For the Benefit of All: Strategic Recommendations to Enhance the State's Role in the Integration of Immigrants in Illinois (Report of the New Americans Policy Council, Year One)

On November 19, 2005, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed the New Americans Executive Order, a first-in-the-nation attempt to adopt a coherent, strategic, and proactive state government approach to integrate the rapidly growing immigrant population of Illinois. For this purpose, the Executive Order created a New Americans Policy Council comprised of 24 prominent Illinois business, faith, labor, community, philanthropic, and governmental leaders with experience in this field. While Illinois has undertaken several efforts to advance immigrant integration, neither it nor any other state has developed a comprehensive and strategic integration policy. Given the rapidly evolving demographics; the fast paced changes of an increasingly global economy; and the growing demand for both high-skilled and low-skilled workers; immigrant integration is one of the most overlooked issues of governance. The Policy Council's strategic approach emphasizes strategies that allow immigrants to be empowered to participate to the fullest extent possible in our economic and civic life, while fostering social cohesion with their new neighbors.This is the report of the New Americans Policy Council for the first year of the New Americans Executive Order project, published in 2006

Civil Wrongs

The Bush administration promised not to single out Arabs and Muslims with measures, but in practice it did exactly that. These measures signaled to and non-citizens alike, that American legal protections did not really apply little in the way of fightin

Islamic Revival among Second-Generation Arab-American Muslims: The American Experience and Globalization Intersect

This article examines the chain of events that facilitated an Islamic revival among second-generation Arab-American Muslims. Based upon research in metropolitan Chicago, it argues against trends in the literature that described Western-born Muslims as foreigners, immigrants or, worse, anti-Western. Similarly, it argues against setting their religious experiences solely in a domestic context. The article begins by documenting the lack of religious institutions and practices among immigrant Arab Muslims before the 1990s and the limited religious socialization of their American-born children. These conditions emerged in part from secular trends in the immigrants\u27 homelands. By the 1990s, a period of global Islamic revival, both immigrant and second-generation Arab Muslims found practiced Islam attractive, particularly its capacity to provide meaning and resilience for their own experiences in America. Individual decisions to embrace Islam as more than a fact of birth were facilitated by developments resulting from globalization and the creation of American Islamic institution, yet were, at the same time, intensely personal choices rooted in local experiences. Although Islamic revival is global, its conduits should not be viewed as causal. The article engages findings by Yang and Ebaugh (2001) and Hirschman (2003), arguing that analyses of religiosity in the United States must take into account historical contexts. Religiosity is an intensely personal experience that must be explained at the intersection of the individual, the local and the global