Chicago is home to the second-largest Mexican immigrant population in the United States, yet the activities of this community have gone relatively unexamined by both the media and academia. In this groundbreaking new book, Xóchitl Bada takes us inside one of the most vital parts of Chicago’s Mexican immigrant community—its many hometown associations. Hometown associations (HTAs) consist of immigrants from the same town in Mexico and often begin quite informally, as soccer clubs or prayer groups. As Bada’s work shows, however, HTAs have become a powerful force for change, advocating for Mexican immigrants in the United States while also working to improve living conditions in their communities of origin. Focusing on a group of HTAs founded by immigrants from the state of Michoacán, the book shows how their activism has bridged public and private spheres, mobilizing social reforms in both inner-city Chicago and rural Mexico. Bringing together ethnography, political theory, and archival research, Bada excavates the surprisingly long history of Chicago’s HTAs, dating back to the 1920s, then traces the emergence of new models of community activism in the twenty-first century. Filled with vivid observations and original interviews, Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán gives voice to an underrepresented community and sheds light on an underexplored form of global activism.

When immigrants to the United States need to learn English, receive health services, open a bank account or get a work certification, US state and local governments or non-profit organizations usually assist as part of the process of supporting immigrant integration and, ultimately, citizenship. But over the past two decades, Mexico, and other origin countries of migrants have been increasingly filling gaps in these activities through their consular representations, particularly focusing on populations with precarious legal status. Put in the larger context of diaspora policies, these practices -- focused on establishing closer ties between the origin country and the emigrant population and protecting their rights through the provision of social services -- are one of the clearest manifestations of the reconceptualization of the boundaries of citizenship and the rights and obligations that come with it. This book looks at citizenship and immigrant integration from the perspective of countries of origin: specifically the processes through which Mexico and other Latin American countries are establishing programs to give their emigrant populations better access to education, health, banking, labor rights, language acquisition and civic participation in the United States. While immigrant integration is often assumed as an issue that mainly concerns the population and institutions of the country of destination, these cases demonstrate the role that origin countries play in supporting migrants' access to opportunities to participate as members of the societies they are a part of, challenging the limits of citizenship and sovereignty, and offering examples of innovative practices in the protection of migrants' rights. As an area of migration governance that is rarely discussed, this book offers a critical evaluation of these programs and their impact on emigrants, particularly on those who are undocumented or have precarious legal status, and the collaborations between governments and civil society groups on which the programs are based.

This book is specifically focused on preparing social workers for practice and research focused on Latinos in the United States. It provides readers with a multi-faceted and updated perspective on this community, including dispersal patterns across the United States and tapping cultural assets for development of social interventions.

In The Sanctuary City, Domenic Vitiello argues that sanctuary means much more than the limited protections offered by city governments or churches sheltering immigrants from deportation. It is a wider set of protections and humanitarian support for vulnerable newcomers. Sanctuary cities are the places where immigrants and their allies create safe spaces to rebuild lives and communities, often through the work of social movements and community organizations or civil society. Philadelphia has been an important center of sanctuary and reflects the growing diversity of American cities in recent decades. One result of this diversity is that sanctuary means different things for different immigrant, refugee, and receiving communities. Vitiello explores the migration, settlement, and local and transnational civil society of Central Americans, Southeast Asians, Liberians, Arabs, Mexicans, and their allies in the region across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Together, their experiences illuminate the diversity of immigrants and refugees in the United States and what is at stake for different people, and for all of us, in our immigration debates.

This volume investigates new migration patterns in the Americas addressing continuities and changes in existing population movements in the region. The book explores migration conditions and intersections across time and space relying on a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach that brings together the expertise of transnational scholars with diverse theoretical orientations, strengths, and methodological approaches. Some of the themes this edited volume explores include main features of contemporary migration in the Americas; causes, composition, and patterns of new migration flows; and state policies enacted to meet the challenges posed by new developments in migration flows.

Placed within the context of the past decade's war on terror and emergent Latino migrant movement, Reform without Justice addresses the issue of state violence against migrants in the United States. It questions what forces are driving draconian migration control policies and why it is that, despite its success in mobilizing millions, the Latino migrant movement and its allies have not been able to more successfully defend the rights of migrants. Gonzales argues that the contemporary Latino migrant movement and its allies face a dynamic form of political power that he terms "anti-migrant hegemony". This type of political power is exerted in multiple sites of power from Congress, to think tanks, talk shows and local government institutions, through which a rhetorically race neutral and common sense public policy discourse is deployed to criminalize migrants. Most insidiously anti-migrant hegemony allows for large sectors of "pro-immigrant" groups to concede to coercive immigration enforcement measures such as a militarized border wall and the expansion of immigration policing in local communities in exchange for so-called Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Given this reality, Gonzales sustains that most efforts to advance immigration reform will fail to provide justice for migrants. This is because proposed reform measures ignore the neoliberal policies driving migration and reinforce the structures of state violence used against migrants to the detriment of democracy for all. Reform without Justice concludes by discussing how Latino migrant activists - especially youth - and their allies can change this reality and help democratize the United States.

In the past two decades, changes in the Mexican government's policies toward the 30 million Mexican migrants living in the US highlight the importance of the Mexican diaspora in both countries given its size, its economic power and its growing political participation across borders. This work examines how the Mexican government's assessment of the possibilities and consequences of implementing certain emigration policies from 1848 to 2010 has been tied to changes in the bilateral relationship, which remains a key factor in Mexico's current development of strategies and policies in relation to migrants in the United States. Understanding this dynamic gives an insight into the stated and unstated objectives of Mexico's recent activism in defending migrants' rights and engaging the diaspora, the continuing linkage between Mexican migration policies and shifts in the US-Mexico relationship, and the limits and possibilities for expanding shared mechanisms for the management of migration within the NAFTA framework.