Reflections on Diasporic Identities: A Prolegomenon to an Analysis of Political Bifocality (original) (raw)
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2013
Since 1990, immigrants and their children have been the fastest growing component of the American population (Portes and Rumbaut 2005; Pew Hispanic Center 2011). Unlike the newcomers who arrived a century ago during the last period of large-scale immigration, today's immigrants are largely non-European, a trend that is projected to persist into the future. By the year 2050, America's Latino and Asian populations are expected to triple, making up 29% and 9% of the nation's population, respectively, while the African American population is expected to only modestly increase its share of the population, from 12% to 13% (Smith and Edmonston 1997; Passel and Cohn 2008). These trends are profoundly altering the nation's racial and ethnic landscape. Until quite recently the United States was a biracial society with a large white majority, a comparatively small black minority, and a relatively rigid color line separating the two groups (Lee and Bean 2004). Today, that landscape is changing. However, it is not yet possible to know exactly how, for we do not know how today's immigrants understand social hierarchy in America, nor how they interpret their place in it, nor how they perceive themselves vis-à-vis the race/ethnicity distinction that has shaped American politics for the last 100 years. Nowhere are the changes to the racial and ethnic landscape as profound as in the workplaces of California, where the number of immigrant workers exceeds that of every other state. In 2010, more than a third of the workforce was foreign born; up from 25% in 1990, while in the United States as a whole, the figures were 16.5% and 12.4%, respectively (Migration Policy Institute 2012). Yet, although the state's racial and ethnic landscape began to change much earlier than in the rest of the nation, even in California we know little about how today's immigrants construct similarities and differences between themselves and other groups, or how
The United States is presently characterized by rising anti-immigrant sentiment, repressive immigration enforcement, and the negative framing of Latinos as threatening and undesirable. As a result, social boundaries between immigrants and natives have hardened and boundary crossing has become more difficult. Under these circumstances, the prediction of classical assimilation theory is turned on its head: the more time that immigrants spend in the United States and the more contact they have with Americans and American society, the more aware they become of the harsh realities of prejudice and discrimination and the more they come to experience the rampant inequalities of the secondary labor market. Rather than ideologically assimilating, therefore, the greater their experience in the United States, the more likely immigrants are to express a reactive ethnicity that rejects the label "American." Our work suggests that the greatest threat to the successful assimilation of immigrants comes not from foreign involvements or transnational loyalties, but from the rejection, exclusion, and discrimination that immigrants experience in the United States.
2009
The United States is presently characterized by rising anti-immigrant sentiment, repressive immigration enforcement, and the negative framing of Latinos as threatening and undesirable. As a result, social boundaries between immigrants and natives have hardened and boundary crossing has become more difficult. Under these circumstances, the prediction of classical assimilation theory is turned on its head: the more time that immigrants spend in the United States and the more contact they have with Americans and American society, the more aware they become of the harsh realities of prejudice and discrimination and the more they come to experience the rampant inequalities of the secondary labor market. Rather than ideologically assimilating, therefore, the greater their experience in the United States, the more likely immigrants are to express a reactive ethnicity that rejects the label “American. ” Our work suggests that the greatest threat to the successful assimilation of immigrants ...
ETHNIC AMERICA: Nativism, Racialization, Crimmigration, Deportations, Mass Mobilization
UCI Sociology Seminar in the Spring of the Pandemic, 2020
UCI Sociology Seminar taught in the Time of the Pandemic, Spring 2020. It is precisely in such moments of crisis—which shake our taken for granted notions and routines to their foundation, revealing the artifices of our social constructions of “reality”—that a sociological imagination flourishes. The goal of this seminar is to broaden your intellectual horizons, and to invite you to a memorable sociological adventure amid a global crisis that you and I will still be talking about many years from now. The course will end in June, but not our role and responsibility as members of the polis, as citizens as well as sociologists confronted by historic crises. The critically informed citizen—whose voice is heard, who acts and votes and remains civically engaged—is racism’s and nativism’s worst enemy. Becoming a critically informed citizen; contextualizing and grasping the varieties of international migration and national (and nativist) reactions to them; seeing through the dominant ideologies of racialization, the politics of moral panics, the criminalization of immigration, detention and incarceration, exclusion and deportation, mobilization and collective action; working to end racial domination and to make this a more just world... all of this is a lifetime commitment that never ends. Silence is not an option at this (potential) turning point in the history of American democracy and racial justice, even amid a once-in-a-century pandemic. Know that history. Voice that history. Read-think-write... and act.