Suchergebnisse

This article introduces the first volume of a two-part series on im/migrant well-being. Stemming from the conference, Im/migrant Well-Being: A Nexus for Research & Policy, the author discusses the importance of studying im/migrant well-being, and why focusing on immigration policies and enforcement measures is of critical importance if scholars are interested in understanding the social factors that shape well-being among im/migrant populations. A brief review of the articles in this special issue is provided as the author argues for the importance of publicly engaged research that can provide policy-oriented solutions to the public and change-makers.

Patterns of labor market incorporation of two samples of middle-class Puerto Ricans (U.S. migrants and return migrants to the Island) are examined in this article. Particular attention is paid to the diverse class backgrounds of Puerto Rican professionals and how these backgrounds (and how they structure migration options) impact educational attainment. The author also examines the resources and opportunities garnered through U.S. citizenship, specifically among those from working-class/poor backgrounds who are more likely to be structurally constrained in their efforts to achieve social mobility. The author further analyzes the direct and indirect impact of these factors on Puerto Ricans' incorporation into mainland and Island labor markets and their entry into the transnational professional workforce.

Through in-depth interviews with 41 middle-class Puerto Rican transmigrants, this research examines how gender constrains global care work. Migration compromises embeddedness in care networks, concurrently heightening its meaning. Women felt these effects more acutely than men given their primary responsibility for reproductive work. Migrants engaged in emotion work to cope with constraints, strategically rearticulating care work; yet unsuccessful strategies resulted in further emotional dislocation, particularly for women. Migration led to a dichotomy in which professional success was pitted against emotional fulfillment through care work. Gender, cultural, and geopolitical factors mediated this split, contributing to a permanently unsettled flow of migrants.

Using narrative analysis, this article examines the relationship between coloniality and racializing characterizations of Puerto Ricans, on the one hand, and taken-for-granted formula stories about U.S. national identity and morality, on the other. Our analysis draws from two data sets: 21 newspaper articles published in a Florida newspaper in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria about the needs and conditions of climate migrants from Puerto Rico and 54 interviews with Puerto Rican climate migrants who relocated to Florida after the hurricane struck the archipelago in 2017. This multilevel analysis explores prevailing colorblind racism frames that circulate across levels of social life embedded in stories that appeal to cultural ways of thinking and feeling about the world. Our findings show how colorblind frames in broadly shared narratives can reinforce racial scripts and perpetuate ethnoracial inequality. They also show that the broad circulation of such narratives at cultural, institutional, and interpersonal levels renders the racialization process less discernible.

The current immigration enforcement regime embodies a colorblind racial project of the state rooted in the racial structure of society and resulting in racism toward immigrants. Approaching racism from structural and social process perspectives, we seek to understand the social consequences of enforcement practices in the lives of undocumented immigrant young adults who moved to the United States as minors. Findings indicate that although legal discourse regarding immigration enforcement theoretically purports colorblindness, racial practices such as profiling subject immigrants to arrest, detention, and deportation and, in effect, criminalize them. Further, enforcement practices produce distress, vulnerability, and anxiety in the lives of young immigrants and their families, often resulting in legitimate fears of detention and deportation since enforcement measures disproportionately affect Latinos and other racialized immigrant groups in U.S. society. We conclude that policies and programs that exclude, segregate, detain, and physically remove immigrants from the country reproduce racial inequalities in other areas of social life through spillover effects that result in dire consequences for these immigrants and their kin. We argue that immigrant enforcement practices reflect the nation's racial policy of our times.

Abstract
Central Florida is an emerging destination for Puerto Ricans migrating to the contiguous states of the United States. We use in-depth interviews with Puerto Rican adults and young adults (N=25) and data from the U.S. Census to examine Central Florida Puerto Rican families' demographic and economic profiles and to compare them to those in older destinations such as New York. We focus particularly on socioeconomic integration. Findings from interviews suggest that kinship networks may aid the efforts of families to maintain socioeconomic stability by providing access to social capital. However, the generational status and levels of acculturation may affect the kinds of jobs that are attainable. Importantly, experiences with discrimination may blunt economic progress and socioeconomic integration. The erosion of feelings of belonging due to discrimination may, in turn, affect future settlement decisions. We discuss the implications of these results for Puerto Rican families' socioeconomic status and economic stability.

Prior work has focused on the role of media in shaping public perceptions of immigrants and in the construction of social illegality. In this article, we examine how the undocumented 1.5 immigrant generation perceive, consume, and navigate media messaging about immigration—and particularly Latino immigrants—to understand the role of media in shaping their lived experiences. We analyze 50 in-depth and nine follow-up interviews with undocumented young adults in Florida collected between 2017 and 2021. Two major themes emerged: (1) how media information and misinformation invoke both legal and ethnoracial consciousness; and (2) how undocumented young immigrants deploy agentic strategies to resist negative and dehumanizing portrayals by rejecting media altogether, leveraging media to resist abuses, and embracing counter-narratives. Based on these findings, we discuss the usefulness of a double consciousness framework and argue for the use of "ethnoracial consciousness" in synergy with legal consciousness to more accurately describe experiences for this population.

Abstract
In recent years, the largest population movement from Puerto Rico to the continental United States in over fifty years has occurred following a prolonged economic crisis, exacerbated by the humanitarian disaster that took place after the archipelago was struck by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Since September 2017, just under 200,000 Puerto Ricans have relocated to the continental United States, the largest number migrating to Florida. Yet not much is known about the adaptation of this population who relocated postdisaster. To contribute to the scholarly literature on Latino integration and based on data from in-depth interviews with 19 Puerto Ricans who moved to Central Florida both before and after the hurricanes of 2017, we focus on the ways in which Puerto Ricans conceptualize home and belonging. We also examine how place-making and belonging are related to emotions, an often-neglected dimension in the study of migrant integration. We engage with literature on space and place and draw from research on emotions and migration to propose five conceptions of home among migrants: home as family, home as identity, home as pleasure, home as community, and home as plausibility.