30617 - Immigrant Communities and Families

Description

This session examines power dynamics, structural constraints, and agency within immigrant populations across diverse contexts. The five papers challenge conventional narratives while offering insights into immigrant experiences.
The first paper contests the "willing subordinate" characterization of immigrant farmworkers, finding that legal precarity—not employer control—explains excessive work patterns. The second paper on ethno-religious infrastructure in Germany reveals that community size poorly predicts organizational capacity, while cultural distance proves more influential and far-right mobilization suppresses immigrant organizing.
Two papers explore family dynamics: research on cross-border marriages in South Korea demonstrates how educational hypergamy affects migrant women's life satisfaction differently across urban-rural settings, while a study of intermarried households in Japan shows how gender imbalance and status exchange shape residential choices and ethnic segregation patterns.
The fifth paper tracks trends in parent-child separation among immigrant families in the United States over 22 years, examining how migration trajectories have changed and vary by region of origin.
Together, these papers reveal the complex navigation of social, economic, and familial landscapes by immigrant communities, providing crucial insights for policy development and theoretical understanding.

Sub Unit

• Immigrant Communities/Families

Presider

• Akanne Torres Beltran, The Ohio State University

Individual Presentations

• Are Immigrant Workers ‘Willing Subordinates?’ Examining Excessive Work by Nativity Among U.S. Farmworkers - Melissa Manzanares, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Beyond Numbers: The Formation of Ethno-Religious Minority Infrastructures - Jonas Wiedner, Berlin Social Science Center; Merlin Schaeffer, University of Copenhagen; Sarah Carol, University College Dublin; Susanne Boeller, University of Bonn, Germany

• Life Satisfaction of Cross-Border Marriage Migrants in South Korea: Exploring Educational Assortative Mating - Sohee Shin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Jorge Manuel Balboa Chia, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Trends and Trajectories in Family Separation among Immigrant Families in the United States - Gabrielle Juteau, Bowling Green State University; Jenjira Yahirun, Bowling Green State University

Session Organizer

• Yoonyoung Choi, University of Arizona