Irene Bloemraad's research while affiliated with University of California, Berkeley and other places
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Publications (82)
Jennifer Elrick’s terrific book argues that changes in Canadian immigration policy – and national identity – derive not just from politics, foreign relations, and economic pressures, but also lie in the culturally-infused boundary work of civil servants. This boundary work occurred through thousands of decisions about who “deserves” to migrate or s...
We call for incorporating organizations into migration scholarship, and for considering immigrants in organizational research. By centering immigrant organizations (IOs) as a unit of analysis, migration scholars can reconsider whether and how IOs affect well-being, integration, political voice, identities, globalization, and development. Migration...
Immigrant legalization policies pose an ethical dilemma between justice and the rule of law. On the one hand, liberal democracies aspire to the principles of individual liberty and equality. Building on liberal ideals of justice, compelling arguments have been made for granting legal status and a path to citizenship to unauthorized migrants by virt...
My scholarly trajectory has been a strange duality of dealing with indifference and authenticity, challenges that shift depending on whether my audience is inside or outside of Canada. Outside of Canada, being a (partial) Canadianist means convincing others that the Canadian case is worth studying. I have done this by promoting a comparative schola...
Many migrants are vulnerable due to noncitizenship, linguistic or cultural barriers, and inadequate safety-net infrastructures. Immigrant-oriented nonprofits can play an important role in improving immigrant well-being. However, progress on systematically evaluating the impact of nonprofits has been hampered by the difficulty in efficiently and acc...
How do immigrant-origin residents claim membership in the United States? Chinese, Vietnamese and Mexican-origin parents and their citizen teenagers were asked what it means to be a good citizen and to be American. In discussing good citizenship, respondents underscored legal, moral, civic, and economic actions over ascriptive characteristics or pol...
This introduction to this special issue of the Journal on Migration and Human Security discusses the background and focus of two meetings precursory to this collection, considers refugee resettlement and integration in the United States within the broader framework of the literature on migrant integration, and reflects on the role that population r...
How should migration scholars navigate tensions between our ethical responsibilities to research participants and growing “open science” calls for data transparency, replication, and accountability? We elaborate a three-step process to navigate these tensions. First, researchers must understand core principles behind open-science initiatives and th...
Comparing the United States (U.S.) and Canadian responses to immigration in the context of each country’s civil rights struggles underscores the importance of history, geography, demography, and institutional structures in determining law and policy. Civil rights in the U.S. required a civil war over slavery and created an important role for courts...
![To Be Truly [National Identity], How Important Is It to Have Been Born...](profile/Leanne-Son-Hing-2/publication/334147693/figure/tbl1/AS:775923968253954@1562006098418/To-Be-Truly-National-Identity-How-Important-Is-It-to-Have-Been-Born-Here_Q320.jpg)
Western societies have experienced a broadening of inclusive membership, whether we consider legal, interpersonal, or cultural membership. Concurrently, we have witnessed increased tensions around social citizenship, notably harsher judgments or boundaries over who “deserves” public assistance. Some have argued these phenomena are linked, with expa...
Activists do not just ‘name’ problems faced by migrants; they ‘frame’ them, constructing a particular meaning of the social world. Activists in the United States are especially likely to use rights language. Some appeal to human rights; others call on the history and resonance of civil rights. Those who contest immigrant inclusion often instead evo...
This introduction to the special issue takes stock of the current state of the pro-immigrant movement in the United States. It begins by reflecting back on the massive demonstrations for immigrant rights that swept the U.S. in 2006 and considers whether they should be seen as one episode in a broad, long-term immigrant movement, or just a remarkabl...
This paper explores processes by which a broadening of legal, social and cultural membership in Western societies appears to be accompanied by a reduction in the social rights of citizenship, in part due to harsher judgements concerning the deservingness of low-income populations. As more diverse groups are extended formal national membership, fewe...
This article synthesizes the literature on citizenship and immigration to evaluate the heft of citizenship and theorize why it matters. We examine why citizenship laws vary cross-nationally and why some immigrants acquire citizenship while others do not. We consider how citizenship influences rights, identities, and participation and the mechanisms...
I advance a conceptual approach to citizenship as membership through claims-making. In this approach, citizenship is a relational process of making membership claims on polities, people and institutions, claims recognized or rejected within particular normative understandings of citizenship. Such a conceptual shift moves scholarship beyond typologi...
What does it mean to be ‘American’? Drawing on in-depth interviews with 76 undergraduates attending elite universities and 72 teenaged citizen children of immigrants living in mostly low-income households, we identify understudied economic narratives of Americanness: as future-oriented economic opportunities for elite undergraduates or stratified n...
Supporting and investing in the integration of immigrants and their children is critically important to US society. Successful integration contributes to the nation's economic vitality, its civic and political health, and its cultural diversity. But although the United States has a good track record on immigrant integration, outcomes could be bette...
Supporting and investing in the integration of immigrants and their children is critically important to US society. Successful integration contributes to the nation?s economic vitality, its civic and political health, and its cultural diversity. But although the United States has a good track record on immigrant integration, outcomes could be bette...
This article asks whether parents’ legal status as noncitizens or undocumented migrants leads U.S.-born youth to engage in active, compensatory political and civic participation or whether parents’ legal exclusion generates apolitical, even alienated views of citizenship. Drawing on 54 in-depth interviews conducted over a 2-year period with 40 teen...
Although social movement scholars in the United States have long ignored activism over immigration, this movement raises important
theoretical and empirical questions, especially given many immigrants' lack of citizenship. Is the rights “master” frame,
used extensively by other US social movements, persuasive in making claims for noncitizens? If no...
A rich civic infrastructure of community-based organizations (CBOs) can help generate, diffuse and maintain a culture of engagement and health that benefits marginalized populations most at risk for illness, disability, and poor health. Attention to CBOs advances “meso-level” frameworks for understanding health cultures and outcomes by going beyond...
What, exactly, is solidarity? And how does it differ from another term that Kymlicka (2015), uses in his article, namely an ethic of “social membership”?
Kymlicka (2015), notes the virtual absence of theorizing on ‘solidarity’ outside of sociology. Indeed, even within sociology, Kymlicka cites social theorist Jeffrey Alexander to argue that solida...
I argue that sociologists have directed insufficient attention to the study of citizenship. When citizenship is studied, sociologists tend to concentrate on just one facet: rights. I elaborate four conceptual facets of citizenship. I link two—citizenship as rights and belonging—to theoretical elaborations of multiculturalism. Considering multicultu...
In this special issue on “Multiculturalism During Challenging Times,” we present six articles focused on multiculturalism as it is currently practiced or implemented in Canada, across Europe, in Mauritius, and in South Korea. We apply SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to assess the strengths and weaknesses of its applica...
Between 1790 and 1952, naturalization was reserved primarily for “free white persons.” Asian immigrants were deemed non-white
and racially ineligible for citizenship by legislation and the courts. European immigrants and, importantly, Mexican immigrants
were considered white by law and eligible for naturalization. Yet, few Mexicans acquired US citi...
We argue that scholars of immigrant integration should pay more attention to immigrants' ‘civic visibility’ among local government officials, organisations and other residents. To document and analyse immigrants' civic visibility, we examine coverage of the Vietnamese and Indian communities in newspapers in San Jose, Boston, Vancouver and Toronto f...
Social identity threats, depending on the content of the identity targeted, may evoke varying socio-political responses. In this regard, religious discrimination may be especially threatening, challenging both the social group and its belief system, thereby promoting more active collective responses. This research examined how religious and ethnic...
Across immigrant-receiving democracies, “multiculturalism” has come under assault by political decision-makers and commentators. The academic debate, while less fiery, is also heated. We start by outlining the multiple meanings of “multiculturalism”: a term for demographic diversity; a political philosophy of equality or justice; a set of policies...
Across immigrant-receiving democracies, “multiculturalism” has come under assault by political decision-makers and pundits. The academic debate, while less fiery, is also heated. We start by outlining the multiple meanings of “multiculturalism:” a term for demographic diversity; a political philosophy of equality or justice; a set of policies to re...
How is the political participation of Asian immigrant communities portrayed by local mainstream media? How does coverage vary over time, by immigrant group, and by host country? This article examines the civic presence of Indian and Vietnamese immigrants in Boston, San Jose, Toronto, and Vancouver from 1985 to 2005. We measure civic presence using...
The authors argue that taken-for-granted notions of deservingness and legitimacy among local government officials affect funding allocations for organizations serving disadvantaged immigrants, even in politically progressive places. Analysis of Community Development Block Grant data in the San Francisco Bay Area reveals significant inequality in gr...
Three major constraints hinder cross-national comparisons: a lack of data on the immigrant origins of political candidates and elected representatives, incomplete public data on the immigrant origins of national populations or electorates, and cross-national differences in the definition of the minority population. This article addresses these meth...
This article introduces the symposium on the representation of immigrant-origin and ethnic minorities in Europe. It argues for the importance of research on this topic, noting the large, established populations of immigrant-origin citizens and their descendants across Western European countries and these minorities’ underrepresentation in elected b...
Many European cities have significant shares of immigrants among their inhabitants. Their unequal access to the political life of the cities, and the country overall, is a major democratic deficit. This introduction to the symposium emphasises the need to consider immigrants as actors in politics and explains the specific relevance of the local lev...
The degree to which a nation envisions civil rights as applying to all residents offers insight into its commitment to and capacity for immigrant inclusion. A much-debated question is whether there is a trend toward convergence in national policies around immigrant inclusion, given globalization and the rise in human rights norms. Or do institution...
The presence of immigrants and their activities challenge traditional notions of citizenship centred on the conflation of national and state membership. Four dimensions of citizenship— defined here as membership in a socio-political community—are identified: legal status, rights, identity, and participation. Discussion centres on the constraints an...
We examine the official scope and actual coverage of immigrant civil society in seven California cities using a widely employed 501(c) 3 database. First, we code immigrant organizations in official data and compare their number and proportion with population statistics; we find substantially fewer immigrant organizations than we would expect. Secon...
Across immigrant-receiving democracies on both sides of the Atlantic, policies of “cultural recognition” (e.g., “multiculturalism”) have become a convenient punching-bag for political elites. Among academics, heated theoretical debates exist over whether such policies foster or hinder immigrants' engagement with their adoptive nation. We provide a...
Cross-national comparison increases the complexity of data collection and analysis but offers the promise of innovative new knowledge; it is hard to know what is noteworthy about an outcome or process without a comparative reference point. Juxtaposing Canada and the United States, two countries more similar to each other than to any other, allows r...
Between mid-February and early May 2006, an estimated 3.7 to 5 million people took to the streets in over 160 cities across the United States to rally for immigrant rights. Marches and demonstrations were organized from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, and forty-two states in between. The majority of those who took to the streets were Latino,...
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 accessibly written v...
From March 10 to May 1, 2006, between 3.5 and 5 million people across the United States participated in immigrant rights rallies. Many of the faces in the crowd were those of children and adolescents. This chapter discusses youth engagement and family political socialization during the spring 2006 immigrant rights protests. It builds on an emerging...
This article is an attempt to qualify existing evidence that increasing diversity is detrimental to a vibrant civil society. We focus specifically on immigration-generated diversity, and argue that while it may have negative effects on some specific civic and political outcomes in some contexts, these effects vary widely across advanced democracies...
The perceived need to re-unite military families after World War II, initially addressed by ad-hoc war-brides legislation, played a key role in the reformulation of U.S. immigration policy. The large number of military spouses, especially from Asia, pushed policymakers to revise their notions of racial admissibility, thus helping to establish famil...
In this article, we examine the coverage of immigrant civil society in a widely-used 501(c)3 database. We estimate the organizational undercount for four immigrant communities (Indian, Mexican, Portuguese and Vietnamese) across seven cities in Silicon Valley, using interviews with 160 key informants and community leaders and extensive examination o...
The perceived need to re-unite military families after World War II, initially addressed by ad-hoc war-brides legislation, played a key role in the reformulation of U.S. immigration policy. The large number of military spouses, espcially from Asia, pushed policymakers to revise their notions of racial admissibility, thus helping to establish family...
Die große Zahl und die unterschiedliche Herkunft internationaler Migranten stellen althergebrachte Vorstellungen von der Staatsbürgerschaft
innerhalb nationalstaatlicher Grenzen zunehmend in Frage. Im Jahr 2005 lebten laut Schätzungen der Vereinten Nationen 191
Million Menschen außerhalb ihres Geburtslandes. Diese Zahl hat sich seit 1975 verdoppelt...
Up to a million children and teenagers participated in the 2006 immigrant rights marches. Why do young people engage in protest politics, and how are they mobilized into such activities? A longstanding literature on political socialization suggests that young people learn from their parents, acquiring political attitudes and interests from older ge...
Citizenship encompasses legal status, rights, participation, and belonging. Traditionally anchored in a particular geographic and political community, citizenship evokes notions of national identity, sovereignty, and state control, but these relationships are challenged by the scope and diversity of international migration. This review considers no...
For many Americans, participation in community organizations lays the groundwork for future political engagement. But how does this traditional model of civic life relate to the experiences of today's immigrants? Do community organizations help immigrants gain political influence in their neighborhoods and cities? In Civic Hopes and Political Reali...
In the spring of 2006, the United States experienced some of the largest, most widespread protest marches in its history, from massive demonstrations of a half million people or more in large cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas to unprecedented rallies in places like Schuyker, Nebraska, and towns across South Carolina. In total, several...
Boundary Control: Naturalization Laws, Nationality and Becoming AmericanWho Naturalizes? Understanding Immigrants' Acquisition of US CitizenshipDiversity, Culture and American NationhoodConclusion
This article considers how well the existing sociological literature on immigrant integration and assimilation responds to public fears over multiculturalism. The current backlash against multiculturalism rests on both its perceived negative effects for immigrants' socioeconomic integration and its failure to encourage civic and political cohesion....
What effect do relatively small differences in social policy have on the lives of the working poor? Comparing hotel workers in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia, Dan Zuberi argues convincingly that government policies matter and can improve the lives of those toiling in low-skilled, low paying service jobs. According to Zuberi, th...
On June 6, 2006 former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan pronounced to the General Assembly, “We are in a new migration era.”² According to UN statistics, international migrants numbered 191 million in 2005, more than twice the number in 1970. About a third of these people live in Europe and about a quarter live in North America. Between 1990 and 200...
What were the determinants and patterns of naturalization in the first two decades of the 20th century? Low levels of citizenship acquisition among contemporary immigrants are frequently contrasted to the assumed rapid naturalization of prior European migrants, but in truth we know little about the earlier period. Historic data are well suited to i...
This article uses the puzzle of diverging trajectories of immigrant citizenship in the United States and Canada to build a
new approach to the study of citizenship and political incorporation. I consider three existing models of citizenship: an
approach that considers citizenship adoption as the product of cost/benefit calculations; an approach tha...
Using 1990 U.S. Census 5% PUMS and 1991 Canadian Census 3% public and 20% restricted microfiles, this article demonstrates the existence of a North American naturalization gap: immigrants living in Canada are on average much more likely to be citizens than their counterparts in the United States, and they acquire citizenship much faster than those...
The dynamics of globalization, especially international migration, challenge traditional frameworks of citizenship and prompted scholars to develop new models of membership: transnationalism and postnationalism. All three-the traditional, transnational and postnational-explicitly or implicitly address the controversial topic of dual citizenship, or...
I argue that state intervention can foster immigrants’ and refugees’ ability to establish and to sustain community organisations. Drawing on 147 qualitative interviews and documentary information from the Portuguese and Vietnamese communities in metropolitan Boston and Toronto, I show how settlement and multiculturalism policies provide material an...
Using 1990 U.S. Census 5% PUMS and 1991 Canadian Census 3% public and 20% restricted microfiles, this article demonstrates the existence of a North American naturalization gap: immigrants living in Canada are on average much more likely to be citizens than their counterparts in the United States, and they acquire citizenship much faster than those...
Citations
... free movement should be conceived as a universal human right, what the criteria for the allocation of citizenship in democratic societies should be, what rights noncitizen residents should be entitled to, and what moral obligations states have toward refugees (e.g. Carens 2013;Gibney 2015;Fine and Ypi 2016;Miller 2016;Oberman 2016;Song 2018;Bauböck 2020;Owen 2020). These issues have a high degree of 'fit' with important themes of modern political theory, such as the appropriate constitution of the democratic polity, the conditions for achieving equality and justice in liberal states, and the requirements of global justice and legitimacy of the international state system. ...
Reference: The ethics of migration policy dilemmas
... Or the polity as a structure which does not overlap perfectly with the nation, but holds the nation-state together nevertheless? These are questions that matter as much in relation to emigration-as to immigration, though the real political and economic implications are clearly most salient for residents of any given polity Bloemraad & Sheares, 2017;Bloemraad, 2022;Erdal et al., 2018;. ...
... For example, this could have revealed individuals' names and locations, their network of family and friends, as well as other sensitive information including immigration status. This could potentially expose individuals to harm such as hate speech, detention or, in the case of refugees, pressures from authorities on family members who remained in the country of origin (Bloemraad and Menjívar 2021). ...
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... This is despite the fact that since the 1970s, the educational level of immigrants, particularly from Mexico, has risen (Massey and Gelatt 2010). As for civic participation, even though immigrants have been found to have lower levels of civic engagement than the native-born population overall (Waters and Gerstein Pineau 2015), these levels can vary by legal status (Bloemraad 2013), institutional threats, local enforcement efforts (Ebert and Okamoto 2013), and extent of inclusionary context (Okamoto and Ebert 2010); they are affected by socioeconomic characteristics such as education (D avila and Mora 2007;Foster-Bey 2008) and by an immigrant group's home country conditions of exit (Terriquez 2012). Civic engagement among immigrants can produce critical political gains (see Brettell 2020), even when overall anti-immigrant sentiment is in high gear. ...
... Not only does this showcase an extant system exercising jurisdictional control over the allocation of supports for marginalized groups, but it also alludes to acceptable exclusion from relief programmes. It is imbued in a moral logic of 'deservedness' (Bambra and Smith, 2010;Beck, 1967;Bloemraad et al., 2019;Skocpol, 1992;Slothuus, 2007;Steensland, 2006) based on productivity and means-tested dependence that has long informed the relationship between people with disabilities, society and the state. Indeed, the knot that binds welfare, work and perceptions of deservedness together has become tighter with time (Lamont, 2019), and the significance of this was further heightened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as the distribution of resources took centre stage. ...
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... Political participation has traditionally taken into account the socio-economic characteristics of immigrants, and only more recently has the influence of state policies (Bloemraad 2007) and of public and private institutions such as political parties, labor unions, and social organizations (Bloemraad 2007;Wong 2006) been found to play a significant role. My study takes the position that the political incorporation of immigrants is fundamentally a social experience and therefore of concern to sociologists. ...
... Beyond some pioneering studies (Mezzadra, 2004;Tyler and Marciniak, 2014), Isin's contribution on "acts of citizenship" (Isin, 2008) and its analytical wake in the more recent literature on the mobilization of undocumented migrants, anti-deportation movements or struggles against border regimes, has been the most important contribution in the migration studies field (McNevin, 2011;Nyers and Rygiel, 2012;Barbero, 2012;Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl, 2017). Despite recent bridges built between the two literatures (Steinhilper, 2021;Bloemraad and Voss, 2020) and the promise it offers, research remains highly fragmented across different fields. The common elements emanate more from the research agenda, without being exhaustive: labor rights, access to legal status and citizenship in the case of undocumented migrants and refugees, anti-internment and anti-deportation movements, border regimes, the "right to the city", and more recently, civil society solidarity. ...
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... Despite previous criticism, in this less represented category and in subcategories of explanations, positive arguments were found to explain why MRAS come to the EU and why accepting them might benefit EU society. Thus, in addition to applying the reflexive and critical approach toward human security, future research in this regard might include focusing on the perceptions of migrant legitimation strategies among EU citizens using a methodology similar to that of Voss et al. (2020) in the US context. Are arguments around "values" more acceptable than rights claims, as in the US context? ...
... in this vein, Bloemraad and gleeson (2012), in their study of immigrant groups, argued that formal organizations are simply superior in accessing and mobilizing resources for the political and civic inclusion of their constituents. Similarly, Marwell (2004Marwell ( , 2007 documented the transformation of communitybased social service organizations into political actors in the context of the privatization of the welfare state and the subsequent changes in the funding mechanism for the provision of social services. ...
... In that regard, the literature on citizenship acquisition highlights the importance of immigrants' marital status and family composition in the decision to apply for citizenship (Yang 1994;Street 2014;Helgertz and Bevelander 2017). Similarly, previous studies show that the institutional and political context in which immigrants live can shape immigrants' decisions concerning naturalization (Bloemraad 2018). Institutional forces, such as the destination country's citizenship policies, have the potential to restrict or expand immigrants' access to citizenship and, thus, have an important impact on immigrants' decision to naturalize (Peters et al. 2016). ...
