Keeping the Immigrant Bargain

Keeping the Immigrant Bargain PDF Author: Vivian S. Louie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Keeping the Immigrant Bargain

Keeping the Immigrant Bargain PDF Author: Vivian S. Louie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Keeping the Immigrant Bargain

Keeping the Immigrant Bargain PDF Author: Vivian Louie
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610447794
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Most nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants arrived in the United States with barely more than the clothes on their backs. They performed menial jobs, spoke little English, and often faced a hostile reception. But two or more generations later, the overwhelming majority of their descendants had successfully integrated into American society. Today's immigrants face many of the same challenges, but some experts worry that their integration, especially among Latinos, will not be as successful as their European counterparts. Keeping the Immigrant Bargain examines the journey of Dominican and Colombian newcomers whose children have achieved academic success one generation after the arrival of their parents. Sociologist Vivian Louie provides a much-needed comparison of how both parents and children understand the immigrant journey toward education, mobility, and assimilation. Based on Louie's own survey and interview study, Keeping the Immigrant Bargain examines the lives of thirty-seven foreign-born Dominican and Colombian parents and their seventy-six young adult offspring—the majority of whom were enrolled in or had graduated from college. The book shows how they are adapting to American schools, jobs, neighborhoods, and culture. Louie discovers that before coming to the United States, some of these parents had already achieved higher levels of education than the average foreign-born Dominican or Colombian, and after arrival many owned their own homes. Significantly, most parents in each group expressed optimism about their potential to succeed in the United States, while also expressing pessimism about whether they would ever be accepted as Americans. In contrast to the social exclusion experienced by their parents, most of the young adults had assimilated linguistically and believed themselves to be full participants in American society. Keeping the Immigrant Bargain shows that the offspring of these largely working-class immigrants had several factors in common that aided their mobility. Their parents were highly engaged in their lives and educational progress, although not always in ways expected by schools or their children, and the children possessed a strong degree of self-motivation. Equally important was the availability of key institutional networks of support, including teachers, peers, afterschool and other enrichment programs, and informal mentors outside of the classroom. These institutional networks gave the children the guidance they needed to succeed in school, offering information the parents often did not know themselves. While not all immigrants achieve such rapid success, this engrossing study shows how powerful the combination of self-motivation, engaged families, and strong institutional support can be. Keeping the Immigrant Bargain makes the case that institutional relationships—such as teachers and principals who are trained to accommodate cultural difference and community organizations that help parents and children learn how to navigate the system—can bear significantly on immigrant educational success.

Dreams Achieved and Denied

Dreams Achieved and Denied PDF Author: Robert Courtney Smith
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610449096
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have achieved one of the biggest one-generation jumps in mobility in American immigration history. In 2020, 42-percent of U.S.-born Mexican men and 49-percent of U.S.-born Mexican women in New York City had graduated from college. This high level of educational attainment is dramatically higher than their U.S.- and foreign-born counterparts in other places. How did U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City achieve such remarkable mobility? In Dreams Achieved and Denied, sociologist Robert Courtney Smith examines the laws, policies, and individual and family practices that promoted–and inhibited–their social mobility. For over twenty years, Smith followed nearly one hundred children of Mexican immigrants in New York City to learn what determined their ability to move up the social ladder. Smith finds that legal status was fundamental in shaping opportunities for mobility. Having or gaining legal status enabled individual and family efforts for mobility to be rewarded and by allowing efficacious use of New York City and New York State policies and practices that support mobility. Lacking legal status, however, blocked mobility, even for those individuals and families engaging in the same strategies, limiting the benefit derived from those mobility-promoting city and state policies. The young people that Smith followed employed a number of strategies to pursue advancement. Smith finds that having strong mentors, picking better high schools, and the desire to keep the immigrant family bargain–the expectation that children of immigrants will redeem their parents’ sacrifice by doing well in school, helping their parents and younger siblings, and becoming ethical, well-educated people–all led to better adult lives and outcomes. The ability to successfully utilize these strategies was aided by New York City and State policies that are immigrant-inclusive and mobility promoting, including New York State laws that offers undocumented New Yorkers in-state tuition at public universities, allows them to get standard driver’s licenses, and access state health insurance programs, as well as New York City’s school choice system, which allows for students to attend better schools outside of their designated school catchment zone. Dreams Achieved and Denied is a fascinating exploration of the historic upward mobility of Mexicans in New York City, which counters the dominant story research and public discourse tell about Mexican mobility in the United States.

The Immigrant Advantage

The Immigrant Advantage PDF Author: Claudia Kolker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416586830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From an award-winning journalist comes a fascinating exploration of the life-enhancing customs that immigrant groups have brought with them to the U.S. and of how Americans can improve their lives by adapting them.

Urban Politics

Urban Politics PDF Author: Stephen J. McGovern
Publisher: CQ Press
ISBN: 1506311210
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1361

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Book Description
Steve McGovern’s Urban Politics: A Reader examines the changing structure of political power in cities through the lens of historical development, accompanied with brief explorations of pertinent public policy issues. Having studied and taught urban politics for over 20 years, McGovern (Haverford College) foregrounds his approach with a discussion of cities in a global era, and then divides the material into five parts, or themes: the formation of city politics; city politics under stress; the politics of urban revitalization; the changing dynamics of urban politics; and visions of contemporary urban politics. He expands the scope of his exploration by integrating literature that is not commonly observed in urban politics texts, i.e. works by journalists as well as scholars, and by including debates about political power in both big and smaller cities.

Societal Contexts of Child Development

Societal Contexts of Child Development PDF Author: Elizabeth T. Gershoff, Ph.D.
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199943915
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Societal Contexts of Child Development provides comprehensive literature reviews for six broad contextual influences on children's development and addresses these contexts from an applied research perspective.

Handbook of the Sociology of Education in the 21st Century

Handbook of the Sociology of Education in the 21st Century PDF Author: Barbara Schneider
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319766945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
This handbook unifies access and opportunity, two key concepts of sociology of education, throughout its 25 chapters. It explores today’s populations rarely noticed, such as undocumented students, first generation college students, and LGBTQs; and emphasizing the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity and social class. Sociologists often center their work on the sources and consequences of inequality. This handbook, while reviewing many of these explanations, takes a different approach, concentrating instead on what needs to be accomplished to reduce inequality. A special section is devoted to new methodological work for studying social systems, including network analyses and school and teacher effects. Additionally, the book explores the changing landscape of higher education institutions, their respective populations, and how labor market opportunities are enhanced or impeded by differing postsecondary education pathways. Written by leading sociologists and rising stars in the field, each of the chapters is embedded in theory, but contemporary and futuristic in its implications. This Handbook serves as a blueprint for identifying new work for sociologists of education and other scholars and policymakers trying to understand many of the problems of inequality in education and what is needed to address them.

Structured Luck

Structured Luck PDF Author: Onoso Imoagene
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610449266
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is a lottery that awards winners from underrepresented countries the chance to apply for legal permanent residence in the United States. Most lottery winners think of themselves as lucky, viewing the win as an opportunity to pursue better lives for themselves and their families. In Structured Luck, sociologist Onoso Imoagene uses immigrants’ stories to show that while the visa program benefits many recipients, the program’s design can also lead to exploitation in their countries of origin and reduced potential once they are in the United States. Combining ethnographic observation in Africa and interviews with immigrants, their family members, and friends from Ghana and Nigeria, Imoagene demonstrates that the visa program is a process of “structured luck,” from how people hear about the lottery, who registers for it, and who participates in it to the application requirements for the visa. In Ghana and Nigeria, people often learn about the lottery through friends, colleagues, or relatives who persuade them to enter for the perceived benefits of receiving a visa: opportunities for upward mobility, permanent legal status, and the ability to bring along family members. Though anyone can enter the lottery, not everyone who wins obtains a visa. The visa application process requires proof of a high school diploma or artisan skills, a medical exam, a criminal background check, an interview with U.S. consular officers, and payment of fees. Such requirements have led to the growth of visa entrepreneurs, who often charge exorbitant fees to steer immigrants through the process. Visa recipients who were on track to obtain university degrees at home often leave in the middle of their studies for the United States but struggle to continue their education due to high U.S. tuition costs. And though their legal status allows them to escape the demoralizing situations that face the undocumented, these immigrants lack the social support that the government sometimes provides for refugees and other migrants. Ultimately, Imoagene notes, the real winner of the visa lottery is not the immigrants themselves but the United States, which benefits from their relatively higher levels of education. Consequently, she argues, the U.S. must do more to minimize the visa program’s negative consequences. Structured Luck illuminates the trauma, resilience, and determination of immigrants who come to the United States through the Diversity Visa Program and calls for the United States to develop policies that will better integrate them into society.

Race and Immigration

Race and Immigration PDF Author: Nazli Kibria
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 074564791X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Immigration has long shaped US society in fundamental ways. With Latinos recently surpassing African Americans as the largest minority group in the US, attention has been focused on the important implications of immigration for the character and role of race in US life, including patterns of racial inequality and racial identity. This insightful new book offers a fresh perspective on immigration and its part in shaping the racial landscape of the US today. Moving away from one-dimensional views of this relationship, it emphasizes the dynamic and mutually formative interactions of race and immigration. Drawing on a wide range of studies, it explores key aspects of the immigrant experience, such as the history of immigration laws, the formation of immigrant occupational niches, and developments of immigrant identity and community. Specific topics covered include: the perceived crisis of unauthorized immigration; the growth of an immigrant rights movement; the role of immigrant labor in the elder care industry; the racial strategies of professional immigrants; and the formation of pan-ethnic Latino identities. Written in an engaging and accessible style, this book will be invaluable for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate-level courses in the sociology of immigration, race and ethnicity.

Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts PDF Author: Janet M. Ruane
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506345786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Is it true that "numbers don′t lie?" Is America "the land of equal opportunity?" Is marriage a "dying institution?" Each of the 23 essays in Second Thoughts reviews a familiar conventional wisdom, and introduces relevant sociological concepts and theories in order to explain, qualify, and sometimes debunk that conventional wisdom.