NOTE: NO FURTHER DISCOUNT FOR THIS PRODUCT - Significantly reduced price-- Overstock List Price This report is the culmination of more than two years of research into immigrant integration efforts across all sectors of society in the United States. The report provides an overview of successful integration initiatives observed in many sectors and prescribes recommendations to launch a coordinated national campaign--similar to past Americanization movements--to promote the assimilation of immigrants into American civic culture. It presents recommendations presented for the President's consideration. It provides a blueprint to implement the vision of a coordinated national strategy and affirms America's long-standing tradition as a nation of immigrants.
Immigrants from all over the world have been drawn for centuries to the United States, and their contributions continue to strengthen this great nation. Enriching our national character, immigrants bring vitality and optimism to both our economy and society. A nation based not on ethnicity, race, religion, or culture, the United States of America is a country in which people from every background come together to govern themselves in a political framework inclusive of all. Americans have embraced the opportunities and met the challenges associated with each successive wave of immigration. Several recent factors point to the need for a concerted national effort to ensure the successful assimilation of our current wave of immigrants. Today's immigrants are coming to the United States in record numbers, from diverse countries of origin, and some are settling in new gateway communities without long immigrant-receiving traditions. These trends warrant action from all sectors of society to foster the integration of immigrants into American civic culture. All of us have a vested interest in reengaging and preserving the fundamental civic principles and values that bind immigrants and citizens alike. The result of such efforts builds universal attachment to America's core civic values, strengthens social and political cohesion, and will help the United States continue to prosper as a nation of immigrants bound by an enduring promise of freedom grounded in democracy, liberty, equal opportunity, and respect for the rule of law. Recognizing a historic opportunity to emphasize the importance of immigrant integration, on June 7, 2006, President George W. Bush created by executive order the Task Force on New Americans (Task Force). The Task Force brought together a wide variety of federal agencies to strengthen the efforts of federal, state, and local agencies to help legal immigrants embrace the common core of American civic culture, learn our common language, and fully become Americans. The efforts of the Task Force centered on the idea that assimilation is an opportunity to renew America's political values and enrich communities by celebrating the bonds that unite us all. The Task Force was guided by two themes that have uniquely defined America's immigration experience: Diversity within Unity: Diversity makes America strong, but unity keeps America successful. In advocating patriotic assimilation, the Task Force refers to a unifying civic identity that respects diversity, including individual religious and cultural traditions, but does not use these elements to define the identity of the political community. American identity is political and is composed of three key elements: 1) embracing the principles of American democracy; 2) identifying with U.S. history; and 3) communicating in English. Citizenship Is an Identity: Citizenship is an identity and not simply a benefit. Feeling and being perceived as part of the political community is an important indicator of a person's integration into a society. As a result of roundtable discussions, site visits, and the collective experience and research of Task Force members, the Task Force on New Americans recommends strengthening assimilation efforts across the nation and among all sectors of society. The integration efforts described in this report are a federal call to action that defines a modern-day Americanization movement. The Task Force on New Americans calls for the following: 1. An Americanization Movement for the Twenty first Century, 2. Viewing Integration as a Two-way Street, 3. Improved Legislation on Integration and Citizenship, 4. Federal Celebration of Citizenship , 5. Federal Leadership on Integration, 6. Enhanced E-learning Tools for Adults, 7. Encouraging the Private Sector to Promote, Integration, 8. Mobilizing the Volunteer Community, 9. Increasing Integration Stakeholders, 10. Broadened Analysis and Evaluation of Integration.
The arrival of immigrants on America's shores has always posed a singular problem: once they are here, how are these diverse peoples to be transformed into Americans? The Americanization movement of the 1910s and 1920s addressed this challenge by seeking to train immigrants for citizenship, representing a key element of the Progressives' "search for order" in a modernizing America. Frank Van Nuys examines for the first time how this movement, in an effort to help integrate an unruly West into the emerging national system, was forced to reconcile the myth of rugged individualism with the demands of a planned society. In an era convulsed by world war and socialist revolution, the Americanization movement was especially concerned about the susceptibility of immigrants to un-American propaganda and union agitation. As Van Nuys convincingly demonstrates, this applied as much to immigrants in the urbanizing and industrializing West as it did to those occupying the ethnic enclaves of cities in the East. In Americanizing the West he tells how hundreds of bureaucrats, educators, employers, and reformers participated in this movement by developing adult immigrant education programs-and how these attempts contributed more toward bureaucratizing the West than it did to turning immigrants into productive citizens. He deftly ties this history to broader national developments and shows how Westerners brought distinctive approaches to Americanization to accommodate and preserve their own sense of history and identity. Van Nuys shows that, although racism and social control agendas permeated Americanization efforts in the West, Americanizers sustained their faith in education as a powerful force in transforming immigrants into productive citizens. He also shows how some westerners-especially in California-believed they faced a "racial frontier" unlike other parts of the country in light of the influx of Hispanics and Asians, so that westerners became major players in the crafting of not only American identity but also immigration policies. The mystique of the white pioneer past still maintains a powerful hold on ideas of American identity, and we still deal with many of these issues through laws and propositions targeting immigrants and alien workers. Americanizing the West makes a clear case for regional distinctiveness in this citizenship program and puts current headlines in perspective by showing how it helped make the West what it is today.
Pledging allegiance, singing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” wearing a flag pin—these are all markers of modern patriotism, emblems that announce the devotion of American citizens. Most of these nationalistic performances were formulized during the early twentieth century and driven to new heights by the panic surrounding national identity during World War I. In To Become an American Leslie A. Hahner argues that, in part, the Americanization movement engendered the transformation of patriotism during this period. Americanization was a massive campaign designed to fashion immigrants into perfect Americans—those who were loyal in word, deed, and heart. The larger outcome of this widespread movement was a dramatic shift in the nation’s understanding of Americanism. Employing a rhetorical lens to analyze the visual and aesthetic practices of Americanization, Hahner contends that Americanization not only tutored students in the practices of citizenship but also created a normative visual metric that modified how Americans would come to understand, interpret, and judge their own patriotism and that of others.
Continuing large-scale migration to the United States raises the question of how best to integrate new immigrants into the American national community. Traditionally, one successful answer has been to encourage immigrants to learn our language, culture, history, and civic traditions. New immigrants would then be invited become citizens and welcomed as full members of the community. However, a concerted effort is underway to gain acceptance for, and implement, the idea that the United States should allow new immigrants to vote without becoming citizens. It is mounted by an alliance that brings together progressive academics, law professors, local and state political leaders, and community activists, all working to decouple voting from American citizenship. Their effort show signs of success, but is it really in America's best interests to allow new immigrants to have the vote? Their proposals have been much advocated, but little analyzed. Neither a polemic nor a whitewash, Stanley A. Renshon provides a careful analysis of the arguments put forward by advocates of this position on the basis of fairness, increasing democracy, civic learning, and moral necessity and asks: Do they really help immigrants become Americans?
"With all entries followed by cross-references and further reading lists, this current resource is ideal for high school and college students looking for connecting ideas and additional sources on them. The work brings together the many facets of global studies into a solid reference tool and will help those developing and articulating an ideological perspective." — Library Journal The Encyclopedia of Global Studies is the reference work for the emerging field of global studies. It covers both transnational topics and intellectual approaches to the study of global themes, including the globalization of economies and technologies; the diaspora of cultures and dispersion of peoples; the transnational aspects of social and political change; the global impact of environmental, technological, and health changes; and the organizations and issues related to global civil society. Key Themes: • Global civil society • Global communications, transportation, technology • Global conflict and security • Global culture, media • Global demographic change • Global economic issues • Global environmental and energy issues • Global governance and world order • Global health and nutrition • Global historical antecedents • Global justice and legal issues • Global religions, beliefs, ideologies • Global studies • Identities in global society Readership: Students and academics in the fields of politics and international relations, international business, geography and environmental studies, sociology and cultural studies, and health.
How do (im)migrant writers negotiate their representation of a multilingual world for a monolingual audience? Does their English betray the presence of another language, is that other language erased, or does it appear here and there, on special occasions for special reasons? Do words and meanings wander from one language and one self to another? Do the psychic and cultural worlds of different languages split apart or merge? What is the aesthetic effect of such wandering, splitting, or merging? Usually described as “code-switches” by linguists, fragments of other languages have wandered into American literature in English from the beginning. Wanderwords asks what, in the memoirs, poems, essays, and fiction of a variety of twentieth and twenty first century writers, the function and meaning of such language migration might be. It shows what there is to be gained if we learn to read migrant writing with an eye, and an ear, for linguistic difference and it concludes that, freighted with the other-cultural meanings wrapped up in their different looks and sounds, wanderwords can perform wonders of poetic signification as well as cultural critique. Bringing together literary and cultural theory with linguistics as well as the theory and history of migration, and with psychoanalysis for its understanding of the multilingual unconscious, Wanderwords engages closely with the work of well-known and unheard-of writers such as Mary Antin and Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez and Junot Díaz, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Bok and Truus van Bruinessen, Susana Chávez-Silverman and Gustavo Perez-Firmat, Pietro DiDonato and Don DeLillo. In so doing, a poetics of multilingualism unfolds that stretches well beyond translation into the lingual contact zone of English-with-other-languages that is American literature, belatedly re-connecting with the world.
The go-to book on immigration: fact-based, comprehensive, and nonpartisan. Immigration is one of the most controversial topics in the United States and everywhere else. Pundits, politicians, and the public usually depict immigrants as either villains or victims. The villain narrative is that immigrants pose a threat—to our economy because they steal our jobs; our way of life because they change our culture; and to our safety and laws because of their criminality. The victim argument tells us that immigrants are needy outsiders—the poor, huddled masses whom we must help at our own cost if necessary. But the data clearly debunks both narratives. From jobs, investment, and innovation to cultural vitality and national security, more immigration has an overwhelmingly positive impact on everything that makes a society successful. In The Truth About Immigration, Wharton professor Zeke Hernandez draws from nearly 20 years of research to answer all the big questions about immigration. He combines moving personal stories with rigorous research to offer an accessible, apolitical, and evidence-based look at how newcomers affect our local communities and our nation. You'll learn about the overlooked impact of immigrants on investment and job creation; realize how much we take for granted the novel technologies, products, and businesses newcomers create; get the facts straight about perennial concerns like jobs, crime, and undocumented immigrants; and gain new perspectives on misunderstood issues such as the border, taxes, and assimilation. Most books making a case for immigration tell you that immigration is good for immigrants. This book is all about how newcomers benefit you, your community, and your country. Skeptics fear that newcomers compete economically with locals because of their similarities and fail to socially assimilate because of their differences. You'll see that it's exactly the opposite: newcomers bring enduring economic benefits because of their differences and contribute positively to society because of their similarities. Destined to become the go-to book on one of the most important issues of our time, this book turns fear into hope by proving a simple truth: immigrants are essential for economically prosperous and socially vibrant nations.
