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This chapter reviews the integration experiences and policies in Germany before and after the so-called “refugee crisis’. Chancellor Angela Merkel's famous words ‘wir schaffen das’ (we manage this) have mobilized both policy actions and a massive grassroots engagement. In this context, we discuss the scope, efficiency and impact of German integration and adaptation policies. We review critically how Germany has dealt institutionally with immigration in the past and how it has adjusted its institutional approach to deal with the refugee crisis. Furthermore, in a case study on integration policies in higher education, we highlight the interplay between institutional approaches and grassroots engagement to achieve integration objectives. We argue that to a certain extent, the refugee crisis has acted as a catalyst for Germany to come to terms with its long-denied status as an immigration country.

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promised to reduce inequalities in insurance coverage between Latinos and non-Latinos by expanding coverage, it also excluded a large portion of noncitizen immigrants. Past research has demonstrated that among Latinos, further inequalities have developed between citizens and noncitizens after the ACA took effect, but it is unclear if this pattern is unique to Latinos or is evident among non-Latinos as well. I use data from the 2011 to 2016 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) (n = 369,386) to test how the relationship between citizenship status (native citizen, naturalized citizen, or noncitizen) and insurance coverage changed after the ACA, adjusting for health, demographic, and socioeconomic factors. I disaggregate the analysis by ethnicity to test whether this change differs between Latinos and non-Latinos. The analysis finds that after the ACA, naturalized citizens across ethnic groups moved toward parity with native citizens in health insurance coverage while the benefits of the ACA for noncitizens were conditional on ethnicity. For non-Latinos, lacking citizenship became less disadvantageous for predicting insurance coverage while for Latinos, lacking citizenship became even more disadvantageous in predicting insurance coverage. This bifurcation among noncitizens by ethnicity implies that while the ACA has strengthened institutional boundaries between citizens and noncitizens, this distinction is primarily affecting Latinos. The conclusion offers considerations on how legal systems of stratification influence population health processes.

This chapter discusses how gender scholarship has transformed the study of immigration in the United States since the 1970s.

This discussion is based on a synthesized review of immigration studies and their connections to gender scholarship in different historical contexts.

Over the past four decades, gender scholarship has significantly shaped the theories, methodologies, and core concerns in immigration studies in the United States. Before the 1970s, immigration research focused on men. Studies of immigrant women began in the 1980s, which not only challenged previous gender-blind perspectives but also highlighted women’s unique experiences. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the study of gender and immigration focused on immigrant women’s vulnerabilities in the global economy and enhancing women’s status at home through employment in the host society. Since the 1990s, more diverse topics have emerged to involve discussion on globalization and transnationalism. These gendering trends in immigration studies have not taken place in an intellectual vacuum. Rather, they have been influenced by developments in gender scholarship within different historical contexts.

To enrich gender-focused and feminism-informed research in immigration studies, scholars will have to build connections across subareas and engage in dialogues with each other. More immigrant groups must also be studied to reflect the extremely diverse make-up of current immigrants in the United States. Intersectional analyses are also needed to avoid homogenizing studied groups. Finally, mainstream immigration research must begin to perceive gender as an essential analytical framework.

Multicultural and multi-ethnic diversity is increasing across Europe. The current influx of migrants from conflict zones such as Syria and Iraq makes the issue even more important and challenging. Consequently, how we consider the identification of special educational needs (SEN) and then the making of appropriate provision to meet those needs must change. In this chapter we examine the interface between these important factors – SEN and ethnic origin. We draw upon two research programmes in order to highlight these issues. First, we examine large-scale studies using quantitative methods to explore the relationship between ethnicity and different categories of SEN. Second, we report research that uses qualitative methods, exploring the perspectives of children and young people with SEN, growing up in multicultural United Kingdom. Although these research studies were carried out in the United Kingdom, they have resonance across Europe, and beyond.

In democratic societies people can impact policy making and in theory can direct societal development. Hence, due to active public participation in the decision-making process, it might be easier to solve societal problems in democratic countries. Nonetheless, democracies are not free from social ills nor are nondemocracies. Though the benefits outweigh the costs of democratic changes, the costs should not be forgotten. Especially when we consider the impact of democracy and development on population health, the costs are significant though limitedly discussed.

The costs in societal health are especially visible among poverty-driven populations of democratic and nondemocratic countries. Poverty, in general, limits access to medical care and modern medical treatment. Poverty is also one of the most influential separators of society separating social strata in terms of their differentiated access to health-care facilities and modern medical treatments. Democracies by being more likely supported by international networks that help to open access to medical care, including international medical services, ease the struggle against poverty and unhealthy living conditions, but democracies are still unable to eliminate them.

The ‘hostile environment’ agenda of Government has effectively endorsed the deliberate exploitation of irregular migrants in the agricultural industry. This minor project of jurisprudence will provide two arguments in support of this hypothesis. Firstly, the vulnerabilities faced by irregular migrants are reinforced through the xenophobic narrative embodied within the law and the courts. The lack of priority afforded to modern slavery on the UK Policy Agenda has allowed a ‘grey labour market’ (1) to develop. Irregular migrants face a ‘precarity paradox’ and (2) they must avoid the carceral regime of immigration control by entering into unprotected and deliberately exploitative work. Secondly, a lacklustre attempt to remedy the corruption in the horticultural industry proves that the state is preoccupied, capitalising on irregular labour practice in the interests of state capital. Thus, the Government allows the commodification of workers within the supply chain to profit British businesses.

This article addresses the claim, particularly popular in the 2000s and implicitly resting on a segmentation view of the labour market, that a flexible labour market-driven immigration policy (within the EU as well as from outside), often associated to a ‘Canadian model’, would respond to the economic needs of continental European countries.

A comparative historical approach is applied, including analysis of historical series of unemployment and migration data and a qualitative analysis of secondary sources on Germany, Spain and Canada, selected as best representatives of different labour market and immigration regimes. The research asks to what extent, and how, immigration has been used as a ‘buffer’ for labour market uncertainty.

Against ideas of a ‘Canadian’ model advertised in Europe (e.g. Germany), the historical and quantitative analysis shows that Canada itself has moved from short-term labour market-driven immigration policies to more long-term approaches. In fact, there has been a stronger labour market-migration link in Spain, but not without problems,

The article is a small-N comparison of critical cases, that is most different labour market models. Major demographic and geographic differences exist between the three countries, which raises even more scepticism about the suitability of a Canadian model in Europe.

The policy implications are centred on the detected paradox of labour market-driven immigration policies: in order to be sustainable, they need to have a long-term orientation and involve some degree of social integration policies.

The article adds to comparative studies of migration policies through a stronger link to labour market analysis and in particular issues of uncertainty and segmentation.

The US fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation’s development, but it also took place long before the nation’s mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830–1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830–1880 and test the results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850–1860, 1860–1870, and 1870–1880 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early US fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity tradeoff, and life cycle savings theories.