This pamphlet is the second of a projected series of papers intended to offer those interested in planning relief abroad a digest of pertinent material prepared by organizations other than the Russell Sage Foundation. It covers needs to be met in the Near East; racial, religious, political, and other problems; forms of assistance; and achievements.
JAMES L. BARTON, an American Protestant missionary, established educational institutions in the Near East.
This pamphlet is the second of a projected series of papers intended to offer those interested in planning relief abroad a digest of pertinent material prepared by organizations other than the Russell Sage Foundation. It covers needs to be met in the Near East; racial, religious, political, and other problems; forms of assistance, and achievements.
JAMES L. BARTON, an American Protestant missionary, established educational institutions in the Near East.
A form listing people and places—including churches, employers, medical agencies, and public officials—that social agencies might have visited with columns for noting the number of visits to each. An explanation following the list notes that agencies using the largest number of outside sources of information will be seen as having made the best investigation into the cases they are treating.
This booklet discusses schools in the North and Lowland South known as “mountain mission schools” as distinguished from public schools and from well-endowed private schools. After describing the character of these schools, it describes how these schools can have a positive impact on generations of people in the region.
JOHN C. CAMPBELL was the secretary of the Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation.
“The 1.2 million US deportations from 2014 to 2024 are more than a statistic. They are a compendium of 1.2 million tragedies. In Surviving the ICE Age, Joanna Dreby harnesses her formidable ethnographic skills to vividly depict the pain, suffering, and trauma inflicted on the children of New York’s immigrants, most of whom are US citizens. It offers a sobering chronicle of the damage being done to the next generation of Americans that should be read by all.”
—DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
“Joanna Dreby and her team powerfully illuminate the profound generational burdens of immigration enforcement. Surviving the ICE Age reveals how silencing, disruption of childhood relationships, and challenges to belonging shape development long after enforcement episodes occur. As we face increasingly virulent anti-immigrant policies, this compassionate and urgent book reveals what is truly at stake for the next generation when we prioritize deportation over humane immigration reform.”
—CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO, professor in residence and director, Immigration Initiative, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“Joanna Dreby’s Surviving the ICE Age is a compelling and deeply textured exploration of the profound and often overlooked effects of immigration enforcement on immigrant children’s lives and futures. Timely and essential, this book offers a powerful account of a critical issue, making a major contribution to our understanding of its human cost—and to the migration literature. An important work from a distinguished social scientist.”
—MICHAEL FIX, senior fellow and former president, Migration Policy Institute
For the past three decades, U.S. immigration policy has become increasingly restrictive, focused on enforcement both at the southern border and across the country. A shift in emphasis from status regularization to criminalization has had rippling effects for families and communities. While we know much about how immigration enforcement impacts the undocumented, we know less about longstanding effects on U.S. citizens. In Surviving the ICE Age, sociologist Joanna Dreby draws on interviews with young adults with foreign-born parents to better understand what it was like to grow up during a time of heightened U.S. migratory control.
Dreby shows that a restrictive approach to immigration creates problems over time and across generations. These issues occur regardless of one’s citizenship status and go beyond deportations. Despite having pride in their heritage, her interviewees did not talk much about immigration. She refers to this unwillingness—and at times, inability—to speak about immigration as silencing. Silencing in a community or family is often intended to protect children, but this can leave them with little information about their backgrounds and status, leading to fear and anxiety instead. Self-silencing often resulted from traumatic experiences tied to enforcement episodes, which sometimes took the form of memory loss or emotional withholding. Dreby finds that experiences with the immigration system that disrupted relationships in a child’s household arising from family separations, moves, or changing roles in the family had especially long-term effects, causing, at times, ongoing mental health issues. Even the risk of immigration involvement left some young adults feeling vulnerable and undermined their sense of safety and security as U.S. citizens.
Dreby also highlights stories that offer hope. Young adults developed strategies to persevere, and children who grew up in communities and families that openly talked about migration felt empowered and fared much better, especially when they had access to resources, such as adequate food and shelter, mental health services, and community support. Dreby calls for policies and practices to mitigate the harms of restrictive migratory control on children’s wellbeing, such avoiding the arrest of parents in front of children and ensuring that U.S. citizen children’s interests are considered in immigration court without their direct involvement.
Surviving the ICE Age details the generational harms caused by U.S. immigration policy and offers suggestions for a better way forward.
JOANNA DREBY is professor of sociology at the University of Albany, State University of New York
“Many studies of social movement influence focus on policy and legislative victories. Changing Minds brilliantly widens the aperture, asking how movements change beliefs and popular culture. This enlightening work illuminates how notable movements of the twentieth century altered the topology of the possible by making resonant claims that transformed the wider contours of American life. Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta offer a refreshing view of how struggles gain prominence and provide a lens to understand our unsettled times.”
—WALTER W. POWELL, Jacks Family Professor of Education (and by courtesy) professor of sociology, organizational behavior, management science and engineering, and communication, Stanford University
“Drawing on two lifetimes of research on social movements, Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta join forces to illuminate the important interface between social movements and the diffusion of meanings that lead to social and cultural change. The abundant examples they provide from many corners of society help us make sense of the impact change agents can have on the public sphere. These accomplished sociologists also bring together what we know (and more) about various processes that help explain how public opinion changes. I strongly recommend Changing Minds as a most useful contribution that should be read widely.”
—MICHÈLE LAMONT, professor of sociology and of African and African American studies, and Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Harvard University
“It could be argued that the most consequential and enduring effects of social movements are cultural. And yet, social movement scholars have devoted comparatively little attention to theorizing these effects and the processes and factors that produce them. In Changing Minds, Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta have gone a long way toward addressing this lacuna.”
—DOUGLAS McADAM, Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology, Stanford University
Social movements—organized efforts by relatively powerless people to change society—can result in legal and policy changes, such as laws protecting same-sex marriage and tax rebates for solar energy. However, movements also change people’s beliefs, values, and everyday behavior. Such changes may help bring about new policies or take place in the absence of new policy, yet we still know little about when and why they occur. In Changing Minds, sociologists Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta ask why movements have sometimes had fast and far-reaching cultural influence.
Polletta and Amenta examine the trajectories of U.S. social movements, including the old-age pension movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Black rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s movement of the 1970s, right-wing movements in the 1980s and 1990s, and the environmental movement up to the present, to determine when, why, and how social movements change culture. They find that influential movements are featured in the news, but not only in the news. Movement perspectives may appear also in opinion and commentary outlets, on television talk shows and dramas, in movies, stand-up comedy, and viral memes. Popular culture producers remake movement messages as they transmit them, sometimes in ways that make those messages compelling. For example, while the news largely ignored feminists’ challenge to inequality in the home, popular cultural outlets turned “liberation” into a resonant demand for women’s right to self-fulfillment outside the home and within it. Widespread attention to the movement may lead people to change their minds individually. But more substantial change is likely when companies, schools, and other organizations outside government strive to get out in front of a newly legitimate issue, whether environmental sustainability or racial equity, by adopting movement-supportive norms and practices. Eventually, ideas associated with a movement may become a new common sense—though not always the ideas that the movement intended.
Throughout Changing Minds, Polletta and Amenta provide activists with strategies for getting their message heard and acted on. They suggest how movement actors can get into the news as political players or experts rather than lawbreakers or zealots. They show when it makes sense for activists to work with popular cultural producers and when they should create their own cultural outlets. They explain why the routes to cultural influence have changed and why urging people to take one easy step to save the planet can do more harm than good.
Changing Minds is a fascinating exploration of why and how some social movements have caused profound shifts in society.
FRANCESCA POLLETTA is Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
EDWIN AMENTA is Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Since the early 2000s, employment in temporary contract worker programs has significantly increased in response to claims by employers that other workers will not take jobs in certain industries. The Great Recession, the decline of undocumented Mexican migration, and the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the expansion of the H-2B visa program used when non-agricultural employers face labor shortages in seasonal jobs. However, the impacts of the program on H-2B workers and on the companies that recruit and employ them are not well understood.
“In this sequel to Mexican New York, Robert C. Smith solidifies his reputation as an intimate interpreter of social change over the life course. Dreams Achieved and Denied tells a subtle story about the upward mobility of children of Mexican immigrants striving to keep their side of the immigrant family bargain. This is a must-read to understand the experiences of the largest immigrant group in the United States.”
—David FitzGerald, Gildred Chair in U.S.-Mexican Relations and professor of sociology, University of California, San Diego
“The culmination of a two-decade study of immigrant youngsters, Dreams Achieved and Denied exemplifies the power of research that truly matters. With rigor and passion, Robert C. Smith captures experiences deeply significant to policymakers and to all who care about the multifaceted American journey.”
—Patricia Fernández-Kelly, professor of sociology, Princeton University
“A valuable contribution to contemporary debates of social mobility in the United States, Dreams Achieved and Denied shows in great detail the mechanisms that promote upward mobility and those that tragically curtail it. Based on an impressive longitudinal study, this remarkable book offers a worm’s-eye view into the experiences of adult children of Mexican immigrants pursuing their dreams in New York City. Persuasively argued and rigorously researched, this book is a timely and socially important work that deserves a wide readership.”
—Roberto G. Gonzales, Richard Perry University Professor of Sociology and Education, University of Pennsylvania
U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have achieved perhaps the biggest single jump in mobility in American immigration history. In 2020, 42 percent of second-generation U.S.-born Mexican men and 49 percent of U.S.-born Mexican women in the city had graduated from college–versus a 13-14-percent second-generation college graduation rate for most other places in recent decades. How did this happen? In Dreams Achieved and Denied, sociologist Robert Courtney Smith (Graduate Center, City University of New York) examines the laws, policies, and individual and family practices that promoted–and inhibited–their social mobility.
For over twenty years, Smith followed the lives and mobility of nearly one hundred children of Mexican immigrants in New York City. Immigrant-inclusive and mobility-promoting measures here include enabling undocumented people to attend public colleges at in-state tuition rates and the city’s subway and school choice systems, which enabled students to attend better schools or take opportunities outside their neighborhoods.
Smith finds that keeping the immigrant bargain – whereby children of immigrants redeem their parents’ sacrifice by doing well in school, helping their parents and siblings, and becoming “good” people (in their parents’ words) – helped them achieve better adult outcomes and lives. Having mentors, picking academically strong schools and friends, and using second chance mechanisms also promoted mobility. However, lacking legal status blocked mobility, by preventing others from benefiting from these same mobility-promoting policies.
Dreams Achieved and Denied deeply analyzes the historic upward mobility of U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City.
ROBERT COURTNEY SMITH is a professor of sociology, immigration studies and public affairs at the CUNY Graduate Center
“In Structured Luck, Onoso Imoagene gives us an unparalleled look into the U.S. Diversity Visa Program, revealing its far-reaching effects on the life trajectories of migrants and its role as a catalyst of the migration industry in countries of origin. Through rich interviews and careful institutional analysis in the United States, Nigeria, and Ghana, she offers us a critical assessment of the program’s reputation as a windfall lottery and shows us that luck, in this case, is painstakingly made through strategic responses to policy constraints.”
Natasha Iskander, James Weldon Johnson Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, New York University
The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is a lottery that awards winners from underrepresented countries the chance to apply for legal permanent residence in the United States. Most lottery winners think of themselves as lucky, viewing the win as an opportunity to pursue better lives for themselves and their families. In Structured Luck, sociologist Onoso Imoagene uses immigrants’ stories to show how the program’s design often leads to their exploitation in their origin countries, the interruption of their education, and reduced potential once they are in the United States.
Combining ethnographic observation in Africa and interviews with over one hundred immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria, Imoagene demonstrates that the visa program is a process of “structured luck,” from how people hear about the lottery, who registers for it, and who participates in it to the application requirements for the visa. In Ghana and Nigeria, people often learn about the lottery through friends, colleagues, or relatives who persuade them to enter for the perceived benefits of receiving a visa: opportunities for upward mobility, permanent legal status, and the ability to bring along family members. Though anyone can enter the lottery, not everyone who wins obtains a visa. The visa application process requires proof of a high school diploma or artisan skills, a medical exam, a criminal background check, an interview with U.S. consular officers, and payment of fees. Such requirements have led to the growth of visa entrepreneurs, who often charge exorbitant fees to steer immigrants through the process. Visa recipients who were on track to obtain university degrees at home often leave in the middle of their studies for the United States but struggle to continue their education due to high U.S. tuition costs. And though their legal status allows them to escape the demoralizing situations that face the undocumented, these immigrants lack the social support that the government sometimes provides for refugees and other migrants. Ultimately, Imoagene notes, the real winner of the visa lottery is not the immigrants themselves but the United States, which benefits from their relatively higher levels of education. Consequently, she argues, the U.S. must do more to minimize the visa program’s negative consequences.
Structured Luck illuminates the trauma, resilience, and determination of immigrants who come to the United States through the Diversity Visa Program and calls for the United States to develop policies that will better integrate them into society.
ONOSO IMOAGENE is associate professor of social research and public policy at New York University, Abu Dhabi.
“As the Latino population has grown in the United States, it has been racialized along the lines of legality and nationality, compelling middle-class Latinos who ‘look Hispanic’ constantly to have to identify themselves as not being undocumented, unskilled Mexican migrants. This dynamic plays out differently in different regions of the country, depending on the local history of immigration and the actual ethnic and class origins of the region’s Latinos. Irene Browne’s probing analysis of college-educated Dominicans and Mexicans in greater Atlanta is brilliant in revealing the dilemmas, complexities, and burdens that prevailing U.S. stereotypes create for middle-class Latinos of Afro-Caribbean and mestizo origin, especially within a region historically characterized by a rigid Black-White color line. Precarious Privilege reminds us of the need to always look beyond the narrow confines of stigmatized ethnoracial labels to see the true nature of the individuals they purport to describe.”
—DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
“Since 2005, southern states have been plagued by rising anti-immigrant sentiment and immigration policy restrictionism, racializing the experiences of all Latines as ‘poor,’ ‘undocumented,’ and ‘Mexican.’ In this compelling book, sociologist Irene Browne takes us deep into the lives of middle-class and professional Mexican and Dominican immigrants in Atlanta, Georgia, who simultaneously experience but also marshal class-based identities and resources to resist such stigmatization and prove their worth. Absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in better understanding the U.S. Latine population’s remarkable internal diversity today.”
—HELEN B. MARROW, associate professor of sociology, Tufts University
In recent years crackdowns on immigrant labor and a shrinking job market in California, Arizona, and Texas have pushed Latine immigrants to new destinations, particularly places in the American South. Although many of these immigrants work in manufacturing or food-processing plants, a growing number belong to the professional middle class. These professionals find that despite their privileged social class and regardless of their national origin, many non-Latines assume that they are undocumented working-class Mexicans, the stereotype of the “typical Latine.” In Precarious Privilege, sociologist Irene Browne focuses on how first-generation middle-class Mexican and Dominican immigrants in Atlanta respond to this stigmatizing assumption.
Browne finds that when asked to identify themselves by race, these immigrants either reject racial identities entirely or draw on belief systems from Mexico and the Dominican Republic that emphasize European-indigenous mixed race identities. When branded as typical Latines in the U.S., Mexican middle-class immigrants emphasize their social class or explain that a typical Latine can be middle-class, while Dominicans simply indicate that they are not Mexican. Rather than blame systemic racism, both Mexican and Dominican middle-class immigrants often attribute misperceptions of their identity to non-Latines’ ignorance or to individual Latines’ lack of effort in trying to assimilate.
But these middle-class Latine immigrants do not simply seek to position themselves on par with the U.S.-born white middle class. Instead, they leverage their cosmopolitanism—for example, their multilingualism or their children’s experiences traveling abroad—to engage in what Browne calls “one-up assimilation,” a strategy that aims to position them above the white middle class, who are often monolingual and unaware of the world outside the United States. Middle-class Latines’ cosmopolitanism and valuing of diversity also lead them to have cordial relations with African Americans, but these immigrants do not see themselves as sharing African Americans’ status as oppressed minorities.
Although the stereotype of the typical Latine has made middle-class Latine immigrants susceptible to stigma, they insist that this stigma does not play a significant role in their lives. In many cases, they view the stereotype as a minor issue, feel that opportunities for upward mobility outweigh any negative experiences, or downplay racism by emphasizing their class privilege. Browne observes that while downplaying racism may help middle-class Latine immigrants maintain their dignity, it also perpetuates inequality by reinforcing the lower status of working-class undocumented immigrants. It is thus imperative, Browne argues, to repeal harsh anti-immigration policies, a move that will not only ease the lives of the undocumented but also send a message about who belongs in the country.
Offering a nuanced exploration of how race, social class, and immigration status intersect, Precarious Privilege provides a complex portrait of middle-class Latine immigrants in the United States today.
IRENE BROWNE is associate professor of sociology at Emory University.
