Immigration and Identity

Immigration and Identity
Author: Salman Akhtar
Publisher: Jason Aronson
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1999
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780765702326

Immigration from one country to another is a complex psychological process with significant and lasting effects on an individual's identity. Even under the best circumstances, immigration is a traumatic occurence; like other traumas, it mobilizes a mourning process. It also offers renewed opportunity for psychic growth and alteration, and the mourning-liberation process transforms the immigrant's identity. In this book, this progression is highlighted along the dimensions of drives and affects, interpersonal and psychic space, temporality, and social affiliation. As the topics of identity and immigration are brought together in a deep and meaningful way, their clinical assessment and relevance are presented. Detailed guidelines are offered for conducting psychotherapy with immigrant patients, including child and family interventions. The specific dilemmas of the immigrant therapist are also explored, including linguistic differences, maintaining cultural neutrality and transference-countertransference issues.

Rethinking National Identity in the Age of Migration

Rethinking National Identity in the Age of Migration
Author: Migration Policy Institute
Publisher: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2012-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3867934746

Greater mobility and migration have brought about unprecedented levels of diversity that are transforming communities across the Atlantic in fundamental ways, sparking uncertainty over who the "we" is in a society. As publics fear loss of their national identity and values, the need is greater than ever to reinforce the bonds that tie communities together. Yet, while a consensus may be emerging as to what has not worked well, little thought has been given to developing a new organizing principle for community cohesion. Such a vision needs to smooth divisions between immigration's "winners and losers," blunt extremism, and respond smartly to changing community and national identities. This volume will examine the lessons that can be drawn from various approaches to immigrant integration and managing diversity in North America and Europe. The book delivers recommendations on what policymakers must do to build and reinforce inclusiveness given the realities on each side of the Atlantic. It offers insights into the next generation of policies that can (re)build inclusive societies and bring immigrants and natives together in pursuit of shared futures.

Immigration, Cultural Identity, and Mental Health

Immigration, Cultural Identity, and Mental Health
Author: Eugenio M. Rothe
Publisher:
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0190661704

This book outlines the various psychosocial impacts of immigration on cultural identity and its impact on mainstream culture. It examines how cultural identity fits into individual mental health and has to be taken into account in treatment.

Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity

Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity
Author: Nancy Foner
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-10-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610448537

Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic? Western European countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have witnessed a significant increase in Muslim immigrants, which has given rise to nativist groups that question their belonging. Contributors Thomas Faist and Christian Ulbricht discuss how German politicians have implicitly compared the purported “backward” values of Muslim immigrants with the German idea of Leitkultur, or a society that values civil liberties and human rights, reinforcing the symbolic exclusion of Muslim immigrants. Similarly, Marieke Slootman and Jan Willem Duyvendak find that in the Netherlands, the conception of citizenship has shifted to focus less on political rights and duties and more on cultural norms and values. In this context, Turkish and Moroccan Muslim immigrants face increasing pressure to adopt “Dutch” culture, yet are simultaneously portrayed as having regressive views on gender and sexuality that make them unable to assimilate. Religion is less of a barrier to immigrants’ inclusion in the United States, where instead undocumented status drives much of the political and social marginalization of immigrants. As Mary C. Waters and Philip Kasinitz note, undocumented immigrants in the United States. are ineligible for the services and freedoms that citizens take for granted and often live in fear of detention and deportation. Yet, as Irene Bloemraad points out, Americans’ conception of national identity expanded to be more inclusive of immigrants and their children with political mobilization and changes in law, institutions, and culture in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Canadians’ views also dramatically expanded in recent decades, with multiculturalism now an important part of their national identity, in contrast to Europeans’ fear that diversity undermines national solidarity. With immigration to North America and Western Europe a continuing reality, each region will have to confront anti-immigrant sentiments that create barriers for and threaten the inclusion of newcomers. Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity investigates the multifaceted connections among immigration, belonging, and citizenship, and provides new ways of thinking about national identity.

Changing Identities

Changing Identities
Author: James M. Freeman
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Total Pages: 170
Release: 1995
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

This text is part of The New Immigrants Series edited by Nancy Foner. This groundbreaking new series fills the gap in knowledge relating to today's immigrants, how these groups are attempting to redefine their cultures while here, and their contribution to a new and changing America.

Replenished Ethnicity

Replenished Ethnicity
Author: Tomás Roberto Jiménez
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2010
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0520261410

"Without a doubt, Tomas Jimenez has written the single most important contemporary academic study on Mexican American assimilation. Clear-headed, crisply written, and free of ideological bias, Replenished Ethnicity is an extraordinary breakthrough in our understanding of the largest immigrant group in the history of the United States. Bravo!"--Gregory Rodriguez, author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America "Tomas Jimenez's Replenished Ethnicity brilliantly navigates between the two opposing perils in the study of Mexican Americans--pessimistically overracializing them or optimistically overassimilating them. This much-needed and gracefully written book illuminates the on-the-ground situations of the later generations of this key American group, insightfully identifying and analyzing the unique factor operating in its case: more or less continuous immigration for more than a century. Jimenez's work provides a landmark for all future studies of Latin American incorporation into U.S. society."--Richard Alba, author of Remaking the American Mainstream "Tomas Jimenez's study adds a much-needed but long absent element to our understanding of how immigration contributes to the construction and reproduction of Mexican American ethnicity even as it continuously evolves. His work provides useful and needed detail that are absent even from the most reliable surveys."--Rodolfo de la Garza, Columbia University "In a masterful piece of social science, Tomas Jimenez debunks allegations about slow social and cultural assimilation of Mexican Americans through a richly textured ethnographic account of Mexican Americans' lived experiences in two communities with distinct immigration experiences. Population replenishment via immigration, he claims, maintains distinctiveness of established Mexican origin generations via infusion of cultural elixir-in varying doses over time and place. Ironically, it is the vast heterogeneity of Mexican Americans-generational depth, socioeconomic, national origin and legal-that both contributes to the population's ethnic uniqueness and yet defies singular theoretical frameworks. Jimenez's page-turner uses the Mexican American ethnic prism to re-interpret the U.S. ethnic tapestry and revise the canonical view of assimilation. Replenished Ethnicity sets a high bar for second generation scholarship about Mexican Americans."--Marta Tienda, The Office of Population Research at Princeton University

Paper Families

Paper Families
Author: Estelle T. Lau
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822337478

A look at how the Chinese Exclusion Act and later legislation affected Chinese American communities, who created fictitious "paper families" to subvert immigration policies.

Here, There, and Elsewhere

Here, There, and Elsewhere
Author: Tahseen Shams
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1503612848

Challenging the commonly held perception that immigrants' lives are shaped exclusively by their sending and receiving countries, Here, There, and Elsewhere breaks new ground by showing how immigrants are vectors of globalization who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies—not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies in places beyond. Tahseen Shams posits a new concept for thinking about these places that are neither the immigrants' homeland nor hostland—the "elsewhere." Drawing on rich ethnographic data, interviews, and analysis of the social media activities of South Asian Muslim Americans, Shams uncovers how different dimensions of the immigrants' ethnic and religious identities connect them to different elsewheres in places as far-ranging as the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Yet not all places in the world are elsewheres. How a faraway foreign land becomes salient to the immigrant's sense of self depends on an interplay of global hierarchies, homeland politics, and hostland dynamics. Referencing today's 24-hour news cycle and the ways that social media connects diverse places and peoples at the touch of a screen, Shams traces how the homeland, hostland, and elsewhere combine to affect the ways in which immigrants and their descendants understand themselves and are understood by others.

Identity and Migration in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Identity and Migration in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Author: MariaCaterina La Barbera
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2014-11-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319101277

This book addresses the impact of migration on the formation and transformation of identity and its continuous negotiations. Its ground is the understanding of identity as a complex social phenomenon resulting from constant negotiations between personal conditions, social relationships, and institutional frameworks. Migrations, understood as dynamic processes that do not end when landing in the host country, offer the best conditions to analyze the construction and transformation of social identities in the postcolonial and globalized societies. Searching for novel epistemologies and methodologies, the research questions here addressed are how identity is negotiated in migration processes, and how these negotiations work in contemporary multiethnic Europe. This edited volume brings to the field a novel convergence of theoretical and empirical approaches by gathering together scholars from different countries of Europe and the Mediterranean area, from different disciplines and backgrounds, challenging the traditional discipline division.