The next volume in the Common Threads book series, Immigrant Identity and the Politics of Citizenship assembles fourteen articles from the Journal of American Ethnic History . The chapters discuss the divisions and hierarchies confronted by immigrants to the United States, and how these immigrants shape, and are shaped by, the social and cultural worlds they enter. Drawing on scholarship of ethnic groups from around the globe, the articles illuminate the often fraught journey many migrants undertake from mistrusted Other to sometimes welcomed citizen. Contributors: James R. Barrett, Douglas C. Baynton, Vibha Bhalla, Julio Capó, Jr., Robert Fleegler, Gunlög Fur, Hidetaka Hirota, Karen Leonard, Willow Lung-Amam, Raymond A. Mohl, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Lara Putnam, David Reimers, David Roediger, and Allison Varzally.

Immigration is continuously and rapidly changing the face of Western countries. While newcomers are harbingers of change, host nations also participate in how new populations are incorporated into their social and political fabric. Bringing together a transcontinental group of anthropologists, this book provides an in-depth look at the current processes of immigration, political behavior, and citizenship in both the United States and Europe. Essays draw on issues of race, national identity, religion, and more, while addressing questions, including: How should citizenship be defined? In what ways do immigrants use the political process to achieve group aims? And, how do adults and youth learn to become active participants in the public sphere? Among numerous case studies, examples include instances of racialized citizenship in “Algerian France,” Ireland’s new citizenship laws in response to asylum-seeking mothers, the role of Evangelical Christianity in creating a space for the construction of an identity that transcends state borders, and the Internet as one of the new public spheres for the expression of citizenship, be it local, national, or global.

Over the past four decades, the foreign-born population in the United States has nearly tripled, from about 10 million in 1965 to more than 30 million today. This wave of new Americans comes in disproportionately large numbers from Latin America and Asia, a pattern that is likely to continue in this century. In Transforming Politics, Transforming America, editors Taeku Lee, S. Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramírez bring together the newest work of prominent scholars in the field of immigrant political incorporation to provide the first comprehensive look at the political behavior of immigrants.Focusing on the period from 1965 to the year 2020, this volume tackles the fundamental yet relatively neglected questions, What is the meaning of citizenship, and what is its political relevance? How are immigrants changing our notions of racial and ethnic categorization? How is immigration transforming our understanding of mobilization, participation, and political assimilation? With an emphasis on research that brings innovative theory, quantitative methods, and systematic data to bear on such questions, this volume presents a provocative evidence-based examination of the consequences that these demographic changes might have for the contemporary politics of the United States as well as for the concerns, categories, and conceptual frameworks we use to study race relations and ethnic politics. Contributors Bruce Cain (University of California, Berkeley) * Grace Cho (University of Michigan) * Jack Citrin (University of California, Berkeley) * Louis DeSipio (University of California, Irvine) * Brendan Doherty (University of California, Berkeley) * Lisa García Bedolla (University of California, Irvine) * Zoltan Hajnal (University of California, San Diego) * Jennifer Holdaway (Social Science Research Council) * Jane Junn (Rutgers University) * Philip Kasinitz (City University of New York) * Taeku Lee (University of California, Berkeley) * John Mollenkopf (City University of New York) * Tatishe Mavovosi Nteta (University of California, Berkeley) * Kathryn Pearson (University of Minnesota) * Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University) * S. Karthick Ramakrishnan (University of California, Riverside) * Ricardo Ramírez (University of Southern California) * Mary Waters (Harvard University) * Cara Wong (University of Michigan) * Janelle Wong (University of Southern California)

The United States is once again experiencing a major influx of immigrants. Questions about who should be admitted and what benefits should be afforded to new members of the polity are among the most divisive and controversial contemporary political issues. Using an impressive array of evidence from national surveys, The Politics of Belonging illuminates patterns of public opinion on immigration and explains why Americans hold the attitudes they do. Rather than simply characterizing Americans as either nativist or nonnativist, this book argues that controversies over immigration policy are best understood as questions over political membership and belonging to the nation. The relationship between citizenship, race, and immigration drive the politics of belonging in the United States and represents a dynamism central to understanding patterns of contemporary public opinion on immigration policy. Beginning with a historical analysis, this book documents why this is the case by tracing the development of immigration and naturalization law, institutional practices, and the formation of the American racial hierarchy. Then, through a comparative analysis of public opinion among white, black, Latino, and Asian Americans, it identifies and tests the critical moderating role of racial categorization and group identity on variation in public opinion on immigration.

Standing at the intersection of immigration and welfare reform, immigrant Latin American women are the target of special scrutiny in the United States. Both the state and the media often present them as scheming "welfare queens" or long-suffering, silent victims of globalization and machismo. This book argues for a reformulation of our definitions of citizenship and politics, one inspired by women who are usually perceived as excluded from both. Weaving the stories of Mexican and Central American women with history and analysis of the anti-immigrant upsurge in 1990s California, this compelling book examines the impact of reform legislation on individual women's lives and their engagement in grassroots political organizing. Their accounts of personal and political transformation offer a new vision of politics rooted in concerns as disparate as domestic violence, childrearing, women's self-esteem, and immigrant and workers' rights.

This book analyzes immigration policies in East Asia in the context of contemporary global migration flows and mobility. To assess how global norms of migration have impacted the East Asian migration region and explore regional migration trends, the book contains 13 case studies which investigate the regulation of immigration in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Three analytical strands, namely, norm diffusion, identity politics, and citizenship, build the theoretical framework for the case studies which investigate how regional and national norms, discourses, and institutions affect local communities and migration patterns. In particular, the book analyzes contemporary issues such as immigration policy reforms, practices of inclusion and exclusion in local communities, and discourses on multiculturalism and risk. The book utilizes a comparative perspective which enables readers to reflect on the role of national identity, international organizations and law, public security concerns, and labour market demands in the articulation and implementation of contemporary immigration policy in East Asia. This book substantially complements the existing literature on immigration governance and interregional migration mobility in East Asia and will be of interest to academics in the fields of East Asian studies, public policy, immigration and migration studies, and comparative politics.

In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe argues that understanding Asian immigration to the United States is fundamental to understanding the racialized economic and political foundations of the nation. Lowe discusses the contradictions whereby Asians have been included in the workplaces and markets of the U.S. nation-state, yet, through exclusion laws and bars from citizenship, have been distanced from the terrain of national culture. Lowe argues that a national memory haunts the conception of Asian American, persisting beyond the repeal of individual laws and sustained by U.S. wars in Asia, in which the Asian is seen as the perpetual immigrant, as the "foreigner-within." In Immigrant Acts, she argues that rather than attesting to the absorption of cultural difference into the universality of the national political sphere, the Asian immigrant--at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation--displaces the temporality of assimilation. Distance from the American national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative site that produces cultural forms materially and aesthetically in contradiction with the institutions of citizenship and national identity. Rather than a sign of a "failed" integration of Asians into the American cultural sphere, this critique preserves and opens up different possibilities for political practice and coalition across racial and national borders. In this uniquely interdisciplinary study, Lowe examines the historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic meanings of immigration in relation to Asian Americans. Extending the range of Asian American critique, Immigrant Acts will interest readers concerned with race and ethnicity in the United States, American cultures, immigration, and transnationalism.