American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration

1. Introduction Anthropology and Contemporary Immigration to the United States—Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going

Immigration is one of the most pressing contemporary social issues in the United States. In the past four decades, the massive influx of immigrants, mainly from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, has led to dramatic transformations in American society, changing the nation’s cities and a host of social institutions and, of course, altering the lives of the immigrants themselves. The foreign born now represent more than 10 percent of the nation’s population. Together with their American-born children, this group constituted one-fifth of the population of the United States in 2000—56 million people. This is a remarkable figure. If today’s foreign born and their children were to form a country, it would have approximately twice the population of Canada and roughly the same as France or Italy (Foner, Rumbaut, and Gold 2000). The arrival of an unprecedented number of Latin American and Asian immigrants has transformed the ethnoracial makeup of the country. In 2001, according to census estimates, Hispanics surpassed blacks as the nation’s largest minority group. Asians made up 4 percent of the US population, up from one-half of 1 percent in 1960. The effects of immigration are nothing short of momentous. Not 3 1 Introduction Anthropology and Contemporary Immigration to the United States— Where We Have Been and Where We Are Going Nancy Foner surprisingly, the huge recent immigration has given rise to a scholarly literature in all the social sciences as the various disciplines try to grasp and grapple with the complexity of the subject. This volume focuses on the role of anthropology—in particular, social/cultural anthropology—in understanding this crucial new phenomenon. It explores the contributions anthropologists have made to the study of US immigration and, perhaps more important, the contributions they can continue to make in this field. As the number of immigrants to the United States increases—and as more and more anthropologists study the global migrants in our midst—the time is ripe to reflect on where migration anthropology has been and where it is going: to evaluate the discipline’s perspectives, theories, and methods as they pertain to US immigration and to begin developing a research program for the future. This book is the product of a weeklong advanced seminar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October 2001. The authors discussed their essays there and later rethought and revised them in light of the group meeting and readers’ responses. Like the seminar, the volume is organized so that each chapter considers migration from the vantage point of a particular anthropological theme, approach, or subfield: migration and globalization (Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Chapter 2), gender (Patricia Pessar, Chapter 3), transnational migration (Nina Glick Schiller, Chapter 4), immigrant education (Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick, Chapter 5), urban contexts (Caroline Brettell, Chapter 6), medical anthropology (Leo Chavez, Chapter 7, and Jennifer Hirsch, Chapter 8), and the moral challenges of cultural migration (Richard Shweder, Chapter 9). These topics are of fundamental concern to anthropologists of contemporary US immigration, yet they are not, of course, the only ones that have been addressed in the literature. This book is not meant to be an exhaustive review of all migration anthropology or an in-depth analysis of the full range of topics of concern to anthropologists studying migration to the United States. However, the authors inevitably touch on several related areas, for example, the family and household (Pessar) and ethnic/racial identities and relations (Brettell, Stepick and Stepick). Presenting a unified theoretical perspective was not the goal of the seminar, nor is it the purpose of this book. The contributors NANCY FONER 4 do not speak with one voice but bring different theoretical approaches and concerns to their analyses. As they tackle particular issues, the authors analyze and assess concepts, questions, methodological approaches, and theoretical views that guide the work of anthropologists of contemporary US immigration. Thus, all the chapters, whether or not they are explicitly framed in terms of immigration to the United States, have relevance for understanding the new American arrivals. The chapters show the broad range of anthropological concerns and interests and underscore the particular strengths that anthropologists bring to the immigration field. In this introduction, I start out by situating anthropological studies of contemporary US immigration in the context of a developing interdisciplinary field of migration studies and in the context of signi...