Features

Immigration is changing societies throughout the world. A group of Radcliffe fellows explores the effects of these continuous border crossings.

You’ve already seen its effects, either in a nearby neighborhood or on the nightly news. France’s National Assembly recently passed a law banning Muslim girls and women from wearing headscarves (hijab) in public school, insisting that such a display violates the country’s secular identity. German skinheads burn down Turkish immigrants’ houses. Unemployed Americans object vociferously to job postings that demand fluency in both English and Spanish. States such as California, Florida, and Kansas debate granting drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. Baby boomers hire Caribbean “nannies” and nurse’s aides to take their elderly parents to their doctors’ appointments or on afternoon walks. The global poor are moving in with the global rich--and that vast immigration flow is affecting us all.

“Our country has experienced a huge increase in immigration since 1965, especially from Mexico and the Caribbean,” said social scientist Katherine S. Newman. “No aspect of American life has not been fundamentally touched by immigration: our labor markets, our educational system, our pop stars.” Newman was dean of social science at the Radcliffe Institute until July 1, when she was appointed professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University.

In the United States, we often think of ourselves as a nation of immigrants, welcoming anyone willing to work hard in pursuit of the American dream: a house, a lawn, a car, a political voice, and a good education for the next generation. But is this new wave of immigration really comparable to the mid-nineteenth or early twentieth-century influx that brought ashore so many European immigrants? In an era of international plane travel and global phone cards, with the world’s largest border between a first- and a third-world economy, are today’s immigrants “assimilating” in the way that so many European-born immigrants did--or will they remain linguistically and culturally distinct? How will Caribbeans, Mexicans, and Asians’ vast range of skin tones and facial features fit into (or alter) Americans’ bifurcated concepts of race--“white ethnics” on the one side, African Americans on the other--and into America’s contentious national politics? What can we learn from the different responses to immigration in, say, Germany or France?

Realizing that the Radcliffe Institute was uniquely positioned to analyze such questions from an interdisciplinary and international perspective, Katherine Newman invited a select group of academics to form an “immigration cluster” within the Radcliffe Fellowship Program. After a year planning their research agenda and discussing areas of collaboration and cooperation, the group spent 2003–2004 in residence at the Institute. Next year, 2004–2005, the cluster will return for a series of public conferences to share their conclusions with invited academics, international officials, journalists, and others.

Each scholar has concentrated on how to apply his or her own past research to questions raised by contemporary immigration while also drawing on data sets and insights of fellow scholars. For instance, Richard D. Alba RI ’04, distinguished professor of sociology and public policy at the State University of New York at Albany, had explored the factors that shape the situation, status, and identities of immigrants’ children--the “second generation”--when they come from nationalities that are looked down upon in their new countries. In the past, Alba had concentrated on second-generation Americans. At Radcliffe, he expanded his focus internationally, asking what social and institutional differences affect outcomes for disdained or disadvantaged immigrant groups, and compared second-generation North Africans in France, Turks in Germany, and Mexicans in the United States.

Immigration here and there

Some of the differences between immigration here and there can appear shocking to an American. In Germany, for instance, until the year 2000, immigrants’ German-born children and grandchildren were not automatically citizens; they had to apply to be naturalized. Those born since 2000 will, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, have to choose between citizenship in their country of origin and German citizenship.

Riva Kastoryano RI ’04, a senior research fellow at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and a professor at the Political Institute in Paris, had already investigated how French and German state policies and official rhetoric had the unforeseen effect of enforcing immigrants’ personal and collective identification as outsiders. At Radcliffe, she examined a newer European concern over politicized transnational identities that may challenge the nation-states. When Turkey funds Turkish associations in Germany, for instance, is it using its emigrants to lobby for the integration of Turkey in the European Union? When wearing the hijab, are Muslim girls in France being used as frontline weapons in an international war of symbols--challenging French national institutions at the urging of Islamic clerics living in Algeria or Morocco?

Will transnational networks that encourage an allegiance to their original culture “turn the loyalty of the immigrants to the network rather than the nation?” Kastoryano asked. “You put two states in competition for the same individual through dual citizenship and voting, and states and communities compete for the loyalty of their members within and beyond national boundaries. This is a new understanding of nationalism, this ability to belong to two or more nations, to extend your nation to another territory or to redefine a nonterritorial belonging. I call this transnational nationalism. What identity will weigh more?”

Fluid and fixed cultures

Americans tend to see the question of dual loyalties somewhat differently, having wrestled with the issue for more than a century. “We don’t have a fixed idea of what American culture is,” Alba said. “We are willing to accept two-way changes, changes to our culture as well as changes to immigrants and their children. Boundaries are much more fluid here. Assimilation happens while immigrants and their children are making other plans.” That’s not so for France and Germany. “They’re crystallized as nation-states, with fixed ideas about what constitutes their national culture. They expect immigrants to accept that culture as is. They require people to make a much greater effort if they want to enter the mainstream,” said Alba.

He found that static identity can create more hardship for second-generation immigrants--such as higher rates of second-generation unemployment among French Algerians than among Mexican Americans. Even the most assimilated French Algerians tell Alba that they’re turned away because of their Muslim names. (In the United States, Lopez, Rodrigues, Desai, and Minh don’t stand out as much in a telephone book that already contains Wasilewski, DiVirgilio, Eisenberg, and O’Flaherty.) Meanwhile, in France, despite its secular ideology, Christianity is inscribed into the background of everyday life: grand churches and cathedrals are maintained by the state, major streets are named after priests, and many Catholic holy days are official holidays. Muslims, on the other hand, are given “very dilapidated structures converted into mosques or prayer spaces. All this places immigrant minorities in clear positions of inferiority, and leaves them uncertain that they can ever achieve entry without becoming something other than they are,” Alba said.

He hesitated to claim American superiority, however. “Europeans look at us and say: ‘Look at American racism, it’s mind-boggling,’” Alba said. “We look at them and say: ‘How can they ban those girls from wearing the scarf to school?’” More than fifty years after segregation’s legal end (and just 150 years after a civil war over slavery), and more than fifty years after a European genocide (and just a few hundred years after bloody wars over religion), public life on our side of the Atlantic remains distorted by race--and on theirs by religion.

Exploring African ancestry

We all know that African ancestry (its existence or absence) profoundly inflects the experience of being American. Cluster member Reuel R. Rogers RI ’04, assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University, has been working on his first book, which explores how African ancestry or being black affects immigrants who are new to the American racial divide. When Afro-Caribbeans arrive in the United States, they’re sometimes treated (and consider themselves) as different from African Americans. But they are also sometimes subject to the same forms of racial discrimination as their native-born counterparts. How do American racial divisions shape their own (and their children’s) ability to gain a political voice? Do they and their children even have a chance to follow the pluralist model, moving from immigrant to ethnic to full incorporation? Or are they channeled into the same racially tortuous path as African Americans, making the prospect of full incorporation dubious?

From a different perspective, Jennifer L. Hochschild RI ’04, the Henry Labarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard and cochair of the immigration cluster (along with Mary Waters, chair of Harvard’s sociology department), worried that immigrants without African ancestry are assimilating a little too well--too quickly becoming “white” in a way that reinscribes “black” as our national Other. “Look back a hundred years,” she said, “when we had immigration at a slightly higher level, proportional to the population.” When they first arrived, the immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were seen as a profound racial threat, leading such public figures as Teddy Roosevelt to warn of “race suicide” as the Anglo-Saxons’ birth rates steadily dropped. Yet by the 1970s, Slavs, Italians, Jews, and Irish were all defined as “white” and therefore considered to be “real Americans,” said Hochschild, “while African Americans were still at the bottom of the status heap. Now fast-forward one hundred years. We have the same levels of immigration, with new immigrants who are again considered to be nonwhite.” Will the outcome be the same--or can a new multicultural identity be forged?

The importance of skin color

As she explored this question, Hochschild investigated skin color hierarchy in the United States. With both African and European ancestors, African Americans have a wide range of appearances. How does that variation--in skin tone, facial features, hair quality, and so on--affect their social, economic, educational, and political prospects? “Skin color has an amazingly powerful impact,” Hochschild said. Lighter-skinned people of color have, “on balance, better education, higher incomes, and are wealthier and more likely to belong to social groups--even controlling for family backgrounds.” Across the country, lighter-skinned people of color are more likely to be politically active, to belong to more social groups, and to be more politically liberal instead of being racially nationalistic.

The same effects hold generally for Asians and Latinos. The questions facing us, Hochschild said, include these: “Are Latinos going to identify as people of color or form coalitions with African Americans or other immigrant groups? How will they see themselves: as more like blacks or more like whites? Whom will they marry and have children with, and what cultural strands or heritages will they choose to identify with? With which political party will they affiliate, or will they change our political configurations?” And will that differ by sex?

The importance of gender

Luis Ricardo Fraga RI ’04, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University, investigated the intersection of gender and ethnicity among Latina and Latino state legislators. Latinos are now the largest and fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, and they are both an immigrant-derived and a native-born ethnic group. In much of the Southwest United States, they have often been characterized as a racial group separate from both whites and African Americans.

Throughout the 1990s, increasing numbers of Latinos--especially Latina women--were elected to positions at all levels of government. Fraga explored whether the career paths, policy agendas, and legislative successes of Latinas differ from those of their Latino brothers. Might the women be better positioned than the men to make substantive policy changes, precisely because they view the world from the intersection of ethnicity and sex? Fraga’s research suggests that this dual view can in fact be an advantage for Latinas in the legislative process. Latinas tend to see their roles as more inclusive and to use coalitions more effectively than do their Latino brothers, Fraga said.

None of these scholars pretended to know how it will all turn out. Alba dismissed the prediction that by 2050 we’ll be a “majority/minority” nation. “Imagine if we’d tried to forecast fifty years ahead in 1950,” he said. “We’ve changed our basic perceptions of how people fit into categories, and which categories matter.” Just one thing’s certain: our new New World won’t look anything like what we’d expect today.

E. J. Graff is the author of the recently reissued What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, and a contributing editor to Out and The American Prospect.

Photos by Tony Rinaldo