Beyond Receptivity: Exploring the Role of Identity in Educators’ Orientation Toward Newcomers in a New Immigrant Destination

Research on education in new immigrant destinations has highlighted the importance of educators’ professional missions and expertise in shaping their receptivity toward newcomers. Less attention has been given to how educators’ social identities, especially in relation to newcomers, influence how they perceive their role in serving the population. Drawing on the theory of representative bureaucracy, this qualitative study explores how educators’ social identities shaped their identification with and orientation toward addressing the needs of immigrant-origin English learners in one new-destination high school. Results indicate that educators framed their orientation toward serving the population as a moral imperative, a professional responsibility, or a legal obligation. These orientations influenced how educators perceived their role in addressing newcomers’ needs. This study offers implications for educational practice and provides avenues for future research on education in new immigrant destinations.

Peripheral Estates as Arrival Spaces? Conceptualising Research on Arrival Functions of New Immigrant Destinations

In recent years, the question of how urban spaces support the arrival of immigrants has found increased attention among scholars. The emerging discussion uses terms like arrival cities, arrival neighbourhoods, arrival spaces, arrival contexts, or arrival infrastructures to refer to local conditions which support immigrant inclusion. This discussion, however, tends to focus empirically and conceptually on neighbourhoods or cities with long-standing migration histories. Connected to this, arrival spaces are often conceptualised as spaces with strong migrant support networks and economies, as well as with high levels of functional diversity and a high fluctuation of residents. Less focus is placed on the question of if and how destinations that lack these characteristics support the arrival of new immigrants. This contribution focuses on this by discussing existent conceptualisations of arrival spaces and contrasting them with empirical illustrations of peripheral estate neighbourhoods in east German cities that have experienced a substantial population loss since the 1990s, resulting in the partial demolition of housing and infrastructure. Since the refugee migration to Germany starting in 2015, the population dynamic in these neighbourhoods has changed substantially. We contrast these developments with the literature on arrival contexts in order to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the concept, specifically regarding the conditions in new destinations where migrant networks and economies are still emerging, functional diversity is low, and the role of residential fluctuation is unclear. While this article draws on empirical material, its major objective is to point out the blind spots in the current discussion around arrival spaces. It develops questions and offers a research agenda that introduces a wider and more varied set of neighbourhoods into the evolving research agenda on arrival spaces.

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

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, I model what I call intragenerational reverse incorporation. In doing so, I theorize 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, I show how these changes both marginalized and racialized Latino immigrants, who in turn internalized and politicized their new status.

Geographies of migration II: The racial-spatial politics of immigration

This second report on geographies of migration examines scholarship on the racial-spatial politics of immigration in the Global North, which have emerged as important issues in the context of rising nativism, the criminalization of immigrants, and the racist exclusion of immigrants from polities. The report first highlights research that has revealed the entanglements of race, immigration law, and citizenship before turning to ‘new immigrant destinations’ as central contemporary sites where race and belonging are hashed out. The following section examines the effects of anti-immigrant policing and racist politics on the health and well-being of immigrants. Activism and immigrant youth mobilization that challenge anti-immigrant politics and racist exclusions from citizenship are at the center of the arguments I discuss in the penultimate section. I conclude by calling for more geographic analysis of the racial-spatial politics of immigration, as well as of the activism that challenges such politics.