sangay mishra

UK), and the growing view among modern migrants that a trip abroad is necessary, or at least advantageous, for career advancement (nicely captured in a chapter on highly skilled French workers in London)—are identified, illuminated, and interspersed throughout the volume’s chapters. The comparative methodological approach adopted in this volume is manifestly one of its major strengths. More so than many academic collections that set out to undertake transnational analyses, this volume’s chapters genuinely provide a broad global/comparative base from which to draw astute observations. While many cross-cultural texts are limited to coverage of North America and western Europe, this compendium includes chapters on sovereign states and cities seldom selected for analysis, such as Singapore, Gabon, and Dubai. Individually, the chapters provide ethnographic case-study based accounts of the lives of migrant professionals. Their lives are richly revealed by the collection’s contributors through the disciplined use of semistructured, open-ended interview instruments and techniques and fieldwork observations to buttress their findings. Throughout the book, the editor and authors carefully operationalize their terms, clearly articulate the purpose, scope, and intricacies of their research, and provide the reader with abundant sources and references that are well established in the global migration literature. A significant number of specific findings surrounding global migration may be gleaned in this edited collection. The inclusion and explication of these infrequently considered aspects of migration—themes ignored by other books attempting to explain migration in more generic terms—are certainly the volume’s signal strengths, adding a nuanced and highly textured rendering of the global migration process seldom found elsewhere in the academic literature. For example, consumers of the chapters contained in this collection will have a newly enlightened awareness and appreciation for issues such as the children of migrant professionals. In Gabrielle Désilets’s chapter on migrant professionals’ children in Melbourne and Singapore, the ways in which the offspring of migrant professionals navigate new cultural waters as their parents seek career success are examined. Another topic rarely broached in such a collection is the manner in which social organizations, in this case, the Petroleum Wives Club of Port-Gentil, actively socialize the wives of professional migrants into the culture of their spouses’ destination city. Yet another subject that receives attention in this volume is the role formal organizations play, in this case, in Oslo. In Norway, where the immigrant population is expected to grow very rapidly in the next two decades, formal immigrant organizations serve to facilitate the incorporation of professional migrants into the host city by providing cultural learning opportunities. Although studies surrounding the role immigrant organizations play in incorporating newly arrived migrants have traditionally been commonplace in the global migration literature, most focus narrowly on lower-skilled migrants and the role of national and local governments in providing training and employment assistance. Other chapters in this edited volume shed further light on areas that uncommonly appear in books on global migration. In sum, in this fine edited volume, the lives of professional migrants become a vehicle through which we can more fully understand the complexity of the global migration process and, in turn, extend our comprehension of social inequality in modern global cities.

South Asian Americans, one of the fastest-growing and most diverse immigrant communities, have experienced increased discrimination and hate crime during the post-9/11 period. South Asians bore the brunt of racial hostility triggered in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, with Muslims and Sikhs bearing the greatest burden. The domestic security policies inaugurated after 2001 further impacted both South Asian and Arab communities adversely. These official policies ranging from surveillance of mosques and communities to delayed naturalization and restricted immigration have severely encroached upon the civil liberties of the groups. The ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should be an occasion to review some of these policies in order to ensure that South Asian and Arab communities are not being profiled and targeted in the name of domestic security.

This paper analyzes the extent of panethnic South Asian identity formation and mobilization among South Asian immigrants in the United States. Based on the analysis of quantitative data from PNAAPS, 2001 and 60 in-depth interviews conducted with both leaders and community members of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi communities in Los Angeles and New York City, the questions which this paper

This paper analyzes the interface between Muslim communities and the law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles after the 9/11 attacks. Muslim communities have both cooperated with law enforcement as well as challenged them for profiling and targeting the group. On the side of the law enforcement, they switch between the language of multicultural inclusion and trust on the one hand, and suspicion and targeting on the other. This paper is an attempt to analyze the emerging police practices viz a viz Muslim communities and situate them in the larger debate on racial and religious profiling and community policing.

In the days and months following 11 September 2001, South Asians in the United States were lumped together and racialized as ‘outsiders’ and ‘threatening’. The lumping of South Asians existed alongside their differential targeting based on particular religious identities such as Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. The religious identity not only shaped and calibrated the racial hostility against different South Asian groups but also framed their responses to racial attacks. The primacy of religious identities in framing the group response to racial hostility made it difficult to build broader panethnic solidarity, thereby challenging the existing understanding of the dynamics of panethnic identity formation and mobilization. The foregrounding of religious identity by different South Asian groups was, in fact, in broad consonance with the multicultural institutional and ideological framework that provides institutional and discursive avenues for the deployment of exclusive and immutable identities.

South Asian Americans, one of the fastest-growing and most diverse immigrant communities, have experienced increased discrimination and hate crime during the post-9/11 period. South Asians bore the brunt of racial hostility triggered in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, with Muslims and Sikhs bearing the greatest burden. The domestic security policies inaugurated after 2001 further impacted both South Asian and Arab communities adversely. These official policies ranging from surveillance of mosques and communities to delayed naturalization and restricted immigration have severely encroached upon the civil liberties of the groups. The ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should be an occasion to review some of these policies in order to ensure that South Asian and Arab communities are not being profiled and targeted in the name of domestic security.