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Who Are the “We”? Identity and Mixed Unions

Richard Alba and Nancy Foner

in Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe

This chapter further explores the second generation by examining a subjective topic: feelings of belonging. At the bottom, the issue is the extent to which the children of immigrants feel truly at ... More

This chapter further explores the second generation by examining a subjective topic: feelings of belonging. At the bottom, the issue is the extent to which the children of immigrants feel truly at home in the societies where they are living, and whether they are seen by others as perennial outsiders. In exploring identities, the key questions are how, and to what degree, a national identity is extended to those of immigrant background. A related subject concerns intermarriage or—more broadly, since family partnerships are increasingly formed without marriage ceremonies—mixed unions. The chapter then looks at the acceptability of the descendants of new immigrants by dominant majority groups through an analysis of mixed unions, examining both the frequency and consequences of these most intimate of relations.Less

“Are We a Nation?”

Wendy L. Wall

in Inventing the "American Way": The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement

In the late 1930s, the phrase “American Way” exploded into popular use. The proliferation of the term attested to Americans’ profound sense of anxiety about the proper parameters of U.S. political ... More

In the late 1930s, the phrase “American Way” exploded into popular use. The proliferation of the term attested to Americans’ profound sense of anxiety about the proper parameters of U.S. political culture and the basis for national unity in a threatening world. This chapter outlines the domestic and international pressures that converged to give the search for a unifying “American Way” unusual saliency. The Depression threatened longstanding power structures and called into question long-held assumptions about the stability and course of U.S. capitalism. The maturation of “new immigrant” communities, and the northward migration of southern blacks, raised questions about the terms on which ethnic, religious, and racial outsiders would be incorporated into a society long defined by elites as Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Above all, the political triumphs of fascism and communism abroad—combined with fears that those ideologies were gaining ground in the U.S.—intensified concerns about America’s core values.Less

The Battle Begins: World War I and the End of Open Immigration from Europe

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

The first chapter examines Italian and Jewish immigrants’ efforts to oppose proposed restrictions on new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe from the passage of the 1882 Immigration Act to ... More

The first chapter examines Italian and Jewish immigrants’ efforts to oppose proposed restrictions on new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe from the passage of the 1882 Immigration Act to the adoption of a literacy test in 1917. During this critical period in the rise of the antirestrictionist movement, both groups created national advocacy organizations (American Jewish Committee and the Order Sons of Italy) to negotiate with legislators in hopes of achieving more political influence. These organizations successfully opposed the passage of a literacy test for arriving immigrants older than 16 until World War I, when organizations like the Immigration Restriction League successfully used the war to mobilize labor unions, reformers, regular Americans, and politicians from the South eager to preserve their political influence to push for the test, which Congress passed over President Wilson’s veto. War and immigration emerge as linked processes in U.S. history. Amid rampant anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence during WWI, the debate over immigration policy pitted advocates for qualitative restriction against those who advocated for quantitative restriction as the best approach to curtail immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Supporters of the literacy test won a temporary battle.Less

The Select Few: Municipal Accommodation and Elite Collaboration

Abigail Fisher Williamson

in Welcoming New Americans?: Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation

This chapter examines how municipal accommodation influences immigrant political incorporation. Will municipal accommodation enable immigrant participation, or will it dampen foreign-born ... More

This chapter examines how municipal accommodation influences immigrant political incorporation. Will municipal accommodation enable immigrant participation, or will it dampen foreign-born mobilization? Specifically, the chapter analyzes prevalent local government efforts to hire and appoint immigrant intermediaries, who connect officials and immigrants who are otherwise separated by linguistic and cultural barriers. Survey data reveals that even beyond new immigrant destinations, local government officials often rely on such individual intermediaries rather than turning to immigrant organizations identified in past literature. Immigrant intermediaries can open productive communication channels between officials and immigrant leaders as well as sometimes engaging additional newcomers in local civic participation. That said, local officials act on their own incentives to accommodate immigrants and therefore do so in ways that disproportionately benefit established and immigrant elites rather than immigrants more broadly.Less

Building the Apparatus of Immigration Control

Libby Garland

in After They Closed the Gates: Jewish Illegal Immigration to the United States, 1921-1965

This chapter explores the social and political forces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that produced the quotas. During this era of national anxiety over the inferiority of the ... More

This chapter explores the social and political forces of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that produced the quotas. During this era of national anxiety over the inferiority of the “new immigrants,” the federal government took stronger measures to control immigration. The era’s race science, which declared southern and eastern Europeans, along with Asians, unassimilable foreigners, combined with the nationalism of World War I and widespread anti-immigrant sentiment to set the stage for new forms of immigration restriction and control. But it is wrong to take at face value the laws’ seemingly precise formula for controlling immigration. Indeed, the laws reflected confusion rather than certainty about classifying groups of people from around the globe. Such confusion, in turn, made it possible for illegal immigration to flourish. The laws were predicated on the idea that there were sharp divisions among races and peoples, but in practice it was hard for officials to make such distinctions.Less

Introduction

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

The introduction looks at the broader efforts of many Americans, animated by nativism and xenophobia, to cast so called “new immigrants” from Asia and Europe as undesirable. At the end of the ... More

The introduction looks at the broader efforts of many Americans, animated by nativism and xenophobia, to cast so called “new immigrants” from Asia and Europe as undesirable. At the end of the nineteenth century, immigration laws emerged as a tool of social engineering and nation building. At first, legislators passed immigration laws that focused heavily on qualitative restriction to determine who could enter the country. Later they moved on to quantitative restriction, imposing numbers on how many immigrants could arrive. The only issues on which restrictionist legislators and Italian and Jewish anti-restrictionists could find common ground when it came to immigration reform were family reunification and skill-based immigration, which opened up opportunities for some immigrants but heavily penalized others thus contributing to create the uneven and unfair immigration system still in existence today.Less

Introduction

Abigail Fisher Williamson

in Welcoming New Americans?: Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation

This chapter introduces the importance of understanding local government responses to immigrants amid increasing devolution of immigration enforcement coupled with immigrant dispersion to new ... More

This chapter introduces the importance of understanding local government responses to immigrants amid increasing devolution of immigration enforcement coupled with immigrant dispersion to new destinations. It describes federal requirements for how local governments respond to immigrants, the resultant mix of municipal responses, and existing findings about how these responses shape immigrant incorporation. It introduces the book’s theory; namely, that local government officials tend to accommodate rather than restrict immigrants because they face distinct incentives that cause them to frame immigrants as clients and contributors. Owing to these distinct incentives, local government officials accommodate immigrants in ways that largely benefit local elites and can precipitate backlash from the broader public. The chapter presents the study’s methodology of inductive theory-building case studies in four new immigrant destinations—Lewiston, Maine; Wausau, Wisconsin; Elgin, Illinois; and Yakima, Washington— followed by deductive theory testing using a national survey of municipal officials.Less

The Ethnic Mosaic: Immigrant Integration at the Metropolitan Scale

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor

in Unsettled Americans: Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration

This chapter briefly explores the geographic (and temporal) diversity in attitudes toward immigrants within American states and localities. While the federal government has the formal responsibility ... More

This chapter briefly explores the geographic (and temporal) diversity in attitudes toward immigrants within American states and localities. While the federal government has the formal responsibility for determining how many immigrants come into the country and for preventing those who lack permission from entering, it falls to local and regional jurisdictions to frame the living experience of immigrants. In this context, local and regional coalitions of civil leaders set the political tone for whether localities welcome new immigrant populations or resist their presence. Thus the chapter presents the scope, methodology, and thematic elements underlying the different studies undertaken in this volume.Less

Municipal Accommodation: Generating Welcome or Backlash?

Abigail Fisher Williamson

in Welcoming New Americans?: Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation

This chapter demonstrates that municipal efforts to aid immigrants can result in resentment toward the foreign-born as well as the local officials who serve them because the public does not ... More

This chapter demonstrates that municipal efforts to aid immigrants can result in resentment toward the foreign-born as well as the local officials who serve them because the public does not necessarily share officials’ incentives to accommodate. Across the four new immigrant destinations, long-term residents often perceive efforts to serve immigrants as preferential treatment for undeserving outsiders. Disagreements among established residents over how to respond to immigrants exacerbate divisions between residents and leaders amid socioeconomic inequality. On the national level, whites have been shifting toward the Republican Party, in part over immigration concerns. This chapter offers a sense of how backlash against immigrants and supportive officials emerges locally. To address these challenges, local government officials can promote public acceptance of immigrants by fostering opportunities for meaningful interethnic contact, which make positive perceptions of immigrants more resonant with the public.Less

Inside the Politics Machine

Mark Maguire and Fiona Murphy

in Integration in Ireland: The Everyday Lives of African Migrants

Taking the Irish local and European elections in 2009 as a point of entry, this chapter follows two Nigerian women as they navigate the vagaries of Irish local politics in Dundalk and Drogheda. This ... More

Taking the Irish local and European elections in 2009 as a point of entry, this chapter follows two Nigerian women as they navigate the vagaries of Irish local politics in Dundalk and Drogheda. This chapter explores political participation by ‘new immigrant candidates’ as they engaged with a public caught in the teeth of an extraordinary economic and political crisis. It is also an ethnographic examination of the sensibilities connected to forms of migrant and minority political mobilization.Less

Municipal Responses across Four New Immigrant Destinations

Abigail Fisher Williamson

in Welcoming New Americans?: Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation

This chapter examines how local government responses to immigrants evolved over twenty-five years (1990-2015) in four new immigrant destinations: Lewiston, Maine; Wausau, Wisconsin; Elgin, Illinois; ... More

This chapter examines how local government responses to immigrants evolved over twenty-five years (1990-2015) in four new immigrant destinations: Lewiston, Maine; Wausau, Wisconsin; Elgin, Illinois; and Yakima, Washington. Drawing on the cases, the chapter introduces a model of local government response, which classifies municipalities in terms of how actively they respond and whether the tenor of response tends toward accommodation or restriction. The case studies identify a trend toward accommodation over time in three of the four cities, as well as revealing the substantive importance of local government inaction in response to immigrants. In the refugee destinations of Lewiston and Wausau, with their Somali and Hmong populations, respectively, we see a progression of responses from providing services, to broader convening around immigrant issues, to incorporating immigrants into local public life. In three out of four cities we see a restrictive response followed by intensified efforts at accommodation.Less

Conclusion: Global Predicaments and Cosmopolitan Quarrels

Dalia Abdelhady

in The Lebanese Diaspora: The Arab Immigrant Experience in Montreal, New York, and Paris

This concluding chapter reflects on the importance of multiple attachments and identifications and examines the meaning of cosmopolitanism in the contemporary global world, stressing the utility of ... More

This concluding chapter reflects on the importance of multiple attachments and identifications and examines the meaning of cosmopolitanism in the contemporary global world, stressing the utility of diaspora as a framework for understanding immigration processes that is applicable to diverse populations and adaptable to different national contexts of reception. By exploring the everyday narratives of immigrants' diasporic lives and expressions, this study contributes to the analytical discussions that constitute the current knowledge of the patterns and dynamics of contemporary immigration in a globalized world. Contemporary immigration flows are creating common patterns of integration as more nations are receiving large numbers of “new immigrants.” This analysis argues, based on its empirical and comparative methodology, for the need to move beyond assimilation and ethnic pluralism as modes of understanding contemporary immigration.Less

The Civil Rights Legacy, External Scrutiny, and Reining in Restrictive Response

Abigail Fisher Williamson

in Welcoming New Americans?: Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation

This chapter demonstrates that when local government officials implement restrictive responses to immigrants they often face external scrutiny that leads them to scale back restriction out of concern ... More

This chapter demonstrates that when local government officials implement restrictive responses to immigrants they often face external scrutiny that leads them to scale back restriction out of concern over legal and reputational costs. In Lewiston, Wausau, and Elgin, restrictive responses to immigrants generated external scrutiny from federal regulators, national advocacy groups, and the media, which framed immigrants as a protected class under civil rights law. Local officials responded by scaling back restriction and even implementing compensatory accommodation. This pattern is also evident across the ninety-four cities and towns that considered or passed restrictive ordinances in 2006-7. These cities experienced a marked decline in restriction over time. Eight years later ordinances remained in effect in only one-third of towns and were scaled back in some way in more than three-quarters. Where external scrutiny was greater, ordinances were less likely to remain in effect, even holding constant other salient factors. Even in small, previously homogeneous new immigrant destinations local officials are sensitive to definitions of immigrants as a protected class under civil rights law and in some cases have internalized antidiscriminatory norms associated with these protections.Less

Hollywood and the American Poles during the War

M. B. B. Biskupski

in Hollywood’s War with Poland 1939–1945

By World War II, Hollywood had a long history of ignoring the Polish population of the United States or presenting them negatively. This, in part, reflected the unenviable position the Poles occupied ... More

By World War II, Hollywood had a long history of ignoring the Polish population of the United States or presenting them negatively. This, in part, reflected the unenviable position the Poles occupied in American society and consciousness in the decades before World War II. The Poles were among the “new immigrants” from eastern and southern Europe who had largely displaced the previous flow of arrivals from western Europe by late in the nineteenth century. Of this group the Poles were a significant number. Among the recent immigrants, only the Italians exceeded the Poles, and not by much. The Poles were far more numerous than any other group from Eastern Europe: many times the number of Czechs, Hungarians, and Balkan Slavs, and far more than the Russians, for example. For Hollywood, American Poles were essentially negative characters.Less

Strangers in the Land

in Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion

This chapter, which examines the role of ethnocentrism in defining citizenship and restricting immigration, suggests that at least some of the opposition to immigration can be accounted for by ... More

This chapter, which examines the role of ethnocentrism in defining citizenship and restricting immigration, suggests that at least some of the opposition to immigration can be accounted for by ethnocentrism. It explains that ethnocentrism predisposes people to react to difference with suspicion, contempt, or condescension, especially if the new immigrants present conspicuous differences. The chapter also evaluates the impact of ethnocentrism on public opinion about immigration.Less

The Movie Menace

Hilary A. Hallett

in "Go West, Young Women!": The Rise of Early Hollywood

The fourth chapter explainshow Hollywood came to stand in for the postwar panic over the cultural influence of new immigrants and the immorality of modern girls, driving the film censorship movement ... More

The fourth chapter explainshow Hollywood came to stand in for the postwar panic over the cultural influence of new immigrants and the immorality of modern girls, driving the film censorship movement to unprecedented heights. Critics, including Henry Ford and the second Ku Klux Klan, launched an assault against the industry that entwined panics over sexuality and race into a melodramatic narrative that featured Hollywood, along withparticularly its “perverse” Jewish producers, as the villain out to corrupt the virtue of American girls. Such extreme attacks helped to unite and give credence to once disparate groups of censorship activists, who increasingly came to agree that the industry purveyed Sex Pictures featuring dangerously un-American morality and stars.Less

New Friend: A Sinophone Perspective on the First Locally Produced Film in Singapore and Malaya

Wai-Siam Hee

in Remapping the Sinophone: The Cultural Production of Chinese-Language Cinema in Singapore and Malaya before and during the Cold War

The first chapter searches for evidence of the production of the first Singaporean and Malayan film NewFriend in old periodicals from the 1920s held in the British Library. This corrects the common ... More

The first chapter searches for evidence of the production of the first Singaporean and Malayan film NewFriend in old periodicals from the 1920s held in the British Library. This corrects the common misconception that this film was never screened and confirms the historical significance and standing of NewFriend as the first Singaporean and Malayan film. This chapter also describes the origins of, and public response to, the Nanyang Low Poey Kim Independent Motion Picture Company. It also gives an overview of Liu’s tragic life, from film company owner to his return to China to fight against the Japanese as a ‘Nanyang Volunteer Driver and Mechanic’. In addition, this chapter describes the NewFriend production team and the debates the film sparked among audiences. It then further investigates the problems that the film confronted at the time of its production, including censorship imposed by the British colonial government during the 1920s, the oscillation found in NewFriend’s screenplay between the Nanyang and Chinese styles of literature and art, and the way it handles entanglements between ‘new immigrants’ and Chinese Peranakan. This chapter also observes that NewFriend features a Sinophone ‘linguistic creolisation’, inverting the hierarchical relationship between Chinese people and foreigners found in S.E. Asian reality. This reflects Liu’s optimistic hope that S.E. Asian Chinese society would unite under the banner of ‘Chineseness’ and resist colonial power. Liu Beijin and the case of NewFriend represent pre–Cold War S.E. Asian Chinese cultural productions of Chinese historical identity, in which Chineseness and hybridity coexisted without a binary choice. This provides a historical dimension to reflections on Sinophone topics related to Chineseness and hybridity.Less

A New China, a New Community

Fredy González

in Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico

This chapter illustrates the profound changes that affected the Chinese Mexican community after Mexico established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Chinese Mexican political ... More

This chapter illustrates the profound changes that affected the Chinese Mexican community after Mexico established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Chinese Mexican political associations abruptly closed, while second- and subsequent generation Chinese Mexicans founded their own cultural associations. At the same time, new Chinese immigrants arrived from the mainland, speaking a different language and holding different cultural traditions. The different waves of Chinese Mexicans present a challenge to community unity. Finally, some Chinese Mexicans have slowly come to embrace the People’s Republic of China, making claims to belonging in mainland China while at the same time proudly declaring that their roots are now in Mexico.Less

The New Wandering Rocks

Stephen Watt

in "Something Dreadful and Grand": American Literature and The Irish-Jewish Unconscious

This chapter takes its title from an episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom visits a tawdry book stand seeking salacious titles, most of which are concealed from view. Using this ... More

This chapter takes its title from an episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom visits a tawdry book stand seeking salacious titles, most of which are concealed from view. Using this trope of the hidden, a characteristic of the Freudian uncanny, this chapter explores uncanny affinities between—and eruptions of—hidden Irishness and Jewishness in selected works of John Banville, Brendan Behan, Norman Mailer, Harold Pinter, and Howard Jacobson. The chapter also makes the case for a “multidirectional” historical memory that juxtaposes such widespread traumas as the Great Famine and the Holocaust, in the process continuing a long tradition of paralleling Irish and Jewish diasporic experiences. One test case of multidirectional reading is provided by Bernard MacLaverty’s adducing of parallels between the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Shoah. The chapter and book conclude with a summary of more recent representations of immigrant America by Brian Friel and Gish Jen.Less