected by civil wars, military conquests, and destruction, with the displacement of large numbers of men, women and children as a result. This has implications for the modern debate on Athenian attitudes to immigration, which normally focuses on just two groups of free non-citizens: adult, able-bodied men who moved to Athens voluntarily to take advantage of the city’s economic opportunities and (more recently) on the free non-citizen population who had come to Athens as slaves and who stayed on after their manumission. This article argues that refugees were likely to have constituted a considerable component of the migration to Athens during certain troubled periods in the course of the fourth century. This means that the size of Athens’s immigrant population was likely to have fluctuated considerably, that many of the refugees would have been destitute, that women and children (sometimes unaccompanied by adult male relatives) may have made up an even greater proportion of the non-citizen population than normally assumed, and, thus, that a considerable number of these immigrants would not have been able to contribute substantially to Athens’s grain trade or military. The implications of this for our assessment of the Athenian motives for admitting groups of refugees are discussed, and it is argued that the requirement that all male and all unaccompanied female immigrants had to find an Athenian sponsor and pay a special metic tax may have constituted a certain level of control over immigrant numbers.     

Institutionalization of Islam in Secular Europe: The Influence of State–Religion Relations on Anti‐Muslim Attitudes

This study examines church–state relations in Europe, and analyzes their influence on anti‐immigrant attitudes. The literature explains this relationship primarily with religious demographics, or state privileges for the majority faith. Alternately, this study focuses on the status of the majority religion. It argues that, in countries with a national church, citizens are more likely to consider the institutionalization of a new religion to be occurring at the expense of the national heritage, and react negatively. To test that hypothesis, the study focuses on Muslim immigrants in Europe, and builds an index that gauges the extent to which European states institutionalize Islam. Then, employing multilevel regression analysis, it investigates how the institutionalization of Islam influences anti‐Muslim prejudice in different contexts of church–state regimes. Individual‐level data come from the latest wave of the European Values Study, and cover 31 countries. Findings indicate that, in European countries with a national church, institutionalization of Islam increases anti‐Muslim prejudice. In countries without a national church, however, institutionalization leads to tolerance. These results confirm the continuing relevance of religion on the national level in Europe, despite the decline in individual religiosity.     

The Science of Empire: Darwinism,Human Diversity,and Russian Physical Anthropology

Summary : The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.     

Negotiating Muslim identity and diversity in Greek urban spaces

Based on a recent study of indigenous and migrant Muslims in Greece, this article provides an exploration of the spatial expressions of religious identity and practice among indigenous and migrant Muslims in Athens. Through a detailed analysis of ethnographic and visual material, we investigate the ways in which Muslim communities negotiate their religious identities and belonging in a city where there is no official mosque, considering that exclusionary perceptions of Islam constitute an important element of Greek national identity. The discussion concentrates on the management of visibility of Muslim identity through public displays of religious practices. Finally, we explore the ongoing debates surrounding the building of a Central Mosque in Athens as a symbolic claim to acceptance and recognition of Muslim presence and religious diversity in the Greek capital.     

加拿大二线城市华人新移民经济融合研究——“三重玻璃效应”与移民向下层社会流动

论文对加拿大二线城市卡尔加里和爱德蒙顿华人新移民的主要特点、移民动机和融合过程中的主要障碍进行了分析,探讨了新移民在加拿大向下层社会流动的问题。研究显示,新移民在经济融合过程中遭遇多方面的障碍,尤其在就业和语言方面。他们在移民加拿大之后,经历了去技能化和以前的学历和工作经验贬值,促使他们向下层社会流动,而这种状况反过来又阻碍了他们的融合进程。华人新移民的负面经历可以归因于由玻璃大门、玻璃房门和玻璃天花板构成的"三重玻璃效应"。加拿大政府应采纳融合框架政策,除承认移民的流动自由外,还要保证他们能享有与其他加拿大人一样同等的公民权益。     

俄罗斯远东“中国移民问题”论析

在俄罗斯远东乃至全俄罗斯,“中国移民问题”是一个被有关势力上升到政治层面加以夸大、炒作的敏感问题。其主要肇因既有历史基因的复萌,也有现实利益的驱动。在其影响下,中俄两国开展劳务合作的潜力远未得到应有的发挥。近年来,俄虽有部分学者和政界人士能较为客观地分析中国移民问题,阐述利用中国劳务的必要性,且积极探讨利用中国劳务的有效途径,但俄罗斯社会对中国人持有的戒备和排斥心理仍相当浓厚。对此,我们应多从自身方面找原因,改进做法,积极应对,促使俄罗斯社会改变对中国人的偏见,从而将远东变成中俄合作真正的窗口和桥梁。