Immigration and Its Effects

Responding to the reality of intensified worldwide migrations today, scholars from many disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical perspectives have taken up the challenge of making sense of people in motion. How are different migrant streams and stories comparable, and how do their contrasts also illuminate the larger phenomenon? In this review, I will consider a set of books that exemplify the research of many migration scholars and, I hope, illustrate the value of comparative consideration in uncovering broader patterns and questions with which all students of immigration must wrestle.

While most of these books lean toward qualitative narratives rather than enumerated policy prescription, the authors’ disciplinary backgrounds include anthropology, sociology, Latino studies, literary criticism, religious and legal studies, journalism, and ethnic studies. Thus each utilizes a different set of methods, in turn generating different sorts of data, interpretation, and indeed, ethical entailments. Collectively, however, they explore the multiple ways in which migration has challenged old models of social life; the push and pull of migration; the nature of cultural hybridity; the tension between studying “the border” and borders more broadly; the underlying and evolving labor regime of neoliberal capitalism; and the multidirectional, global reality of migration today. For all scholars of contemporary migration, however, it would be wise to keep in mind Anna Tsing’s prophetic advice—that we not become so enthralled by a focus on migrants that we inadvertently create a new geography of center and margin that leaves behind those left behind, people who do not themselves migrate. ¹They too are profoundly affected, and effected, by the processes of migration.

Labor and Legality, by ethnographer Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, takes a close look at the lives of ten Mexican men working without papers in a restaurant in Chicago, as well as at their family ties and remittance practices. The revised edition of Life on the Hyphen, by literature professor Gustavo Pérez Firmat, is a study of the bicultural experiences and world created by and for “1.5 generation” Cuban-Americans. In The Diaspora Strikes Back, cultural theorist Juan Flores brings a notion of “cultural remittances” (4, 9, 11) to the fore in looking at Puerto Ricans and Caribbeans from diasporic communities who return to the islands. In the second edition of The Latino Threat, anthropologist Leo R. Chavez first examines the history of US myths about Latinos as “illegal aliens” and then focuses on contemporary iterations of such narratives in a variety of settings. Transnational Crossroads, edited by Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., reminds us of the entanglement of Latin Americans immigrating to the United States with Asian and Pacific Islanders, principally in California and Hawaii. Susan Eva Eckstein’s sociological study The Immigrant Divideposits two contrasting cohorts of Cuban émigrés—”Exiles” and “New Cubans.” And in Showdown in the Sonoran Desert, journalist Ananda Rose tries to focus in a fair and balanced...