Re-Conceptualizing the Economic Incorporation of Immigrants: A Comparison of the Mexican and Vietnamese

Using data from the 2000 5 per cent Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, this article advocates three shifts in our theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding immigrant economic incorporation. First, through a comparison of Mexican and Vietnamese immigrants, these findings highlight the importance of an immigrant population’s relationship to the state for economic outcomes, and cautions against analyses that aggregate the foreign-born population. Second, through a joint analysis of unemployment and poverty outcomes, these findings call for researchers to be specific about the varied aspects of ‘‘economic incorporation’’ and distinguish between factors that drive labor market access, and those that foster material well-being. Lastly, by examining three state economic, demographic and policy variables, this article promotes an approach that takes human capital into account, while also heeding the immigrant context of reception

Challenging dualism : public professionalism in ‘troubled’ times

In recent decades neo-liberal reform has significantly impacted on public sector professionals. Sociological interest in such impact has tended to focus on professionals as subjects of such reform: as either de-professionalized ‘victims’ who feel oppressed by the structures of control or strategic operators seeking to contest the spaces and contradictions of market, managerial and audit cultures. Such a dualism is reflective of wider separations of agency and structure that have plagued sociology down the years. Our approach challenges modernizing agendas which seek to re-professionalize or empower professionals without examining the changing conditions of their work or the neo-liberal conditions which frame their practice. It also questions the policy outcomes of reconciling the dualism between agency and structure through a ‘third way’ politics that purports to remove the tensions and conflicts between professions and various stakeholders, the private and the public, and markets and civic society

Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston

[Excerpt] This book examines how immigrant workers\u27 rights are enforced in practice, how claims are channeled, and why and how advocates take on particular battles. In the chapters that follow, I draw on an in-depth comparative case study of two immigrant-receiving destinations—San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas—to examine the dynamics of enforcing immigrant worker rights. I consider how certain solutions become commonly understood as appropriate responses to a given issue that affects immigrant laborers, and which actors take on responsibility for the advancement of particular worker problems. For example, why does a construction worker who has been cheated of a week\u27s pay in San Jose get funneled to a local legal aid clinic and eventually a state agency to file a formal claim, while his counterpart working in one of Houston\u27s sprawling track developments will struggle to find any lawyer willing to serve him and will perhaps never set foot in a government office to file a claim? Why do the San Jose police have little to offer this worker, while in Houston any police officer is required to make a theft-of-service report when asked? How is it that if this nonunionized worker were to call the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council in San Jose, he would be advised to call the California Department of Labor Standards Enforcement or seek out a local legal aid clinic, while in Houston the Harris County AFL-CIO Council would be more likely to encourage him to pay a visit to city hall, the federal building, or perhaps even a worker center to help organize a direct action, depending on his situation? And how do we understand the vastly different support immigrant workers will find from their consulates in these two cities? The goal of this book is to help answer these questions and expand our understanding of how immigrant worker rights are enforced and advanced. I situate the rights of immigrant workers in the space between both labor standards enforcement and immigration control, two conflicting jurisdictions whose implementation can vary widely, depending on their local political context. I then look beyond government bureaucrats to understand how enforcement strategies are influenced by local intermediaries who may have diverse interests in the advancement of immigrant worker rights. These include local elected officials, who can either intensify or mitigate the surveillance of undocumented immigrants and promote or stymie the interests of workers; civil society actors, who have direct knowledge of and access to immigrant workers, and who work in diverse ways to advance their rights; and consular institutions, whose unique combination of political legitimacy, institutionalized resources, and unfettered support for their emigrant population creates a unique pathway for rights enforcement

Narratives of Deservingness and the Institutional Youth of Immigrant Workers

This article speaks to the special issue’s goal of disrupting the deserving/undeserving immigrant narrative by critically examining eligibility criteria available under two arenas of relief for undocumented immigrants: 1) the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides temporary deportation relief and work authorization for young adults who meet an educational requirement and other criteria, and 2) current and proposed pathways to legal status for those unauthorized immigrants who come forward to denounce workplace injustice, among other crimes. For each of these categories of “deserving migrants,” I illuminate the exclusionary nature each of these requirements, which pose challenges especially for those workers who have limited education. As such, I argue for the importance of an institutional perspective on youth. Specifically, I demonstrate how the educational criteria required by DACA privileges a select few individuals who have access to formal educational institutions as deserving, while ignoring other empowering but non-traditional models of worker education. I also examine those mechanisms that reward workers who come forward to contest employer abuse. These include the current U-Visa program, which opens a path to legal status for those select claimants who have been harmed by employer abuse and aid criminal investigations (e.g. Saucedo, 2010). In a similar vein, some advocates and legal scholars have proposed a pathway to citizenship for those workers involved in collective organizing (e.g. Gordon, 2007, 2011). I weigh the benefits and exclusivity of each pathway for addressing the precarity of the millions of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. In doing so, I highlight how institutions have unevenly incorporated immigrant workers, creating wide categories of vulnerability that go ignored. That is, demographically young immigrants are often privileged as deserving, as are those institutionally mature workers who have been successfully incorporated by civic organizations and legal bureaucracies. Meanwhile, institutionally young immigrants—those who have been excluded from these spaces—are framed as undeserving. As a result, rather than to see legal status as a pathway to incorporation, it is extended as a reward for those who have surpassed longstanding barriers

Corporate Social Responsbility in Business Courses: How Can Generation Y Learn?

This paper deals with the teaching of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Business courses to Generation Y Business students in Australian universities. Generation Y students embody particular characteristics that may seem paradoxical, such as placing an increased emphasis on an improved materialistic lifestyle alongside green marketing or climate change issues. Generation Ys also highly value a balanced work-leisure environment but are comfortable with living on high levels of debt and expenses. The question then emerges: what is the most effective method of educating Generation Y Business students about CSR? A three-fold approach is proposed: a foundation of life-long learning about the theory and principles of how one goes about making intrinsic decisions in life and business, incorporating concepts of CSR into Business units, and then applying these concepts in Business Internships

Flatness of tracer density profile produced by a point source in turbulence

The average concentration of tracers advected from a point source by a multivariate normal velocity field is shown to deviate from a Gaussian profile. The flatness (kurtosis) is calculated using an asymptotic series expansion valid for velocity fields with short correlation times or weak space dependence. An explicit formula for the excess flatness at first order demonstrates maximum deviation from a Gaussian profile at time t of the order of five times the velocity correlation time, with a t–1 decay to the Gaussian value at large times. Monotonically decaying forms of the velocity time correlation function are shown to yield negative values for the first order excess flatness, but positive values can result when the correlation function has an oscillatory tail