Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The aim of this study is to develop an understanding of Cape Town's foreign African immigrants by looking at the profile, character and role of immigrant associations and how they shape survival strategies as well as possible paths to the integration of African immigrants. The thesis seeks to develop an understanding of the mediating role played by Cape Town's African foreign immigrant organisations. I also look at the transnational activities of these organizations. I selected Cape Town because it prides itself on liberal values of toleration, diversity and non-racialism while at the same time branding itself as an African City. The City of Cape Town has no comprehensive policy that protects or promotes the immigrants’ interests. The study of the agency and organisations of foreign African immigrants has been singularly neglected by scholars who have been mostly concerned with understanding why South Africans are xenophobic. This study is largely qualitative with life stories interviews that shed light on the context of exit and reception of African immigrants in Cape Town and reveals the hardship immigrants endure and the problems they face in their efforts to integrate into South African society. The thesis shows the different kinds of exclusions African immigrants face in both private and public spaces and highlights also the role of immigrant's organizations in negotiating space and dealing with xenophobic attacks on their community members. My findings concur with the work of key scholars such Alejandro Portes. Immigrant organisations have a variety of activities and sub-organisations that promote both transnational and local collective action. The thesis documents types of immigrant organisations, their characteristics, location, membership, objectives, activities and their efforts in assisting their members in cases of xenophobic attacks. In Cape Town, immigrants have formed organizations that help them to network with one another in order to negotiate space in this hostile environment.

This thesis consists of two related chapters and one unrelated chapter. The first focuses on the health of immigrants in Canada, using the most up-to-date Canadian Community Health Surveys (CCHS). I re-investigate the previously well-established Healthy Immigrant Effect (HIE)--the finding that upon arrival, immigrants are relatively healthier than the native-born population; but that this health advantage declines over the years after migration. Measures of health used in this study include self-assessed health status, the likelihood of being overweight or obese, and the incidence of various chronic conditions. The first part of this chapter replicates the heavily cited work of McDonald and Kennedy (2004) by pooling multiple years of CCHS, and estimating a model controlling for immigrants' cohorts of arrival to disentangle the true effect of years-since-migration (YSM) from the cohort effects. The second part of this chapter takes a closer look at the more recent cohorts of arrival of immigrants. Here I use a matching method to compare various measures of health between immigrants who arrived before and after the implementation of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). It is important to note that this study does not make any direct link between the implementation of IRPA and the health outcomes of immigrants. It merely observes and compares the health of two different cohorts of immigrants, making no assumptions as to whether these changes are a result of IRPA. My main finding is that the initial health advantage is no longer present for more recent cohorts of immigrants to Canada, and that these recent cohorts of immigrants face higher health risks associated with being overweight or obese. The other two chapter--Chapter 2, Income Processes and Intra-household Risk Sharing, and Chapter 3, Health Shocks and Income Dynamics--deal with different aspects of modelling of labour income risk over the life cycle using the US Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). In Chapter 2, I take advantage of MEPS's large sample size (some 40,000 households) to concentrate on estimating income risk-sharing among couples. This refers to an intra-household insurance mechanism that allows couples to diversify labour income risks; for instance, they can and dynamically coordinate labour-supply decisions in response to income shocks. Specifically, this study decomposes income volatility, distinguishing between single and couple household types, and models couples' income risk-sharing as the covariance of the husband and wife's income variance for both transitory and permanent components. I use an innovative identification strategy, assuming the invariability of market price for labour to marital status, to uncover couple-specific risk-sharing parameters by allowing the income profile of singles and non-singles to have partial common structure. I find evidence of risk-sharing between spouses in response to both transitory and permanent income shocks, suggesting that couples' earning capability might be partially insulated from the impact of transitory and permanent income risk. Chapter 3 is co-authored with two of my supervisors, C. Deri Armstrong and G. Dunbar. The work is done primarily by myself, except for the Introduction, where both co-authors contribute to the writing. G. Dunbar also contributes to parts of the sections on Heterogeneous Health Impacts and Endogeneity, and to the Conclusion. This chapter also uses MEPS data, but focuses on understanding the significance of the negative health shocks in decomposing labour income risk. As in Chapter 2, we break down the cross-sectional variance of residual earnings into transitory and permanent components. We then propose a method to decompose the heterogeneity of health shocks impacts by partitioning the cross-sectional variance of residual earnings into a health and non-health component. We use emergency room (ER) visits as a proxy for negative health shocks, and we separately consider the impact of these negative health shocks for several groups, such as single men and single women with no child, single mothers, and couples. We also probe the role of health insurance in attenuating the income effects of health shocks, and put forward a creative method to control for misspecification biases in the income regressions--the usual ability bias. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in health shocks is gender-differentiated. We find that health shocks have heterogeneous impacts for single women with no child, as well as single mothers; but no such evidence is found for single men. For couples, we find that having health insurance coverage reduces the impact of negative health shocks on income volatility by roughly 10 percentage points.

Thesis advisor: Hans de Wit / The current displacement crisis in the German context has focused scholarly attention on refugee student access to higher education. However, much less research has attended to supports at higher education institutions (HEIs) for enrolled migrant and refugee students. In fact, education research in the German setting rarely focuses on students from any migrant background, though these students comprise between 20-25% of all German tertiary enrollment. This study uses Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) and a postcolonial lens to analyze “equal opportunity” plans and programs at 32 German HEIs across all 16 federal states. Data sources include the “equal opportunity plan” unique to each HEI (Gleichstellungsplan) and interviews with “equal opportunity office” (Gleichstellungsbüro) faculty and staff. Key findings include a bureaucratization and numerification of diversity in the German case, as well as an almost exclusive focus on diversity as gender. This dissertation offers a potentially transferable theoretical model, which may be relevant in national settings with increasingly diverse student populations, histories of colonial possession or fantasy, or primarily public higher education systems (Bhabha, 1994; El-Tayeb, 2016; Kilomba, 2008; Said, 1979). / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Undocumented educations are those educational practices falling outside of legitimated educational institutions or appearing only in marginalized, liminal ways. Through resisting, conflicting with, or simply not fitting into the grammar of school they do not “count” as education. Those educations, and thus the everyday lives of those who practice them, are routinely placed “at-risk.” Often, policymakers and educators propose reforms to this issue, aiming to more effectively include or ensure stronger academic outcomes for populations of students whose educational lives have been marked in precarious ways. Working with 9 recently immigrated youth in New York City, this project explores such undocumented educations in youth’s everyday lives in order to open new understandings of what counts, who counts, and in what ways, in educational discourses. Rather than joining the chorus of reform efforts, I listen to the rigorous, wild, and ethereal educational practices already present in youth’s lives. This project takes up entangled methods of an affective ethnography and a history of the present. Historical work explores prevalent discourses around the education of “newcomer” youth to interrogate how this educational truth came to flourish as an intervention for newcomer youth. Affective ethnography, meanwhile, moves through many places exploring sensations, intensities, and encountering everyday educations and their relationship to the educational life of the school. An affective ethnography opens space to work with youth in exploring educations largely illegible to dominant discourses without submitting these educational practices to new forms of control. Results suggest that linguistically and culturally affirmative schools emerge from understandings of how to better include and improve outcomes for newcomer youth. At the same time, political shifts require schools to constantly evolve to continue pursuing these ideas. Youths’ educational practices change and move through spaces like school or afterschool programs but also connect and flow in a borderless curriculum that challenges the supremacy of educational projects built dominantly on inclusion and success. Failure, daydreaming, and experimentation all play critical roles in youth’s everyday lives. The project ultimately concludes that listening to the already-present everyday educational practices of immigrant youth makes a radically different, ungoverned educational otherwise possible.

This thesis explores the production process of developing a virtual reality experience with an emphasis on digital humanities and the methods of adapting real-world events, narratives, and media coverage into an interactive, location based VR experience. The thesis contextualizes the production of an accompanying media project, which is informed by the history of U.S migration and the media’s impact on the opinion of Americans. Through the observation of production methods, this paper summarizes the process of creating a VR experience that expands the established production pipeline to more fluidly produce immersive interactive content. Using Homebound: The Interactive Immigrant Experience, a collaborative VR project as a prototype for these methods, we were able to integrate and develop a media production pipeline that uses off the shelf hardware in unison with Unreal Engine 4 to produce a prototype VR experience that follows the narrative on a Latin American Immigrant. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The problem of immigration has been around since the dawn of man because humans cannot just stay in one place, especially if that place is not suitable for their lives and their families. It is a reasonable expectation of the human condition to want to feel free and safe because we do not live in a utopian society. There are social injustices, wars, and atrocities that threaten the most basic of human needs and freedoms in many countries across the globe. Homebound, the virtual reality experience, which was developed in Unreal, aims to make sense of this crisis and shed light on the lives affected by this social ill. By using rich environments, virtual production and motion capture, to construct a place that captures the realism of the illegal immigration narrative, this manuscript will show how behavioral and gameplay psychology, when paired with environmental storytelling, can be utilized to craft impactful and empathetic, immersive stories and edutainment experiences for the player. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

No description available.

Background:Twenty-four percent of the elderly population in Sweden are foreign-born. These immigrants' knowledge of the Swedish language varieties and their conditions and need for care differ from each other, which means that those people have different opportunities to assimilate in the Swedish elderly care and the care provided. Good and functional care is a crucial factor in to be to create good care and a relationship between care staff and older immigrants. Those factors are necessary to be able to offer good and patient-safe care.   Aim: The purpose of this study was to describe older immigrants' experiences of communication in care meetings.  Method: The study's design was in the form of a literature review based on ten scientific studies with qualitative and quantitative articles and a mixed article. Results: The results have been presented in three themes, and in the first theme, experiences in dealing with healthcare staff have been presented. The second theme has focused on language barriers, and the third theme has focused on the experiences of using an interpreter in care meetings. Conclusion: Lack of communication, language barrier, and cultural clash are obstacles to care staff being able to provide good care and attention. The results also shown patients' concerns and difficulties in creating trust and a functioning relationship with healthcare staff.

Chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases are a global concern. In recent decades, Canada has also experienced a major increase in immigration. Yet, a detailed profile of chronic disease and multimorbidity risk patterns across different immigrant populations has been lacking in Canada. The purpose of this dissertation is to identify knowledge gaps in the scientific literature on the development of chronic conditions and multimorbidity across immigrant populations in Ontario, using population-based immigrant and health data housed at ICES. The principal findings of this dissertation indicate that: 1. The risk of developing a chronic condition and multimorbidity was complex and varied by immigrants’ visa category and world region origin since: a. Refugees had the highest risk of developing a chronic condition and multimorbidity (two or more co-occurring chronic conditions) compared to long-term Ontario residents. b. There were differences in the risk of developing a chronic condition and multimorbidity by world regions of origin, when examined across different immigrant categories. 2. Hypertension and diabetes, and in combination with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease were the leading multimorbidity dyad and triad groups for all immigrant categories and long-term residents of Ontario. 3. The risk of developing a chronic condition increased among immigrants in more recent landing cohorts. The risk was highest among more recent refugees, and lower for family and economic class immigrants, when compared to long-term Ontario residents. These findings provide evidence to inform public health policy and planning by highlighting the complexity and heterogeneity of health outcomes across immigrant populations. Knowledge generated from this work will inform policies and evidence-based decision-making aimed to address the threat of chronic diseases and reduce health disparities.

Purpose: The current study was conducted to ascertain whether the effects of nativity (i.e., U.S. born vs. immigrant) on Hispanic adolescent substance use is mediated by ecological processes such as family functioning, school connectedness, and perceived peer substance use. Methods: The effects of family, peer, and school processes on adolescent substance use were examined in a nationally representative sample of 742 (358 male, 384 female) Hispanic youth (mean age = 15.9; SD = 1.8). Results: Results from a structural equation model indicated that the higher rates of substance use among U.S.-born Hispanics (compared with foreign-born Hispanics) are partially mediated by perceived peer substance use (as measured by the adolescent). The results also showed that perceived peer substance use and school connectedness mediate the relationship between family processes and substance use, suggesting that family processes may offset some of the deleterious effects of negative peer selection on adolescent substance use. Conclusion: These findings imply that public health behavioral interventions to prevent substance use among both U.S.-born and foreign-born Hispanics may need to attend to multiple ecological processes, including family, school, and peers.