Joel S. Fetzer

Religious Institutions, Church–State History and Muslim Mobilisation in Britain, France and Germany

With more than 10 million Muslims living in Western Europe, states are struggling to accommodate the religious needs of Muslims in state-supported institutions. Such issues include whether to fund separate Islamic schools and how or whether to teach Islam in state-supported schools. Despite these common concerns, national governments vary widely in their response to the religious needs and practices of Muslim citizens and permanent residents. This paper looks at how Britain, France and Germany have resolved these issues. We explore how pre-existing Church–State practices and institutional arrangements structured the politics of state accommodation of Muslims’ religious needs in each country.

New Guests of the Irish Nation

chapter. Yvonne Rieker’s chapter*on courtship patterns amongst Italian immigrants in postwar Germany*avoids this trap by concentrating on a single theme. Wendy Pojman’s essay on immigrant domestic workers and their impact on mothering practices in Italy (both their own and their employers’) is disappointing, as it relies solely on the work of others. w?>Part 3 rounds off the book with three strong chapters which take a wider view of the Italian family, community and nation in the migratory context. All of them are based on solid ethnographic research. First, Carol Lynn McKibben writes about the transnational community of Sicilians in Monterey, California. They have a transnational identity that is both translocal (linking back to three fishing villages in northwest Sicily) and occupational*a fishing community in which the men (traditionally) fished (in both Sicily and California) and the women worked in fish-processing factories. Susanne Wessendorf ’s chapter is about a shorter-distance translocal migration*of South Italians to Switzerland* and specifically their ambivalent orientations to return ‘home’, either for long-term stays or for holiday visits. An interesting focus of her work is the ‘return’ attitudes of the Swiss-born second generation. Finally, Baldassar uses the tropes of family and nostalgia amongst different classes of Italo-Australians (labour migrants and professionals) to explore the long-distance practices of visits ‘home’ and care-giving. In conclusion, this is a stimulating collection of mostly very well-written chapters which sets a new agenda for studying the intimate, gendered lives of migrants, their families and their communities in multiple settings in the Italian diaspora.

The Effect of Confucian Values on Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Taiwan

Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in the extent to which ”Asian values,” or Confucian ideology, inhibit a countrys acceptance of liberal-democratic values. Much of that research, however, focused on the experience of nondemocratic states, concentrated on theory rather than empirical analysis, was written before the complete democratization of Taiwan, and/or created a pan-Confucian-values index instead of estimating the effects of the main components of Confucianism (family loyalty, social hierarchies, and social harmony) individually. In this article, we review theoretical arguments for why Confucian values would decrease public support for democratization, women’s rights, and freedom of speech. We then use OLS and Logit to estimate models of data from the Taiwan subsamples of the 1995 World Values Study and the 2001 East Asia Barometer. Our results indicate that adherence to Confucian values did not consistently undermine public support for liberal democracy in 1995 and even increased support for some liberal-democratic values in 2001. Our findings thus disconfirm previous empirical research on this question. The article concludes by discussing how Confucian and liberal-democratic values might reinforce rather than undermine each other.

Why Did House Members Vote for H.R. 4437

This article examines why members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted for H.R. 4437, the controversial 2005 bill to construct a 700-mile immigration barrier along the U.S.-Mexican border and to criminalize illegal presence and aid to undocumented immigrants. Logit analysis suggests that being a first-term House member or a Republican and representing a district that was in the South or the West or heavily blue-collar substantially boosted the odds of supporting H.R. 4437. If a members district was disproportionately Asian, Latino, or, especially, African American, he or she was instead more likely to oppose the measure.

Election Strategy and Ethnic Politics in Singapore

According to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s electoral system is essentially representative and does not suffer from significant ethnic conflict. Opposition leaders, however, denounce legislative elections as unfair and claim that Singapores ethnic minorities disagree politically with the Chinese-dominated Peoples Action Party (PAP). This essay aims to test both of these hypotheses empirically, using freely available electoral and public-opinion data. Logistic regression of the 1968-2006 parliamentary election results by constituency indicates that the PAP government did create Group Representation Constituencies in 1988 so as to eliminate districts that had voted disproportionately for the opposition in 1984. Analysis using Gary Kings method of ecological inference suggests that ethic polarization between Chinese and Malays was moderately high in the 1976 election, peaked in 1988, and was minimal in 2006. Indians, meanwhile, appear to have voted with the Chinese in all three elections. A parallel cross-sectional, logistic regression of the 2002 Singapore subset of the World Values Survey, however, has Indian respondents being slightly less likely to admit to dissatisfaction with the government and indicates that being Malay does not make one more willing to express such dissatisfaction. These empirical results thus cast doubt on the extent to which Singapores elections have been truly free, fair, and devoid of ethnic tension. The findings also suggest that young, middle-class, highly educated Chinese have replaced working-class Malays as the greatest challenge to continued PAP dominance.

The Causes of Emigration from Singapore: How Much Is Still Political?

ABSTRACT: Efforts to maintain a robust Singaporean economy have had to confront the serious challenge of substantial brain drain from the city-state. To address the negative effects of this problem, Singapores ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP) has adopted a policy of increasing reliance on a foreign labor force. Meanwhile, the PAP appears to ignore the continued loss of human and intellectual capital. This study examines the main determinants of emigration from Singapore, specifically the political factors. The analysis is based on two primary data surveys that investigated what Singaporeans think about emigration: the 2006 Asian Barometer and the 2000–2002 Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia. Contrary to some previous empirical literature, data from these surveys indicate that anti–PAP and pro-democratic ideas strongly influence the decision of native Singaporeans to leave the island state. These findings likewise suggest that democratization and an expansion of business and technical education would be more effective in preserving economic growth than a policy of importing labor in the face of popular xenophobia.

The Causes of Pro-Immigration Voting in the United States Supreme Court.

During the pre-confirmation debate over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, critics accused her of allowing her background to influence her judicial decisions. This article assesses the validity of such a claim for all sitting justices from 1875 to 2007 in one relevant policy area, immigration. In this article, we look at all 185 immigration-related decisions by the Supreme Court from its creation through 2007. Logistic general estimating equation regression analysis of Supreme Court voting on these cases suggests that justices who were nominated by Democratic presidents, who were urbanites, and who had previous judicial experience were more likely to vote in favor of immigration. However, justices who grew up in the Southwest, had Southern European ancestors, or were ideological conservatives were more hostile to immigration. Although public opinion, the unemployment rate, and the percent foreign-born in a given year did not affect justices’ votes, non-asylum cases and appeals from the Eighth Circuit were more likely to receive favorable treatment. The mean level of racial liberalism of the Senators in office during a particular justices confirmation hearings likewise had a large impact on his or her subsequent rulings. These findings suggest that Supreme Court voting on immigration is substantially influenced by justices’ background and political preferences as well as by some political and legal structures. These results thus support Legal Realism and New Institutionalism instead of the Traditional Legal Model of Supreme Court behavior.

The Effect of Unrestricted Immigration on Crime

The few quantitatively oriented investigators who have looked at the relationship between immigration and crime typically focus on a single country or region and tend to find little or no overall effect from migration. This chapter therefore uses cross-national statistics to test the “strain” and “importation” models of migration and criminal deviance in three natural experiments: Mariel Cubans in Miami; Pieds-Noirs and Harkis “repatriates” in Marseille; and Eastern Europeans in Dublin. Elite interviews, archival materials, and quantitative panel models suggest that unrestricted migration does increase burglary rates. However, the sudden arrival ofprimarily low-skilled individuals — some of whom had already served prison time in Cuba — appears to have boosted the homicide rate in Miami.

Theories of Open Borders

Political philosophers such as Joseph Carens, Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, and Will Kymlicka have argued for the morality of an open-borders immigration policy, yet other social theorists such as Michael Walzer, Stephen Macedo, and John Isbister dismiss this approach because of the supposed harm that unrestricted immigration would cause to natives. After exploring the normative arguments for and against open borders, the chapter concludes that the crux of many theoretical objections to unrestricted immigration is empirical. Unfortunately, however, many of the factual assumptions that immigration restrictionists make have not been fully or rigorously tested. This monograph therefore aims to see if unregulated immigration actually hurts natives. In testing this hypothesis, the book focuses on three natural experiments: Mariel Cubans in Miami; Algerian “Repatriates” in Marseille; and Eastern Europeans in Dublin.

How Harmful Is Unrestricted Immigration

Overall, this study concludes that the empirical case against open borders is overstated. The analysis does find overcrowding of housing and schools and a higher burglary rate for all three cities. In Miami only, migration also appears to have led to more homicides, racial violence, and ethnic voting. Overcrowding eventually dissipated over time, however, as municipalities built more schools and apartments for the newcomers. Burglaries did increase, but many of the victims were probably the immigrants themselves. Ethnic scapegoating lies at the root of ethnic voting and racial violence. The many additional murders in Miami arguably represent an atypical case of a sending country deliberately inducing the emigration of violent criminals. With the exception of crime, then, any significant effects from large-scale immigration seem manageable.