In this essay, we survey what is known about the role of race and legal status in the incorporation of immigrants in twenty-first-century America. In light of the striking contrast in life outcomes between those with and without legal status, we argue that although legal status and the stereotypes deriving from it are clearly related to race, legal status is now playing a relatively autonomous role in limiting the life chances of many immigrants. society by many, although not all, immigrants of color and their descendants. The current wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric coexists with considerable evidence of relatively successful social and economic integration into U.S. Once applied to unauthorized immigrants, it then stigmatizes their co-ethnics, including those whose ancestors have been in the United States for generations. They’re rapists.” This mischaracterization is attached to old and ugly racial stereotypes. This is clear in the rhetoric of the Trump administration: “They’re bringing drugs.
The label “illegal” brands otherwise law-abiding migrants with the stigma of criminality, especially Latinx and Caribbean people who account for more than three-quarters of the undocumented. Yet they remain politically excluded and vulnerable. citizen children) are clearly part of American society economically and socially. 3 They and their relatives (who include approximately 5.9 million U.S. Only 14 percent have been here less than five. By 2017, two-thirds of America’s undocumented had lived in the United States more than ten years. 2 Unlike many unauthorized immigrants during the twentieth century, these people are not transient or circular migrants. 1 Today there are an estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States (down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007).
Starting in the late 1980s, the militarization of the Southern border created a large and more or less permanent unauthorized population. In recent decades, this question has been complicated by another factor: legal status. The question is how it matters and for whom. The question of the role of race in the acceptance and absorption of non-White immigrants is of course not an “either-or.” No honest observer could argue that race does not matter enormously in American society. Meanwhile, immigrants from all over the globe–most of them people of color–continue to be drawn to what they still perceive as a land of opportunity and a place to make a better life for their children. At the same time, many progressive academics and legal theorists have critiqued the very idea of assimilation or integration of immigrants and their children, arguing that “people of color” would never experience the eventual mobility and acceptance that European immigrants of the past did. The Trump presidency made racial exclusion and denigration of immigrants a cornerstone of its ideology and policy.
Mobility mary full#
How much will their non-White status limit the full integration of the current wave of immigrants and their descendants? This is a question that, ironically, seems to unite the left and the right in American politics today. He is currently writing The New American Dilemma: Race Citizenship and Social Exclusion with Mary C. Mollenkopf, and Jennifer Holdaway, 2008), and Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (edited with John H. His publications include Growing up Muslim in Europe and the United States (edited with Mehdi Bozorgmehr, 2018), Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (with Mary C. Philip Kasinitz is Presidential Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
She is currently writing The New American Dilemma: Race Citizenship and Social Exclusion with Philip Kasinitz. Kefalas, and Jennifer Holdaway, 2011), and The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (edited with Richard Alba, 2011). Her publications include The Integration of Immigrants into American Society (edited with Marisa Gerstein Pineau, 2016), Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century (edited with Patrick J. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Waters, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2006, is PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences and the John L.
0 kommentar(er)
