Last month, The New Yorker published a great, extended form piece documenting the long, complicated, terrifying, and still uncertain journey of one Syrian refugee from his homeland to a new country in Europe. “Ten Borders: One Refugee’s Epic Escape from Syria,” by Nicholas Schmidle, is certainly investigative journalism rather than social scientific analysis, but the article paints a moving, deeply human portrait of what these folks—so often marginalized, dismissed, or even demonized—are going through. Here on The Society Pages, we’ve also taken quite a few looks at different angles on migration, immigration, and the refugee experience. Here are a few pieces you may find interesting:
“The Invisibility of Today’s Women Refugees,” by Katharine Donato. A TSP special feature on how female refugees’ movements are often masked by social forces that shape the timing of their moves.
“Refugees and Social Instability: There’s Research on That!” by Evan Stewart and Miray Phillips. Social science on the motives and meaning of migration shows a clear difference in why refugees and migrants travel, but also how the places where they move can blur the lines between the groups.
“Fifty Years of ‘New’ Immigration: Viewpoints,” by Shehzad Nadeem, John D. Skrentny, Jennifer Lee, Zulema Valdez, and and Donna R. Gabaccia. A Contexts magazine collection of essays on U.S. immigration since 1965.
Hello everyone! With the candy consumed and the early evenings setting in, we have rounded up the latest work at TSP to brighten your morning! Here is a look at what we’ve been up to:
“…most of the images I have seen are of men making the trip from Syria and other countries to Western Europe…I know that the gender composition of most displaced persons and refugees generated by warfare is balanced, half men and half women. So where are the women among these refugees?”
This fall I’ve been working on the address I’m supposed to give as President of the Midwest Sociological Society in Chicago this coming March (23-26). Playing off of our program theme of a year ago, it is tentatively titled: “Sociology and its Publics: The Next Generation.” Among the themes I’ve been reading about and trying to think through are the social conditions and institutional infrastructures of public engagement—and very high on that list are all the new social media forms that began to appear just as the thing we call “public sociology” was beginning to be named and championed by Michael Buroway.
If you are interested in such topics, Kieran Healy has a great piece on social media and public sociology that you should take a look at. It is based on a talk he gave recently at UC–Berkeley.
Almost as if by ESP, Joel Best of the University of Delaware sent me this little reflection he wrote about the evolution of media coverage of his research on fear and Halloween over the years. It seems both timely and appropriate to share (with his permission).
“Experiencing the Death of Print.”
In 1985, I published my research on fears of Halloween sadism, first in a sociology journal and then in Psychology Today magazine. My principal finding—that I could not find any reports of children being killed or seriously injured by contaminated treats received while trick-or-treating—struck the press as newsworthy, and I wound up giving a couple dozen interviews that year.
That was the beginning of a seasonal job. For 31 years, I have fielded late-October calls from reporters at all sorts of media—a few hundred in all, I suppose. The great majority came from newspapers. Typically, a reporter would be assigned to write a story about Halloween safety and, not really knowing how to proceed, she’d often check LEXIS-NEXIS to see what other reporters wrote on the topic the previous year, find me quoted, and then give me a call.Print journalism may not be dead, but it doesn’t seem that healthy.
This year had a normal amount of traffic—eight requests for interviews, which covered the usual topics. But there was one difference: I spoke to only one newspaper reporter. All the other interviews were for podcasts, websites, or other Internet-based media.
We hear a lot about the death of print: newspapers and magazines have declining circulations. Young people, in particular, prefer to get their news through electronic means. As a result, newspapers are publishing fewer pages of news and employing fewer reporters to write stories. The inevitable result is fewer feature stories about Halloween safety, and therefore fewer print journalists contacting me. Print journalism may not be dead, but it doesn’t seem that healthy. Once again, Mills has been proven right: the sociological imagination can link my personal experiences to larger public issues.
Happy Halloween weekend all! Before you put on your costumes, turn on your favorite scary movies, and embark on a self-induced candy coma, check out the treats we have for you over at TSP this week.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 on Liberty Island (Lyndon B. Johnson Library Collection/Yoichi R. Okamoto)
This weekend marked the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act). In the week ahead we are going to recognize this transformative piece of legislation–not only was it a complete overhaul of immigration policies and patterns of migration, it has had huge, if often not fully appreciated impacts on American culture and society–by highlighting a series of recent postings, commentaries, and reflections from sociologists and other social scientists that have appeared of late on the TSP homepage and through our social media. These will include great contributions from sociologists including Richard Alba, Nancy Foner, Douglas Massey, and John Skrentney, as well as Minnesota’s own superstar historian Erika Lee.
Many of these folks, it turns out, will also be gathered here in Minnesota at the Immigration History Research Center (IHRC) for a conference reflecting on all this later in the month. I myself have been asked to be on a panel entitled “An Assessment of the 1965 Immigration Act and Future Immigration Policy.” I’m a little nervous about this because I think of myself as more of a dabbler on immigration than an expert. That is, I’m someone who relies heavily on the work of others and whose own research on the topic is limited and operates mainly around the edges and margins of the field–race, culture, collective identities, assimilation theory.
With this in mind, I’ve been trying to pull together my ideas and reflections on immigration policy past and present by thinking “through a racial lens.” There are several reasons I’m working on this angle.
Perhaps the most basic is that the original 1965 policy was motivated by in large part by the desire to eliminate racism and discrimination from the American immigration system. Passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and ’65, immigration reform was intended to abolish old, restrictive quotas and outright bans against migrants from Asia and Africa as well as to overhaul the Bracero which was seen as exploitation of Mexican laborers. In diversifying the sources of immigration and placing a premium on skills and family ties, in fact, the new law was supposed to establish a more equitable, racially just policy and society.
There are three racial angles I’m planning to focus on: demography, culture, and incorporation.
Demography. I don’t think it is hard to argue that the immigration reform opened the doors to massive amounts of new immigration and the immigration of people from countries and cultures that previously had been restricted or severely limited. My main goal will be to highlight and discuss how this new immigration has dramatically transformed the racial and ethnic composition of the populace, remaking colorlines and categories of identification in the process. For what it is worth, I might also note that these changes and their implications will continue to evolve and change in coming years, driven not only by continued migration but also by differential birth rates, changing patterns of identification, and shifts in ethnic intermarriage.
Culture. The expansion and diversification of migration to the United States that resulted from 1965 immigration reform was, whether intentionally and directly or not, associated with a whole series of shifts and changes and challenges to established racial heirarchies, shifting race relations, and racial attitudes associated with the movements we talk about as the Civil Rights movement. This includes the decline and discrediting of assimilation as an ideal or goal; the recognition and expansion of minority rights; the enrichment and diversification of lifestyles and culture more generally; the emergence of a politics of multiculturalism; and the virtual enshrinement of the discourse of diversity.
I myself have written the most about multiculturalism and the discourse of diversity. In a recent paper, I summarized these into several different arguments. One is that Americans are, nowadays, quite open and optimistic about diversity–not only on race and immigrant lines but on issues ranging from religion and sexuality to gender, disability, and age. “We are,” as Nathan Glazer put it almost twenty years ago, “all multiculturalists now.” The second major point cuts against the first: it is that talk about diversity is often marked by a series of underlying tensions and misgivings–about the relationship between group rights and individual freedoms, about ideals and hopes versus realities; about ideals versus actual structural conditions; about ideals versus inequalities. indeed, for as much as Americans tend to start with the positives about diversity, when it comes down to it, they often talk about the problems and conflicts and inequalities that go along with social difference in actual social life. And one of the biggest of these problems has to do with race. This is my third and perhaps most important point: that however open and far-reaching and general talk about diversity might be, the bulk of this discourse is deeply informed and determined–over-determined, I have suggested–by attitudes and understandings and experiences having to do with race in the United States. And the crux of the matter here is that this highly abstract and overly optimistic and entirely dominant discourse about diversity makes it very, very difficult to own up to the real problems and challenges of difference in the United States–especially those having to do with race. There’s a lot to say here–the persistence of racial inequities, the emergence of deeply racialized politics and policies and a paradoxically related colorblindness; the intractability and even invisibility of white privilege, colorblind racism–but my most important will be that all of this has particular bearing on immigrants.
Incorporation. The perverse politics and culture of race that I have been talking about all has particular bearing on immigrants–not only in terms of the policies they encounter but also the stereotypes and biases they create. It helps explain some of the prejudicial attitudes against immigrants that scholars have documented. Yet this does not hit home evenly or equally on all American immigrants, and presents an especially pronounced challenge for darker skinned migrants, those associated with African Americans and blackness more generally. This is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to research and writing from Alejandro Portes and his colleagues on “segmented assimilation.” At least in theory, it puts race at the center of any account of the differential incorporation experiences of migrants and their children. The implications here are massive and range from the unique ways in which these new Americans understand and identify themselves to the opportunities for mobility and success that they and their children will encounter.
For the panel where I am planning to present some version of all this, we are supposed to talk about implications for public policy. I assume the idea is to focus on policy related to immigration. I don’t know how much I have to say about that. Like many scholars, I agree that we need a real policy on immigration. I think it is important that our policy, whatever it is, focus not only on who gets in (or not), but also on how all of our new arrivals are treated once in this country, what kind of needs they have and supports we can provide. And I agree with Doug Massey’s that we need a policy that is not driven only by utopian ideals or abstract fears, but by an actual, realistic understanding of social and economic processes that motivate migration. I guess I’d simply add that the realities of race and racism in contemporary America are a big and quite distinct part of this social package as well.
Anyway, that’s what I will be thinking about and working on over the next couple of weeks. If any of you have any ideas or advice, I’d welcome it. And even if not, you are all invited to come to Minneapolis later in the month to get a much bigger, more comprehensive big on immigration history, politics, and policy that this topic deserves. I hear the weather will be beautiful.
“A ‘Blank Space’ for Women in Music?” by Jacqui Frost. Reviews of Ryan Adams’ cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 highlight how gender affects who gets credit for creativity in the music industry.
