Abstract
In Shifting Boundaries, Alexis Silver contributes to scholarship on the perspectives and experiences of immigrant youth in the context of immigrant incorporation, integration, and immigration federalism in the United States. Through in-depth qualitative interviews in Allen Creek, a pseudonym for a small town in rural North Carolina, Silver reveals examples of the shifting ground which immigrant youth must navigate throughout their daily lives and which prevents them from establishing a firm foundation.
Through this work, Silver offers new insight into understandings of international migration and immigration federalism by contributing the concept of “tectonic incorporation” to theoretical discussions about the shifting, multi-layered, and multi-scalar contexts of immigrant integration, incorporation, and reception. Much like the concept of Earth’s tectonic plates, Silver describes “tectonic incorporation” as a metaphor for the political and institutional structures that often move unpredictably as immigrants navigate the ever-changing context of immigration policy. As policies at different levels — local, state, and federal — shift in different directions, immigrants must reassess their situations, regain their footing, and change plans to accommodate new policy landscapes. The landscapes that tectonic incorporation create are particularly tumultuous for the 1.5-generation youth — immigrants brought to the United States as children. Silver’s work focuses on both 1.5-generation undocumented youth and their second-generation citizen peers to distinguish the differences that shifting policies have on each group.
Throughout the book, Silver highlights the interactions among local, state, and federal policies that shape and influence the receptivity context for immigrant youth. By focusing on the instability of institutional and governmental policies, she argues that undocumented immigrant youth are unable to follow a linear path to incorporation. The metaphorical “tectonic plates” of federal, state, and local policies, along with social institutions, move in different directions, sometimes toward and sometimes away from further incorporation. When aligned, these tectonic policy plates may create pathways for immigrant youth toward solid ground. Yet, when policies at multiple scales move in different directions, the ground upon which immigrant youth navigate their daily lives will feel less sturdy, revealing fault lines. Silver suggests that when such tremors occur, immigrant youth may become discouraged and their ambitions deflated as they fear repeated disappointment. Many immigrant youth will subsequently be tenuously positioned to take advantage of programs, such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 1 that may emerge rather unexpectedly. When policymakers later rescind such programs, immigrant youth are again at a crossroads of whether they can reach their ambitions or stumble backwards due to newly imposed or re-imposed barriers.
Following the introduction, which introduces the concept of tectonic incorporation and its contribution to theory, and a thorough chapter reviewing the wider literature on contexts of reception and theories of assimilation, incorporation, and integration, the book proceeds into several chapters describing immigrant youth’s experiences in the study area. Chapter two documents the experiences of immigrant youth and those who interact with them in the context of local policies and small town politics. Chapter three explores these experiences within the context of pathways to social membership and belonging in the local high school. Chapter four examines undocumented immigrant youth’s perspectives after graduating high school and the isolation and backlash that ensued after DACA was signed into effect, due to a variegated landscape of access to higher education and opportunity beyond high school. Chapter five then explores examples of alternatives for upward mobility and incorporation when traditional avenues to work and higher education contain obstacles associated with liminal legality. Chapter six turns to immigrant youth activism as a means to inclusion and as a way immigrant youth assert membership through activism. Throughout these chapters, Silver weaves a compelling narrative, drawn from interviews with immigrant youth and other community members and bolstered by links to the broader literature, of how immigrant youth experience tectonic incorporation. She concludes the book with a discussion of tectonic incorporation in practice in a multilayered context of reception, exclusion, and racialized ethnicity, followed by policy recommendations.
Shifting Boundaries contributes not only another example of the many ways in which immigrants, particularly immigrant youth, navigate a multi-scalar context of immigration policy in their daily lives but also a new lens through which to examine the dynamic, ever-changing local, state, and federal policy contexts of immigration federalism. It serves as a resource for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers interested in immigrant incorporation and integration within the multi-layered, multi-scalar contexts of immigration federalism in the United States and other immigrant-receiving contexts. Amid the dynamic immigration policy landscape in the United States, this book offers a fresh perspective on the experiences of different immigrant communities as they navigate a variety of pathways and daily experiences on the shifting ground of immigration policy landscapes brought about by processes of “tectonic incorporation.”