Living in Two Homes

Integration, Identity and Education of Transnational Migrants in a Globalized World

Mariella Espinoza Herold, Rina Manuela Contini

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787146303
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization and dynamic transnational migrations are bringing remarkable demographic differences to Europe and the United States. Transnational immigration flows from Eastern Europe, Africa and elsewhere are creating economical and educational inequities that are forcing EU nation- states to reflect on these differences and imagine solutions. Immigrants bring cultural practices, forms of art, and perspectives on all aspects of human experience that transform and enrich the cultures of host countries. Dichotomies between natives and newcomers emerge, as well as new forms of identities and distinctions between "them" and "us". In addition, schools are not prepared to educate diverse children with varied educational backgrounds and languages. Societal inequities cannot be understood in isolation but rather need to be understood from a global perspective. This book gathers researchers from across the globe to examine paradigms, policies, and practices for developing an inclusive intercultural and transnational framework to reduce inequities. This is necessary to positively integrate culturally-diverse families, children and adolescents into schools and societies.

Part I
Integration

CHAPTER
1

Mexican Immigrants Integration in the Midwest: A Case Study

Antonio V. Menéndez Alarcón

ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the patterns of immigrants’ integration in a state of the Midwest of the United States, Indiana, which has experienced a growth of more than 250% of the foreign-born population in the last 20 years. The study, based on in-depth interviews and document analysis, examines the ways that immigrants blend into mainstream society in everyday life and in social interactions, as well as the obstacles they encounter in this process. The study reveals the cultural changes in the host culture as a result of the large number of immigrants who have established their residence in this state, the dichotomies that emerge between “natives” and “newcomers.” It also shows that immigrants stay connected to their country of origin through electronic media (in particular television and computers) and how this technology affects the process of integration. Finally, the study demonstrates that there is a process of segmented assimilation and variations in the immigrants’ sense of identity according to their socioeconomic status and ethnic background.

Keywords: Integration; cultural identity; Midwest; prejudice; discrimination; segmented assimilation

Brief Background

The United States has been considered since the beginning a country of immigration. The different waves of immigration brought people to the United States from all over the world. From the mid of the 20th century to the present the larger number of immigrants went to the United States from Latin America. The largest proportion of Latin Americans in the United States is from Mexico. In the second decade of the 21st century, immigrants of Mexican origin constitute about two-thirds (34 million) of the total number of immigrants from Latin America. There is an estimate of 12.2 million Mexican immigrants (first-generation immigrants) in the United States in 2015. The number of people born in Mexico but living in the United States has been relatively constant since 2007 (Ng, José, Salgado, & Serrano, 2016).

The flow of Mexican immigrants to the United States has been steadily growing for the last half of the 20th century, but in the beginning of the 21st century it was impacted by the economic crisis of 2008, as well as the passing of anti-immigrant laws in several states directed mostly at undocumented immigrants, including Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee. It is estimated that close to 60% of Mexican immigrants are unauthorized immigrants; therefore, they were the most impacted by these laws. Furthermore, from 2008 to the present there has been an increase in the number of undocumented immigrants (Massey, 2013).

Many sectors for different reasons consider important to revise the present immigration laws, which are considered obsolete, to address the multiple issues related to immigration and integration. As a result, in April 2013 the Senate passed a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform: “The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.” However, this new law was never brought to a vote in the House of Representatives, controlled by republicans.

The partisans of the law suggest that comprehensive immigration reform would create a better system of checks and balances in the immigration system, would provide undocumented immigrants with a legal way to earn citizenship and try to solve the humanitarian dilemma of the 12 million undocumented immigrants as well as the related issue of law enforcement (American Immigration Council, 2016).

The opponents argue that the bill passed in the senate is in fact an amnesty bill that does not address the real issues of America’s immigration challenges, imposes high costs on taxpayers, increases government expending, and merely encourages additional illegal immigration (About News, 2016; Heritage Foundation, 2016).

Given that the bill was not going anywhere in the House, the Obama administration issued on June 15, 2012, an executive order to halt deportation of young people (DREAM Act – Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act). In the following section, we address briefly some of the key contributions of Mexican immigrants to U.S. Economy and society.

CONTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRANTS FROM MEXICAN ORIGIN TO THE ECONOMY

According the recent study sponsored by the BBVA, the Mexican immigrants are essential to the U.S. economy, contributing about 4% to GDP and considering second- and third-generation Mexicans, their contribution rises to 8%. Mexican immigrants predominantly work in construction, tourism, and manufacturing, but in GDP terms, “they contribute the most to the agricultural sector, construction, and accommodation and food services.” Indeed, Mexican immigrants contribute to about 18% of U.S. GDP in agriculture forestry and fishing, 13.4% to the construction sector, and about 11.7% to the accommodation and food services sector’s output (Ng et al., 2016).

Furthermore, the large majority of Mexican immigrants fill jobs that Americans cannot or will not fill, mostly at the low ends of the skill spectrum. Immigrants also raise demand for goods as well as the supply, and do not take jobs or lower the pay rate. As Griswold (2002) demonstrates, during the boom of the 1990s, the national unemployment rate fell below 4% and real wages rose up the income scale during a time of relatively high immigration. These immigrants also contribute to the Mexican economy. Mexican immigrants’ remittances to Mexico reached US$24791.7 million in 2015 (Ng et al., 2016).

CONTRIBUTION TO U.S. CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Mexican Americans have made significant contributions to virtually every aspect of American culture and society. For instance, influencing U.S. cooking and eating habits. In addition, most Mexican families emphasize bilingualism and biculturalism, teaching their children Spanish in order to pass down their heritage and culture, which has helped to revive the Spanish language in the United States. In 1980, there were roughly 11 million Spanish speakers in the United States representing 5% of the population. By 2012, the number of Spanish speakers increased to over 38 million, representing 13% of the U.S. population. And they are very present in Media and entertainment. The United States has now many Spanish-language media outlets ranging from giant commercial broadcasting networks to local radio stations. The two largest broadcasting networks are Univision and Telemundo, which provide Spanish-language television to the majority of the United States (Hispanics Contribution, 2016).

Furthermore, there are many Mexican Americans that have contributed to U.S. culture and society. The following individuals represent a brief sample of these contributions. In entertainment and art, we can mention Paul Rodríguez, who has worked in a number of television series and movies; Anthony Quinn, who made over 100 films; Ricardo Montalban, who has made many popular movies and starred in popular television series, Edward James Olmos, who received an Oscar nomination for best actor; Chita Rivera, who has acted and danced in Broadway musical productions, winning a Tony Award; José Arcadia Limón, who was a pioneer of modern dance and choreography; film and theater director Luis Valdez; internationally known writers such as Rolando Hinojosa, Sandra Cisneros, and Lucha Corpi, whose works address the struggles of women in contemporary society. In music, we can mention Eduardo Mata, one of the most respected conductors in the world and well musician and performer Carlos Santana.

In science, it is worth noting the renowned physicist and educator, Alberto Vinicio Baez, a pioneer in X-ray radiation, optics, and microscopy, and in environmental education, and chemist Mario Molina who earned national prominence by explaining, with fellow chemist F. Sherwood Rowland, how chlorofluorocarbons contribute to deplete the Earth’s ozone layer (Hispanics Contribution, 2016).

Mexicans have also been present in sports. They have a long tradition participating in soccer, baseball, horse racing, and boxing, but they have also had an impact in other sports such as tennis, and golf: for instance we can mention former tennis champion Pancho Gonzalez, in golf Lee Trevino and Nancy Lopez who have won almost every major championship title and broken many records and were finally inducted into the LPGA Hall of Fame. All these contributions are not only well known by the population at large, but it also shows that immigrants from Mexican origin are an important part of U.S. society.

Introduction

The integration of immigrants has become a prime topic of political contention and social concern over the last decade in the United States and the world, as testified by ongoing public debates, in the Internet, magazines, newspapers, and television programs; as well as by political speeches and numerous scholarly publications and papers presented at conferences. Many observers and scholars perceive the new multicultural environment and what they see as the lack of assimilation of new waves of immigrants as a major threat to U.S. society (i.e., Center for Immigration Studies, Federation for American Immigration Reform, Huntington, 2008). They argue that the continuous influx of immigrants from Latin America will divide the United States into two nations, and two cultures. This growing concern about loss of social and cultural cohesion (Menéndez-Alarcón & Novak, 2010) and the related anti-immigrant resentment is reflected in the Presidential campaign of 2016. Assimilationist approaches question also the economic impact of ethnic resources for language acquisition and labor-market chances (Esser, 2009). The reactions to this new multicultural environment occur in different sectors of U.S. society. It is not just a question of social class conflict or of white Anglos versus Hispanics. Many within the African-American community also harbor resentment about the newcomers. While these conflicts are reminiscent of prior waves of immigration, new doubts arise about whether integration is still happening or even possible in this new situation.

The United States espoused in practice the assimilationist approach during most of the 20th century (Alba & Nee, 1997), even though not in a systematic manner and sometimes with allowances for coexistence of multiculturalism or diversity. However, the rhetoric, during the last quarter of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, has been mostly defending a multicultural perspective although it has not been consistently implemented. The fact is that no single model can solve the problems related to the process of immigrants’ integration. As the comparative study by Ersanilli and Koopmans (2010) suggests, macro differences in integration regimes have large effects on immigrants’ retention of their ethnic cultures and their adoption of the host country’s culture. They conclude that integration policies by themselves have limited effect on immigrants’ integration and provide elements to support a combination of material cost/benefits and boundary permeability perspectives to explain integration. Therefore, the micro approach becomes more relevant to analyze the issues of integration, particularly the salient and important issues that bind immigrants and natives together within a given cultural context.

The abundant research on quantifiable aspects of integration, such as educational attainment, labor-market participation, or receipt of welfare is not equally matched by knowledge about its nonquantifiable elements, such as cultural and group affiliation, ethnic or religious identity, perceived perceptions of prejudice and discrimination, or the value of citizenship (Thomson & Crul, 2007). In sum, the literature about immigrant perceptions of the host community is scarce, and relatively limited regarding country-specific, political cultures, historical experiences, and political practices. Instead of looking first and foremost at the “macro” dimensions (legal rules, policies, structural barriers, institutions, social indicators of difference, etc.), as is typically done in the comparative literature on immigration regimes (see a critique in Schmitter Heisler, 2006), this chapter concentrates on “micro” processes of integration. If one analyzes individual beliefs and experiences as part of a larger political-cultural framework, it is easier to understand under what circumstances individuals use cultural boundaries and develop or lose ethnic identities (Immerfall, Boehnke, & Baier, 2010).

This chapter addresses the complex issue of integration from a microsociology perspective, and explores possible alternatives and/or modifications to the citizenship and integration model. This analysis is fundamental to our understanding of the immigration process and policies that will contribute to deal with the conviviality of different cultures in the same territory.

Certainly, a key question that we have to consider is: what is understood by immigrants’ integration in the 21st century? Immigrants’ integration implies an interrelated process at the individual and societal level. Esser (2006, p. 7) refers to integration as “the inclusion (or exclusion) of actors in an existing social system” as well as to the cohesion of the social system “beyond different elements of a society.” The research on integration identifies several models/patterns of integ...