Thesis (MPA.) --University of Limpopo, 2016 / Refer to document

Thesis (MPA.) -- University of Limpopo -- 2016. / Refer to document

The Black population in the United States is undergoing a significant transformation. Over the last four decades, the African immigrant population has increased from 130,000 to 2 million, making them one of the fastest growing groups in the United States. Yet, notably absent from much of the discourse on how immigration is changing our society is a serious engagement with the dynamic changes happening within the country’s Black population. This dissertation examines how these demographic realities are experienced in young people’s daily lives. I use the case of low-income, adolescent children of West African immigrants to understand how processes of immigrant integration and racialization unfold generationally across racial and ethnic lines. I focus specifically on their identity-work and acculturation in the context of families, local institutions, and transnational social fields. Methodologically, I draw on ethnographic observations and interviews with 71 second-generation West African teenagers in three New York City public high schools. The dissertation consists of five substantive chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the ethnic and racial identifications of second-generation West Africans, some of the meanings they make around these identities, and begins to delve into the contextual mechanisms shaping these identities, namely their families, neighborhoods and law enforcement. Chapters 3 and 4 respectively analyze the role of transnational visits to parent home countries and religion on acculturation and understandings of Blackness and Africanness, among other identities. The final chapter, Chapter 5, explores three mechanisms shaping the selective acculturation of African immigrant youth: adoption of American cultural features, maintenance of ethnically distinct features, and the introduction of African cultural forms. My research makes three contributions. First, by placing adolescent children at the center of my analysis, I show how these young people are both making and made by a unique sociohistorical and political context that has significant consequences for their racial and ethnic identity-work. Second, it contributes to understandings about the relationship between socioeconomic status and second-generation immigrant integration. Contrary to arguments that second-generation identification and acculturation are patterned by class, I find that low-income African immigrant youth selectively acculturate into American society and maintain strong ethnic identities similar to their middle-class counterparts. The third contribution provides evidence that as immigrants, their children and their host communities continually interact through institutions like schools and neighborhoods, a mutual cultural reconstitution process occurs that fundamentally transforms both immigrants and the cultural landscape from which communities in the host society fashion an “American” identity. Taken together, in shedding light on second-generation Black immigrant racialization processes, this dissertation challenges assumptions about low-income Black youth and offers a dynamic, agentic and relational understanding of immigrant integration. It also highlights how broader meanings of immigrant integration and Blackness in the United States are fundamentally changing.

This ethnographic study investigates conditions in which groups often found to be at odds with each can instead form mutually productive and supportive relationships. As an Anglophone West Indian immigrant man myself, I am personally interested in how members of my group find success in the US and fit into the larger US African descendant sphere of Black people. As a clergyman, I am professionally interested in how different Black ethnic groups find ways to get along and even appreciate each others’ differences, as part of a larger whole. Since much of my working life is keyed to creating conditions for a positive climate in which people can be the best of themselves, I hypothesized that in the right environment groups known to be suspicious of and stereotype each other, and even engage in outright conflict, could reach a workable resolution over time. That of Afro Caribbeans and Southern African Americans presented an exemplary case. To investigate whether this positive outcome was possible in the right conditions, I selected St Albans, Queens, 1965-present, as a site to conduct research that would help me learn a) how Anglophone Afro Caribbean immigrants made successful places for themselves in the US and the neighborhood; b) from their point of view, found paths to acceptance and even mutual appreciation of African Americans of Southern migrant backgrounds; and c) test whether particular characteristics of a neighborhood environment offer support for mutual acceptance and appreciation, without either group having to give up what it culturally values. The study found that because of several factors St. Albans indeed promoted a context which fostered getting along, and even getting along well. These included sufficient employment and housing opportunities, similarities in income and middle class status, numerous churches that reinforced positive values, and the fact that the racial tensions characteristic of many parts of the US were not prevalent in the daily life of the neighborhood.

A research project submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2002. / African migration to South Africa is not a recent phenomenon bu in recent history, dates back to about one hundred and fifty years when African men migrated from some southern African countries to work in the South African mines. During this period however, the apartheid regime restricted African entry into the labour market of South Africa to contract mine workers, who were obviously men. Due to the abolition of apartheid. African migration to South Africa now has a gender profile. SkPIed, professional and businesswomen of African origin are now migrating independently to South Africa. This new face oftAfrican migration is transforming South African society and culture. African women from other countries have migrated to South Africa with parts of their cultures (their dresses and their food). In South Africa, these women have acquired both positive and negative identities. The negative identities expose them to discrimination in South Africa. On the other hand, the positively acquired identities nave given the women economic independence in their families and an occupational identity in their professions. In their attempt to adjust to life in South Africa, African migrant women encounter difficulties as a result of the restrictionist immigration policy of South Africa. These women are not happy with such a policy which is based solely on economic considerations. African women claim that they struggled alongside South Africans to bring apartheid to an end and were promised by the ANC-in-exilc that they were going to be welcome in an apartheid- free South Africa. These women claim that Iliey are here to make a contribution, which is clearly portrayed by their occupational experiences. This study portrays the fact that African migrant women arc impacting on South African society and are being impacted by it as well. As tempting as it is. it would be a mistake by the South African government to dismiss the current contribution made by these women both in the formal and informal sector of the South African economy. Coining from other African countries which have been plagued with political turmoil, degrading poverty and worsening of peoples living conditions (especially with the consequences of the implementation of the structural adjustment programs), migrant women have learnt to use their initiative, especially in the area of small businesses. This has enabled the women to transform their financial situations in their families. Diverse strategies have been utilised in this transformation; the inherent but powerful social networks which aided in relocating to new or particular areas in South Africa, financial and social support from their "fictive kin" system. As a "modus operandi" for Ghanaian migrant women hairdressers, country men/wo men are employed from Ghana and brought to South Africa to work in their hair salons. Since South Africans believe that Ghanaians are the best hairdressers, the migrant women have decided to employ as many Ghanaians in their salons as possible, to keep their businesses busy even in their absence. Some of the migrant women have opened food shops where indigenous West African foods are sold to the migrant population. These shops are placed in strategic places, like in central Durban which is accessible to all living in KwaZufu-Natal. In the formal sector, most of (lie migrant women were among tlic first black women lo occupy certain positions, which were previously occupied by white South Africans. Positions such as supervisors in catering departments in Iiospitals. lecturers and head of departments at some universities are examples of the empowering contribution of migrant women to South African society. These women's lives have also been impacted by South African society, especially in the apartheid era. Considering the precarious conditions under which mizrant women from Zambia lived in KwaZulu-Natal in the apartheid era (they were considered as spies because Zambia hosted some of the A.N.C-in-exile and I.F.P dominated this area), it was in their best interest to watch every step they took because they could have been killed. However, they live to tell of how they narrowly escaped death. Migration to South Africa by migrant nurses which once was considered as an opportunity to "have their own share of the gold" has turned to disillusionment. They have been caught in the web of the immigration policy of South Africa. The conditions for a migrant to stay in South Africa depend on how scarce his/her skill is. Nursing which was considered a scarce skill in the 1990s is no longer scarce. This has led lo a second migration to England by the nurses. Despite the recent increase in this second migration, some have decided to use the opportunities of working and studying in South Africa to obtain university degrees, which they believe will improve their financial situations. According to the remarks made by some of the migrant women, th;y are happy lo be where they are, for, comparatively. South Africa still has the best to ofler migrant women in the African continent. However, the migration literature shows that researchers in the field of migration have been gender-blind. Independent skilled, career and businesswomen of African origin have been side-lined in scholarly research on migration in post apartheid South Africa. In collecting data used for this study, the snowball method of sampling was used because other me! hods were not appropriate. The population of study was made of a core sample often women, although interviews were conducted informally with a cross-section with other migrant women. The study of independent African migrant women is an example of an ethnographic account at its best.

“Undocumented Youth” is a socio-legal history of Latinx child migration to and within the United States between 1937 and 1986. By drawing on archival collections from across the country, the dissertation analyzes a crucial missing dimension of Mexican and Central American (im)migration history that adult-centric histories have overlooked or obscured. The dissertation uncovers a legal system of migrant exclusion that relied on various legal and quasi-legal forms of domestic restrictions and removal that combined with federal policies governing international migration. Under this broad legal apparatus, “border crossing” included migration from Mexico into the U.S. and domestic migration across state lines. Federal and state officials denied ethnic-Mexican border-crossing youth, with and without U.S. citizenship, legal rights and access to welfare state benefits, especially public education. This hybrid system of restriction and removal resulted in multiple injuries to children and families, including migrant minors’ exploitation on farms, educational deprivation, detention, and deportation beginning in the 1940s. The broad racialization of the criminal and invading “alien” of all ages at mid-century spurred ambivalent legal and political responses from officials in power that ranged from humanitarian to punitive. As grassroots activists and sympathetic policymakers found ways to intervene on behalf of unaccompanied and accompanied ethnic-Mexican migrant children, the state persistently and creatively enacted new draconian measures and refashioned well-meaning polices to reinforce the power and reach of the domestic removal apparatus. In response to the rights deprivations and welfare state exclusion imposed on the nation’s migrant Mexican youth, child welfare and migrants’ rights activists devised a series of local welfare programs in the 1940s and ‘50s to restore border-crossing minors’ “right to childhood” based on middle-class norms of innocence, play, and education. These local efforts led ultimately to federal reform, specifically the establishment of the Migrant Education Program (MEP) in 1965 during the War on Poverty. However, the MEP’s introduction of a unique data collection technology in schools jeopardized the privacy of undocumented youth and their parents, making them vulnerable to the criminal justice system and federal immigration enforcement. This data collection helped transform public schools into school-to-deportation pipelines. Concurrently, undocumented Mexican and Central American youth were forced to endure different forms of educational deprivation and rights violations in carceral and quasi-carceral sites, in immigrant detention and on commercial farms. The tensions and contestations over rights provoked by child migrants with and without U.S. citizenship after 1937 led to legal experiments, liberal pro-migrant federal policies like the MEP, and landmark court decisions, such as Plyler v. Doe (1982), that provided the rhetorical and policy foundations necessary to construct modern, child-centered mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. These legal experiments and court battles also increasingly defined national U.S. citizenship as the sole grounds for claiming rights, eclipsing social and local citizenship as modes of belonging. As a result, they hardened the distinctions between the citizen and the noncitizen migrant. In the 1970s, a legal regime with strict noncitizen restrictions emerged that no longer collapsed all border-crossing minors into a single discursive and legal category. By the late-twentieth century only minors and adults without federal U.S. citizenship were identified and marginalized as “migrants,” marking a sharp departure from the category’s previous legal and social meanings.

With unique historical, political, and social perceptions, the experiences of refugees, and later, their children, contribute to a more complex narrative of remembrance, citizenship, and belonging in the United States. Often framed as creating a disconnect between generations, intergenerational trauma may be addressed by surfacing different forms of affective and embodied remembrance. Recognizing the unique identities and subjectivities that the second-generation, Southeast Asian American (SEAA) population embodies (and the implications that those have for how the U.S. perceives and produces itself), this project engages narrative inquiry and participatory visual methodologies to explore how the children of Southeast Asian (SEA) refugees make meaning of their family histories and themselves through negotiating generational memories. This project shows that SEAA young people are actively engaging with the legacies of their families and communities as they move through the world. Through a series of individual interviews, participant creations, a whole group sharing circle, and a group co-created artifact, my analysis shows the ways that SEAA continually look inward and turn outward, seeking to understand, build, and re-member as they negotiate generational memories. As SEAA move toward continuity through a deep recognition and, ultimately, acceptance of rupture, they engage in healing practices. Drawing from the ways that a feminist refugee epistemology asserts the refugee as knower and centers their rich, complicated daily experiences and the ways that healing justice centers the transformation of institutions and relationships to facilitate individual and collective healing, this project offers continued opportunities to theorize the connections between historical understandings and how young people with legacies of displacement see themselves as actors in relation to those around them.

Today, there are about 250 million international migrants globally, and the number is increasing each year. Immigrants have contributed to the global economy, bridged cultural and business exchanges between host and home countries, and increased ethnic, racial, social, and cultural diversity in the host societies. Immigrants have also been overgeneralized about, misunderstood, scapegoated, and discriminated against. Understanding what drives international migration, who migrate, and how immigrants fare in destination has valuable theoretical, practical, and policy implications. This dissertation consists of three essays on international immigration. The first paper aims to test a series of immigration theories by studying immigrant skill-selection into South Africa and the United States. Most of the research on the determinants of immigrant skill selection has been focusing on immigrants in the United States and other developed destination countries. However, migration has been growing much faster in recent years between developing countries. This case study offers insights into the similarities and differences of immigration theories within the contexts of international migration into South Africa and the US. This project is funded by the Hamilton Research Fellowship of Columbia School of Social Work. The second paper narrows down the focus onto Asian immigrants in the United States, studying how the skill-selection of Asian immigrants from different regions has evolved over the past four decades. Asian sending countries have experienced tremendous growth in their economy and educational infrastructure. The rapid development provides an excellent opportunity to test the theories on the associations between emigrants’ skill-selection and sending countries’ income, inequality, and education level. On the other hand, during the study period, the United States has had massive expansion employment-based immigration system, followed by cutbacks in immigration policies. I study the association between immigration patterns and these policies to draw inferences on how the changes in immigration policies have affected the skill selection of Asian immigrants. This research is funded by Columbia University Weatherhead East Asia Institute’s Dorothy Borg Research Program Dissertation Research Fellowship. The third paper centers on the less-educated immigrant groups in the US and investigates the gap in welfare use between less-educated immigrant and native households during 1995-2018, spanning periods of economic recessions and recoveries, changes in welfare policy regimes, and policies towards immigrants. I use “decomposition analysis” to study to what extend demographic factors, macroeconomic trends, and welfare and immigration policy could explain the disparities in welfare participation between immigrants and natives. This paper is co-authored with Dr. Neeraj Kaushal from Columbia School of Social Work and Dr. Julia Shu-Huah Wang from the University of Hong Kong. The work has been published in Population Research and Policy Review (doi.org/10.1007/s11113-020-09621-8).

Despite the challenges they face in K-12 schools, members of immigrant communities consistently express high educational aspirations, a commitment reflected in the rising numbers of immigrant and first-generation students enrolling in higher education throughout the United States. Though colleges and universities have worked to institute programs that better serve the needs of diversifying student cohorts, members of immigrant families continue to experience challenges once they reach college, including stress and social isolation, restrictions on their future employment, and the looming threat of deportation or family separation. This indicates that personal investment in education and nascent institutional reforms are not enough to mitigate the inequalities that shape educational access for historically excluded communities, raising questions about how immigrant families collectively navigate the challenges and opportunities of higher education. Drawing on 28 months of ethnographic research in the San Fernando Valley, a collection of suburbs north of Los Angeles, CA, this dissertation explores how students from mixed-status immigrant families navigate the transition from high school to postsecondary life. This multi- sited, longitudinal study utilizes in-person and virtual participant observation, semi-structured interviews, archival research, text analysis, and guided photo elicitation. In total, the study includes data collected from students, educators, and caregivers throughout southern California. Over the course of the dissertation, I explore how family dynamics, coupled with socio- political constraints, inform postsecondary trajectories. I further investigate how family dynamics shift in response to new institutional priorities, highlighting the informal advising networks that emerge among older and younger members of the “first-generation” student population. In re-conceptualizing higher education as a familial project, my dissertation makes three primary contributions. First, I show how the pursuit of postsecondary education responds to cultural narratives of sacrifice that provide students with a critical foothold when they face challenges in K-12 and college environments. Second, I unravel how the technocratic activities involved in applying to and matriculating in college require that students from immigrant families engage in strategic acts of disclosure that can exacerbate stress, anxiety, and feelings of non-belonging that persist throughout their time in higher education. Finally, I break apart the traditional notion of the “first-generation” student, showing how older and younger members of this population differentially experience the high-school-to-college transition and seek to pave the way for those that follow them.

This dissertation explores the experience of Indian immigrants to the United States in the early twentieth century through an examination of the self-published writings of Dinshah P. Ghadiali, a Parsi Zoroastrian who immigrated to the United States with the hope of establishing himself as an important inventor but instead earned notoriety as a charismatic if irrepressible quack. With his family, Ghadiali settled in New Jersey in 1911, and became a naturalized citizen in 1917, the same year that Congress banned further immigration from all of Asia. He purchased a printing press early in his career to promote his discoveries but gradually repurposed it to archiving the many injuries and affronts he suffered in his encounters with immigration officials, police, journalists, judges, and juries. Ghadiali was arrested several times throughout his career for laws governing the practice of medicine, but he became the target of increasingly racialized persecution after he married a white woman in 1923. He was accused of "white slavery" and sentenced to prison for five years. In 1932, the government sought to strip him of his citizenship. Ghadiali believed he had been singled out for persecution by professional rivals--in fact, he was caught in a much broader campaign to denaturalize citizens of Indian origin after the Supreme Court, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), determined that Indians were "racially ineligible" for citizenship. The volumes examined here consist mainly of Ghadiali's reconstructions of his many encounters with the law. Rather than a biography or cultural study of racialization, this dissertation explores the way in which immigrant subjects participate in the crafting of personhood or subjectivity through violent and mundane encounters with legal institutions, legal language, and legal form.