Xavier Escandell

When contact with immigrants matters: threat, interethnic attitudes and foreigner exclusionism in Spain's Comunidades Autónomas

Abstract This article examines the ‘contact hypothesis’ and theories of group threat in Spain, a country of recent mass immigration. Drawing on data for the period 1991–2000, we investigate whether respondents who interact with African and Latin American immigrants express lowered exclusionism compared to those who do not. Measures assessing contact include: close relationship, occasional encounter or acquaintanceship, and workplace contact. After multiple individual- and contextual-level controls, it is found that the close and occasional forms of contact are consistent predictors of lessened foreigner exclusionism across time, but workplace contact is not. Group threat (measured as perceived number of people with different nationality, race, religion or culture) contributes considerably to explaining variation in attitudes inter-regionally. Over time, close contact with migrants becomes a weaker predictor of reduced foreigner exclusionism. Finally, these results suggest that perceived threat is a consistent predictor of exclusionism over time, while the proportional presence of immigrants has no impact in either competitive or non-competitive settings.

Transnational Lives, Travelling Emotions and Idioms of Distress Among Bolivian Migrants in Spain

This article examines the emotional and health impacts that immigration to Spain has on Bolivian families. We explore transnational preventive and healing activities deployed in Spain and Bolivia to allay emergent anxieties, frustrations and illnesses. Although undocumented migrants have access to a universal public health system, they adopt pluralistic approaches to healing, combining traditional and biomedical treatments. An understanding of these healing strategies requires attention to how emotions and their embodiment are experienced in the context of immigration. We propose a theoretical framework which draws upon a constructivist approach to emotions and expand its potential by linking it to influences of transnational lifestyles and bifocality. Preoccupation and sorrow are considered key etiological agents for many illnesses in the Andes and therefore migrants are particularly mindful about how their own suffering abroad affects vulnerable relatives in Bolivia. Communication between migrants and relatives is permeated by white lies, non-disclosure or blatant suppression of information about illnesses or personal difficulties. Migrants rely on particular relatives to access transnational healing methods, while simultaneously concealing information about their health from others. A migrants health experiences are thus constrained not only by difficulties with the public health system but also by emotional considerations that span informal transnational networks.

Nationalisms and Anti-immigrant Sentiment in Spain

This article explores links between nationalism and immigrant exclusionism in Spains 17 Comunidades Autónomas. Drawing from social identity and marginality theories and using Análisis Sociológicos, Económicos y Políticos (ASEP), 1991–2000 data results show that strong national–regional identification is a predictor of anti-immigrant sentiment among Basques, Catalans and Galicians, but not in the remaining Comunidades Autónomas. Basques, Catalans and Galicians who strongly identify with region of residence are more likely to express immigrant exclusionism than those identifying ‘as regional as Spanish’. Simultaneously, ‘Spanish only’ respondents did not yield statistically significant results in favouring exclusionism as compared with those with dual identification across all regions.

Paths to citizenship? Public views on the extension of rights to legal and second-generation immigrants in Europe.

This study uses variations in the legal-institutional frameworks of citizenship to explore cross-nationally public views about granting equal rights to legal immigrants and citizenship status to second-generation immigrants in 20 European countries. We link the literatures on citizenship regimes and attitudes toward immigrants to construct a conceptual model that is tested using ISSP data from 2003 and a set of matching contextual measures. Results from hierarchical linear regression analyses indicate that (1) opposition to the extension of rights to legal immigrants is augmented by shorter periods of required residency for naturalization and (2) granting citizenship status to second-generation immigrants is not sensitive to whether a regime consents or not to citizenship by birth. Net of individual and contextual controls, the findings also show that resistance to the expansion of rights to legal immigrants is higher in countries consenting to dual citizenship. Furthermore, our analyses reveal that Eastern European respondents do not differ significantly from their Western counterparts with respect to extending rights to either category of immigrants. These results are discussed in reference to the diversity of citizenship regimes in Europe and in light of the existing debates on harmonizing immigration policies.

Marrying into the American Population: Pathways into Cross-Nativity Marriages

Cross-nativity marriages have been a neglected dimension of intermarriage patterns in the U.S., although they provide a vehicle for the easy social and political integration of the foreign-born spouse and the couples children. We first present U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service data to show that cross-nativity marriages are common among migrants entering the country and appear to be increasing over time. The following analyses based on 2008 American Community Survey data imply several pathways into cross-nativity marriages that are strongly gendered and race specific and that involve major social institutions such as the higher educational system and the U.S. military.

Locating the Global in Transnational Ethnography

Globalization continues to be an increasingly important issue for contemporary anthropology and sociology as cross-border interconnections and the movement of peoples, capital, and culture around the world expand and intensify. Since the 1990s, an increasing number of researchers have become interested in this general topic and the literature on the subject has proliferated. Within this literature has emerged an approach of the study of globalization commonly referred to as global ethnography. Both cultural anthropology and qualitative sociology have long been focused on ethnography as their most distinctive academic contributions (Clifford 1986; Hendry 2003, 498; Marcus and Fischer 1999; Atkinson et al. 2001). However, at first glance, ethnography and globalization do not appear to be compatible as a number of scholars have noted (Burawoy 2000, 1–5; 2001, 147; Coleman 2010, 496; Gille and Riain 2002, 273; Hendry 2003, 498). Some suggest that ethnography’s confinement to the local prevents it from accessing the global (Burawoy 2000, 1–3; Peltonen 2007, 346). Globalization is often associated with macro-social processes, deterritorialized flows and networks across national borders, and large-scale international institutions and corporations that are either detached from localities or affect