Popular Assigned Readings for Courses on Immigration



This list has been compiled to give a flavor of the most popular or frequently assigned readings for college and university courses on immigration.  This list is still under revision.  It is meant to give those interested in immigration a starting point for reading.  It is more heavily oriented to books than journal articles. We welcome suggestions for new readings to be included.

Gender and Family
Society
    The New Second Generation
    Assimilation/Incorporation, Race and Ethnic Identity
    Social Networks and Transnationalism
    Religion and Migration
Politics
    Political Incorporation
    Immigration Policy
    The United States-Mexico Border and Migration
Economics
    Immigrant Labor Conditions
    Causes and Consequences of Migration, Globalization
Comparative Studies
    Non-U.S. Migration
    Historical Studies
Methods and Major Theories
    Research Methods for Migration Studies
    Migration Theories - Major Schools and Alternative Theories



Gender and Family

Agrawal, Anuja. Migrant Women and Work. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

This volume studies the patterns and consequences of long-term migration among Asian women, primarily 'solo migrant women', who migrate globally as well as across the Asian continent in order to find work. Covering a broad terrain of gender issues, the volume analyzes the changing gender composition of migration streams and the specific conditions under which they migrate, as also compares the different outcomes of male and female migration. The contributors discuss a variety of issues from a fresh perspective including gender equality, household division of labor and state policies regarding welfare provisions. Overall, the volume maintains that the structural ramifications of women's migration extend beyond the lives of migrant women themselves insofar as their labor plays a crucial factor in shaping gender relations in the societies of both the migrants and their hosts. The picture of migrant workers that emerges from this volume suggests that the specificity of the migrant woman's occupational class marks the degree of her vulnerability. Among the case studies presented are: the migration of Filipino women; Thai rural women's migration to Bangkok; Indian nurses in the Gulf; and Asian women medical workers in the UK.

Behera, Navnita C. Gender, Conflict and Migration. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Research on the subject of women's migration and conflict is generally organized along the twin axes of gender and conflict, and gender and migration. The reality of women's conflict-driven migration, however, falls between these two axes. The essays in this volume seek to fill this gap by examining the changes in status, identities and power relations among women and men as they move from a conflict situation at home, to migrant camps, to the post-conflict or peace-building phase when they return home. The volume provides key insights to the understanding of these issues in specific conflict situations throughout South Asia.

Gardner, Martha. The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

The Qualities of a Citizen traces the application of U.S. immigration and naturalization law to women from the 1870s to the late 1960s. Like no other book before, it explores how racialized, gendered, and historical anxieties shaped our current understandings of the histories of immigrant women. The book takes us from the first federal immigration restrictions against Asian prostitutes in the 1870s to the immigration "reform" measures of the late 1960s. Throughout this period, topics such as morality, family, marriage, poverty, and nationality structured historical debates over women's immigration and citizenship. At the border, women immigrants, immigration officials, social service providers, and federal judges argued the grounds on which women would be included within the nation. As interview transcripts and court documents reveal, when, where, and how women were welcomed into the country depended on their racial status, their roles in the family, and their work skills. Gender and race mattered. The book emphasizes the comparative nature of racial ideologies in which the inclusion of one group often came with the exclusion of another. It explores how U.S. officials insisted on the link between race and gender in understanding America's peculiar brand of nationalism. It also serves as a social history of the law, detailing women's experiences and strategies, successes and failures, to belong to the nation.

George, Sheba Mariam. When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

With a subtle yet penetrating understanding of the intricate interplay of gender, race, and class, Sheba George examines an unusual immigration pattern to analyze what happens when women who migrate before men become the breadwinners in the family. Focusing on a group of female nurses who moved from India to the United States before their husbands, she shows that this story of economic mobility and professional achievement conceals underlying conditions of upheaval not only in the families and immigrant community but also in the sending community in India. This richly textured and impeccably researched study deftly illustrates the complex reconfigurations of gender and class relations concealed behind a quintessential American success story.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Kibria, Nazli. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and new Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia have recruited foreign household workers at a rapidly increasing rate. Many come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Pei-Chia Lan interviewed and spent time with dozens of Filipina and Indonesian domestics working in and around Taipei as well as many of their Taiwanese employers. On the basis of the vivid ethnographic detail she collected, Lan provides a nuanced look at how boundaries between worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in private households. She also sheds light on the fate of the workers, "global Cinderellas" who seek an escape from poverty at home only to find themselves treated as disposable labor abroad.

Lan demonstrates how economic disparities, immigration policies, race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in the relationship between the migrant workers and their Taiwanese employers. The employers are eager to flex their recently acquired financial muscle; many are first-generation career women as well as first-generation employers. The domestics are recruited from abroad as contract and "guest" workers; restrictive immigration policies prohibit them from seeking permanent residence or transferring from one employer to another. They care for Taiwanese families' children, often having left their own behind. Throughout Global Cinderellas, Lan pays particular attention to how the women she studied identify themselves in relation to others-- whether they be of different classes, nationalities, ethnicities, or education levels. In so doing, she offers a framework for thinking about how migrant workers and their employers understand themselves in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows.

Peña, Milagros. Latina Activists across Borders: Women's Grassroots Organizing in Mexico and Texas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Available 2007).
Show/Hide Info

In this sociological analysis of grassroots activism, Milagros Peña compares women's NGOs in two regions - the state of Michoacán in central Mexico and the border region encompassing El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In both Michoacán and the border region, women have organized to take on a variety of concerns, including domestic violence, the growing number of single women who are heads of households, and exploitive labor conditions. By comparing women's activism in two distinct areas, Peña illuminates their different motivations, alliances, and organizational strategies in relation to local conditions and national and international activist networks.

Drawing on interviews with the leaders of more than two dozen women's NGOs in Michoacán and El Paso/Juarez, Peña examines the influence of the Catholic church and liberation theology on Latina activism, and she describes how activist affiliations increasingly cross ethnic, racial, and class lines. Women's NGOs in Michoacán put an enormous amount of energy into preparations for the 1995 United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Women in Beijing, and they developed extensive activist networks as a result. As Peña demonstrates, activists in El Paso/Juarez were less interested in the Beijing conference; they were intensely focused on issues related to immigration and to the murder and disappearance of scores of women in Juarez. Ultimately, Peña's study highlights the consciousness-raising work done by NGOs run by and for Mexican and Mexican American women: they encourage Latinas to connect their personal lives to the broader political, economic, social, and cultural issues affecting them.

Segura, Denise A. and Patricia Zavella. Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Available May 2007).
Show/Hide Info

Women's migration within Mexico and from Mexico to the United States is increasing; nearly as many women as men are migrating. This development gives rise to new social negotiations which have not been well examined in migration studies until now. This path-breaking anthology analyzes how economically and politically displaced migrant women assert agency in everyday life. Scholars across diverse disciplines interrogate the socioeconomic forces that propel Mexican women into the migrant stream and shape their employment options; the changes that these women are making in homes, families, and communities; and the "structural violence" that Mexican women confront in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly conceived: in the economic, social, cultural, and political interstices between the two countries.

This anthology includes twenty-three essays--two of which are translated from the Spanish?that illuminate women's engagement with diverse social and cultural challenges. One contributor critiques the statistical fallacy of nativist discourses within the United States that portray Chicana and Mexican women's fertility rates as "out of control." Other contributors explore the relation between sexual violence and women's migration from rural areas to urban centers within Mexico, the ways that undocumented migrant communities challenge conventional notions of citizenship, and young Latinas' commemorations of the late, internationally renowned singer Selena. Several essays address workplace intimidation and violence, harassment and rape by U.S. border patrol agents and maquiladora managers, sexual violence, and the brutal murders of nearly two hundred young women near Ciudad Juárez. This rich collection highlights both the structural inequities faced by Mexican women in the borderlands and the creative ways they have responded to them.

Thapan, Meenakshi. Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Focusing on Asian women's experience of immigration, the contributions in this book collectively highlight the gendered dimension of migration, the different experiences of men to women and the subsequent consequences for women within the constraints of the root culture and the strategies deployed to make life more bearable in the host country. The central theme discussed is the fact that immigrant women are unable to completely break away from the chains of traditional patriarchal norms, imposed by either their host country or root culture. Immigrant women's identity is, therefore, far more fluid and regulated by both social and state institutions they encounter.


Society

The New Second Generation

Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley and New York, University of California Press and Russell Sage, 2001.

Rumbaut, Rubén G. and Alejandro Portes. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley and New York, University of California Press and Russell Sage, 2001.

Zhou, Min and Carl L. Bankston III. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998.

Assimilation/Incorporation, Race and Ethnic Identity

Alba, R. and V. Nee. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Aranda, Elizabeth M. Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico: Migration, Return Migration, and the Struggles of Incorporation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico examines the experiences of incorporation among two groups of middle-class Puerto Ricans: one that currently lives in the U.S. mainland and one that has resettled in Puerto Rico. The analysis focuses on their subjective interpretations of incorporation and the conditions under which they decide to move back and forth between the mainland and island. Findings reveal that migration to the mainland results in educational, occupational and economic gains in the U.S., which also help return migrants re-enter Island labor markets. U.S. settlement brings its own set of struggles. Puerto Ricans see themselves as members of transnational families, yet the struggles of leading dual lives result in settlement decisions that reflect desires to live locally with roots in one place instead of feeling split between the two. Experiences with U.S. racism complicate these decisions, given Puerto Ricans' struggles with racial identity and exclusion in spite of their economic, occupational, and residential integration into mainland society. This study illustrates the conditions under which various patterns of attachments to place-or emotional anchoring-develop, and how these feelings impact future Puerto Rican settlement.

Bean, Frank D. and Gillian Stevens. America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003.

Bedolla, Lisa García. Fluid borders : Latino power, identity, and politics in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

This provocative study of the Latino political experience offers a nuanced, in-depth, and often surprising perspective on the factors affecting the political engagement of a segment of the population that is now the nation's largest minority. Drawing from one hundred in-depth interviews, Lisa García Bedolla compares the political attitudes and behavior of Latinos in two communities: working-class East Los Angeles and middle-class Montebello. Asking how collective identity and social context have affected political socialization, political attitudes and practices, and levels of political participation among the foreign born and native born, she offers new findings that are often at odds with the conventional wisdom emphasizing the role socioeconomic status plays in political involvement.

Das Gupta, Monisha. Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In Unruly Immigrants, Monisha Das Gupta explores the innovative strategies that South Asian feminist, queer, and labor organizations in the United States have developed to assert claims to rights for immigrants without the privileges or security of citizenship. Since the 1980s many South Asian immigrants have found the India-centered "model minority" politics of previous generations inadequate to the task of redressing problems such as violence against women, homophobia, racism, and poverty. Thus they have devised new models of immigrant advocacy, seeking rights that are mobile rather than rooted in national membership, and advancing their claims as migrants rather than as citizens-to-be. Creating social justice organizations, they have inventively constructed a transnational complex of rights by drawing on local, national, and international laws to seek entitlements for their constituencies.

Das Gupta offers an ethnography of seven South Asian organizations in the northeastern United States, looking at their development and politics as well as the conflicts that have emerged within the groups over questions of sexual, class, and political identities. She examines the ways that women's organizations have defined and responded to questions of domestic violence as they relate to women's immigration status; she describes the construction of a transnational South Asian queer identity and culture by people often marginalized by both mainstream South Asian and queer communities in the United States; and she draws attention to the efforts of labor groups who have sought economic justice for taxi drivers and domestic workers by confronting local policies that exploit cheap immigrant labor. Responding to the shortcomings of the state, their communities, and the larger social movements of which they are a part, these groups challenge the assumption that citizenship is the necessary basis of rights claims.

Deaux, Kay. To Be an Immigrant. New York: Russell Sage, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In To Be an Immigrant, social psychologist Kay Deaux explores the role of both social conditions and individual capacities in determining how well immigrants adapt to life in their new homelands, and makes a strong case for the relevance of social psychology in immigration studies. To Be an Immigrant looks at how immigrants are defined, shaped, and challenged by the cultural environment they encounter in their new country and offers an integrated psychological framework for studying the immigrant experience. Deaux argues that in addition to looking at macro-level factors like public policies and social conditions and micro-level issues like individual choices, immigration scholars should also study influences that occur on an intermediate level, such as interpersonal encounters. Each of these three levels of analysis is essential to understanding how immigrants adapt to a new homeland and form distinct identities. As a case study for her framework, Deaux examines West Indians, exploring their perceptions of the stereotypes they face in the United States and their feelings of connection to their new home. Though race plays a limited role in the West Indies, it becomes more relevant to migrants once they arrive in the United States, where they are primarily identified by others as black, rather than Guyanese or Jamaican. Deaux's research adds to a growing literature in social psychology on stereotype threat, which suggests that negative stereotypes about one's group can hinder an individual's performance. She finds that immigrants who have been in the United States longer and identify themselves as African-American suffer from the negative effects of stereotype threat more than recent immigrants.

Huntington, Samuel. "The Hispanic Challenge." Foreign Policy : 30-45. 2004.

Kaplan, David H. and Wei Li. Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Immigration has expanded dramatically in both traditional and emerging receiving nations. This worldwide boom has profoundly altered urban areas as new arrivals have transformed inner cities and suburbs alike into bastions of new ethnic economic activity.

Examining the essential role of space in assisting and modifying ethnic business activity, this book considers how ethnic economies are reshaping the urban landscape in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Italy. Each chapter explores the significance of urban space and local context in the development of an ethnic economy and how, in turn, ethnic economies have helped to recreate urban neighborhoods.

With its international scope and rich case studies, this book will be invaluable for scholars and students alike in the fields of ethnic studies, urban studies, economic development, geography, and sociology.

Light, Ivan. Deflecting Immigration: Networks, Markets, and Regulation in Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In Deflecting Immigration, sociologist Ivan Light shows how Los Angeles reduced the sustained, high-volume influx of poor Latinos who settled there by deflecting a portion of the migration to other cities in the United States. In this manner, Los Angeles tamed globalization's local impact, and helped to nationalize what had been a regional immigration issue. Los Angeles deflected immigration elsewhere in two ways. First, the protracted network-driven settlement of Mexicans naturally drove up rents in Mexican neighborhoods while reducing immigrants' wages, rendering Los Angeles a less attractive place to settle. Second, as migration outstripped the city's capacity to absorb newcomers, Los Angeles gradually became poverty-intolerant. By enforcing existing industrial, occupational, and housing ordinances, Los Angeles shut down some unwanted sweatshops and reduced slums. Their loss reduced the metropolitan region's accessibility to poor immigrants without reducing its attractiveness to wealthier immigrants. Additionally, ordinances mandating that homes be built on minimum-sized plots of land with attached garages made home ownership in L.A.'s suburbs unaffordable for poor immigrants and prevented low-cost rental housing from being built. Local rules concerning home occupancy and yard maintenance also prevented poor immigrants from crowding together to share housing costs. Unable to find affordable housing or low-wage jobs, approximately one million Latinos were deflected from Los Angeles between 1980 and 2000. The realities of a new global economy are still unfolding, with uncertain consequences for the future of advanced societies, but mass migration from the Third World is unlikely to stop in the next generation. Deflecting Immigration offers a shrewd analysis of how America's largest immigrant destination independently managed the challenges posed by millions of poor immigrants and, in the process, helped focus attention on immigration as an issue of national importance.

Perlmann, Joel. Italians Then, Mexicans Now. New York: Russell Sage, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

In Italians Then, Mexicans Now, Joel Perlmann uses the latest immigration data as well as 100 years of historical census data to compare the progress of unskilled immigrants and their American-born children both then and now. The crucial difference between the immigrant experience a hundred years ago and today is that relatively well-paid jobs were plentiful for workers with little education a hundred years ago, while today's immigrants arrive in an increasingly unequal America. Perlmann finds that while this change over time is real, its impact has not been as strong as many scholars have argued. In particular, these changes have not been great enough to force today's Mexican second generation into an inner-city "underclass." Perlmann emphasizes that high school dropout rates among second-generation Mexicans are alarmingly high, and are likely to have a strong impact on the group's well-being. Yet despite their high dropout rates, Mexican Americans earn at least as much as African Americans, and they fare better on social measures such as unwed childbearing and incarceration, which often lead to economic hardship. Perlmann concludes that inter-generational progress, though likely to be slower than it was for the European immigrants a century ago, is a reality, and could be enhanced if policy interventions are taken to boost high school graduation rates for Mexican children.

Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America A Portrait Third edition. Revised, Expanded, and Updated. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. (Available October 2006)
Show/Hide Info

This third edition of the widely acclaimed classic has been thoroughly expanded and updated to reflect current demographic, economic, and political realities. Drawing on recent census data and other primary sources, Portes and Rumbaut have infused the entire text with new information and added a vivid array of new vignettes and illustrations. Recognized for its superb portrayal of immigration and immigrant lives in the United States, this book probes the dynamics of immigrant politics, examining questions of identity and loyalty among newcomers, and explores the psychological consequences of varying modes of migration and acculturation. The authors look at patterns of settlement in urban America, discuss the problems of English-language acquisition and bilingual education, explain how immigrants incorporate themselves into the American economy, and examine the trajectories of their children from adolescence to early adulthood. With a vital new chapter on religion--and fresh analyses of topics ranging from patterns of incarceration to the mobility of the second generation and the unintended consequences of public policies--this updated edition is indispensable for framing and informing issues that promise to be even more hotly and urgently contested as the subject moves to the center of national debate.

Thapan, Meenakshi. Transnational Migration and the Politics of Identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Focusing on Asian women's experience of immigration, the contributions in this book collectively highlight the gendered dimension of migration, the different experiences of men to women and the subsequent consequences for women within the constraints of the root culture and the strategies deployed to make life more bearable in the host country. The central theme discussed is the fact that immigrant women are unable to completely break away from the chains of traditional patriarchal norms, imposed by either their host country or root culture. Immigrant women's identity is, therefore, far more fluid and regulated by both social and state institutions they encounter.

Waters, Mary C. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.

Yung, Judy, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai. Chinese American Voices From the Gold Rush to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Described by others as quaint and exotic, or as depraved and threatening, and, more recently, as successful and exemplary, the Chinese in America have rarely been asked to describe themselves in their own words. This superb anthology, a diverse and illuminating collection of primary documents and stories by Chinese Americans, provides an intimate and textured history of the Chinese in America from their arrival during the California Gold Rush to the present. Among the documents are letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs; many have never been published before or have been translated into English for the first time. They bring to life the diverse voices of immigrants and American-born; laborers, merchants, and professionals; ministers and students; housewives and prostitutes; and community leaders and activists. Together, they provide insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion. Featuring photographs and extensive introductions to the documents written by three leading Chinese American scholars, this compelling volume offers a panoramic perspective on the Chinese American experience and opens new vistas on American social, cultural, and political history.

Social Networks and Transnationalism

Aranda, Elizabeth M. Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico: Migration, Return Migration, and the Struggles of Incorporation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico examines the experiences of incorporation among two groups of middle-class Puerto Ricans: one that currently lives in the U.S. mainland and one that has resettled in Puerto Rico. The analysis focuses on their subjective interpretations of incorporation and the conditions under which they decide to move back and forth between the mainland and island. Findings reveal that migration to the mainland results in educational, occupational and economic gains in the U.S., which also help return migrants re-enter Island labor markets. U.S. settlement brings its own set of struggles. Puerto Ricans see themselves as members of transnational families, yet the struggles of leading dual lives result in settlement decisions that reflect desires to live locally with roots in one place instead of feeling split between the two. Experiences with U.S. racism complicate these decisions, given Puerto Ricans' struggles with racial identity and exclusion in spite of their economic, occupational, and residential integration into mainland society. This study illustrates the conditions under which various patterns of attachments to place-or emotional anchoring-develop, and how these feelings impact future Puerto Rican settlement.

Espiritu, Yen Le. Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

George, Sheba Mariam. When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

With a subtle yet penetrating understanding of the intricate interplay of gender, race, and class, Sheba George examines an unusual immigration pattern to analyze what happens when women who migrate before men become the breadwinners in the family. Focusing on a group of female nurses who moved from India to the United States before their husbands, she shows that this story of economic mobility and professional achievement conceals underlying conditions of upheaval not only in the families and immigrant community but also in the sending community in India. This richly textured and impeccably researched study deftly illustrates the complex reconfigurations of gender and class relations concealed behind a quintessential American success story.

Gregory, Steven. The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. (Available December 2006).
Show/Hide Info

In The Devil behind the Mirror, Steven Gregory provides a compelling and intimate account of the impact that transnational processes associated with globalization are having on the lives and livelihoods of people in the Dominican Republic. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the adjacent towns of Boca Chica and Andrés, Gregory's study deftly demonstrates how transnational flows of capital, culture, and people are mediated by contextually specific power relations, politics, and history. He explores such topics as the informal economy, the making of a telenova, sex tourism, and racism and discrimination against Haitians, who occupy the lowest rung on the Dominican economic ladder. Innovative and beautifully written, The Devil behind the Mirror masterfully situates the analysis of global economic change in everyday lives.

Hein, Jeremy. Ethnic Origins: The Adaptation of Cambodian and Hmong Refugees in Four American Cities. New York: Russell Sage, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In Ethnic Origins, Jeremy Hein investigates the role of religion, family, and other cultural factors on immigrant incorporation into American society by comparing the experiences of two little-known immigrant groups living in four different American cities not commonly regarded as immigrant gateways. Ethnic Origins provides an in-depth look at Hmong and Khmer refugees-people who left Asia as a result of failed U.S. foreign policy in their countries. These groups share low socio-economic status, but are vastly different in their norms, values, and histories. Hein compares their experience in two small towns-Rochester, Minnesota and Eau Claire, Wisconsin-and in two big cities-Chicago and Milwaukee-and examines how each group adjusted to these different settings. Hein finds that for each group, their ethnic background was more important in shaping adaptation patterns than the place in which they settled. Hein shows how, in both the cities and towns, the Hmong's sharply drawn ethnic boundaries and minority status in their native land left them with less affinity for U.S. citizenship or "Asian American" pan-ethnicity than the Khmer, whose ethnic boundary is more porous. Examining two unique immigrant groups in communities where immigrants have not traditionally settled, Ethnic Origins illustrates the factors that shape immigrants' response to American society and suggests a need to refine prevailing theories of immigration.

Levitt, Peggy, and Mary C. Waters. The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.

Menjívar, Cecilia. Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Olwig, Karen Fog. Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (Available June 2007).
Show/Hide Info

Caribbean Journeys is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural meaning of migration and home in three families of West Indian background that are now dispersed throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain. Moving migration studies beyond its current focus on sending and receiving societies, Karen Fog Olwig makes migratory family networks the locus of her analysis. For the people whose lives she traces, being "Caribbean" is not necessarily rooted in ongoing visits to their countries of origin, or in ethnic communities in the receiving countries, but rather in family narratives and the maintenance of family networks across vast geographical expanses.

The migratory journeys of the families in this study began more than sixty years ago, when individuals in the three families left home in a British colonial town in Jamaica, a French Creole rural community in Dominica, and an African-Caribbean village of small farmers on Nevis. Olwig follows the three family networks forward in time, interviewing family members living under highly varied social and economic circumstances in locations ranging from California to Barbados, Nova Scotia to Florida, and New Jersey to England. Through her conversations with several generations of these far-flung families, she gives insight into each family's educational, occupational, and socio-economic trajectories. Olwig contends that terms such as "Caribbean diaspora" wrongly assume a culturally homogeneous homeland. As she demonstrates in Caribbean Journeys, anthropologists who want a nuanced understanding of how migrants and their descendants perceive their origins and identities must focus on interpersonal relations and intimate spheres as well as on collectivities and public expressions of belonging.

Stephen, Lynn. Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Available May 2007).
Show/Hide Info

Lynn Stephen's ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca-the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle-who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many-national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class-borders that these migrants repeatedly cross, Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: she assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities.

Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era-hierarchies that debase Mexico's indigenous groups-are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grassroots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

Religion and Migration

Carnes, Tony, and Fenggang Yang, eds., Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries. New York: New York University Press 2004.

Ebaugh, Helen Rose, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 2000.

Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America A Portrait Third edition. Revised, Expanded, and Updated. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. (Available October 2006)
Show/Hide Info

This third edition of the widely acclaimed classic has been thoroughly expanded and updated to reflect current demographic, economic, and political realities. Drawing on recent census data and other primary sources, Portes and Rumbaut have infused the entire text with new information and added a vivid array of new vignettes and illustrations. Recognized for its superb portrayal of immigration and immigrant lives in the United States, this book probes the dynamics of immigrant politics, examining questions of identity and loyalty among newcomers, and explores the psychological consequences of varying modes of migration and acculturation. The authors look at patterns of settlement in urban America, discuss the problems of English-language acquisition and bilingual education, explain how immigrants incorporate themselves into the American economy, and examine the trajectories of their children from adolescence to early adulthood. With a vital new chapter on religion--and fresh analyses of topics ranging from patterns of incarceration to the mobility of the second generation and the unintended consequences of public policies--this updated edition is indispensable for framing and informing issues that promise to be even more hotly and urgently contested as the subject moves to the center of national debate.

Warner, R. Stephen, and Judith G. Wittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1998.

Wierzbicki, Susan. Beyond the Immigrant Enclave: Network Change and Assimilation. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2004.

Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III, Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Youth Adapt to Life in the United States. New York: Russell Sage, 1998.


Politics

Political Incorporation

Bedolla, Lisa Garcia. Fluid borders: Latino power, identity, and politics in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

This provocative study of the Latino political experience offers a nuanced, in-depth, and often surprising perspective on the factors affecting the political engagement of a segment of the population that is now the nation's largest minority. Drawing from one hundred in-depth interviews, Lisa García Bedolla compares the political attitudes and behavior of Latinos in two communities: working-class East Los Angeles and middle-class Montebello. Asking how collective identity and social context have affected political socialization, political attitudes and practices, and levels of political participation among the foreign born and native born, she offers new findings that are often at odds with the conventional wisdom emphasizing the role socioeconomic status plays in political involvement.

Bloemraad, Irene. Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

How can societies that welcome immigrants from around the world create civic cohesion and political community out of ethnic and racial diversity? This thought-provoking book is the first to provide a comparative perspective on how the United States and Canada encourage foreigners to become citizens. Based on vivid in-depth interviews with Portuguese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees in Boston and Toronto and on statistical analysis and documentary data, Becoming a Citizen shows that greater state support for settlement and an official government policy of multiculturalism in Canada increase citizenship acquisition and political participation among the foreign born. The United States, long a successful example of immigrant integration, today has greater problems incorporating newcomers into the polity. While many previous accounts suggest that differences in naturalization and political involvement stem from differences in immigrants' political skills and interests, Irene Bloemraad argues that foreigners' political incorporation is not just a question of the type of people countries receive, but also fundamentally of the reception given to them. She discusses the implications of her findings for other countries, including Australia and immigrant nations in Europe.

Das Gupta, Monisha. Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In Unruly Immigrants, Monisha Das Gupta explores the innovative strategies that South Asian feminist, queer, and labor organizations in the United States have developed to assert claims to rights for immigrants without the privileges or security of citizenship. Since the 1980s many South Asian immigrants have found the India-centered "model minority" politics of previous generations inadequate to the task of redressing problems such as violence against women, homophobia, racism, and poverty. Thus they have devised new models of immigrant advocacy, seeking rights that are mobile rather than rooted in national membership, and advancing their claims as migrants rather than as citizens-to-be. Creating social justice organizations, they have inventively constructed a transnational complex of rights by drawing on local, national, and international laws to seek entitlements for their constituencies.

Das Gupta offers an ethnography of seven South Asian organizations in the northeastern United States, looking at their development and politics as well as the conflicts that have emerged within the groups over questions of sexual, class, and political identities. She examines the ways that women's organizations have defined and responded to questions of domestic violence as they relate to women's immigration status; she describes the construction of a transnational South Asian queer identity and culture by people often marginalized by both mainstream South Asian and queer communities in the United States; and she draws attention to the efforts of labor groups who have sought economic justice for taxi drivers and domestic workers by confronting local policies that exploit cheap immigrant labor. Responding to the shortcomings of the state, their communities, and the larger social movements of which they are a part, these groups challenge the assumption that citizenship is the necessary basis of rights claims.

Milkman, Ruth. L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement. New York: Russell Sage, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In L.A. Story, sociologist and labor expert Ruth Milkman explains how Los Angeles, once known as a company town hostile to labor, became a hotbed for unionism, and how immigrant service workers emerged as the unlikely leaders in the battle for workers' rights. L.A. Story shatters many of the myths of modern labor with a close look at workers in four industries in Los Angeles: building maintenance, trucking, construction, and garment production. Though many blame deunionization and deteriorating working conditions on immigrants, Milkman shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Her analysis reveals that worsening work environments preceded the influx of foreign-born workers, who filled the positions only after native-born workers fled these suddenly undesirable jobs. Ironically, L.A. Story shows that immigrant workers, who many union leaders feared were incapable of being organized because of language constraints and fear of deportation, instead proved highly responsive to organizing efforts. As Milkman demonstrates, these mostly Latino workers came to their service jobs in the United States with a more group-oriented mentality than the American workers they replaced. Some also drew on experience in their native countries with labor and political struggles. This stock of fresh minds and new ideas, along with a physical distance from the east-coast centers of labor's old guard, made Los Angeles the center of a burgeoning workers' rights movement.

Ong, Aihwa. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Peña, Milagros. Latina Activists across Borders: Women's Grassroots Organizing in Mexico and Texas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Available 2007).
Show/Hide Info

In this sociological analysis of grassroots activism, Milagros Peña compares women's NGOs in two regions - the state of Michoacán in central Mexico and the border region encompassing El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In both Michoacán and the border region, women have organized to take on a variety of concerns, including domestic violence, the growing number of single women who are heads of households, and exploitive labor conditions. By comparing women's activism in two distinct areas, Peña illuminates their different motivations, alliances, and organizational strategies in relation to local conditions and national and international activist networks.

Drawing on interviews with the leaders of more than two dozen women's NGOs in Michoacán and El Paso/Juarez, Peña examines the influence of the Catholic church and liberation theology on Latina activism, and she describes how activist affiliations increasingly cross ethnic, racial, and class lines. Women's NGOs in Michoacán put an enormous amount of energy into preparations for the 1995 United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Women in Beijing, and they developed extensive activist networks as a result. As Peña demonstrates, activists in El Paso/Juarez were less interested in the Beijing conference; they were intensely focused on issues related to immigration and to the murder and disappearance of scores of women in Juarez. Ultimately, Peña's study highlights the consciousness-raising work done by NGOs run by and for Mexican and Mexican American women: they encourage Latinas to connect their personal lives to the broader political, economic, social, and cultural issues affecting them.

Pickus, Noah. True Faith and Allegiance. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

True Faith and Allegiance is a provocative account of nationalism and the politics of turning immigrants into citizens and Americans. Noah Pickus offers an alternative to the wild swings between emotionally fraught positions on immigration and citizenship of the past two decades. Drawing on political theory, history, and law, he argues for a renewed civic nationalism that melds principles and peoplehood. This tradition of civic nationalism held sway at America's founding and in the Progressive Era. Pickus explores how, from James Madison to Teddy Roosevelt, its proponents sought to combine reason and reverence and to balance inclusion and exclusion. He takes us through controversies over citizenship for blacks and the rights of aliens at the nation's founding, examines the interplay of ideas and institutions in the Americanization movement in the 1910s and 1920s, and charts how both left and right promoted a policy of neglect toward immigrants and toward citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century. True Faith and Allegiance shows that contemporary debates over a range of immigration and citizenship policies cannot be resolved by appeals to fixed notions of creed or culture, but require a supple civic nationalism that bridges the gap between immigrants' needs and American principles and practices.

Rogers, Reuel R. 2006. Afro-Carribean Immigrants and the Politics of Incorporation: Ethnicity, Exception, or Exit. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Zlolniski, Christian. Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

This book exposes the underbelly of California's Silicon Valley, the most successful high-technology region in the world, in a vivid ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants employed in Silicon Valley's low-wage jobs. Christian Zlolniski's on-the-ground investigation demonstrates how global forces have incorporated these workers as an integral part of the economy through subcontracting and other flexible labor practices and explores how these labor practices have in turn affected working conditions and workers' daily lives. In Zlolniski's analysis, these immigrants do not emerge merely as victims of a harsh economy; despite the obstacles they face, they are transforming labor and community politics, infusing new blood into labor unions, and challenging exclusionary notions of civic and political membership. This richly textured and complex portrait of one community opens a window onto the future of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the new U.S. economy.

Immigration Policy

Borjas, George J. Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Bosniak, Linda. The Citizen and the Alien. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Examining alienage and alienage law in all of its complexities, The Citizen and the Alien explores the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the practices and institutions of citizenship in liberal democratic societies, especially the United States. In doing so, it offers an important new perspective on the changing meaning of citizenship in a world of highly porous borders and increasing transmigration. As a particular form of noncitizenship, alienage represents a powerful lens through which to examine the meaning of citizenship itself, argues Linda Bosniak. She uses alienage to examine the promises and limits of the "equal citizenship" ideal that animates many constitutional democracies. In the process, she shows how core features of globalization serve to shape the structure of legal and social relationships at the very heart of national societies.

Dinnerstein, Leonard & David M. Reimers. Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1988.

Dow, Mark. American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Show/Hide Info

Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. In American Gulag, prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority. American Gulag exposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.

Garcia, Maria Cristina. Seeking refuge: Central American migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

The political upheaval in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had a devastating human toll at the end of the twentieth century. A quarter of a million people died during the period 1974-1996. Many of those who survived the wars chose temporary refuge in neighboring countries such as Honduras and Costa Rica. Others traveled far north, to Mexico, the United States, and Canada in search of safety. Over two million of those who fled Central America during this period settled in these three countries.

In this incisive book, María Cristina García tells the story of that migration and how domestic and foreign policy interests shaped the asylum policies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. She describes the experiences of the individuals and non-governmental organizations--primarily church groups and human rights organizations--that responded to the refugee crisis, and worked within and across borders to shape refugee policy. These transnational advocacy networks collected testimonies, documented the abuses of states, re-framed national debates about immigration, pressed for changes in policy, and ultimately provided a voice for the displaced.

García concludes by addressing the legacies of the Central American refugee crisis, especially recent attempts to coordinate a regional response to the unique problems presented by immigrants and refugees--and the challenges of coordinating such a regional response in the post-9/11 era.

Tichenor, Daniel J. Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.

The United States-Mexico Border and Migration

Borjas, George J., (editor). Mexican Immigration to the United States. University of Chicago Press, Spring 2007

Juffer, Jane. The Last Frontier: The Contemporary Configuration of the U.S.-Mexico Border. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

The Bush administration has designated the U.S.-Mexico border "the last frontier" against potential terrorists from Latin America. Analyzing the human costs, The Last Frontier explores the effects of neoliberal policies on the border. On the one hand, neoliberal economics depend on open borders for the free flow of trade and the maintenance of a low-wage labor force. On the other, both Mexico and the United States continue to heighten surveillance mechanisms and Border Patrol forces, especially in the wake of September 11, in an attempt to close those borders.

Covering a range of disciplinary perspectives--geography, political science, anthropology, American studies, literary studies, and environmental studies--these essays contend that U.S. policies to curtail immigration and drug trafficking along the Mexican border are ineffective. George W. Bush's call for a volunteer security force has legitimized a vigilante presence through the formation of Minutemen civilian border patrols, in addition to larger numbers of Border Patrol agents and expanded detention centers. One contributor argues that, due to the increasingly dangerous border-crossing conditions, more undocumented immigrants are remaining in the United States year-round rather than following the traditional seasonal pattern of work and returning to Mexico. Another contributor interviews drug smugglers and government officials, revealing the gap between reality and the claims of success by the U.S. government in the "war on drugs." Focusing on the social justice movement Ni Una Mas (Not One More), one essay delves into the controversy over the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez and the refusal of the government to investigate these murders properly. Other essays consider instances of resistance and activism--ranging from political movements and protests by NGOs to artistic expression through alternative narratives, poetry, and photography--against the consequences of neoliberalism on the border and its populations.

Nevins, Joseph. Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "illegal alien" and The Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Segura, Denise A. and Patricia Zavella. Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Available May 2007).
Show/Hide Info

Women's migration within Mexico and from Mexico to the United States is increasing; nearly as many women as men are migrating. This development gives rise to new social negotiations which have not been well examined in migration studies until now. This path-breaking anthology analyzes how economically and politically displaced migrant women assert agency in everyday life. Scholars across diverse disciplines interrogate the socioeconomic forces that propel Mexican women into the migrant stream and shape their employment options; the changes that these women are making in homes, families, and communities; and the "structural violence" that Mexican women confront in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands broadly conceived: in the economic, social, cultural, and political interstices between the two countries.

This anthology includes twenty-three essays--two of which are translated from the Spanish--that illuminate women's engagement with diverse social and cultural challenges. One contributor critiques the statistical fallacy of nativist discourses within the United States that portray Chicana and Mexican women's fertility rates as "out of control." Other contributors explore the relation between sexual violence and women's migration from rural areas to urban centers within Mexico, the ways that undocumented migrant communities challenge conventional notions of citizenship, and young Latinas' commemorations of the late, internationally renowned singer Selena. Several essays address workplace intimidation and violence, harassment and rape by U.S. border patrol agents and maquiladora managers, sexual violence, and the brutal murders of nearly two hundred young women near Ciudad Juárez. This rich collection highlights both the structural inequities faced by Mexican women in the borderlands and the creative ways they have responded to them.

Stephen, Lynn. Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Available May 2007).
Show/Hide Info

Lynn Stephen's ethnography follows indigenous Mexicans from two towns in the state of Oaxaca-the Mixtec community of San Agustín Atenango and the Zapotec community of Teotitlán del Valle-who periodically leave their homes in Mexico for extended periods of work in California and Oregon. Demonstrating that the line separating Mexico and the United States is only one among the many-national, regional, cultural, ethnic, and class-borders that these migrants repeatedly cross, Stephen advocates an ethnographic framework focused on transborder, rather than transnational, lives. Yet she does not disregard the state: she assesses the impact migration has had on local systems of government in both Mexico and the United States as well as the abilities of states to police and affect transborder communities.

Stephen weaves the personal histories and narratives of indigenous transborder migrants together with explorations of the larger structures that affect their lives. Taking into account U.S. immigration policies and the demands of commercial agriculture and the service sectors, she chronicles how migrants experience and remember low-wage work in agriculture, landscaping, and childcare and how gender relations in Oaxaca and the United States are reconfigured by migration. She looks at the ways that racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from the colonial era-hierarchies that debase Mexico's indigenous groups-are reproduced within heterogeneous Mexican populations in the United States. Stephen provides case studies of four grassroots organizations in which Mixtec migrants are involved, and she considers specific uses of digital technology by transborder communities. Ultimately Stephen demonstrates that transborder migrants are reshaping notions of territory and politics by developing creative models of governance, education, and economic development as well as ways of maintaining their cultures and languages across geographic distances.

Zúñiga, Víctor and Rubén Hernández-León. New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States. New York: Russell Sage, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

In New Destinations, editors Víctor Zúñiga and Rubén Hernández-León bring together an inter-disciplinary team of scholars to examine demographic, social, cultural, and political changes in areas where the incorporation of Mexican migrants has deeply changed the preexisting ethnic landscape. New Destinations looks at several of the communities where Mexican migrants are beginning to settle, and documents how the latest arrivals are reshaping--and being reshaped by--these new areas of settlement. New Destinations is the first scholarly assessment of Mexican migrants' experience in the Midwest, Northeast, and deep South--the latest settlement points for America's largest immigrant group. Enriched by perspectives from demographers, anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, and political scientists, this volume is a good starting point for scholarship on the new Mexican migration.

Economics

Immigrant Labor Conditions

Agrawal, Anuja. Migrant Women and Work. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

This volume studies the patterns and consequences of long-term migration among Asian women, primarily 'solo migrant women', who migrate globally as well as across the Asian continent in order to find work. Covering a broad terrain of gender issues, the volume analyzes the changing gender composition of migration streams and the specific conditions under which they migrate, as also compares the different outcomes of male and female migration. The contributors discuss a variety of issues from a fresh perspective including gender equality, household division of labor and state policies regarding welfare provisions. Overall, the volume maintains that the structural ramifications of women's migration extend beyond the lives of migrant women themselves insofar as their labor plays a crucial factor in shaping gender relations in the societies of both the migrants and their hosts. The picture of migrant workers that emerges from this volume suggests that the specificity of the migrant woman's occupational class marks the degree of her vulnerability. Among the case studies presented are: the migration of Filipino women; Thai rural women's migration to Bangkok; Indian nurses in the Gulf; and Asian women medical workers in the UK.

Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Workers in India program software applications, transcribe medical dictation online, chase credit card debtors, and sell mobile phones, diet pills, and mortgages for companies based in other countries around the world. While their skills and labor migrate abroad, these workers remain Indian citizens, living and working in India. A. Aneesh calls this phenomenon "virtual migration," and in this groundbreaking study he examines the emerging "transnational virtual space" where labor and vast quantities of code and data cross national boundaries, but the workers themselves do not. Through an analysis of the work of computer programmers in India working for the American software industry, Aneesh argues that the programming code connecting globally dispersed workers through data servers and computer screens is the key organizing structure behind the growing phenomenon of virtual migration. This "rule of code," he contends, is a crucial and underexplored aspect of globalization.

Aneesh draws on the sociology of science, social theory, and research on migration to illuminate the practical and theoretical ramifications of virtual migration. He combines these insights with his extensive ethnographic research in offices in three locations in India--in Delhi, Gurgaon, and Noida--and one in New Jersey. Aneesh contrasts virtual migration with "body shopping," the more familiar practice of physically bringing programmers from other countries to work on site, in this case, bringing them from India to New Jersey. A significant contribution to the social theory of globalization, Virtual Migration maps the expanding transnational space where globalization is enacted via computer programming code.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and new Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. Since the 1980s, the newly prosperous countries of East Asia have recruited foreign household workers at a rapidly increasing rate. Many come from the Philippines and Indonesia. Pei-Chia Lan interviewed and spent time with dozens of Filipina and Indonesian domestics working in and around Taipei as well as many of their Taiwanese employers. On the basis of the vivid ethnographic detail she collected, Lan provides a nuanced look at how boundaries between worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in private households. She also sheds light on the fate of the workers, "global Cinderellas" who seek an escape from poverty at home only to find themselves treated as disposable labor abroad.

Lan demonstrates how economic disparities, immigration policies, race, ethnicity, and gender intersect in the relationship between the migrant workers and their Taiwanese employers. The employers are eager to flex their recently acquired financial muscle; many are first-generation career women as well as first-generation employers. The domestics are recruited from abroad as contract and "guest" workers; restrictive immigration policies prohibit them from seeking permanent residence or transferring from one employer to another. They care for Taiwanese families' children, often having left their own behind. Throughout Global Cinderellas, Lan pays particular attention to how the women she studied identify themselves in relation to "others"-whether they be of different classes, nationalities, ethnicities, or education levels. In so doing, she offers a framework for thinking about how migrant workers and their employers understand themselves in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows.

Milkman, Ruth. L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement. New York: Russell Sage, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

In L.A. Story, sociologist and labor expert Ruth Milkman explains how Los Angeles, once known as a company town hostile to labor, became a hotbed for unionism, and how immigrant service workers emerged as the unlikely leaders in the battle for workers' rights. L.A. Story shatters many of the myths of modern labor with a close look at workers in four industries in Los Angeles: building maintenance, trucking, construction, and garment production. Though many blame deunionization and deteriorating working conditions on immigrants, Milkman shows that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Her analysis reveals that worsening work environments preceded the influx of foreign-born workers, who filled the positions only after native-born workers fled these suddenly undesirable jobs. Ironically, L.A. Story shows that immigrant workers, who many union leaders feared were incapable of being organized because of language constraints and fear of deportation, instead proved highly responsive to organizing efforts. As Milkman demonstrates, these mostly Latino workers came to their service jobs in the United States with a more group-oriented mentality than the American workers they replaced. Some also drew on experience in their native countries with labor and political struggles. This stock of fresh minds and new ideas, along with a physical distance from the east-coast centers of labor's old guard, made Los Angeles the center of a burgeoning workers' rights movement.

Waldinger, Roger D. How the Other Half Works: Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2003.

Zlolniski, Christian. Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

This book exposes the underbelly of California's Silicon Valley, the most successful high-technology region in the world, in a vivid ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants employed in Silicon Valley's low-wage jobs. Christian Zlolniski's on-the-ground investigation demonstrates how global forces have incorporated these workers as an integral part of the economy through subcontracting and other flexible labor practices and explores how these labor practices have in turn affected working conditions and workers' daily lives. In Zlolniski's analysis, these immigrants do not emerge merely as victims of a harsh economy; despite the obstacles they face, they are transforming labor and community politics, infusing new blood into labor unions, and challenging exclusionary notions of civic and political membership. This richly textured and complex portrait of one community opens a window onto the future of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the new U.S. economy.

Causes and Consequences of Migration, Globalization

Bean, Frank D. and Gillian Stevens. 2003. America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Borjas, George J. Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Bosniak, Linda. The Citizen and the Alien. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Examining alienage and alienage law in all of its complexities, The Citizen and the Alien explores the dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion inherent in the practices and institutions of citizenship in liberal democratic societies, especially the United States. In doing so, it offers an important new perspective on the changing meaning of citizenship in a world of highly porous borders and increasing transmigration. As a particular form of noncitizenship, alienage represents a powerful lens through which to examine the meaning of citizenship itself, argues Linda Bosniak. She uses alienage to examine the promises and limits of the "equal citizenship" ideal that animates many constitutional democracies. In the process, she shows how core features of globalization serve to shape the structure of legal and social relationships at the very heart of national societies.

Gregory, Steven. The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. (Available December 2006).
Show/Hide Info

In The Devil behind the Mirror, Steven Gregory provides a compelling and intimate account of the impact that transnational processes associated with globalization are having on the lives and livelihoods of people in the Dominican Republic. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the adjacent towns of Boca Chica and Andrés, Gregory's study deftly demonstrates how transnational flows of capital, culture, and people are mediated by contextually specific power relations, politics, and history. He explores such topics as the informal economy, the making of a telenova, sex tourism, and racism and discrimination against Haitians, who occupy the lowest rung on the Dominican economic ladder. Innovative and beautifully written, The Devil behind the Mirror masterfully situates the analysis of global economic change in everyday lives.

Zlolniski, Christian. Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

This book exposes the underbelly of California's Silicon Valley, the most successful high-technology region in the world, in a vivid ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants employed in Silicon Valley's low-wage jobs. Christian Zlolniski's on-the-ground investigation demonstrates how global forces have incorporated these workers as an integral part of the economy through subcontracting and other flexible labor practices and explores how these labor practices have in turn affected working conditions and workers' daily lives. In Zlolniski's analysis, these immigrants do not emerge merely as victims of a harsh economy; despite the obstacles they face, they are transforming labor and community politics, infusing new blood into labor unions, and challenging exclusionary notions of civic and political membership. This richly textured and complex portrait of one community opens a window onto the future of Mexican and other Latino immigrants in the new U.S. economy.

Comparative

Non-U.S. Migration

Behera, Navnita C. Gender, Conflict and Migration. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Research on the subject of women's migration and conflict is generally organized along the twin axes of gender and conflict, and gender and migration. The reality of women's conflict-driven migration, however, falls between these two axes. The essays in this volume seek to fill this gap by examining the changes in status, identities and power relations among women and men as they move from a conflict situation at home, to migrant camps, to the post-conflict or peace-building phase when they return home. The volume provides key insights to the understanding of these issues in specific conflict situations throughout South Asia.

Bloemraad, Irene. Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

How can societies that welcome immigrants from around the world create civic cohesion and political community out of ethnic and racial diversity? This thought-provoking book is the first to provide a comparative perspective on how the United States and Canada encourage foreigners to become citizens. Based on vivid in-depth interviews with Portuguese immigrants and Vietnamese refugees in Boston and Toronto and on statistical analysis and documentary data, Becoming a Citizen shows that greater state support for settlement and an official government policy of multiculturalism in Canada increase citizenship acquisition and political participation among the foreign born. The United States, long a successful example of immigrant integration, today has greater problems incorporating newcomers into the polity. While many previous accounts suggest that differences in naturalization and political involvement stem from differences in immigrants' political skills and interests, Irene Bloemraad argues that foreigners' political incorporation is not just a question of the type of people countries receive, but also fundamentally of the reception given to them. She discusses the implications of her findings for other countries, including Australia and immigrant nations in Europe.

Deniz Göktürk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes, eds. Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955-2005. April 2007.

Garcia, Maria Cristina. Seeking refuge: Central American migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

The political upheaval in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had a devastating human toll at the end of the twentieth century. A quarter of a million people died during the period 1974-1996. Many of those who survived the wars chose temporary refuge in neighboring countries such as Honduras and Costa Rica. Others traveled far north, to Mexico, the United States, and Canada in search of safety. Over two million of those who fled Central America during this period settled in these three countries.

In this incisive book, María Cristina García tells the story of that migration and how domestic and foreign policy interests shaped the asylum policies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. She describes the experiences of the individuals and non-governmental organizations--primarily church groups and human rights organizations--that responded to the refugee crisis, and worked within and across borders to shape refugee policy. These transnational advocacy networks collected testimonies, documented the abuses of states, re-framed national debates about immigration, pressed for changes in policy, and ultimately provided a voice for the displaced.

García concludes by addressing the legacies of the Central American refugee crisis, especially recent attempts to coordinate a regional response to the unique problems presented by immigrants and refugees--and the challenges of coordinating such a regional response in the post-9/11 era.

Kaplan, David H. and Wei Li. Landscapes of the Ethnic Economy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Inc., 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Immigration has expanded dramatically in both traditional and emerging receiving nations. This worldwide boom has profoundly altered urban areas as new arrivals have transformed inner cities and suburbs alike into bastions of new ethnic economic activity.

Examining the essential role of space in assisting and modifying ethnic business activity, this book considers how ethnic economies are reshaping the urban landscape in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Italy. Each chapter explores the significance of urban space and local context in the development of an ethnic economy and how, in turn, ethnic economies have helped to recreate urban neighborhoods.

With its international scope and rich case studies, this book will be invaluable for scholars and students alike in the fields of ethnic studies, urban studies, economic development, geography, and sociology.

Olwig, Karen Fog. Caribbean Journeys: An Ethnography of Migration and Home in Three Family Networks. Durham, NC: Duke University Press (Available June 2007).
Show/Hide Info

Caribbean Journeys is an ethnographic analysis of the cultural meaning of migration and home in three families of West Indian background that are now dispersed throughout the Caribbean, North America, and Great Britain. Moving migration studies beyond its current focus on sending and receiving societies, Karen Fog Olwig makes migratory family networks the locus of her analysis. For the people whose lives she traces, being "Caribbean" is not necessarily rooted in ongoing visits to their countries of origin, or in ethnic communities in the receiving countries, but rather in family narratives and the maintenance of family networks across vast geographical expanses.

The migratory journeys of the families in this study began more than sixty years ago, when individuals in the three families left home in a British colonial town in Jamaica, a French Creole rural community in Dominica, and an African-Caribbean village of small farmers on Nevis. Olwig follows the three family networks forward in time, interviewing family members living under highly varied social and economic circumstances in locations ranging from California to Barbados, Nova Scotia to Florida, and New Jersey to England. Through her conversations with several generations of these far-flung families, she gives insight into each family's educational, occupational, and socio-economic trajectories. Olwig contends that terms such as "Caribbean diaspora" wrongly assume a culturally homogeneous homeland. As she demonstrates in Caribbean Journeys, anthropologists who want a nuanced understanding of how migrants and their descendants perceive their origins and identities must focus on interpersonal relations and intimate spheres as well as on collectivities and public expressions of belonging.

Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Historical Studies

Gardner, Martha. The Qualities of a Citizen: Women, Immigration, and Citizenship, 1870-1965. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

The Qualities of a Citizen traces the application of U.S. immigration and naturalization law to women from the 1870s to the late 1960s. Like no other book before, it explores how racialized, gendered, and historical anxieties shaped our current understandings of the histories of immigrant women. The book takes us from the first federal immigration restrictions against Asian prostitutes in the 1870s to the immigration "reform" measures of the late 1960s. Throughout this period, topics such as morality, family, marriage, poverty, and nationality structured historical debates over women's immigration and citizenship. At the border, women immigrants, immigration officials, social service providers, and federal judges argued the grounds on which women would be included within the nation. As interview transcripts and court documents reveal, when, where, and how women were welcomed into the country depended on their racial status, their roles in the family, and their work skills. Gender and race mattered. The book emphasizes the comparative nature of racial ideologies in which the inclusion of one group often came with the exclusion of another. It explores how U.S. officials insisted on the link between race and gender in understanding America's peculiar brand of nationalism. It also serves as a social history of the law, detailing women's experiences and strategies, successes and failures, to belong to the nation.

Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Fit to Be Citizens? demonstrates how both science and public health shaped the meaning of race in the early twentieth century. Through a careful examination of the experiences of Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health officials used complexly constructed concerns about public health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public health practices played a key role in assigning negative racial characteristics to the group. The book skillfully moves beyond the binary oppositions that usually structure works in ethnic studies by deploying comparative and relational approaches that reveal the racialization of Mexican Americans as intimately associated with the relative historical and social positions of Asian Americans, African Americans, and whites. Its rich archival grounding provides a valuable history of public health in Los Angeles, living conditions among Mexican immigrants, and the ways in which regional racial categories influence national laws and practices. Molina's compelling study advances our understanding of the complexity of racial politics, attesting that racism is not static and that different groups can occupy different places in the racial order at different times.

Perlmann, Joel. Italians Then, Mexicans Now. New York: Russell Sage, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

In Italians Then, Mexicans Now, Joel Perlmann uses the latest immigration data as well as 100 years of historical census data to compare the progress of unskilled immigrants and their American-born children both then and now. The crucial difference between the immigrant experience a hundred years ago and today is that relatively well-paid jobs were plentiful for workers with little education a hundred years ago, while today's immigrants arrive in an increasingly unequal America. Perlmann finds that while this change over time is real, its impact has not been as strong as many scholars have argued. In particular, these changes have not been great enough to force today's Mexican second generation into an inner-city "underclass." Perlmann emphasizes that high school dropout rates among second-generation Mexicans are alarmingly high, and are likely to have a strong impact on the group's well-being. Yet despite their high dropout rates, Mexican Americans earn at least as much as African Americans, and they fare better on social measures such as unwed childbearing and incarceration, which often lead to economic hardship. Perlmann concludes that inter-generational progress, though likely to be slower than it was for the European immigrants a century ago, is a reality, and could be enhanced if policy interventions are taken to boost high school graduation rates for Mexican children.

Pickus, Noah. True Faith and Allegiance. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Show/Hide Info

True Faith and Allegiance is a provocative account of nationalism and the politics of turning immigrants into citizens and Americans. Noah Pickus offers an alternative to the wild swings between emotionally fraught positions on immigration and citizenship of the past two decades. Drawing on political theory, history, and law, he argues for a renewed civic nationalism that melds principles and peoplehood. This tradition of civic nationalism held sway at America's founding and in the Progressive Era. Pickus explores how, from James Madison to Teddy Roosevelt, its proponents sought to combine reason and reverence and to balance inclusion and exclusion. He takes us through controversies over citizenship for blacks and the rights of aliens at the nation's founding, examines the interplay of ideas and institutions in the Americanization movement in the 1910s and 1920s, and charts how both left and right promoted a policy of neglect toward immigrants and toward citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century. True Faith and Allegiance shows that contemporary debates over a range of immigration and citizenship policies cannot be resolved by appeals to fixed notions of creed or culture, but require a supple civic nationalism that bridges the gap between immigrants' needs and American principles and practices.

Yung, Judy, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai. Chinese American Voices From the Gold Rush to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Show/Hide Info

Described by others as quaint and exotic, or as depraved and threatening, and, more recently, as successful and exemplary, the Chinese in America have rarely been asked to describe themselves in their own words. This superb anthology, a diverse and illuminating collection of primary documents and stories by Chinese Americans, provides an intimate and textured history of the Chinese in America from their arrival during the California Gold Rush to the present. Among the documents are letters, speeches, testimonies, oral histories, personal memoirs, poems, essays, and folksongs; many have never been published before or have been translated into English for the first time. They bring to life the diverse voices of immigrants and American-born; laborers, merchants, and professionals; ministers and students; housewives and prostitutes; and community leaders and activists. Together, they provide insight into immigration, work, family and social life, and the longstanding fight for equality and inclusion. Featuring photographs and extensive introductions to the documents written by three leading Chinese American scholars, this compelling volume offers a panoramic perspective on the Chinese American experience and opens new vistas on American social, cultural, and political history.

Methods and Major Theories

Research Methods for Migration Studies

Nancy Foner, Nancy and Rubén G. Rumbaut, and Steven J. Gold. Immigration Research for a New Century: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. New York, Russell Sage, 2001.

Migration Theories - Major Schools and Alternative Theories

Massey, Douglas S., Joaquín Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino, and J. Edward Taylor. Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millenium. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998.

Pessar, Patricia R, "The Role of Gender, Households, and Social Networks in the Migration Process: A Review and Appraisal," in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999: pp.53-70.

Sassen, Saskia. "America's Immigration 'Problem,'" in Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money, New York: The New Press, 1998: pp.31-53.

Zolberg, Aristide R, "Matters of State: Theorizing Immigration Policy." in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999: pp.71-93.



Immigration Workshop - Berkeley, CA 94720