This dissertation is a study on Mexican-American families focusing on undocumented parents with U.S. born children. I argue that these families represent the most contemporary wave of migrants to enter the United States without documentation since the late 1990s and early 2000s. Research on social inequality situates transmission processes between parents and children, I show how undocumented status can be transmitted and experienced through the creation of a particular social context that encapsulates entire families, including U.S. born children. States, which adopt a legal and institutional framework, aimed at restricting immigrant rights present social and cultural challenges for these parent’s, and their children’s integration experiences. I examine how a process of racialization tied to immigration status translates to what it means to be Mexican American. I observe the ways that social support and intra-group relations across Mexican-American communities are weakened because of the increasing stigmatizing element that is undocumented status. By qualitatively capturing families’ experiences across North Carolina and New York, I highlight the meaning and consequences of legal status and detail how it is hindering this group’s progression overall. How families experience undocumented status varies across the individual, community and state levels. Families are learning to adapt to enforcement measures that merely serve to sustain a durable form of inequality that I argue is creating a new Mexican-American experience.

Scholars have studied and debated the causes and dynamics of assimilation for decades. Still, existing work has yet to explain how we get from encounter, interaction and taking assimilative “steps” toward the other to judging the other as “socially similar.” I introduce two innovations in approach to address this issue. First, I borrow from theories of collective action, narrative networks, uncoupling and “wrong” tales to ask how societies and their memories are simultaneously re-made. Second, I shift the focus to established residents, who are generally conspicuous outsiders to explanations of the multilateral process of social assimilation in migrant-receiving communities. I conducted a case study of Hicksville, a suburban Long Island hamlet and migration gateway; immersed myself in 150+ years of village history through the study of archival documents and oral histories; and chose three empirical puzzles for in-depth analysis. The first empirical chapter theorizes the long-term consequences of the state appropriation and demolition of the west side of Hicksville’s historical Broadway for a road widening project in the late 1960s. The second investigates the relegation of turn-of-the-century ethnic settlements to the sidelines of shared memory. The third explains the mis-remembering of civil rights era “race riots” outside a local real estate office. I argue that unsettlement of existing relational matrices produces action, silence and storytelling; that silences create the narrative space for stories to uncouple from narratives and narratives from networks; and that within these spaces, ‘wrong” tales, narrative anchor stitching, narrative infilling, and other creative forms of historytellling emerge. As memories, narratives and social relations shift, a village society gets re-member-ed. In conclusion, I illuminate a novel pathway for studying the achievement of social similarity as a multilateral narrative process by closely examining the dynamics of silence and storytelling in one migrant-receiving village.

In this study, through a group of children’s critical inquiries about migrant belonging, I aimed to understand migrant children’s epistemic privilege and generate a counter-narrative against the predominant problem-based framing of migrant children. To achieve the research purpose, the guiding questions I set forth are the following: 1. What issues, problems, and questions regarding migrant belonging do a group of migrant children bring to the surface? 2. How do the children investigate those issues, problems, and questions? 3. What role does the researcher play in the child-led critical inquiry process? To address the questions, 33 critical inquiry sessions were held from 2019 to 2020 in an afterschool class in a Korean elementary school. At the intersection of practitioner research tradition and a participatory approach, this study oriented itself toward reflexive, action-oriented research. The findings suggest that the children’s engagement in critical inquiries brought methodological dilemmas, posing questions to my assumptions about the research topics as well as to my plans, and shifted research design. These complexities caused by children demonstrated that critical inquiries involve generative possibilities wherein not only children can generate knowledges but researchers also reconstruct one’s preconceptions and better understand the research topics, ultimately developing better research design. In addition, children demonstrated their insights about migrant belonging by reconceptualizing belonging from a migrant Joseonjok child’s perspective. The children also taught people how othering practices were at work in Korean society and impacted their belonging. Based on the generated knowledges, the children, on the one hand, created counter-narratives and informed us about how to rethink migrant belonging in South Korea and, on the other hand, attempted to counteract othering practices, which let me reconsider what “action” would mean in the critical inquiries. With these findings, I discuss migrant children’s epistemic privilege, particularly regarding their insights about the nation-building project in South Korea, how children navigate the critical inquiries, and researcher’s role in the critical inquiries. The discussion generates implications for researchers in the field of curriculum studies and qualitative methodology and for practitioners and curriculum designers who conduct critical inquiries with children.

In the literature on immigrants, the focus has been mostly on the migrants themselves or the way receiving societies react to their arrival. In sociology, there is also a long tradition dedicated to studying how residential contexts and neighborhoods impact the opportunities of the disadvantaged. Less attention, however, has been paid to the connection between these two areas of study. Despite the obvious parallel challenges that immigrants face for achieving social mobility in America’s cities and towns, we know less about how arriving to particular places impacts immigrant integration. This gap has grown larger by the tendency to recurrently study immigrant life in exceptionally populous and diverse cities like New York and Los Angeles, or in equally exceptional small, rural destinations. This dissertation seeks to answer one key question: How do different aspects of local context affect immigrant life chances and their ability to fully participate in the social life of their places of residence? The first chapter of my dissertation shows that the literature in migration studies is not fully examining the range of immigrant destinations. I show these tendencies in the literature by conducting a bibliometric analysis of integration studies published in major immigration journals and books from 2008 to 2018. To address the conceptual problems created by this tendency, I propose a framework that moves past populational criteria for case selection and focuses instead on components of context that existing research shows matter for intergenerational mobility and integration. I also introduce a typology of contexts based on possible combinations of these components and offer some hypotheses of how these types might affect integration. This first chapter sets up the principles that guide the rest of the dissertation. In the second, third and fourth chapters, I introduce an original survey and interview study (MATIS) examining the impact of one aspect of context – institutions – on Mexican integration in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Tucson, Arizona. These cities are selected because they are maximally similar with respect to relevant contextual features other than their institutions, and have comparable flows of Mexican immigrants. The study surveys 1.5 and second-generation Mexican immigrants in both cities, and triangulates this data with follow-up interviews on a subsample of second-generation survey respondents with low and high educational attainment. The results reveal that the generosity of college funding that exists in New Mexico through the lottery scholarship, a program that does not have an analogue in Arizona, facilitates entry and completion of college degree for the children of Mexican immigrants. Respondents in both cities explained their educational attainment in a variety of ways, including as a result of their parent’s education, their relationships in their communities and schools, and events in their lives, but only the generosity of college funding stood out as being different across cities. These explanations, and others, are explored using regression analysis which finds that Mexicans that attended high school in New Mexico are more likely to complete college than their counterparts in Arizona even when accounting for individual and family characteristics. Beyond demonstrating the important part that contextual features of place, in this case local institutions, can have on the mobility outcomes of immigrants these empirical findings have clear policy implications. The immediate finding is that increased generosity in educational funding for immigrants in college has direct and observable returns on college attainment, a finding which is aligned with a vast literature connecting college affordability and completion. Additionally, I discuss how the structure of the lottery scholarship, which de-emphasizes merit aid, may have egalitarian consequences for disadvantaged groups.

This thesis explores the ways in which the local socio-political and historical context shapes immigrants lives with particular attention to the role of the state, local culture and region in their new racialisation.

Double exposure has often been used as a metaphor for the condition of emigration: of being between two places simultaneously, of layering the memory of one place onto another. To extend the metaphor of double exposure, this study turns to the medium of photography itself to explore how it functions within Russian émigré narratives of the self. I examine how Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Gary Shteyngart, and the visual artist Ilya Kabakov use photographs in their autobiographical works—from literary memoirs to art installations—as a device for representing the divided self in emigration. “Double exposure” works as a flexible concept in this dissertation: as a metaphor for exilic double consciousness; for the autobiographical tension between multiple selves; and as a model for the composite structure of these texts that join together word and image. Bringing together photography and autobiography in this study, I explore how the “objective” medium of photography offers these authors a version of the self as visual object to be used creatively within their own self-representations. Self-representation, after all, involves the transformation of one’s own subjectivity into an object of investigation. And the objectivity of the photograph cannot be divorced from the subjective experience of looking at and interpreting the sense data that the image supplies. The photograph’s uneasy relationship between objectivity and subjectivity makes it a rich source for autobiographical practices of self-creation and self-investigation. The photographs and their textual mediation work as visual metonyms that stand in for the larger project of self-representation; they picture the act of picturing the self. This dissertation charts the critical ambivalence to family photographs in these works, how they stage a back-and-forth between an affective or nostalgic attitude to images and a sharp awareness of the limits or dangers of such an attitude. The subjects of this dissertation reveal a divided attitude to the visual medium, both attracted and repelled by the promise of photographs. The divided attitude to photographs in these works, I argue, stems in part from a crisis in vision. From the semiotic appraisal of photographs to the disciplinary and propagandistic abuses of photography, to see the photograph as an uncomplicated restoration of the past is no longer possible by the second half of the twentieth century (if, indeed, it ever was). And yet, it is the very losses of the twentieth century that make urgent the need to collect and preserve the fragments that remain. These authors exhibit an ambivalence about how photographs preserve the past and what kind of information they provide us with, about how these images represent the self (and the family), and finally about how this form of representation compares with the written word. Each of my four chapters examines a different modality of this ambivalent approach to photographs as they intersect with narrating the self: Nabokov’s agonistic contest between photography and his visual memory; Brodsky’s resignation to the modern photographic condition that ruptures the continuity of memory and experience; Shteyngart’s divided reading of the self from a hyphenated Russian-American perspective; and Kabakov’s ironically sincere recuperation of an affective response after postmodernism. Considering photos as both indexical documents that provide evidence but also as indeterminate images that demand interpretation, I read the photographs as an integral component of self-construction in these works, rather than as transparent illustrations of the self. These photographs offer a productive site for representing the divided self in emigration, the experience of trauma, and the convergence of personal and social history.

Immigrants from Western Europe to the United States are commonly assumed to be racially white. Almost no attention has been paid, however, to recent changes occurring within the composition of the Western European immigrant population: individuals who were born in Western Europe but whose families have origins outside of Western Europe have been migrating to and settling in the US in growing numbers. This study examines the growing diversity of this migratory stream, investigating seven groups of immigrants from Western Europe to the US. I analyze data from the European Social Survey, the US census, the American Community Surveys, the Migrant Integration Policy Index, the UN database, and the World Bank database. First, this study analyzes these origin groups' economic and social characteristics' within Western Europe. I show that while immigrants within Western Europe present an improvement in economic indicators over time and generations, they show no improvement in social indicators. Furthermore, immigrants from less developed regions report on higher rates of being socially excluded, which, in turn, correlate with lower economic achievements. Furthermore, I disentangle the economic `ethnic penalty' of minorities in Western Europe by dividing it into four components: individual characteristics, country characteristics, the social environment in host country, and the policy environment in host country. Then, I analyzed the 'educational penalty' of minority youths in Western Europe and its nature. I show that only intercultural policies help in advancing minorities in Western Europe, due to the poor social acceptance they experience. Given this background on the condition of minorities within Western Europe, I turn to investigate the move that some of them make to the US. I show that immigrants from Western Europe of non-European descents carry a higher `ethnic penalty' when they come to the US, but most of them advance faster economically than the majority of Western Europeans who migrate to the US. I test three plausible explanations for this phenomenon, finding that the level of discrimination experienced by a given ethnic group is the most determinant factor. Minorities who experience a higher discrimination level in Western Europe integrate faster in the US. Social differences between Western Europe and the US, therefore, appear to affect immigrants and their integration patterns. This phenomenon represents a new type of migration: `social migration'. While immigration has been understood overwhelmingly in terms of the two fundamental categories of economic and political (refugee) immigration, the new category of social migration is now emerging between them. I end with examining the far-reaching implications of this new development.

My dissertation examines second generation Dominican high school students and their parents in a diverse, middle-class suburb. At a moment when immigrant families are arriving directly to suburban locations, and the number of second generation immigrants in our public schools is growing, it is important to examine how they are making sense of their experiences in this new context. In my study, I consider how one sub-group of Latinx high school students, with at least one parent born in the Dominican Republic, are experiencing a new place. Specifically, I look at their experiences within their community, school and family influence their assimilation processes, their ideas about future success, and the role of education in reaching that success. I also explore how the parents’ experiences in this community inform their definitions of success for their children and the role that education plays in achieving it, and how those beliefs affect their children. I examine the parents’ accounts through in-depth interviews and the students’ accounts through pre and post in-depth interviews two years apart, as well as photo elicitation interviews. I found that the location of this suburb, adjacent to an ethnic enclave, provides a context that supports the process of selective acculturation, whereby the students are learning English and American customs while also developing and maintaining their Dominican cultural practices, including speaking Spanish. I also uncovered nuances to their understanding of the role of education in securing future success, through the use of open-ended questions. I found that the students with college-educated parents were more cautious about believing in the American Dream, and the idea that education guarantees success. Despite this, all of the families in the study approached education in similar ways, a style typically attributed to low-income families. And lastly, I found that the families lacked the social and cultural capital to gain educational advantages, specifically in the college application process. My study challenges the assumption that immigrant families arriving to middle-class suburbs are equipped to take advantage of the resources that their place of residence can afford them. Living in this type of place signals an achievement of the American Dream, but we have to question whether their children will be able to maintain it.

The United States is currently experiencing an unprecedented wave of immigration. When studying foreign-born students, anthropologists and sociologists have focused primarily on two areas: how schools integrate children into the American ‘mainstream’ and the complexities of foreign-born students learning English. Much of the debate centers on the best models for building academic English, comparing academic achievement of students by their home country, and comparing educational outcomes among different generations (e.g., newcomers versus second-generation students). In an effort to study successful models, some anthropologists of education have studied newcomer programs, such as the Internationals Network for Public Schools (INPS), that have been successful at graduating in higher numbers students recently arriving in the United States from non-English speaking countries. This ethnography builds on that line of work by looking at two areas that the literature has failed address: (1) how multiple actors in the political, philanthropic, and educational realms of the United States come together to design a school for foreign-born adolescents, and (2) how students, who find themselves in a school designed for recently-arrived foreign-born adolescents, navigate the school policies and structures, as implemented by the staff, and their fellow peers. To investigate these questions, this ethnography used participant observation, small group discussions, and interviews of students and staff at Voyager, a high school in the INPS, over the 2013-2014 school year. This dissertation reports several significant findings. First, students from smaller national and linguistic groups are forced to integrate, while those of the majority home language group are allowed to dominate linguistically and socially. Whereas in most schools White (or sometimes Black) American students are centered as the norm, in this INPS school that nucleus forms around the numerical majority, in this case Spanish speakers. To accommodate this social fact, students from smaller linguistic groups learn and use elements of the locally dominant language, Spanish. Second, while the existing literature largely praises the INPS model, some INPS students resist school structures and pedagogical techniques that are key to the INPS model, such as heterogeneous grouping and collaborative projects. This dissertation sheds light on the complex social negotiations underway in an Internationals schools providing a more nuanced picture. This ethnography argues that student pedagogical and language ideologies should be considered especially where they disagree with specific INPS policies, such as schooling ELLs together in the same school without native English speakers. It also argues that there may be certain unintended consequences for the dominant language group in a multilingual environment i.e. students in the dominant language group may have limited English language acquisition and academic success. The Internationals model might currently be the best model for educating newcomer students, but a critical look into an INPS school and its impact on the lives of students provides a strong contribution and a healthy critique that may help improve the model further.

Chan Raymond Mow-chiu. / "2001." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 218-234). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.