immigration

The Chicago Sun Tribune ran a story today about how Chinese immigrants working in Italy’s fashion industry have had a transformative effect on the Tuscan city of Prato. While the impact of this wave of immigration and success appears positive, there are some indications that life for Chinese workers in the fashion industry be more grim than originally thought.

Christine Spolar reports:

Like some city neighborhoods, suburbs and small towns across the U.S. where Mexicans and other immigrants gather in search of jobs, Prato is a place where two culturally different communities can live side-by-side and never really know each other.

“In all my travels, I had never seen anything like it,” said Roberto Ye, a son of Chinese immigrants and an Italian citizen who opened a Western Union office in the heart of Prato. “I said to myself: This is not like being in Chinatown in Chicago or New York or anywhere else. This is like China. White people are the foreigners here.”

To understand the impact, follow the money. This year, Chinese immigrants in Italy sent home a whopping 1.68 billion euros, about $2.4 billion, the lion’s share of all 6 billion euros in remittances recorded by Italy’s government.

“You have to forget anything you have ever learned about immigration when you come to Prato. Forget typical patterns. Europe has turned itself into a global marketplace and the Chinese who come are trying to take advantage of that,” said Andrea Frattani, Prato’s multicultural minister.

The darker side of this success story…

Police have raided hundreds of crowded workshops in the past few years where Chinese live, work and sleep. They earn far-below standard wage yet produce wares reportedly sold even in designer shops.

Some Chinese offer excuses for breaking labor laws. Workers still find conditions in Italy better than in China, they claim. But law-enforcement agents argue that Italian and Chinese entrepreneurs wrongly squeeze the most vulnerable. Italians subcontract with Chinese businessmen to cover dodgy business practices. Chinese owners rule over workers desperate for jobs.

Authorities worry about potential dangers: Criminal networks can prey on outsiders who don’t speak the native language — and Italy is a place where mafias already operate.

Social integration between Italians and Chinese is almost non-existent; schools are the few places where the young of both cultures mingle.

The sociological commentary…

Chinese businesses exist in Italy but they aren’t part of Italy. There has been immigration but not integration,” said Daniele Cologna, a sociologist at the Codici research group in Milan.

Full story.

Science Daily reports on a new study from sociologist Rob Ford about the decline in racial prejudice in Britain since the 1980s, which the research suggests is attributable to the tolerance of younger generations.

Dr. Rob Ford from The University of Manchester says that social contact with black or Asian Britons is becoming increasingly unremarkable to white people in their 20s and 30s.

The study published in next month’s British Journal of Sociology found that while 60% of people born in the 1910s opposed marriage between white relatives and ethnic minorities, this figure falls to 25% for people born in the 1970s.

The study draws upon data from the British Social Attitudes Survey conducted in the 1980s and 90s.

“The marked decline in racial prejudice is backed by further data points in 2006, 2004 and 2003 so the results here are pretty emphatic: we are becoming a more tolerant society. The attitudes of older cohorts reflect the fact that their perceptions were shaped by growing up in an ethnically homogeneous Britain before mass immigration began,” he said. “Those cohorts express much more hostility about social contact with minority groups than their children and grandchildren.”

Ford cautions against the assumption that racial prejudice will disappear in the immediate future. He notes, “…while prejudice is therefore likely to be less of a problem in the future, it is unlikely to disappear overnight. Cohort replacement is a slow process and significant levels of hostility to ethnic minorities remain even in the youngest cohorts surveyed here.”

Read more.

Science Daily reports today on a new study from sociologists Mark Levels, Jaap Dronkers and Gerbert Kraaykamp, which suggests that factors like country of origin, destination country, and qualities of immigrant communities play a significant role in educational outcomes for immigrant children.  

The research, which looked at the mathematical literacy scores of thousands of 15-year-old immigrants to 13 Western nations from 35 different native countries, indicates that economic development and political conditions in an immigrant’s home country impact the child’s academic success in his or her destination country. Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.

Children of immigrants from politically unstable countries have poorer scholastic performance compared to other immigrant children. “Adult political immigrants are known to face serious negative consequences that can be related to the political situations in their origin countries,” said sociologist Mark Levels, junior researcher in the Department of Sociology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. “We found that these consequences carry across generations to affect their children’s educational chances as well. Our findings therefore have urgent implications in countries that receive a large number of these immigrants.”

Mark Levels, one of the primary investigators told Science Daily, “Specific educational programs designed to counter the negative effects of political migration may be essential to ensure that the children of politically motivated immigrants achieve their full potential.”

Read more here.

NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday featured a report on the results of a new collaborative study from some of our country’s premier immigration scholars — John Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Philip Kasinitz.

Margot Adler of NPR reports:

In much of the debate over immigration, there is an underlying question: Are today’s immigrants assimilating into the mainstream as easily as past generations? The answer, at least in New York City, is an unqualified “yes,” according to the results of a 10-year study involving more than 3,000 young men and women, most of them in their 20s.

John Mollenkopf, a professor at City University of New York and an author of the study, says that if you look at the children of immigrants, “the kids are doing well compared to their parents and also doing well compared to the native-born comparison groups.”

Link to the story.

The New York Times reports on a new collaborative study by sociologist Philip Kasinitz of CUNY, political scientist John H. Mollenkopf, and Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters. The findings from this $2 million 10-year project will soon be published in a book titled “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age” from Harvard University Press.

The study focused on a number of different groups to examine the experiences of adult children of immigrants in the New York region including: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (encompassing Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. For the purposes of comparison, the investigators also studied U.S.-born whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans born on the mainland who live in the New York area.

The study pointed to signs of positive progress as many of these adult children achieve more than their parents in education as well as earnings, in some cases surpassing native-born Americans. But on a more cautionary note, the study highlighted how persistent poverty and low academic achievement among Dominicans and the prevalence of racial discrimination again Caribbean immigrants impede universal progress for all groups.

How did they do it?

“The study was based on 3,415 telephone interviews conducted between 1998 and 2000; 333 face-to-face follow-up interviews in 2000 and 2001; and a final round of 172 follow-up interviews in 2002 and 2003. The subjects of the study were 18 to 32 at the time of the initial interviews and were either born in the United States to at least one immigrant parent, or arrived in the United States by age 12. The study covered 10 counties: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Westchester and Nassau in New York and Essex, Hudson, Passaic and Union in New Jersey.”

The Independent Lens is currently collecting photographs that illustrate what it means to be an American through the website Flickr.com to integrate into an upcoming PBS documentary called ‘A Dream in Doubt.’ This documentary, based on the premise that the American Dream is becoming increasingly elusive, highlights the racial stereotypes in the U.S. including the wave of hate crimes following September 11th. The documentary is set to air on PBS Tuesday, May 20, 2008.

See the photography collection.

In a recent USA Today article on new patterns in American immigration, sociologist Douglas Massey weighs in.

USA Today’s Haya El Nasser reports:

“Douglas Massey, sociologist at Princeton University and editor of New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration, says immigrants are ‘more mobile and … moving into economic niches in the suburbs.’

Their arrivals in such rural areas sometimes have produced outcries for a crackdown on illegal immigration. ‘When you go into a place like North Carolina that hasn’t had immigrants in 100 years and people speaking a different language plop down in the middle of their society, it’s unnerving to a lot of people,’ Massey says.

Immigrants, including many who entered the country illegally, also have flocked to fast-growing suburbs to fill the need for construction workers, gardeners, maids and other service workers. Such areas also have attracted more affluent, highly educated immigrants who are engineers, doctors and lawyers.

‘You have an industrial park with a bunch of programmers and engineers and a bunch of them are foreign-born,’ Massey says. ‘Then you have the service staff, and they’re foreign-born, too.'”