Browsing by Subject "immigration"
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Item Being and Belonging in America: Second-Generation Asian American Teachers’ Stories of Negotiating Identity and Culture(2021-06) Phadke, MeghanIn the last quarter century, the United States has seen the highest levels of immigration since the turn of the 19th century (Frey, 2020; Massey, 2013). Unlike migrations of the past, this one has brought Brown and Black folks from across the Global South to the United States, forever changing the demographics of the nation (Frey, 2020; Foner, 2000; Massey 2013). This boom is largely a result of post-colonial conditions, neoliberal policy, and U.S. military incursions that have destabilized the globe. These factors, along with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, have ushered in a large-scale shift in U.S. demographics, that while geographically uneven, continues to change the notion and nature of American identity (Alba, 2018). As the United States continues to experience large-scale immigration, primarily from Asia and Central and South America, we must confront the ways in which this reality is impacting our schools, teachers, and students. This dissertation is concerned with the implications of this ongoing transformation in demographics within the United States on the nature and notion of American identity, of what and who count as American, and the impacts of this shift on the realities for schools and the lives of teachers and students who labor and learn within them. In attending to this concern, this study focuses on Asian Americans, a population that significantly contributes to this demographic shift and who are increasingly the target of White anxiety and rage. In addition to socio-culturally situated contestations of belonging, this population has historically faced legal and formalized exclusion which has compounded Asian Americans’ relationship to the social imaginary of America. This contestation is even more pronounced for Second-Generation Asian Americans, whose belonging is additionally complicated by their status as American-born. This critical narrative study presents the stories of four Second-Generation Asian American elementary school teachers currently working at public elementary schools in the Twin Cities, alongside the researcher’s own story as U.S. student, teacher, and teacher-educator. These stories reveal fraught negotiations of identity and culture and the ways in which these teachers mobilize their Second-Generation Asian American identity in the service of their students.Item Beyond Stereotypes: Imagining Other Histories, Politics, and Identities in Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Comedy of Stage and Screen(2023-12) Ice, ChristopherThis dissertation project investigates the ways in which ethnic minority comedy functions as a space where historically marginalized humorists talk and laugh back at dominant discourses, stereotypes, and status quos regarding immigrant and visible ethnic minority populations in contemporary France. Through analyses of themes of history, politics, and identities, this work demonstrates not only how these comedians subvert racist and xenophobic preconceived notions and rhetoric that have been deeply engrained in the French collective consciousness, but also how they negotiate and imagine alternative narratives. Consideration of a wide range of mainstream comedic genres including stand-up, one-person shows, television sitcom, film comedy, and sketch comedy, traces the career paths of these increasingly popular performers and shows how they establish relationships with audiences and fan bases in order to communicate their messages. The first chapter is a history of ethnic minority comedy in France and is driven by the question of how a complete lack of mainstream representation for visible ethnic minority comedians in the 1970s evolved to the point today where some of the most popular and influential French humorists are of immigrant background. The following chapters of the dissertation focus on the comedic performers, Fellag and Jamel Debbouze, who respectively represent first- and second-generation immigrants in France. The second chapter presents and probes the work of the Franco-Algerian humorist, Fellag in his one-man shows, Djurdjurassique Bled (2000) and Le dernier chameau (2005) in order to show how he imagines a more inclusive concept of Algerian identity on both sides of the Mediterranean. The third chapter explores Jamel Debbouze’s political and social engagement in the film Le ciel, les oiseaux et…ta mère! (1999); the television sitcom, H (Canal +, 1998-2002); a collection of sketches entitled Made in Jamel (2010); and his one-man show, Tout sur Jamel (2011); and highlights Debbouze’s promotion of a multicultural France as well as his defense of marginalized populations in colonial and post-colonial contexts.Item Exceptional Empire and Exceptional Subjects: Biopolitics and the Transnational Making of the Korean/Asian/American through the Cold War(2016-12) Kim, SeonnaThis dissertation explores how the contemporary Korean American and Korean diasporic literary productions imagine and respond to the nexus between the “exceptional” American empire and the exceptional juridico-political subjects it produced and managed in South Korea and across the Pacific through the prolonged Cold War. Drawing on critical biopolitical studies, this project frames the Cold War U.S. military and humanitarian interventions in Asia as neoimperialist governmentality, which not only created excessive, doubled sovereignty and states of exception but also produced and displaced exceptional subjects in the areas affected. My research on the historical, political, legal, and cultural discourses on these displaced subjects evinces that they were not simply excluded as a demographic exception to the Korean and American nation-states, but included in their Cold War geopolitics and biopolitics. This dissertation proposes that the transnational making of the exceptional Korean, Asian, or Asian American subjects through the Cold War provides key sites for understanding the transnational history and dimensions of the post-World War II formation of Asian America as it illuminates the links between U.S. foreign policy in Asia and domestic racial liberalism during the Cold War. Tracing the origin of the transpacific exceptional subjects and their transpacific links, the project also draws a genealogy of a forgotten Korean diaspora that still haunts the modernity of Korean and American nation-states. I argue that the selected cultural memories and imaginaries produced by Nora Okja Keller, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Jane Jeong Trenka, and Chang-rae Lee expose and intervene in the complex operations and technologies of U.S. sovereign biopower and governance within and across its national border and its logics of exclusion and inclusion by verbally enacting scenes of multiple subjectifications of the exceptional figures in Asia and America. Chapter by chapter, the dissertation attends to the particular conjunctures of local and global biopolitics in which the exceptional subjects emerged and were subjectified. It also demonstrates how each of these texts in a unique and experimental way disrupts the normative codifications and configurations of the exceptional empire as a global peacekeeper or humanitarian force and of the exceptional(ized) subjects as undeserving racial aliens or exceptionally deserving model citizens. Collectively, these literary texts create an aesthetics of the stateless that imagines alternative models of politics, subjectivity, and cross-national and interracial community to move beyond biopolitics and towards a decolonized future.Item Gut microbiome westernization in Hmong and Karen refugees and immigrants in the United States(2018-08) VANGAY, PAJAUMany United States immigrant populations develop metabolic diseases post-immigration, but the causes are not well understood. Although the microbiome plays a role in metabolic disease, there have been no studies measuring the effects of U.S. immigration on the gut microbiome. We collected stool, dietary recalls, and anthropometrics from 514 Hmong and Karen individuals living in Thailand and the U.S., including first- and second-generation immigrants and 19 Karen individuals sampled before and after immigration, as well as from 36 U.S.-born Caucasian individuals. Using 16S and deep shotgun metagenomic DNA sequencing, we found that migration from a non-Western country to the U.S. is associated with immediate loss of gut microbiome diversity and function, with U.S.-associated strains and functions displacing native strains and functions. These effects increase with duration of U.S. residence, and are compounded by obesity and across generations.Item The Impact of Ethnic and Mainstream News Media Collaboration on Immigrant News: A Content Analysis of the Sahan Journal/Star Tribune Partnership(2023) Gunapalan, TracyThis thesis uses a quantitative content analysis of the Star Tribune’s coverage of immigrant communities and immigration between the year prior to its partnership with Sahan Journal and the year during it. With the goal of examining how patterns of coverage shifted with the partnership, this work considers the visibility of immigrants and immigration coverage across two years as well as the types of frames that were most often deployed in these types of news stories. Considering the complexities of race in this discourse, differences across European and non-European immigrant communities were also examined. Findings reveal that the partnership saw decreased coverage of immigrants and immigration but that it also resulted in the utilization of more positive frames in these stories, regardless of whether subjects were European immigrants or not. However, results also demonstrate that the criminalization of immigration remains a significant issue in mainstream coverage of immigrant communities. This research suggests that while ethnic/mainstream partnerships may be helpful for creating more positive coverage of immigrant communities, further efforts are necessary to address persisting news values and norms that misrepresent and neglect communities of color.Item Latino Children at the Intersection of Immigration and Health Care Policy: A Mixed-methods Study of Parental Documentation Status, State-level Policy, and Access to Coverage and Care(2015-08) Pintor, JessiePurpose: Latino children experience the highest uninsurance rate among their peers and those with immigrant parents experience the greatest coverage disparities. Most (60%) of these 10 million children belong to mixed-status families in which parents and children have different documentation statuses that confer differential rights, benefits, and vulnerabilities. Immigrant adults face significant restrictions on public coverage, and barriers created by documentation status suggest that policies intended to restrict access for immigrant adults may ultimately exclude their children, most of whom are U.S.-born citizens. Because of these federal restrictions – which are maintained under the ACA – the bulk of immigrant healthcare policymaking is ultimately delegated to states. My first objective was to estimate gaps in insurance coverage by parental documentation status among a nationally representative sample of citizen children of Latino immigrants. Second, in light of immigrant healthcare policymaking at the state level, I sought to examine whether disparate state-level healthcare policy moderated the relationship between parental documentation status and children’s coverage. My final objective was to explore the mechanisms through which parental documentation status affects children’s access to coverage and care. Methods: My mixed-methods sequential explanatory design integrated secondary data analysis with semi-structured interviews. In AIM 1 I used the Survey of Income & Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate differences in insurance by children’s citizenship and parental documentation status within a nationally-representative cross-section of 4,227 children of Latino immigrants. I pooled a cross-section of 1,260 children of Latino immigrants from the final wave of the 2004 SIPP Panel (August-December 2007) with 2,967 children from the 2nd wave of the 2008 Panel (December 2008-March 2009). I first estimated uninsurance and coverage type by children’s citizenship and parental documentation status. I then estimated binary and multinomial probit models to estimate the marginal effects of children’s citizenship, parental documentation status, and their interaction on the probability of being insured (binary probit) and the probability of being insured by employer-sponsored insurance (ESI), Medicaid/CHIP, and direct-purchase or other private coverage (multinomial probit). In AIM 2, I used multilevel models to examine whether state-level policy on immigrant access to coverage moderated the effect of parental documentation status among a sample of 3,615 citizen children of Latino immigrants in 30 states with sufficient sample size for multilevel modeling. AIM 3 consisted of semi-structured interviews with 14 Latino immigrant parents and 6 key informants in Minnesota, with the objective of uncovering mechanisms to help explain the relationship between parental documentation status and children’s coverage identified in AIMS 1 and 2. Findings: The children of Latino immigrants experienced high uninsurance rates and low rates of ESI. Non-citizen children fared the worst, with an uninsurance rates of 54.1% compared to 28.2% for citizen children (p<.001). Citizen children with at least one undocumented parent had lower rates of insurance than their counterparts (32% vs. 27% for citizen children with citizen/legal permanent resident (LPR) parents, p<.001). These differences were no longer significant after adjusting for age and immigration-related and socioeconomic barriers and facilitators. In adjusted multinomial models, citizen children with undocumented parents were significantly less likely to hold ESI coverage than citizen children with two citizen parents. State-level policy on immigrant access to prenatal coverage moderated the effect of parental documentation status. In states where all (income-eligible) pregnant women are eligible for Medicaid coverage regardless of immigration status, there were no differences in children’s uninsurance rates by parental documentation status. In these states, both children with at least one undocumented parent and their counterparts had an uninsurance rate of 26%. In states where undocumented pregnant women are not eligible for Medicaid prenatal coverage, 45% of citizen children with at least one undocumented parent were uninsured, 17 percentage points higher than children with citizen/LPR parents (p<.001). These differences held up in adjusted models. Finally, Latino immigrant parents for the most part did not feel their own documentation status affected their citizen children’s access to coverage. Two key policies in Minnesota help explain why parental documentation status was not identified as a major barrier to coverage for citizen children. Prenatal coverage is available to all income-eligible pregnant women, regardless of immigration status, and newborns are automatically enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP when their mother is covered by the same at birth. In contrast, undocumented children are restricted from Medicaid/CHIP coverage, and as a result faced the greatest barriers to coverage and care. Conclusions: The bulk of research on coverage disparities for children of immigrants has focused on parental citizenship. Examining parental documentation status – an often masked distinction – provides insight into lack of insurance generally and ESI specifically, and reveals further disparities. The degree of insurance and ESI followed a strong gradient where children with undocumented parents experienced the most vulnerability and children with two citizen parents the least. The gap in ESI– which persisted after adjusting for several parental and family characteristics – appears to be the driving force behind these disparities. State-and local-level analyses provided a more complete picture of coverage disparities by parental documentation status.Item Making Sense of Immigration(2012-09-20) Massey, Douglas; Blazar, Bill; Sturdevant, LoriItem A Needs Assessment Survey for a Resource Center for African Immigrants and Refugees in St. Paul, Minnesota(University of Minnesota: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, 2003-01) Bazile, Anne MartheA report prepared for the African Refugee Support Services.Item Protecting the Civil Rights of Detained Immigrants in Minnesota(Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 2011) Chin, Jacob; Fennelly, Katherine; Moccio, Kathleen; Miles, Charles; Pacas, Jos� D.Item Responding to Growing Diversity: a Case Study of Mankato, Minnesota(2018-08) Lindsay, CarynThrough the lens of social cognitive theory, this study explored the responses of European Americans in the Mankato/North Mankato metropolitan area in south central Minnesota to increasing numbers of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. It identified activities and perspectives of European American community leaders and compared those to the views of diverse community leaders.Item The Rhetorical Dimensions of Citizenship: Undocumented Immigrants Defining Their Identity and Place in the “Nation of Immigrants”(2018-06) Trifonov, SvilenThe idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants has been a focal point of citizenship and immigration discourses in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. At the same time, unauthorized migration became a political concern in the nation-state’s regime of governmentality. The regime defined the terms of admission, concurrently producing the conditions of illegality, ascribing them to those deemed unwanted and unwelcome, the ever-so-popular “illegal aliens.” As the political regime continues to increase its efforts to place rhetorical and material borders around what is perceived as “American,” citizenship has become an increasingly contested term. In this dissertation, I examine the rhetorical efforts of undocumented immigrants and their allies to protest the dominant discursive regime of illegality. The dissertation posits that the mythic framework of “nation of immigrants” has come to define the different ways in which citizenship and belonging are understood in the United States. Through examinations of speeches by immigrant rights activists, the three case studies of the dissertation present several ways in which undocumented immigrants and their allies approach the concept of citizenship. My examination reveals how some activists strategically appeal for marginal inclusion through documentation; other activists demand a path to citizenship as a strategy for inclusion; yet others rely on decolonializing rhetorics that seek to redefine cultural and formal citizenship in the United States. The three contrasting strategies illustrate the complexity of immigrant rights activism in the early 21st century, showcasing how undocumented immigrants unmask, challenge, reconfigure, but also sometimes reaffirm, the powers of the nation-state to determine the norms of citizenship. In its entirety, the project advances our understanding of the rhetorical dimensions of citizenship and offers insights into how the coalition building efforts of immigrants are often limited by their contrasting and competing visions of inclusion and membership in a national community.Item Root Causes and Solutions to Disparities for Hispanics/Latinos in the Juvenile Justice System(Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER), 2005) Hispanic Advocacy and Community Empowerment through Research (HACER)Item A Rural Community’s Response to its Changing Demography: Welcome to Worthington(2011) Stone, BarbaraItem A Summary of Asian-American Travel Interests and Behaviors(University of Minnesota Tourism Center, 2015) Benavides, JuliaThis report provides a brief outline of the existing and potential domestic travel market among Asian Americans in the United States. Demographic, income, English proficiency information, and basic trip characteristics are presented.Item Understanding the Processes and the Consequences of Immigration(2014-05) Causadias, JoseIn this dissertation, I examine the phenomenon of immigration and how intercultural contact affects both immigrants and natives through acculturation and enculturation processes. I center on three main sources of individual differences in the outcomes of acculturation and enculturation: a) ethnicity, b) genetic plasticity, and c) immigrant generation. To examine these three sources, I employed data from a sample of Asian (n = 1584) and Latino (n = 3525) adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, who were assessed in four waves from ages 12-16 to ages 24-32. I found some group differences between Asians and Latinos, evidence of Gene-Culture correlations, and partial support for generational differences. These findings are discussed using a Cultural Development and Psychopathology framework (Causadias, 2013).