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The world is witnessing a rapid rise in the number of victims of human trafficking and of migrants—voluntary and involuntary, internal and international, authorized and unauthorized. In the first two decades of this century alone, more than 65 million people have been forced to escape home into the unknown. The slow-motion disintegration of failing states with feeble institutions, war and terror, demographic imbalances, unchecked climate change, and cataclysmic environmental disruptions have contributed to the catastrophic migrations that are placing millions of human beings at grave risk. Humanitarianism and Mass Migration fills a scholarly gap by examining the uncharted contours of mass migration. Exceptionally curated, it contains contributions from Jacqueline Bhabha, Richard Mollica, Irina Bokova, Pedro Noguera, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, James A. Banks, Mary Waters, and many others. The volume’s interdisciplinary and comparative approach showcases new research that reveals how current structures of health, mental health, and education are anachronistic and out of touch with the new cartographies of mass migrations. Envisioning a hopeful and realistic future, this book provides clear and concrete recommendations for what must be done to mine the inherent agency, cultural resources, resilience, and capacity for self-healing that will help forcefully displaced populations.

Beyond the gilded gates of Google, little has been written about the suburban communities of Silicon Valley. Over the past decades, the region's booming tech economy spurred rapid population growth, increased racial diversity, and prompted an influx of immigration, especially among highly skilled and educated migrants from China, Taiwan, and India. At the same time, the response to these newcomers among long-time neighbors and city officials revealed complex attitudes in even the most well-heeled and diverse communities. This book takes an intimate look at the everyday life and politics inside Silicon Valley against a backdrop of these dramatic demographic shifts. At the broadest level it raises questions about the rights of diverse populations to their own piece of the suburban American Dream. It follows one community over several decades as it transforms from a sleepy rural town to a global gateway and one of the nation's largest Asian American-majority cities. There, it highlights the passionate efforts of Asian Americans to make Silicon Valley their home by investing in local schools, neighborhoods, and shopping centers. It also provides a tale of the tensions that emerge over this suburb's changing environment. The book uncovers suburbia as an increasingly important place for immigrants and minorities to register their claims for equality and inclusion.

More Than Just Black delves into the experiences of second generation Nigerian adults in the United States and Britain, examining how race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect their identities and assimilation trajectories. I pay particular attention to how their relations with their proximal hosts, African Americans in the United States and Black Caribbeans in Britain, affect how they identify. I conclude that the Nigerian second generation have more in common with fellow immigrants than they do with their proximal hosts. OR Focusing on questions of identity, More Than Just Black examines the nature of second generation Nigerians incorporation in the United States and Britain. I investigate how, in combination, race, ethnicity, and class (both parental and individual) affect the identity formation process and assimilation trajectories of the adult second generation of Nigerian ancestry in both countries. I find that despite living in countries where people are categorized by race and where race and racial categorization still hold great social and political power, the Nigerian second generation in both countries are not defined through the prism of race. They have formed a nuanced identity that balances race, a Nigerian ethnicity (which includes an achievement orientation akin to “model minority” groups), a pan-African identity, and, depending on structure of national identity and perceptions of thoroughness in redressing past ethnoracial traumas, identification with the country of destination.

This is a study of the adaptation of second-generation immigrants—children of immigrants—in Spain. It is based on a sample of close to seven thousand students, who were originally interviewed in schools of metropolitan Madrid and Barcelona in 2008–09, when they were, on average, fourteen years old. The sample was followed into late adolescence and reinterviewed at an average age of eighteen, by the time of high school graduation or entry into the labor market. A sample of the respondents’ parents (20 percent) was also interviewed in 2010. The project replicated the design of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (CILS), the only study of its kind ever conducted in the United States. The parallel designs allow systematic comparisons between the two countries on adaptation outcomes, such as educational achievement and ambition; labor-market participation, occupational status, and income; national self-identity and self-esteem; experiences of discrimination; and indicators of downward assimilation, such as early childbearing and incidents of arrest and incarceration. Known by its Spanish acronym (ILSEG), this study is the first of its kind ever completed in Europe. Its results, presented in successive chapters of this book, bear directly on theories of immigrant adaptation, as well as on policies by receiving countries to promote settlement and successful integration of immigrants and their children. Overall, the Spanish model of integration—based on a practical approach to the situation and needs of the foreign-born, without any demands for rapid assimilation—has worked well. Children of immigrants in Spain have joined the universe of their native-parentage age peers relatively painlessly, as evidence by low perceptions of discrimination and rapid increases in self-identification with the country. These findings contrast with the rather problematic adaptation of immigrants and their children in countries bent on imposing a rapid assimilation model, together with the disappearance of culturally distinct ethnic communities.

This book examines the different integration strategies implemented by Mexican immigrants in the Los Angeles region. In doing so, it provides an overview of Mexican migration and integration to the United States. Relying on statistical data and ethnographic information, the book analyzes four different dimensions of the immigrant integration process (economic, social, cultural, and political) and shows that there is no single path for its achievement, but instead an array of strategies that yield different results. However, the analysis also shows that immigrants' successful integration essentially depends upon their legal status and long residence in the region. The book shows that, despite this finding, immigrants nevertheless decide to settle in Los Angeles, the place where they have made their homes.

Embracing the Spirit/Abrazando El Espíritu is an interdisciplinary investigation of the underestimated emotional, physical, and financial exploitation framing the U.S. and Mexican governments’ conceptualization and implementation of the binational mid-twentieth-century guest-worker program most commonly known as the Bracero Program in the United States and Mexico. The oral life histories, correspondence, photographs, songs of love, and writing of Mexican children, women, and men—bracero families recruited to participate and sustain this contract labor program—renders a history that reveals these governments’ overdependence on these families’ spirited confrontation of a most inhumane family situation at the margins of U.S. and Mexican society. Being separated from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border for indefinite periods of time—without adequate information, protections, resources, rights, wages, or guarantees of ever seeing each other again—paved the way for these children, women, and men becoming daringly honest, invested, and ingenious in their pursuit of a humane and just family life that often transcended state-manufactured conceptualizations of borders and contract labor. Indeed, the bracero family experience is at heart a history about the hard truths of Mexican immigrant family separation.

This book examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, the book moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.

Gardens are immobile, literally rooted in the earth, but they are also shaped by migration and by the transnational movement of ideas, practices, plants, and seeds. This book reveals how successive conquests and diverse migrations have made Southern California gardens, and in turn how gardens influence social inequality, work, leisure, status, and our experiences of nature and community. Drawing on historical archival research, ethnography, and over one hundred interviews with a wide range of people including suburban homeowners, paid Mexican immigrant gardeners, professionals at the most elite botanical garden in the West, and immigrant community gardeners in the poorest neighborhoods of inner-city Los Angeles, this book offers insights into the ways that diverse global migrations and garden landscapes shape our social world.

From Alaska to Florida, millions of immigrants and their supporters took to the streets across the United States to rally for immigrant rights in the spring of 2006. The scope and size of their protests, rallies, and boycotts made these the most significant events of political activism in the United States since the 1960s. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of this historic moment. It traces the evolution and legacy of the 2006 protest movement in engaging, theoretically informed discussions. It addresses topics including unions, churches, the media, immigrant organizations, and immigrant politics. Today, one in eight U.S. residents was born outside the country, but for many, lack of citizenship makes political voice through the ballot box impossible. This book helps us better understand how immigrants are making their voices heard in other ways.

This book presents a unique interplay of leading scholars and journalists working on the contentious topic of immigration. The chapters reflect on how hard it is to write about one of the defining issues of our time—one that is at once local and global, familiar and uncanny, concrete and abstract. Highlighting and framing central questions surrounding immigration, the book explores topics including illegal immigration, state and federal mechanisms for immigration regulation, enduring myths and fallacies regarding immigration, immigration and the economy, immigration and education, the adaptations of the second generation, and more. Together, these chapters give a clear sense of the ways in which scholars and journalists enter, shape, and sometimes transform this essential yet unfinished national conversation.