Getting Ahead: Social Mobility, Public Housing, and Immigrant Networks

8. Immigrant Networks

208 | 8 Immigrant Networks This chapter brings together the stories that embody the Social Flow framework, explores the dynamics that restrict the framework, such as gendered roles and homophobia, explains how transnational dynamics facilitate the framework, and discusses the relevance of assimilation theories to social mobility. I also apply the framework to domestic and international migration and demonstrate how Social Flow captures key aspects of the social world, including the balance of efficiency and inefficiency within and across borders , and the incorporation of immigrants in receiving countries. Finally, I discuss how migration can be used as a policy tool to improve the prospect of social mobility for individuals who are socially excluded. Immigrants as Self-Propelling Agents Teresa is a child psychiatric social worker at the East Boston Community Health Center, where she treats hundreds of families, many of which are immigrants. She is among a handful of bilingual service providers for the Latin American population in East Boston. When I interviewed her, she stopped before answering the question about her experiences treating families in East Boston and asked me, “Are you going to print this?” Before I could answer, she went on to make the following statement: To tell you the truth, I’d rather work with immigrants any day. I like working with them because they have hope and motivation. They listen to advice and they look for resources to get ahead. They are different from the others I see. . . . I am not sure how to describe it but . . . [the others] seem to be dormant, like zombies that can’t access opportunities because they don’t have the motivation necessary. Teresa expressed self-consciousness about her beliefs; she knew she might portray a negative picture of some of her clients, but she nonetheless Immigrant Networks | 209 expressed her beliefs that Latin American immigrants have ample agency and that people who are native-born and live in poverty are “dormant” as a result of the ways in which structural forces have eroded their agency. This comment in itself demonstrates how immigrants who live in high-poverty neighborhoods do not fit our conventional understanding of individuals in such neighborhoods. This conventional understanding is largely based on a skewed understanding of reality, which is the result of a myopic, stereotypical focus on African Americans to the detriment of the study of other groups that live in poverty (Edin and Lein 1997; Elliott et al. 1996; Massey 1990; Stack 1996, 1997; Venkatesh 2006; Wacquant and Wilson 1989; Wilson 1987, 1996, 2009). Social Flow is premised on the idea that self-propelling agency is necessary for a population to attain social mobility,1 and voluntary immigrants are the quintessential self-propelling agents. Voluntary immigrants do not simply get up and leave their way of life with the intention of replicating the lives they had in their country of origin; rather, they are lured to the United States because of the American Dream and the information they receive through the media and their compatriots about the potential for social mobility. It is probably the case that the overrepresentation of self-propelling agents among immigrants is a selection effect because driven people are more likely to migrate. Boneva and Frieze (2001) found that immigrants have a desire to move to areas with better opportunities, tend to be highly work-oriented, and possess high achievement and power motivation. Olwig (2007) calls immigrants “striving human beings.” These findings are consistent with the empirical evidence from countless recent studies of immigrants that may not explicitly explore social mobility but uncover the desire to get ahead (Bashi 2007; Dohan 2003; Kasinitz et al. 2008; Mahler 1995; Ogbu 2000; SuárezOrozco and Suárez-Orozco 1995; Waldinger, Aldrich, and Ward 2000). Frames Through the experiences of Latin American immigrant women, this ethnography demonstrates that, to achieve social mobility, people need a certain belief embedded in their frames: that their efforts to advance will be rewarded. Mobility-producing frames are not unique to immigrants; MacLeod (1987) found this type of predisposition among a group of young African American men who believed in the equal opportunity promises of the civil rights movement. People who live in higher-income neighborhoods also share this belief in social mobility. Immigrants, meanwhile, also have 210 | Immigrant Networks the struggle-of-immigration narrative, which motivates them toward social mobility. The narrative is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, which pushes immigrants to make...