Helen B. Marrow

Excluded and Frozen Out: Unauthorised Immigrants’ (Non)Access to Care after US Health Care Reform

Though the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010 extends public and private insurance to 32 million individuals in the USA, it expressly excludes unauthorised adult immigrants from participating in the federally-subsidised state health exchanges and the Medicaid expansion. In this article, we show that the ACA has deepened the ‘brightness’ of unauthorised immigrants’ symbolic and social exclusion within the US health care system via a significant boundary expansion for US citizens and long-term legal immigrants that has no parallel for unauthorised immigrants. As an alternative model, we highlight two subnational jurisdictions—one city/county (San Francisco) and one state (Massachusetts)—to show how they have played more promising roles to reframe and unfreeze this ‘frozen-out’ population. While we demonstrate commonalities in how San Francisco and Massachusetts have successfully ‘blurred’ unauthorised immigrants’ symbolic exclusion and reduced their barriers to health care at the subnational level, we also highlight their mutual limitations, which signal an ongoing need for federal inclusion currently out of sight. Our findings speak to contemporary debates about whether immigrant incorporation is best achieved at the supranational, national or subnational levels.

Health care, immigrants, and minorities: lessons from the affordable care act in the U.S.

By the twenty-first century, the number of people migrating across international borders had grown substantially, spurred by ongoing economic, political, and environmental change in the Global Sout...

In Ireland ‘Latin Americans are kind of cool’: Evaluating a national context of reception with a transnational lens:

In this article, I analyze how government policies and social reception shaped Latin Americans’ patterns of incorporation and identity formation in Ireland, a new immigrant destination country in Europe where Latin American migrants lack both historical presence and (neo)colonial linkages, in the early 2000s. I show that Latin Americans in Ireland perceived a weaker form of racialization, not only than several other immigrant, refugee and racial groups there, but also than Latin Americans going to the USA, Spain, and (for Brazilians) Portugal. I then argue that these results illustrate how many Latin American migrants are now embedded within a transnational social field that connects flows of people and ideas across several different receiving countries – both traditional and new – which in turn shapes their relative evaluations of individual national receiving ‘contexts of reception’. I conclude by examining the implications of these results for immigration and Latino Studies scholarship.

How Contact Experiences Shape Welcoming: Perspectives from U.S.-Born and Immigrant Groups:

This research examines how intergroup contact experiences—including both their frequency and their qualities (friendly, discriminatory)—predict indicators of welcoming among U.S.-born and immigrant groups. Analyzing a new survey of U.S.-born groups (whites and blacks) and immigrant groups (Mexicans and Indians) from the Atlanta and Philadelphia metropolitan areas (total N = 2,006), we examine welcoming as a key dimension of social integration. Along with reporting their contact experiences, survey respondents indicated the extent to which they are inclined to welcome and feel welcomed by each of the other groups. Results consistently demonstrated that greater contact frequency predicted greater tendencies to welcome and feel welcomed by each of the other groups. These effects persisted even when demographic characteristics, perceived discrimination, and exposure are included as predictors in the models. Findings also suggested that racial and nativity hierarchies shape how perceived discrimination predicts welcoming others and feeling welcomed by others.

On the Line: Latino Life in New Immigrant Destinations after 2005

Two years—2005 and 2006—were critical for Latino immigrants living in ‘‘new destinations’’ across the U.S. South. A substantial body of literature documents whites and blacks reacting to Latino newcomers warmly or paternalistically (at best) to neutrally or ambivalently or occasionally negatively (at worst) in the two decades prior. Immediately afterward, however, scholars employing both observational and interview techniques began to document a sharp turn, as U.S.-born natives’ curiosity, confusion, and even uncertainty about who Latino newcomers were, and what impacts their presence would wield, morphed quickly into racialization, resentment, and threat. This was especially the case among southern whites (see LópezSanders [2009; n.d.]; McDermott [2011a; 2011b; 2016]). What happened, and why is the change important? Whereas immigration enforcement was relatively lax in these places prior to 2005, it ramped up nationally following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, ultimately triggering immigrants’ rights marches in spring 2006. A nativist backlash followed, directed primarily at Latino immigrants and especially harsh in new destinations with small immigrant populations. Immigration continued to become a more salient issue nationally after 2006, with anti-immigrant rhetoric among politicians and media peaking between 2008 and 2010 (and arguably again now since 2015). Restrictive laws and policies snowballed, particularly in new destination states (e.g., Arizona, Alabama, Georgia) and localities powered by white (not black) politicians and legislators (see Browne et al. [2013]). Interior enforcement programs also intensified, particularly in the South, where states and localities began joining 287(g) and Secure Communities programs in greater numbers by the late 2000s. Also starting in the mid2000s, the REAL ID Act eliminated undocumented immigrants’ access to drivers’ licenses; several southern states began restricting undocumented immigrants’ access to higher education; and deportations climbed above 250,000 per year. Compounding political developments, the 2008 recession constricted job opportunities across a number of sectors important to poor and working-class African American and new Latino southerners, including food processing, manufacturing, and construction. It is even plausible that, taken together, these changes demarcate a distinct before versus after period theoretically and empirically critical to our understanding of Latino immigrant incorporation in the South. It is no wonder that scholarship grounded in the period before 2005 is more optimistic, albeit cautiously so, regarding Latino newcomers’ opportunities for upward mobility and integration within southern economic and social life at that time (e.g., see Hernández-León and Zúñiga [2005]; Marrow [2011]; Morando [2013]; and Striffler [2005], among others). In contrast, scholarship conducted after 2006 poignantly documents Latinos’ rising levels of fear, sharpening perceptions of institutional and interpersonal mistreatment, and frustration with blocked doors. Further, new research is beginning to show that intensifying immigrant marginalization On the Line: Slaughterhouse Lives and the Making of the New South, by Vanesa Ribas. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 272 pp.

Doing Good: Racial Tensions and Workplace Inequalities at a Community Clinic in El Nuevo South

29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780520282964.

Civic Engagements: The Citizenship Practices of Indian and Vietnamese Immigrants . By Caroline B. Brettell and Deborah Reed-Danahay . Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2012 . CCLXXV, 275 pages.

have a political conception of Islam (defined as no separation of state and religion) and only 25 percent attend a mosque more than once a month. Turkish youth feel less accepted, while Latino youth feel a greater sense of belonging, despite some objective indicators that would suggest the reverse. It is especially interesting that in Berlin, where the Turkish youth face the most educational disadvantage, they have comparatively high rates of political Islam (27 percent) and monthly mosque attendance (37 percent). In fact, a lower level of education is associated with a higher level of political Islam: 43 percent of Berlin’s Turkish youth who dropped out of school endorse this view compared to only 6 percent of those who at least started college or university. Welfare states are another way that national structure impacts the incorporation of the second generation. Public housing and income subsidies are more generous in Europe than in the United States. So too are labor market wages: Latino youth tend to earn less than their Turkish peers when the latter find employment. In fact, about onethird of the Latino youth in the United States are among the working poor compared with just 25 percent of Turkish youth in Berlin (the most unequal European urban setting). In addition to national identity, the welfare state, and the labor market, a fourth structural variable is crime and law enforcement. The U.S. Latino youth report living in much more dangerous neighborhoods than the secondgeneration Turks in Europe. Although criminal justice outcomes were not collected in the European data, the Latino youth appear to be more harshly treated by the criminal justice system. Among the lowest educated Latino youth, 36 percent report having been arrested and 20 percent incarcerated. The book concludes with best-practices policies for increasing upward social mobility among the second generation. The most beneficial include early childhood preschooling; full day primary schooling; less use of middle and secondary school vocational tracking; establishing a high achieving reference group in secondary school through AP and honors courses; focusing on college admission late in the secondary school process; and preand after-school childcare to enable men and women to balance work and family life. These recommendations are national and class-based prescriptions rather than interventions based on race or ethnicity. The policies suggest that the needs of the second generation are not much different from those of poor and working class youth of native born parents from both dominant and minority groups.

24.95

Civic Engagements: The Citizenship Practices of Indian and Vietnamese Immigrants (2012) is a multi-year ethnographic study of the dynamics of civic and political incorporation among two post-1965 “immigrant” groups and their 1.5and second-generation children: Indians, a highly skilled and recently arrived group composed primarily of professionals, entrepreneurs, and labor migrants, and the Vietnamese, an officially sanctioned “refugee” population. Brettell and Reed-Danahay’s study focuses on members of these two groups living in the greater Dallas-Forth Worth (DFO) metropolitan area, a new immigrant destination only that has recently begun to receive sustained scholarly attention. The authors employ three types of ethnographic methods to triangulate their data. First, between 2005 and 2008, they conducted contextual research on the cultural landscapes of these two immigrant groups, situating them historically, demographically, and geographically across the highly suburbanized DFO metro area. Included in this enterprise is a mapping of the two groups’ commercial centers, religious institutions, and other public spaces. These data form the basis for Chapter 1, which overviews the two groups’ arrivals and settlement in the region, and also provide rich informational background for future chapters’ foci on the role of religious and ethnic institutions in shaping immigrants’ civic involvement. Second, Brettell and Reed-Danahay draw on hours of participant observation, particularly attendance at a variety of these two groups’ community events (voluntary association meetings, fundraising, and other banquets, ethnic festivals, religious ceremonies, youth group meetings, political protests, and so on), and informal discussions with members of voluntary associations. These data undergird the lion’s share of Chapters 3 through 6, where the authors examine the two immigrant groups’ forms of engagement in religious assemblies (Chapter 3), ethnic associations (Chapter 4), festivals and banquets (Chapter 5), and even pan-Asian groups – which they find are most actively attended by first-generation business and community leaders and 1.5 and second-generation youth, rather than “lay” first-generation immigrant community residents (Chapter 6). Third, Brettell and Reed-Danahay conducted three types of semi-structured interviews: individual interviews with community leaders and media professionals (including some leaders from other ethnic groups who interact with the Indians or Vietnamese); focus-group interviews with college students at several local public and private universities; and individual interviews with 67 Indian and Vietnamese parents of high schooland college-age children, accessed through multiple-entry techniques. These data form the basis for Chapter 2, a detailed analysis of the two groups’ immigrant identities and understandings of citizenship, and show large generational differences. But they also, like the participant observation data, inform the major findings and arguments presented in Chapters 3–6. Overall, this is a well-written and well-organized book; and I see in it three main strengths. First, Brettell and ReedDanahay do a good job of introducing Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s concept of “communities of practice” to the literature on immigrant incorporation. They are largely successful in arguing that this concept sheds greater light on the processes of “situated learning” that take place in a variety of institutional spheres and through which

Latino Lives in America: Making it Home

This important book assesses the level of unreliability—random measurement error—in individual survey items found in general-population surveys, on which much scholarship in sociology and kindred fields depends. Duane Alwin aspires to reduce measurement error at its source by identifying less error-prone methods of constructing and administering surveys. His study contributes to understanding survey quality by showing how reliability varies with item content and instrument design; many findings provide empirical grounding for well-established survey practices, while others suggest that some common data collection protocols may heighten error. The study rests on an original, unique data base of reliability estimates for nearly 500 individual survey items drawn from longitudinal surveys representing well-defined populations. Questions included measure both basic sociodemographic facts and subjective phenomena (beliefs, attitudes, selfperceptions). Alwin coded item properties (number of response alternatives, length), question content (factual or nonfactual), and survey context (inclusion in a topical series or ‘‘battery’’ of related questions, ordinal position within a questionnaire), and then assessed associations between these design features and reliability. As befits a study of data quality, much of Margins of Error justifies the measurement of its dependent variable, item reliability. Three chapters that outline and critique extant approaches to reliability assessment can be read profitably on their own. But the key here is that Alwin seeks reliability measures for single survey items, not composite scales. He stresses the distinction between multiple measures (verbatimreplicated items) and multiple indicators (distinct items related to a common underlying construct). He finds widely-applied ‘‘internal consistency’’ approaches based on classical test score theory (coefficient a) wanting, because they estimate the reliability of multiple-indicator composites rather than individual items, and because such composites need not be ‘‘univocal’’—that is, they combine indicators that often have imperfectly correlated true scores. A particular difficulty is that those methods understate item reliability by classifying stable, but measure-specific, variance in a survey response as erroneous rather than reliable. Alwin argues that cross-sectional designs cannot adequately estimate the reliability of single items, because respondent memory raises correlations among multiple measures or indicators. He advocates longitudinal designs that administer identically worded questions on at least three occasions, suggesting that those measurements be separated by intervals of up to two years to avoid memoryinduced inflation of reliability estimates. When these demanding data requirements are met, suitable analytic methods can distinguish reliability and stability, and incorporate stable item-specific variance within true score variance. Many results substantiate widely-used and -taught guidelines for constructing survey instruments. For example, reliability tends to be higher for factual questions than for items measuring subjective content, for selfreports than for proxy responses about others, and (usually) for shorter questions. In keeping with much recent methodological research on survey data, Alwin invokes cognitive considerations to interpret such associations; he suggests, for instance, that respondents may better comprehend short questions, and more readily access and retrieve information needed to answer factual ones. Of particular note is Alwin’s finding that the widespread survey practice of presenting items in batteries—sets of consecutive questions using the same response format—tends