Browsing by Subject "Immigration"
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Item “Assimulation” in the Land of Ten-Thousand Iranian Communities: Public Assimilation Strategies, Private Preservation Identities(2016-09) Zank, TracyEarly research on Iranians in the global diaspora has demonstrated specific contexts in which Iranians express transnational identity. Much of this research presents and configures “the community” as a harmonious whole through narrow frames of reference, such as ethnic institutions, economic enclaves, majority-minority assessment based on discrimination and prejudice, and inter-generational and gender change. This study addresses the Twin Cities’ Iranian community as a dynamic, dispersed body of relationships and interactions characterized by an institutional fission-fusion pattern with consequences for ethnic group consciousness and individual identification with and expression of Iranianness. I employ a national and gender identity approach to underscore how Iran’s vacillating political history has crafted modern Iranian men and women, first, in alignment with the West, and then along Islamic ideals. Community, consequently, expands and contracts according to global, micro-macro occurrences. A waning sense of identity incites a centripetal “fusion phase” of institutional life, uniting Iranians through the public celebration of pre-Islamic heritage, privately with extended family, and attempts to teach Persian, a critical tool to navigate the complexities of communication in a hierarchal culture. Paradoxically, the “fusion phase” presents obstacles in intra-cultural interaction, leading to a “fission effect.” Fissioning eludes national camaraderie and community involvement as individuals assess each other’s location in the social hierarchy. The analysis of these identity patterns has been explained using transnational approaches with an emphasis on associations forged in power-vying activities aimed to displace authority and reconfigure national narratives. This dissertation explores these social dynamics in the context of the centripetal fusion and centrifugal fission pattern to explain how Twin Cities’ Iranians cultivate community, despite geographic dispersal, through a shared, intimate micro-history forged in a portable ideology that displaces monolithic assumptions of tradition, identity, and belonging.Item Bordered Resistance: Immigrant Health Justice, Biocitizenship, and the Racialized Criminalization of Health Care(2019-06) Hoekstra, ErinBridging critical health and migration studies, this dissertation examines the health effects of racialized processes of immigrant criminalization, focusing on the organizations that provide medical care in an informal, often underground, health system. Governed by a "biopolitics of disposability" (Giroux 2006), immigrant ineligibility for health care contributes to undocumented migrants' experience as distinctly vulnerable, exploitable, and ultimately disposable. Whereas health institutions are usually figured as solutions to the violence embodied in unequal health outcomes, this dissertation argues that spaces of health are also perpetrators of structural violence. Clinics operate as de facto border checkpoints, leaving migrant patients susceptible to deportation for accessing emergency medical services. In the face of the violence of the mainstream health system, a network of humanitarian organizations provide health care to uninsured, undocumented migrants, while resisting the collusion between health and immigration enforcement. In contrast to medical humanitarianism's focus on constructions of migrant "deservingness," this dissertation argues that the concept of biocitizenship, a medicalized belonging based on common humanity, transcends dichotomies of deserving and undeserving, "good" or "bad" migrants. Biocitizenship also critiques the disentitlement and dehumanization of a biopolitics of disposability. Drawing from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with free clinics and humanitarian organizations across Arizona, this dissertation examines immigrant health justice (IHJ) organizations' use of humanitarianism as both a discursive strategy and a field of action. In the borderlands, IHJ organizations frame their politically-contentious work as apolitical medical care and fight for the recognition of the patient status of migrants in need of emergency first aid. In the interior, the IHJ turns its critique toward "health" itself. Employing a rights-based humanitarian discourse, activists castigate the for-profit health system as complicit with immigration enforcement, indicting it for mass structural violence. Centrally, this dissertation argues that these related but distinct discourses across the borderlands and interior amount to an insurgent humanitarianism that exposes the fatal consequences of immigrant criminalization. By claiming various biocitizenships on behalf of their patients, IHJ organizations and activists use medicalized language as the basis of a politics of visibility, highlighting the health needs and fatalities of migrants across the country.Item Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943(2020-08) Weber, Kent“Chinese Exclusion and U.S. Empire in Hawai’i and Cuba, 1874-1943,” interrogates the confluences between United States’ immigration control and overseas territorial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Chinese exclusion laws, some of the earliest federal U.S. immigration laws and the first to name and discriminate against a particular migrant group based on their race, informed and moved with U.S. empire to recreate physical, political, and social borders in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The dissertation traces how efforts to control the transnational migrations of Chinese to and between Cuba, Hawai’i, and the United States became a tool for the geographic movement of U.S. state power as American borders expanded for empire and further attempted to control and limit the movements of Chinese migrants. By examining Cuba and Hawai’i together, the dissertation argues that the exclusion laws offered an adaptable system of corporeal control that aided U.S. colonial projects in each place. The spread of the Chinese exclusion laws outside the continental United States by the end of the nineteenth century did not only occur in the context of expanding U.S. empire, but also helped to define and constitute the boundaries of America’s new imperial domain.Item Collective identity and African American views of Africa, African immigrants, and immigrant entitlements.(2010-06) Pendaz, SadieIn this dissertation, I examine how collective memory and collective identity impact African American interpretations of Africa, African immigrants and African immigrant participation in affirmative action programs. The setting of the research is the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota (the "Twin Cities"), which has a notable historical and contemporary African American population and the largest eastern African population of immigrants from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Sudan. I find that rather than expanding their definition of African American ethnic identity through their interactions with African immigrants, African Americans, relied on a bifurcated notion of the historical place of Africa as part of the two-ness of African American ethnic identity, and African immigrants as an on-the-ground reality. Methodologiclly, I use historical newspaper analysis and extensive in-depth interviews with African Americans and eastern Africans from the Twin Cities. Theoretically I analyze theories of collective memory, intergroup contact and challenge the notion that African American ethnic identity is equatable with black racial identity.Item Conditions, Contestations, and Pockets of Belonging: Youth Citizenship in Small Town America(2021-06) Fahning, HeidiSmall towns in the American Midwest, undergoing significant demographic, political, and economic shifts, are a microcosm reflecting the broader debate of “who belongs” in popular and academic discourse. This year-long, multi-sited ethnographic research study focuses on the personal narratives of six youth of different racial, ethnic, class, and gender identities to understand how youth negotiate and experience belonging within their daily lives. Drawing on an intersectional subjectification (“self-making” and “being-made”) framework, this dissertation advances three arguments. First, I contend belonging in Riverton for the youth is conditional on their positions in racial, class, and gendered hierarchies of belonging. Secondly, I maintain that conceptions of belonging in a small Midwestern town are continuously being shaped, contrived, and contested by actors whose interactions within the high school mirror broader negotiations within varying structures of power across the United States and the world. Through the everyday contestations of belonging, youth are violently excluded and youth create spaces where they experience belonging. Finally, I claim that youth carve out pockets of belonging, conceptualized as spaces where youth experience a sense of at-homeness and belonging, through their everyday interactions. Ultimately, this dissertation argues it is within the conditions, contestations, and pockets of belonging within formal and non-formal educational spaces that shed light on youths’ experiences and conceptions of belonging.Item Después del arresto: Una aproximación interdisciplinaria a la criminalización de las madres inmigrantes(2015-10) Hernandez, LuzKeywords: Immigration, Deportation, Discourse Analysis, Gender, Social Identity, Agency This research presents a comparative discourse analysis of the discourse of Guatemalan and Mexican women who changed their immigration status from undocumented to documented or from undocumented to deported due to an immigration raid in 2008. The corpus data analyzed consists on fifteen interviews, eight interviews with deportee women and seven interviews with women who regularized their immigration status. The analysis focuses on identifying the discursive strategies that these women use to make sense of the experience of changing their immigration status. The interviews are analyzed using discourse analysis as a method along with an interdisciplinary approach using Linguistics, International Migration, Migrant Rights and U.S. Immigration Law. Data analysis demonstrates that deportee women and women who regularized their immigration status use the same discursive strategy, utilizing the pronoun one to talk about changing their immigration status. Deportee women express how they endure this legal punishment and the resulting lack of employment and basic goods. Women who regularized their immigration status explain how their labor rights were denied while undocumented but are granted to them as documented workers. Both use the pronoun one, which reveals that they view and present the experience as a collective experience that they have undergone as part of a social group. This discursive strategy of using uno also discloses how identity is constructed socially. Immigrants are defined and identified as part of a group in society: undocumented, documented or deportee. Contrasting this similarity using uno, women who regularized their immigration status also utilize the pronoun I as a linguistic strategy to indicate that they have more agency in their daily life. In addition, they employ narratives to explain how they solve difficulties and problems that affected them while they were immigrants without proper documentation. The discourse analysis of the discourse of these immigrant women shows how immigrants experience the immigration law that penalizes them. As well, it exhibits how migration and deportation are collective activities, and how migrant rights are granted based on the immigrant’s immigration status. Further data and conclusions are discussed.Item Do “Immigrants Increase the Unemployment of US Citizens?” An Empirical Examination of Trump’s Campaign Rhetoric(2018) Jensen, AnnaI analyze the relationship between immigration and the US economy, specifically, the effects on levels of GDP and unemployment. Employing data that spans the time period 1870 to 2015, and using estimation results from a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) Granger causality/Block exogeneity Wald test (Enders, 2003), I find a long run equilibrium relationship between GDP, unemployment, and immigration inflows that can be specifically described as a bidirectional causality between GDP and immigration, and a unidirectional causality running from immigration to unemployment. Examination of the response of changes in GDP and unemployment levels to a onetime Cholesky innovations (shocks) in immigration, I observe a rise in GDP and a fall in unemployment level. While these observations are relevant for policy making, especially given the current effort to limit legal immigration to the US, I have yet to validate these observations by accounting for the breakdown of the immigrant population into broad geographic regions of their countries of origins, and skill levels, my conclusions should be considered preliminary.Item Episode 15: Economic Impacts of US Immigration Policies(2018-01-30) Allen, Ryan; Conners, Kate"Impeding the path of immigrants—throwing up roadblocks that allow immigrants to come to the United States—is going to create some real economic problems in the future," warns Humphrey School of Public Affairs Associate Professor Ryan Allen. In this podcast Allen discusses the potential economic impacts of immigration policies in the United States and Minnesota, focusing on the role of immigrants in the workforce and the resulting net fiscal effects. "We're actually losing more of our native born residents than we're gaining," says Allen. "More people tend to leave the state of Minnesota than move here from other states. And so, we're going to have to rely on international immigrants. If instead of increasing the flow of international immigrants we're reducing it, that's going to have an enormous impact on our labor force, and potentially, a large impact on the kinds of economic growth we expect in the state."Item Episode 24: Hungry to Get There: Food Access and Transportation in Immigrant Communities(2019-12-09) Burga, Fernando; Conners, KateFernando Burga's recent work seeks to "imagine food as a central aspect of our lives and cities," investigating the intersection of urban planning with immigration, equity, and food systems. Despite the immense disparities faced by immigrant groups and communities of color when it comes to accessing healthy and culturally relevant food, Burga found a relative dearth of qualitative data in how these communities actually experience getting to food access points. Burga, an assistant professor in the urban and regional planning area at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, carried out research workshops with Latino immigrants in both rural Minnesota and the Twin Cities metro region, using a focus group, a graphic survey, and participatory mapping exercises to identify patterns of accessibility and actualize the "foodscapes" within participants' daily lives. Burga urges planners to consider a multidimensional approach to food systems and transportation policy work: "Qualitative research can lead planners to consider agency, empathy, and advocacy as mechanisms to reconsider how cities are made."Item Episode 27: The Immigration Court Observation Project(2020-03-30) Chan, Linus; Levesque, Chris; DeWaard, Jack; Foy, Melanie SommerThe Human Rights Defender Project is a collaborative initiative from The Advocates for Human Rights, the University of Minnesota Law School James H. Binger Center for New Americans, and Robins Kaplan LLP. As part of the project, members of the public can volunteer to sit in on detained immigrant court hearings—which are always open to the public—and record what they observe and feel about the process, giving them a chance to see what these hearings consist of beyond their depictions in the media. In this podcast, you'll hear from three Minnesota academics affiliated with the project: Linus Chan, associate professor of clinical law and director of the Detainee Rights Clinic at the James Binger Center; Jack DeWaard, UMN associate professor of sociology, graduate faculty at the Minnesota Population Center, and adjunct faculty member at the Humphrey School; and Chris Levesque, a PhD student in sociology at UMN and graduate research assistant at the MPC. They discuss why the project differs from other court observation projects due to its focus on perceived fairness, how they're working with the qualitative and quantitative data being collected, and some takeaways from the data itself—including examples of what observers view as fair or unfair.Item Episode 4: U.S. History of Immigration and Deportation(2017-03-17) Lee, Erika; Conners, KateAs new policies relating to immigration, border enforcement, refugee resettlement, and deportation are being implemented, in this podcast we talk to the director of the Immigration History Research Center, historian Erika Lee, about the origins of U.S. immigration policy and their relevance today.Item Essays in International Economics and Labor Economics(2017-08) Viana Costa, DanielaThe three chapters of this dissertation investigate major puzzles in international economics and labor economics. The first chapter investigates the macroeconomic effects of primary commodities trade flows across countries with different export composition. The second chapter studies labor flows of workers with similar skill-level and across countries with similar income. Lastly, the third chapter evaluates the macroeconomic effects of a health policy in the United States. Chapter 1 analyzes how the production and price volatility of primary commodities account for the co-movement between real GDP and terms of trade. Primary commodity exporter countries face large terms of trade fluctuations, largely driven by primary commodity price shocks and amplified by the relative importance of primary commodities in the countries’ exports. In this chapter, I document that an increase in the price of a primary commodity is usually followed by a decrease in terms of trade, defined as the relative price of imports over exports, and an increase in real GDP in these countries. Meanwhile, countries that do not export primary commodities enjoy more stable terms of trade, and their real GDP is positively correlated with terms of trade. Although the literature on primary commodity exporters has focused on developing countries, I show that this relation is independent of a country’s income level. Since standard models are unable to generate real aggregate fluctuations from price shocks if real GDP is correctly measured, this paper identifies a puzzle. I propose a class of mechanisms that is capable of explaining the heterogeneous impact of terms of trade fluctuations across countries. I show that a possible resolution is to incorporate the presence of idle resources and a production cost externality in the primary commodity producing sector in order to connect terms of trade fluctuations to real GDP fluctuations. When subjected to a primary commodity price shock, the model successfully accounts for the behavior of terms of trade and its relation to real GDP for different export compositions. Chapter 2, joint work with Maria Jose Rodriguez Garcia and Rocio Madera, revisits empirical evidence on migration within the European Union-15, disaggregated by occupation. We find that workers move to countries where their type is relatively more abundant among natives. This is at odds with traditional models of migration. We develop a model with external economies of scale that generates an agglomeration force in high-educated labor. Our main result is that a country that is relatively abundant in highly educated labor force will attract foreign labor of the same type. We argue this type of model is more suitable to analyze migration flows between countries of similar income level. Finally, Chapter 3, joint with Juan Carlos Conesa, Parisa Kamali, Timothy Kehoe, Vegard Nygard, Gajendran Raveendranathan, and Akshar Saxena, develops an overlapping generations model to study the macroeconomic effects of an unexpected elimination of Medicare. We find that a large share of the elderly respond by substituting Medicaid for Medicare. Consequently, the government saves only 46 cents for every dollar cut in Medicare spending. We argue that a comparison of steady states is insufficient to evaluate the welfare effects of the reform. In particular, we find lower ex-ante welfare gains from eliminating Medicare when we account for the costs of transition. Lastly, we find that a majority of the current population benefits from the reform but that aggregate welfare, measured as the dollar value of the sum of wealth equivalent variations, is higher with Medicare.Item Families precede nation and race?: marriage, migration, and integration of Japanese war brides after World War II.(2010-08) Nakamura, MasakoUnlike other war brides of World War II, the international and interracial marriages between Japanese women and U.S. servicemen, which were seen as the products and symbols of the U.S. occupation, posed distinct challenges to the American and Japanese state and, in particular, to the image of American families at home and abroad. This dissertation examines how these Japanese women were treated as a "problem" by American and Japanese societies and how the "problem" was approached through diverse but intertwined sites, venues, and agents such as legal discourse, American Red Cross brides' schools in Japan, social science studies, and Japanese War Brides Club at the International Institute in San Francisco, in the late 1940s and 1950s. It also examines how these women responded to those approaches, how they remembered their experiences, and their ongoing transnational relationships with their two home countries, Japan and the United States. I argue that Japanese war brides, who were the majority of not only Asian war brides, but also postwar Japanese immigrants, played a key role in redefining the "American family" and concepts of race and citizenship. They became central to the debate about the makeup of the "ideal American family" and led to changes in postwar U.S. immigration policy as well as popular and scholarly understandings of not only "Japanese war brides" but also interracial marriages. Disciplining these ex-enemy nationals, who were considered to be racially inassimilable and ineligible for citizenship, into good wives and mothers of U.S. citizens became an important mission for Americans in the United States and Japan during the rise of the Cold War. Their "successful" marriages and integration became a display of American racial tolerance in early Cold War America. As a result, the image of these women shifted from a "problem" to a showcase of ideal, "model minority" brides. These Japanese women, both individually and collectively, played a significant part in changing American and Japanese perceptions of "Japanese war brides" and interracial marriage since they had made their decisions to marry U.S. servicemen and immigrate to the United States as young women.Item Immigrant social capital and firm strategic heterogeneity: effects on foreign entry and firm performance.(2011-06) Hernandez, ExequielI explore the effects of firms' ties to co-national immigrants on foreign entry and performance. I argue that location choice and subsidiary survival are influenced by immigrant social capital--which arises from common country bonds and becomes activated when firms co-locate with immigrants of the same nationality in a host location. Moreover, firms respond to and benefit differentially from the resources available through immigrant social capital based on heterogeneity in capabilities, resource needs, and the types of buyers they target. I test these ideas on a sample of foreign investments made by 197 firms from 27 countries into the U.S. between 1998 and 2003. Using a unique set of instruments to account for selection bias, I find strong support for my propositions. This dissertation makes theoretical contributions by showing that immigrant social capital provides firms with unique location-based advantages, and that strategic heterogeneity explains which firms seek out and benefit from social capital. It also has practical implications for managers and policy makers.Item Immigrants and Minnesota’s Workforce Report(2017-01) Allen, Ryan; Committee on Minnesota Workforce and Immigrants; Office of the Vice President for ResearchThe purpose of this report is to describe a range of important factors in understanding the demographic changes underway in Minnesota, with particular attention to evolving trends related to immigrants and refugees, and what role these changes will have on the state’s workforce. Six broad themes related to population change and the workforce of Minnesota: 1. In the coming decades, the population of Minnesota will likely grow at a pace that is significantly slower than growth rates from previous years. 2. The population of Minnesota will grow older and more racially diverse in the future, but these changes in the population will not be equally distributed around the state. 3. It is probable that Minnesota will be dependent upon immigrants for future population growth. 4. The proportion of the foreign born in Minnesota’s population has changed dramatically over time, and currently represents a variety of racial and ethnic groups with varied human capital backgrounds. 5. Projected population changes in Minnesota will likely result in a substantial increase in the immigrant population in the state in the future, but the proportion of immigrants in Minnesota’s population will almost certainly lag the proportion of immigrants in the U.S. population by a significant margin. 6. Without a substantial increase of migration to Minnesota in the future, the state’s labor force will likely grow much slower than it has in recent years. This will make filling job vacancies more challenging in the future.Item Immigration news in the Global South: A comparative analysis of media content and journalistic decisions and practices in Latin America(2020-08) Severino, FernandoThis dissertation analyzes the news media representation of intraregional immigration in Latin America in connection with the journalistic decisions that partially shape this content. Based on an analysis of 1,690 news articles from 16 print and web outlets in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico (sampled from a database created uniquely for this dissertation), this project examines frames, word choices, sources, and other elements of news stories from 2014-2018. It also uses twenty interviews with journalists in these countries ––working for the news outlets analyzed here–– to establish relationships between the coverage produced in these newsrooms and the approach reporters take to write about immigration. Overall, the findings show a predominant presence of two frames in the way news media decides to tell the story about immigration: A victim – humanitarian/human rights frame and a political responsibility–policy solutions and debates frame. These frames are heavily influenced by governmental voices and official messages that are the sources most used by reporters. News articles about the benefits of immigrants and immigration are minimal. The lack of specialization in newsrooms about reporting immigration, limited resources, and the context of violence negatively impact the presence of counternarratives to the official discourse. However, there is an agreement among journalists on writing about immigration in ways that avoid promoting xenophobia and stereotyping. Thus, the storytelling does not use charged labels about the newcomers, and concepts such as "illegality" are virtually absent. From a theoretical perspective, this dissertation provides arguments about the role of professional journalism and journalists in developing countries as a crucial institution for democracy. From a more practical perspective, this project's results could benefit the work of reporters writing about immigration across newsrooms in the Global South.Item The Interplay of Leisure Travelers’ Stress, Coping, and Acculturation Strategies: A Study of Korean Immigrants(2020-12) Choi, AmiGiven the projected diversity among the U.S. national population by 2065, immigrant leisure travelers will increase, are unique and understudied. In a three-article format, this dissertation examines immigrant leisure travelers’ stress, coping, revisit intention, and acculturation among Korean immigrants residing in the United States. The first article proposes an adapted framework that incorporates acculturation as a sociocultural factor underlying immigrants’ leisure travel stress experiences. The second article assesses the relationships within the stress and coping model including primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, coping, and revisit intention using structural equation modeling. Findings suggest that leisure travelers experienced stress across travel phases, employed both problem- and emotion-focused coping strategies to manage stress, and that coping positively related to revisit intentions. The utility and application of the transactional stress and coping model was demonstrated and supported. The third article identifies leisure travel stressors encountered in three select travel phases, and examines if and how acculturation strategies Korean immigrants use to adjust to the new culture differentiates them. Findings revealed perceived travel stress differed by acculturation strategies at all three travel phases and within select individual stressors. Overall, those seeking marginalization and separation perceived significantly higher stress levels than those seeking integration and assimilation. Implications for theory and management and future research are discussed for each chapter.Item Investigating the Online Presence of Immigration Organizations: Understanding the Role of Social Justice and Technical Communication(2021-05) Veeramoothoo, SaveenaThis dissertation investigates how immigration organizations in the US use their online presence to disseminate information. Immigration organizations are typically non-profit organizations whose mission involves helping migrants (whether with legal services, or any number of other services). This dissertation contributes to the conversations on social justice in technical and professional communication (TPC) by focusing on an often overlooked area in TPC research: migration and migrants in the US. This project contributes to the intersection of TPC and migration by investigating how immigration organizations use certain key online spaces and the information they share there. To begin, I first identified a network of national immigration organizations through hyperlinks. This network allowed me to identify two key organizations to further study, namely Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). I then studied the website of each organization, focusing on their content and targeted audiences. Finally, I studied their Twitter accounts, focusing on content, targeted audiences and tweets’ metadata (including frequency of tweets, replies and retweets). Combining the results from the website analysis and Twitter analysis, I discuss the implications of the study, including voice, power and privilege, and audience engagement. Finally, I discuss the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the study and its implications for immigration organizations’ dissemination of information in online spaces.Item Korean looks, American eyes: Korean American adoptees, race, culture and nation.(2009-12) Park Nelson, Kim JaThis project positions Korean adoptees as transnational citizens at intersections within race relations in the United States, as emblems of international geopolitical relationships between the United States and South Korea, and as empowered actors, organizing to take control of racial and cultural discourses about Korean adoption. I make connections between transnational exchanges, American race relations, and Asian American experiences. I argue that though the contradictory experience of Korean adoptees, at once inside and outside bounded racial and national categories of "Asian," "White," "Korean," and "American," the limits of these categories may be explored and critiqued. In understanding Korean adoptees as transnational subjects, single-axis racial and national identity are challenged, where individuals have access to membership and/or face exclusion in more than one political or cultural nation. In addition, this work demonstrates the effects of American political and cultural imperialism both abroad and domestically, by elucidating how the acts of empire-building nations are mapped onto individuals though the regulation of immigration and family formation. My methods are interdisciplinary, drawing from traditions that include ethnography, primary historical sources, and literature. My dissertation work uses Korean adoptees' own life stories that I have collected and recorded in three locations: 1) Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S.; 2) the Pacific Northwest, home to the many of the "first wave" of the oldest living Korean adoptees now in their 40s and 50s; and, 3) Seoul, Korea, home to hundreds of adult Korean adoptees who have traveled back to South Korea to live and work. In addition, I use Korean adoptee published narratives, archive materials documenting the early history of transnational adoption, and secondary sources in sociology, social work, psychology and cultural studies to uncover the many layers of national, racial and cultural belonging and significance for and of Korean adoptees.Item Members by design: how U.S. Immigration policies shape mass public beliefs about American membership.(2011-11) Udani, Adriano A.To what extent and in what ways do public policies on the treatment of noncitizens in America shape mass public beliefs and perceptions about membership in a democratic republic? This dissertation uses an intersectional framework that redeploys the construction of target population theory to better capture the hierarchy of power relations which structure noncitizen membership in America. I depart from dominant works that commonly analyze noncitizen membership by identifying individual-level characteristics that promote integration; studying policy decisions as outputs of unique social contexts; and, using static binary distinctions of deservingness and undeservingness. Instead, I examine the ways in which U.S. immigration policies rearticulate racism and the relationships that race has with other axes of disadvantage involving ethnicity, class, gender, and citizenship. By using a unique dataset of state immigration policies between 1997 and 2010 and national public opinion studies, I investigate how four dominant policy designs that construct American membership send political messages about noncitizens as foreign entrants with criminal intents; as applicants who are required to prove their value in America; as cultural minorities who are deprived and needy; and, as embattled people who must contest and remain resilient against institutionalized inequalities.