Immigrant and Refugee Info
top recent sociology on immigrationIn light of the Obama administration's 2014 DACA program, Contexts put together the most cited articles on immigration from the five years (2009-2014) in three leading sociology journals: American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces.
- Want to know whether immigrants are more or less likely to work in a particular industry than native-born Americans? Pew’s data tool uses American Community Survey data to break it down by state.
- If you’re interested in how the age and sex distributions of US immigrants compare to those of the native born population, The Migration Policy Institute used IPUMS data to put together interactive population pyramids comparing the populations in the US over time.
- The Department of Homeland Security maps out international students by state, showing there were over 2,799 international students in Maine as of November. They also offer downloadable tables of characteristics like age, marital status, country of origin and admission category for greencard holders, nationally and by state.
- The Urban Institute has a data tool that pulls information on children of immigrants from the American Community Survey, so if you wanted to know what percentage of children of immigrants in the US had parents with a Bachelors’ degree (33%), it’s a few clicks away.
- Population Reference Bureau’s data finder generates statistics (and charts and maps) on demand. Want to know the percentage foreign-born in each state’s population? You’re a few clicks away from a map.
Many people consider accepting refugees as a humane and compassionate act. And, I think you could make the case that it is in our nature to empathize with our fellow humans who are experiencing war, famine and violence. However, accepting refugees is not only a moral choice, it is also a very practical one.
Refugees have added immensely to American culture and success. For example, from rescue.org, here is a list of famous refugees including: Albert Einstein, Madeleine Albright, Ellie Wiesel, Sergey Brin, among others. And from the UN here is a list of prominent refugees who have made a difference. And, here is Time Magazine's list of important refugees.
Second, not only do refugees enhance American ingenuity and success, but they also provide America a platform to speak out for humanitarianism, democracy and peace. Refugees are generally fleeing from untenable situations of war, violence, famine, and persecution. Many refugees are at risk because of helping the U.S. with conflicts overseas. For instance, Iraqi and Afghani citizens are threatened with violence for aiding the U.S. with intelligence and other military operations.
Recent Sociological Trends and Refugees
Despite the benefits cited above, the U.S. runs the risk of losing its moral authority regarding refugees as well as its credibility with those who aid U.S. operations overseas because of recent trends regarding refugees.
First, there has been a shift in political rhetoric that uses refugees as an outgroup. Remember we learned that it is easier to mistrust, judge and demonize outgroups. And this PEW research shows that support for refugee settlement has been stronger when the group was European/White.
And the graphs below show how easy it is to highlight refugees as an outgroup because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq shifted the need for refugee status to Asians and Muslims.
The Trump administration has capitalized on refugees as an outgroup by promoting anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric. The National Immigration Law Center has a list of Trump's tweets about refugees here. For example:
- "Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are"
- "These aren't people. These are animals."
- "She's telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How is your country doing?"
- "...refugees, coming from the most dangerous places in the world, including Yemen, Syria, and your favorite country, Somalia, right?"
- President Donald Trump accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of professing a “love” for al Qaeda and talking about “how great” and “how wonderful” al Qaeda is. ( This NY Times article highlights the racist and xenophobic attacks that the President made about sitting Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.)
- “Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.”
In a response to this dangerous rhetoric, in 2016 The American Sociological Association published this statement, including:
In recent years (2016), vitriolic characterizations of immigrants and draconian plans for their exclusion have been floated by political candidates to a surprisingly receptive public. While the U.S. extended refugee status to 3 million persons since 1975, only about 28 percent of the American public currently endorses the continued admission of Syrian refugees.
...the advent of cable news, the Internet, and social media have created additional venues for anti-immigrant sentiments. Their mobilization has shaped the fate of individual candidates, legislative agendas, organizations and social movements on the local, state, and national level....
The degree of anti-immigrant sentiment currently displayed in U.S. society is sizeable and strongly felt. However, despite aphorisms about America’s status as “a nation of immigrants,” evidence of anti-immigrant sentiment is clear and longstanding among wide swaths of the public. The reasons for its recent acceptability might be partly attributable to opportunities to express opposition to immigration in a manner that would have been politically unacceptable prior to the 1990s. In this way, analyses presented by sociologists and other scholars of migration can help us account for changes in popular views of immigration.
Secondly, not only has the rhetoric changed, but the actual policy has as well. By law, the POTUS must notify Congress by the end of September what the refugee limit for the next year will be. During the first year of his presidency, Trump attempted to ban refugees and since then, the U.S. has reached its lowest level of refugees ever! In 2017, the U.S. saw a historically low rate of refugees:
Local Refugees
I facilitated a sociology conference (2015) where we had a keynote speaker discuss refugees.
James Hardan from the World Relief Fund discussed them for us:
Immigrants choose to leave but refugees are forced.
The road to refugee:
Flee homeland, leave everything behind, find temporary shelter (avg stay is 5 years) sometimes living in the forest for an extended time
Interview with UNHCR; often involves reliving the events
Wait for acceptance and nation to accept you
The US resettles 50-60% of worldwide refugees
If accepted, go wherever you are sent and be prepared to pay back airfare costs!
26 million refugees worldwide.
50-80,000 refugees accepted to the US each year
$900 given to each refugee to make it through the first 3 months!
IL is 7th largest recipient of refugees
UNHCR – US Dept state – IOM Travel logistics – Resettlement Services
World Relief Services:
- Initial resettlement
- Employment Services
- Education Services/ESL
- Refugee Counseling Services
- Youth Services
- Volunteer and Church Relations
- Citizenship and Immigration Legal Service
Challenges:
- Educational factors: ESL and lagging academics
- Family and Cultural Dynamics:
- Parent-child role reversal
- Lack of parental involvement in students’ lives
- Lack of parental involvement in school
- Different parenting styles and discipline
- Past and Current Trauma/stress
- Identity crisis
IL refugees:
- Bhutanese
- Ethnic Lhotsampa
- 108,000 people displaced
- Imprisoned, abused, denial of human rights
- Iraqi
- Very different from Bhutanese
- Recent refugees, short term
- Kids have seen and experienced more turmoil than Bhutanese
Closer to our district is the Viator House of Hospitality.
More research on refugees and immigrants from the sociology journal Contexts:
tear gas? this is america.
a haunted generation remembers
Sikh refugees survived a massacre in New Dehli in 1984 but the memory of the event has changed shape as it passes from one generation to the next.
three facts about immigration control from social science
Immigrants and refugees are often criminalized and this article highlights three realities:
- Companies and government bodies benefit from the criminalization of immigrants.
- Global capitalism and institutional racism produce the “facts” that are used to justify immigration control.
- In reality, immigrants and their communities face extreme threats.
Sociologist Helen Marrow and race and education sociologist Will Tyson reached out to other North Carolina sociologists with expertise in immigration: Susan C. Pearce of East Carolina University and Martha Crowley and Kim Ebert of North Carolina State University. Marrow thought of her own students at Tufts University outside Boston, so often surprised to learn what sound, peer-reviewed research says about these matters. “We never hear this,” one student said of such research in 2016. “All we hear are the negative messages [about immigrants] in the media. We hear it so much we even believe it, too.”
Together, our team has aimed to do three things: 1) assess the soundness of the data Miller presents, taking her up on her suggestion to use her sources to verify her claims; 2) provide more accurate information regarding the economic impacts of immigrants and immigration, using peer-reviewed research; and 3) offer an explanation for how and why flawed and biased anti-immigrant messages are so often reported in the media. The literature on this topic is vast, so we highlight just a few key points that readers can use to learn how to spot and critique biased and unfounded messages about immigrants and immigration in their own communities.1) Purely Negative Media Accounts of the Economic Costs of Unauthorized Immigration Often Rely on Questionable Sources.
2) Unauthorized Immigrants Have Little or No Negative Effect on the Wages and Employment of U.S.-born Citizens, and Immigrant Workers Have Positive Effects on American Consumers.
3) Unauthorized Immigrants Do Not Have Large Negative Fiscal Impacts on Taxes and Public Spending When Long-Term Effects and Contributions to Federal Coffers Are Taken into Account.
4) What’s Really Going On? Research Points to Economic, Cultural, and Racial Anxiety.
looking “illegal”
The review of Garcia's work in Contexts explains,
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Since this statement in June 2015, Donald Trump’s rhetoric has only intensified the Latino Threat, by which anti-immigrant attitudes toward Latinx and Hispanic individuals in the U.S. are intensified. It has also provided the underpinnings ofGarcía wanted to understand how Mexican-origin women experience racialization in an anti-immigrant climate and what that means for their sense of belonging or exclusion. She interviewed 60 Mexican-origin women residing in Houston, Texas.García ends with a caution: since the 2016 presidential election, scholars have documented a rise in harassment and intimidation of those perceived to be “illegal,” and it shows no signs of abating. She calls on academics to delve more deeply into the ways racialization and “illegality” unfold in the lives of immigrants and other vulnerable populations.
crime is even lower in diverse immigrant neighborhoods
Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. natives. Still, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign hinged partly on stoking fear of criminality among U.S. arrivals. After his win, Trump seemingly set out to find data to support his alternative facts, requesting a weekly list of crimes committed by immigrants and ordering that a hotline be set up so that victims could directly report crimes committed by non-citizens. Against this backdrop, Feodor Gostjev studied immigrant concentration and neighborhood crime rates for his new article, published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.
undocumented asians, left in the shadows
Asians are the fastest-growing undocumented racial group in the United States, but they are often ignored and that keeps many Asian undocumented immigrants living in the shadows such as those in L.A.'s Koreatown.
Asians are the fastest-growing undocumented racial group in the United States, but they are often ignored and that keeps many Asian undocumented immigrants living in the shadows such as those in L.A.'s Koreatown.
The perspectives of border residents provide an authentic interpretation of border security. El Paso residents do not display any sense of danger living within close proximity to Mexico. As academic research, analyses of crime data, and surveys show border residents feel safe.
Robert Sampson, The Department Chair of Sociology at Harvard in 2008 writes in Contexts here,
I would hypothesize that immigration and the increasing cultural diversity that accompanies it generate the sort of conflicts of culture that lead not to increased crime but nearly the opposite. In other words, selective immigration in the current era may be leading to the greater visibility of competing non-violent mores that affect not just immigrant communities but diffuse and concatenate through social interactions to tamp down violent conflict in general. Recent findings showing the spread of immigration to all parts of America, including rural areas of the Midwest and South, give credence to this argument. The Willie Hortinization of illegal aliens notwithstanding, diversity and cultural conflict wrought by immigration may well prove healthy, rather than destructive, as traditionally believed.
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