Thesis advisor: James E. Lubben / The fact that destination countries in contemporary migration are predominantly welfare states marks a distinct departure from historical patterns. While the impact of international migration on the welfare state is highly contested in the literature, the other side of the relationship--the ways in which advanced welfare states influence the incorporation of immigrants--has barely been examined. This study tests the applicability of an extension of the Welfare Regime Theory in the incorporation of foreign-born as compared to natives across 24 European nations clustered in 5 different welfare regimes. Specifically, it explores how much of the variability in self-reported economic and social capital indicators of incorporation is attributable to the nature of the welfare state and to specific theoretical traits associated with different welfare regimes. Results indicate that immigrants fare economically better in countries with comprehensive welfare systems of social protection and that country's amount of social spending has a positive influence in the economic incorporation of foreign-labor. The impact of the welfare state on individuals' economic well-being is higher for the native-born population than for their immigrant counterparts. Generous welfare systems are also beneficial for the social capital formation of immigrant communities. Immigrants residing in countries representative of the Scandinavian regime report higher levels of generalized trust, trust in institutions and frequency of informal social contacts than immigrants residing in countries representative of other welfare regimes. The same pattern is observed for the native-born population. Country's spending in social benefits increases the social trust and frequency of socialization of both groups, although the impact is larger for the native-born population. Country's spending in means-tested social benefits decreases social trust while country's spending in non-means-tested benefits increases it. Native-born individuals report higher levels of generalized trust and socialize more often than equivalent immigrants. However, the level of trust in country's institutions is higher for immigrant than for their native peers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Shawn McGuffey / Historically, the U.S. has been among the top nation-states of global refugee resettlement, and it continues to be, despite recent domestic political rhetoric against this policy. The U.S. welfare state provides resources to contracted nonprofit immigrant-serving organizations to carry out the U.S. resettlement policy. However, scholars under-examine front-line welfare policy practices with refugees. This area is critical to examine in this historical moment, because scholars argue the rise of neoliberalism has negatively affected the nonprofit human service sector’s capacity to provide social rights to the most vulnerable (Hasenfeld and Garrow 2012). Drawing on participant-observation at a northeastern resettlement organization and 50 semi-structured interviews with front-line bureaucrats and refugees between 2010-2015, I examine how bureaucrats perceive and shape refugees’ initial processes of resettling in the U.S., and how refugees also view this experience. My dissertation found competing restrictive and inclusionary perceptions of and practices with Iraqi, Darfurian, and Bhutanese refugees, which calls into question how, and why, welfare subjects with legal refugee status, are perceived distinctly by their social locations in the shrinking and stigmatized U.S. welfare context. Additionally, my dissertation illuminates how refugees evaluate their resettlement experiences and belonging in the U.S. I present my research in three articles: My first article, Rights and Responsibilities: Bureaucrats’ Competing Frames about U.S. Resettlement Objectives for Refugees, examines the salient frames that bureaucrats used to describe the objectives of U.S. resettlement for refugees. I found two competing frameworks informed their perceptions: market citizenship responsibilities and human rights. By this, I mean local level bureaucrats discussed their role to provide services either geared at making refugees responsible on a path to self-sufficiency, or to provide them with human rights. While I found the responsibilities frame was more dominant, contrary to past findings (Clevenger et al. 2014; Nawyn 2007), frame usage differed depending on one’s professional status and level of experience. Experienced (paid) bureaucrats tended to emphasize the responsibilities frame as most important for assisting refugees with becoming self-sufficient in American society. In contrast, less experienced, temporary (unpaid) bureaucrats generally emphasized the rights frame as most important to assist refugees with gaining membership in the U.S. These insights expand recent immigrant welfare scholarship by illuminating how different local level bureaucratic roles, in contrast to organizational (Nawyn 2010) or city level differences (Clevenger et al. 2014), correlate with distinct frames about refugees. Finally, I discuss how frame usage informs competing notions of the street-level politics of refugee belonging in American society. My second article, Refugees Will Be Poor! Managing Diverging Mobility Transitions to the American Welfare Class, explores how local level bureaucrats evaluate Iraqi and Bhutanese refugees’ “deservingness” of resettlement benefits in the U.S., based on their compliance with self-sufficiency resettlement goals. I argue that bureaucrats divide refugees into “deserving” and “undeserving” poor categories using ethnic and social class distinctions. Specifically, I examined how bureaucrats made decisions to discipline refugees to adhere to a self-sufficiency path. Consequently, these decisions revealed their distinct perceptions of refugee deservingness. Contrary to past scholarship that found race as most salient in informing welfare disciplinary practices and notions of deservingness (Schram 2005; Soss, Fording and Schram 2008), I found bureaucrats used refugees’ ethnicity as a marker for class origins to make decisions to discipline them. They identified Iraqis as having professional class origins; thus, they experienced “unwanted” downward mobility in the U.S. welfare class. In contrast, they viewed Bhutanese as having low class origins; thus, they experienced “desired” upward mobility in the same welfare class. As a result, bureaucrats thought more discipline was needed with Iraqis, compared to the Bhutanese because of their distinct behavioral reactions to their respective mobility shifts. Thus, bureaucrats marked Iraqis as “undeserving” and Bhutanese as “deserving” in their processes of resettling in the U.S. My third article, Waiting for Mobility: Refugee Incorporation as a Process of Temporal Belonging, examines Iraqi and Darfurian refugees’ sense of belonging, on their path toward social mobility in the U.S. I found Iraqis perceived waiting as a lasting obstacle on a generally blocked mobility path; consequently, they felt a sense of enduring social insecurity and a lack of belonging. In contrast, Darfurians perceived waiting as a temporary obstacle to achievable mobility; thus, they felt a sense of belonging, despite feeling a temporary state of social insecurity. Refugees who reconstructed a generally secure past professional class origin (Iraqis), compared to their insecure U.S. class location, expressed more frustration about waiting for mobility. In contrast, refugees who reconstructed a more politically and economically insecure past origin (Darfurians), compared to their secure conditions in the U.S., expressed positive hope for mobility. Bridging welfare theories of waiting (Auyero 2011; Reid 2013) with theories of belonging (Nawyn 2011; Yuval-Davis 2006), I build an immigrant incorporation process theory of temporal belonging to illuminate how refugees’ perceptions of waiting for mobility inform their feelings of belonging in the U.S. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

The thesis addresses the debate about the impact of immigration policy on the socio-economic incorporation of immigrants. A distinction between rights-based and responsibility-based models of incorporation is made and the effect of a feature of the responsibility-based model, temporary residence permits, on socio-economic incorporation is studied. Empirically, a policy change in Sweden that entailed a shift from permanent to temporary residence permits is explored through individual-level register and survey data. The thesis uses a two-folded methodological approach: a traditional regression approach and a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. The composition of the available data motivates the two-folded approach. The limitations of both approaches are discussed, and the results compared and contrasted. The results indicate that immigrants with temporary residence permits work more than immigrants with permanent residence permits. This result should however be interpreted with caution due to the limitations of the approaches used. The results do not show a significant effect oftemporary residence permits on an educational outcome, Swedish tuition, nor on a labour market activation outcome, participation in labour market programmes. The predictions that immigrants with temporary residence permits study less and participate in labour market programmes more than immigrants with permanent residence permits are thus not supported.

The fact that many OECD countries are reliant on international medical graduates (IMGs) to serve their most vulnerable has become even more apparent in the wake of Covid-19. This dissertation examines the role that nation brands play on the international physician labor market and how visa regimes and migration industries shape IMG pathways to Sweden versus US; two widely different societies where around a third of all doctors are IMGs. The US and Sweden represent two different approaches to addressing the same problem — solving a shortfall of healthcare providers, especially in rural areas populated by ethnic minorities and low-income families. While many Swedish regions actively attempts to facilitate the incorporation of IMGs through an intra-European physician recruitment industry, the US seem to rely on the attraction of its political economy and has done little to modify the substantial financial and visa-related obstacles that IMGs face. As a high-skilled immigrant group, immigrant physicians occupy a complex position of advantage and disadvantage; they are privileged in comparison to low-income migrant workers and unauthorized immigrants, yet face more barriers in comparison to domestic physicians, and are often informally sorted into less prestigious positions. This study centers the two largest immigrant physician groups in each country: Indians in the US and Poles in Sweden. The experiences of these labor migrants are triangulated against a third IMG group that have undergone the asylum process in order to reach their host societies — Iraqis. / 2025-05-11T00:00:00Z

Nearly 175, 000 Haitian immigrants have settled in South Florida since the 1970s. Their lives are often lived transnationally with persistent connections and obligations to family members in Haiti. Yet, traditional theories of immigrant assimilation focus on the integration of immigrants into host countries, giving little consideration to relationships and activities that extend into migrants' countries of origin. Conversely, studies of transnational families do not explicitly address incorporation into the receiving country. This dissertation, through the experiences of Haitian immigrants in South Florida, reveals a transnational quest “to raise the family up” through migration, remittances, and the pursuit of higher levels of education. I argue that familial duties and obligations, which have cultural foundations in the Haitian lakou, structure the activities of Haitian transnational families as they pursue socioeconomic advancement through migration and education. With the support of transnational families, many students cross boundaries to academic achievement and improve their opportunities for socioeconomic mobility in the US. With higher levels of education, these individuals contributed to a more favorable incorporation into the United States for their extended families, as well. The data were collected through participant observation and 78 in-depth interviews documenting the migration histories of 27 Haitian immigrant families in South Florida. This dissertation contributes to the existing literature on Haitian immigrants in the United States and to an understanding of the transnational dimensions of immigrant incorporation more broadly.

Immigrant incorporation in the United States has been a topic of concern and debate since the founding of the nation. Scholars have studied many aspects of the phenomenon, including economic, political, social, and spatial. The most influential paradigm of immigrant incorporation in the US has been, and continues to be, assimilation, and the most important place in and scale at which incorporation occurs is the neighborhood. This dissertation captures both of these integral aspects of immigrant incorporation through its consideration of three dimensions of assimilation – identity, trust, and civic engagement – among Latin American immigrants and American-born Latinos in Little Havana, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in Miami, Florida. Data discussed in the dissertation were gathered through surveys and interviews as part of a National Science Foundation-funded study carried out in 2005-2006. The combination of quantitative and qualitative data allows for a nuanced understanding of how immigrant incorporation is occurring locally during the first decade of the twentieth century. Findings reveal that overall Latin American immigrants and their American-born offspring appear to be becoming American with regard to their ethnic and racial identities quickly, evidenced through the salience and active employment of panethnic labels, while at the same time they are actively reshaping the identificational structure. The Latino population, however, is not monolithic and is cleaved by diversity within the group, including country of origin and socioeconomic status. These same factors impede group cohesion in terms of trust and its correlate, community. Nevertheless, the historically dominant ancestry group in Little Havana – Cubans – has been able to reach notable levels of trust and build and conserve a more solid sense of community than non-Cuban residents. With respect to civic engagement, neighborhood residents generally participate at rates lower than the overall US population and ethnic subpopulations. This is not the case for political engagement, however, where self-reported voting registration and turnout in Little Havana surpasses that of most benchmarked populations. The empirical evidence presented in this dissertation on the case of Latinos in Little Havana challenges the ways that identity, trust, and civic engagement are conceptualized and theorized, especially among immigrants to the US.