New from IMR Generational Differences, Work, and Social Change

The Winter 2019 edition of the International Migration Review (IMR) is now available online and in print through paid or institutional subscription. This edition is sorted thematically into four sections. The first section is about enforcement and uncertainty facing immigrants. The second section has articles that examine family and social change, including an article on ethnic and generational differences in gender role attitudes among immigrant populations in Britain. The third section analyzes selectivity and immigration policy. The fourth section features two articles about gender and work, one about migrant domestic workers in Spain and one about itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers. Lastly, this edition has four new book reviews, which are free to access.

From Open Doors to Closed Gates: Intragenerational Reverse Incorporation in New Immigrant Destinations
Jennifer Jones

Existing paradigms of immigrant incorporation fruitfully describe immigrants’ upward or downward mobility across generations. Yet we know very little about intragenerational change. Drawing on a case in which upwardly mobile Latino immigrants see their gains reversed, this article models the coined term “intragenerational reverse incorporation,” and theorizes how incorporation gains can be undone through institutional closure and shifts in reception attitudes spurred by securitization and intensified immigration enforcement. Drawing on data gathered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the article shows how these changes both marginalized and racialized Latino immigrants, who in turn internalized and politicized their new status.

Indigenous Places and the Making of Undocumented Status in Mexico-US Migration
Asad L. Asad, Jackelyn Hwang

The uneven distribution of economic and social resources across communities often falls along ethno-racial dimensions. Few demographers have considered whether such axes of place stratification in a migrant-sending country relate to individuals’ access to economic and social resources in a migrant-receiving country. Taking Mexico-US migration flows as its focus, this article examines if having origins in an indigenous place, a primary axis of stratification in Mexico, is associated with migrants’ documentation status when crossing the border, a primary dimension of stratification in the United States. Using individual-level data from the Mexican Migration Project merged with municipal-level data from the Mexican Census and multilevel models, it finds that migrants from communities in indigenous municipalities in Mexico are more likely to migrate undocumented than documented to the United States compared with those from communities in non-indigenous municipalities, net of the economic and social resources identified in prior work as useful for international movement. Indigenous places — marked by a set of correlated conditions of economic and social disadvantage — disproportionately channel migrants into an undocumented status. This study contributes to understandings of stratification processes in cross-border contexts and has implications for the production of inequality in the United States.

Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers
Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Rachel Silvey, Maria Cecilia Hwang, Carolyn Areum Choi

This article examines the mobility patterns of migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. It identifies and explains the emergence of serial labor migration, which is defined as the multi-country, itinerant labor migration patterns of temporary low-skilled migrant workers. It argues that policy contexts shaping temporary labor migration, as they impose precarious and prohibitive conditions of settlement in both countries of origin and destination, produce the itinerancy of low-skilled migrant workers. In a holistic analysis of the migration process of temporary labor migrants, the article shifts away from a singular focus on the process of emigration, integration, or return and toward an examination of each stage as a co-constitutive step in the migration cycle. These findings illustrate the state of precarity and itinerancy that follows low-wage migrant workers across the various stages of the migration cycle and produces serial migration patterns among migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND MIGRANT PRECARITY

Health and Mental Health Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement
Julia Shu-Huah Wang, Neeraj Kaushal

From Open Doors to Closed Gates: Intragenerational Reverse Incorporation in New Immigrant Destinations
Jennifer Jones

Indigenous Places and the Making of Undocumented Status in Mexico-US Migration
Asad L. Asad, Jackelyn Hwang

GENERATION, FAMILY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

Partner Type Attitudes of Parents and Adolescents: Understanding the Decline in Transnational Partnerships among Turkish Migrants in Flanders
Amelia Van Pottelberge, Emilien Dupont, Frank Caestecker, Bart Van de Putte, John Lievens

Language Use and Children’s BMI Growth among Second-Generation Immigrants in the United Kingdom
Sara Giunti, Filippo Oncini

Exploring Ethnic and Generational Differences in Gender Role Attitudes among Immigrant Populations in Britain: The Role of Neighborhood Ethnic Composition
Senhu Wang, Rory Coulter

SELECTIVITY, IMMIGRATION POLICY, AND DIFFERENTIATED OUTCOMES

Educational Selectivity and Language Acquisition among Recently Arrived Immigrants
Christoph Sporlein, Cornelia Kristen

The Impact of Tourist Visas on Intercontinental South-South Migration: Ecuador’s Policy of “Open Doors” as a Quasi-Experiment
Luisa Feline Freier, Kyle Holloway

GENDER, WORK, AND MIGRANT PRECARITY

Financial Crisis and Migrant Domestic Workers in Spain: Employment Opportunities and Conditions during the Great Recession
Zenia Hellgren, Inmaculada Serrano

Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers
Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Rachel Silvey, Maria Cecilia Hwang, Carolyn Areum Choi

BOOK REVIEWS

Living on the Margins: Undocumented Migrants in a Global City by Alice Bloch and Sonia McKay
Reviewed by Liza Schuster

Narratives of Immigration and Language Loss: Lessons from the German American Midwest by Alice Bloch and Sonia McKay
Reviewed by Henrik Olav Mathiesen

Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq: Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at US Military Bases by Kevin Thomas
Reviewed by Adam Moore

Refuge Lost: Asylum Law in an Interdependent World by Daniel Ghezelbash
Reviewed by Cynthia S. Gorman