How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands examines the range of economic, social, and cultural impacts immigrants have had, both knowingly and unknowingly, in their home countries. The book opens with overviews of the ways migrants become agents of homeland development. The essays that follow focus on the varied impacts immigrants have had in China, India, Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, Mozambique, and Turkey. One contributor examines the role Indians who worked in Silicon Valley played in shaping the structure, successes, and continued evolution of India's IT industry. Another traces how Salvadoran immigrants extend U.S. gangs and their brutal violence to El Salvador and neighboring countries. The tragic situation in Mozambique of economically desperate émigrés who travel to South Africa to work, contract HIV while there, and infect their wives upon their return is the subject of another essay. Taken together, the essays show the multiple ways countries are affected by immigration. Understanding these effects will provide a foundation for future policy reforms in ways that will strengthen the positive and minimize the negative effects of the current mobile world. Contributors. Victor Agadjanian, Boaventura Cau, José Miguel Cruz, Susan Eva Eckstein, Kyle Eischen, David Scott FitzGerald, Natasha Iskander, Riva Kastoryano, Cecilia Menjívar, Adil Najam, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Alejandro Portes, Min Ye

International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart. “When are immigrants ‘us’? When are they ‘them’? Waldinger implores readers to reframe the debate from a before-after dichotomy to a new transnational approach, revealing migrants to be here, there, and in-between at all stages of their migration tenure...The book’s real strength is in the elegance of the author’s argument, supported by evidence that transnationalism itself is not static but an ongoing dialectic.” —R. A. Harper, Choice “The Cross-Border Connection is to be commended for putting substance into the black box of transnationalism, offering scholars a dynamic model to account for the ebb and flow of transnationalism in the real world and yielding testable propositions about the circumstances under which cross-border connections can be expected to expand or contract.” —Douglas S. Massey, American Journal of Sociology

This collection of articles by sociologically minded historians and historically minded sociologists highlights both the long-term persistence and the continuing instability of home country connections. Encompassing societies of origin and destination from around the world, A Century of Transnationalism shows that while population movements across states recurrently produce homeland ties, those connections have varied across contexts and from one historical period to another, changing in unpredictable ways. Any number of factors shape the linkages between home and destination, including conditions in the society of immigration, policies of the state of emigration, and geopolitics worldwide. Contributors: Houda Asal, Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Caroline Douki, David FitzGerald, Nancy L. Green, Madeline Y. Hsu, Thomas Lacroix, Tony Michels, Victor Pereira, Mônica Raisa Schpun, and Roger Waldinger

The story of West Indian immigrants to the United States is generally considered to be a great success. Mary Waters, however, tells a very different story. She finds that the values that gain first-generation immigrants initial success--a willingness to work hard, a lack of attention to racism, a desire for education, an incentive to save--are undermined by the realities of life and race relations in the United States. Contrary to long-held beliefs, Waters finds, those who resist Americanization are most likely to succeed economically, especially in the second generation.

From prizewinning journalist and immigration expert Alfredo Corchado comes the sweeping story of the great Mexican migration from the late 1980s to today. Homelands is the story of Mexican immigration to the United States over the last three decades. Written by Alfredo Corchado, one of the most prominent Mexican American journalists, it's told from the perspective of four friends who first meet in a Mexican restaurant in Philadelphia in 1987. One was a radical activist, another a restaurant/tequila entrepreneur, the third a lawyer/politician, and the fourth, Alfredo, a hungry young reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Over the course of thirty years, the four friends continued to meet, coming together to share stories of the turning points in their lives-the death of parents, the births of children, professional milestones, stories from their families north and south of the border. Using the lens of this intimate narrative of friendship, the book chronicles one of modern America's most profound transformations-during which Mexican Americans swelled to become our largest single minority, changing the color, economy, and culture of America itself. In 1970, the Mexican population was just 700,000 people, but despite the recent decline in Mexican immigration to the United States, the Mexican American population has now passed three million-a result of high birth rates here in the United States. In the wake of the nativist sentiment unleased in the recent election, Homelands will be a must-read for policy makers, activists, Mexican Americas, and all those wishing to truly understand the background of our ongoing immigration debate.

This book details how migrants from Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador are shaping the politics of their country of origin, through increased participation and more competitive elections.

Challenging the commonly held perception that immigrants' lives are shaped exclusively by their sending and receiving countries, Here, There, and Elsewhere breaks new ground by showing how immigrants are vectors of globalization who both produce and experience the interconnectedness of societies—not only the societies of origin and destination, but also, the societies in places beyond. Tahseen Shams posits a new concept for thinking about these places that are neither the immigrants' homeland nor hostland—the "elsewhere." Drawing on rich ethnographic data, interviews, and analysis of the social media activities of South Asian Muslim Americans, Shams uncovers how different dimensions of the immigrants' ethnic and religious identities connect them to different elsewheres in places as far-ranging as the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. Yet not all places in the world are elsewheres. How a faraway foreign land becomes salient to the immigrant's sense of self depends on an interplay of global hierarchies, homeland politics, and hostland dynamics. Referencing today's 24-hour news cycle and the ways that social media connects diverse places and peoples at the touch of a screen, Shams traces how the homeland, hostland, and elsewhere combine to affect the ways in which immigrants and their descendants understand themselves and are understood by others.

Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good—but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception. While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.

In recent decades, increasing numbers of diasporic peoples have returned to their ethnic homelands, whether because of economic pressures, a desire to rediscover ancestral roots, or the homeland government's preferential immigration and nationality policies. Although the returnees may initially be welcomed back, their homecomings often prove to be ambivalent or negative experiences. Despite their ethnic affinity to the host populace, they are frequently excluded as cultural foreigners and relegated to low-status jobs shunned by the host society's populace. Diasporic Homecomings, the first book to provide a comparative overview of the major ethnic return groups in Europe and East Asia, reveals how the sociocultural characteristics and national origins of the migrants influence their levels of marginalization in their ethnic homelands, forcing many of them to redefine the meanings of home and homeland.

Immigration and health care are hotly debated and contentious issues. Policies that relate to both issues—to the health of newcomers—often reflect misimpressions about immigrants, and their impact on health care systems. Despite the fact that immigrants are typically younger and healthier than natives, and that many immigrants play a vital role as care-givers in their new lands, native citizens are often reluctant to extend basic health care to immigrants, choosing instead to let them suffer, to let them die prematurely, or to expedite their return to their home lands. Likewise, many nations turn against immigrants when epidemics such as Ebola strike, under the false belief that native populations can be kept well only if immigrants are kept out. In The Health of Newcomers, Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet demonstrate how shortsighted and dangerous it is to craft health policy on the basis of ethnocentrism and xenophobia. Because health is a global public good and people benefit from the health of neighbor and stranger alike, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure the health of all. Drawing on rigorous legal and ethical arguments and empirical studies, as well as deeply personal stories of immigrant struggles, Illingworth and Parmet make the compelling case that global phenomena such as poverty, the medical brain drain, organ tourism, and climate change ought to inform the health policy we craft for newcomers and natives alike.