Crossing Borders, Changing Places: Immigrant America In A World On The Move

East/West Cultural Passage: Journal of the Research Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, 14, 1 (2014): 24-56

17 Pages Posted: 23 May 2016

See all articles by Rubén G. Rumbaut

Rubén G. Rumbaut

University of California, Irvine - Department of Sociology

Date Written: 2014

Abstract

The world is increasingly on the move. In 2013, the United Nations reported that there were 232 million international migrants worldwide, most of whom were born in the global South and migrated to the global North, reflecting widening global inequalities and intractable conflicts. These largely self-selected border crossers represent 3% of humanity; the other 97% are stayers, living in the countries where they were born. Their “changing places” are sites not only of cultural and demographic transformations, but also of social and political collisions that predictably elicit a range of nativist and exclusionary responses. More immigrants—a fifth of the world’s total—go to the United States than to any other country. This essay focuses on the story of “Immigrant America” over the past half century—from its historic nadir in 1970 to its resurgence as a Nation of Immigrants and now to Deportation Nation—from the Great Inclusion to the Great Expulsion. I examine the historic transformation of the U.S. into a new nation of immigrants along two narrative axes—diversity and inequality. The subtitle is a double entendre, referring at once to the country and to our book Immigrant America—new editions of which have been written and published in each of the past four decades as we seek continuously to grapple with a vertiginously changing world and with this “permanently unfinished” moving target of a society.

Keywords: international migration, global migration trends, immigrants in the United States, modes of incorporation, socioeconomic mobility, settlement, acculturation, inequality, undocumented immigration, detention, deportation

Suggested Citation

Rumbaut, Rubén G., Crossing Borders, Changing Places: Immigrant America In A World On The Move (2014). East/West Cultural Passage: Journal of the Research Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, 14, 1 (2014): 24-56, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2782850 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2782850

Rubén G. Rumbaut (Contact Author)

University of California, Irvine - Department of Sociology ( email )

3151 Social Sciences Plaza A
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
50
Abstract Views
496
PlumX Metrics