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Purpose – Prior research suggests that high school experiences shape young adult political behaviors, particularly among immigrant youth. The U.S. social studies classroom, focused on democratic citizenship education, proves an interesting socializing institution.Methods – Through qualitative inquiry, we interviewed Latino immigrant young adults and their former teachers regarding their high school social studies experiences and evolving political and civic engagement.Findings – Armed with experience bridging the worlds of the school and home, immigrant students respond and relate to the content and pedagogy of the social studies classroom in such a way that they (1) participate in civic discourse and (2) nurture a disposition toward leadership through teachers’ civic expectations of them and instructional emphasis on critical thinking skills.Social implications – The ability to engage in civic discourse and a disposition toward leadership are both necessary to foster America's democratic ideals, and to take on leadership roles during adulthood. With focused effort on the unique perspective of immigrant youth, high school social studies teachers can nurture in these students the ability to become leaders in young adulthood, broadening the potential leadership pool.Originality – This study highlights how the social studies curriculum may be particularly salient to Latino immigrant youth as they transition from adolescence to young adulthood and develop their political and civic identities.

This paper examines how changes in immigration policy levers actually affect the skill characteristics of immigrant arrivals using a unique Canadian immigrant landings database. The paper identifies some hypotheses on the possible effects on immigrant skill characteristics of the total immigration rate, the point system weights and immigrant class weights. The “skill” characteristics examined are level of education, age, and fluency in either English or French. Regressions are used to test the hypotheses from Canadian landings data for 1980–2001. It is found that (i) the larger the inflow rate of immigrants the lower the average skill level of the arrivals, (ii) increasing the proportion of skill-evaluated immigrants raises average skill levels, and (iii) increasing point system weights on a specific skill dimension indeed has the intended effect of raising average skill levels in this dimension among arriving principal applicants.

The focus of this chapter is on the experience of safety by Dutch seniors in a multicultural neighbourhood and how this is shaped by their labelling of immigrant men in public space. I describe how meaning is given to immigrants in general, and more specifically, to immigrant men who hang around in public places. This research is based on ongoing interactions with 30 senior citizens (above 60 years of age) over a period of two years and shows that regular and fleeting interethnic contact has major but opposing influences on how the presence of ethnic men in public space is perceived. Those who have prolonged interethnic contact over years tend to normalize the behaviour of ‘immigrant men hanging around’; those who do not have these contacts tend to use the populist rhetoric in media and politics to criminalize this behaviour.

One of the most important changes in the past few decades influencing the way in which early childhood is experienced in European countries is the dramatic increase of mothers with young children who are also active in the paid labour force. The Dutch case is exemplary of this change. Dutch women's labour force participation increased from internationally the lowest rate for married women at 7.3% in 1960, to 32.8% in 1987 and to 58.7% in 2005. The latter was above the average participation rate in the European Union (15 countries) (Statistics Netherlands, CBS, 2006). In addition, the proportion of employed mothers with children below the age of 6 more than doubled in less than a decade: from 26% in 1988 to 57% in 1996 (OSA, 1997).¹ In 2003, 90% of women in the Netherlands remained in the labour force after giving birth to their first child, although they worked fewer hours (Statistics Netherlands, CBS, 2006). Children who are born in the Netherlands nowadays, therefore, generally have a mother working in the labour market, who has to organise her time around the triple needs of care, income and professional demands. This substantial change from the situation still prevalent in the mid-eighties, is somewhat counter-balanced by changes in fathers’ behaviour following the birth of a child. While in most European countries fathers increase their labour force participation when they have a child (see e.g. Plantenga & Siegel, 2004), an increasing proportion of Dutch fathers on the contrary reduces it. 10% of first-time fathers reduced their working hours when their child was born in 1997, 13% did so in 2003 (Statistics Netherlands, CBS, 2006).²

Purchasing a home is the largest expenditure many people will make during their lifetime, as well as their greatest source of wealth. There is a homeownership gap between natives and immigrants well documented in the literature. I examine the determinants of homeownership, the value of purchased homes (a measure of potential housing wealth), and the equity owned for those who have purchased a home (a measure of actual housing wealth) for immigrants and natives. When immigrants are separated by citizenship status the homeownership gap between natives and immigrants is shown to be a gap between natives and non-citizen immigrants. Immigrant citizens have ownership outcomes as good or better than natives. Further, the gap reflects a problem in ownership, brought about by age and income distributional differences, not in value or equity for homeowners. All immigrants are predicted to have higher home value and home equity than natives.

In this chapter, we explore a form of young people’s activism taking place in a central societal institution and a central forum in the lives of young people – school – that we conceptualise as ‘active equity’. We present three cases from northern Finland: reindeer herders smashing potatoes, immigrant youth requesting a key and young people lying on sofas during breaks between lessons. We suggest that these acts, in the contexts in which they took place, were an unrecognised form of social action for equity undertaken by young people. We argue that the concept of active equity helps examine the assertion of rights and claims for justice by children and young people. In each case we present, young people make visible an inequity in their contexts: the reindeer herding way of life was overlooked in school, asylum-seeking or refugee immigrants were excluded from the main school building, and non-high-performing young people were excluded from comfortable areas during lessons. These, in turn, linked to broader societal inequities in Finland, a country commonly known for its equality. In school, young people are commonly viewed through intersecting discourses of democracy and education. In both discourses, they are commonly positioned as learners rather than speakers. Through active equity, young people subtly imprint themselves on the scene of education in new ways. For this reason, their acts of active equity remain typically either unrecognised or seen as oppositional in school.

The social inclusion of youth is addressed from the perspective of goal-directed action in order to understand and foster it effectively. Conceptualized from the perspective of contextual action theory (CAT), the specific understanding of action as levels, perspectives and systems provides the basis to unpack the complexity of human action. One pertinent action system is identified as project. It refers to a series of actions over time with the same goal. Using this understanding, the social inclusion of youth is described though the joint actions and projects between youth and non-familial adults. These joint actions and projects include advocating for youth, providing instrumental knowledge and encouraging community involvement and civil engagement. CAT is also used to conceptualize and conduct research on the social inclusion of youth. Specifically, the action project method was used to describe the joint projects of both youth with disability and immigrant youth as these projects involved the youth’s social inclusion.

Purpose – This paper is a critical analysis of the relation between immigration and crime/criminalization in Italy, with particular reference to “second generation” immigrants enrolled in the eighth grade of a sample of junior high schools in Bologna, Italy. The paper investigates whether – after allowing for differences in sex, social class, and other relevant variables – significant differences in self-reported deviance would emerge between second-generation immigrants and Italians. The research draws on three major criminological theories about deviant behavior: social control theory, labeling approach, and culture conflict theory.

Methodology – The study has been conducted as a self-report survey of a sample of 335 students enrolled in the eighth grade of 4 junior high schools in the metropolitan area of Bologna, Italy. Respondents were administered a questionnaire in the classroom, and asked to answer questions focusing on socio-biographical factors, socio-economic conditions, value-orientation, and self-reported deviant behaviors. Regression analysis was conducted on the data, and an interpretative model was developed based on the findings.

Findings – The research offers no evidence of a higher frequency or seriousness of self-reported deviance among young “second-generation” immigrants compared to Italians. The findings suggest that – both for Italian and immigrant respondents – self-reported deviant behaviors appear to be strongly correlated with cultural/generational conflict, the perception of stigma, and weak family bonds.

Value – The paper offers an original contribution to scholarly research about migration and crime/criminalization. More specifically, it supports those criminological studies that deny any role of migration or national origin in the etiology of criminal behaviors.

This study empirically investigates the difference in employment status between marriage immigrants and native women in Taiwan based on a combined dataset from the 2003 Survey of Foreign and Mainland Spouses’ Life Status and 2003 Women’s Marriage, Fertility and Employment Survey. The conceptual framework is based on the family labor supply model, the human and social capital theories, and the immigrant assimilation theory. From the Probit model of the employment probability, our findings indicate that family background variables, including the presence of small children and husbands’ characteristics, play fairly significant roles in determining the employment probability of marriage immigrants. As for native women, human capital variables such as schooling and age are the most significant factors affecting their employment probability, while husbands’ characteristics play a less important role in this respect. The finding that the employment probability of foreign spouses rises rapidly with the number of years that have elapsed since migration may confirm the employment assimilation for marriage immigrants. This study further applies the nonlinear decomposition analysis developed in the work of Yun (2004) to examine the gap in employment probability between native women and foreign spouses in Taiwan. Our findings show that the employment probability differentials are mostly due to the difference in coefficients and that the effects of the two age variables play dominant roles. The difference in coefficients, in sum, contributes to increasing the gap of employment probability, while the difference in characteristics, in sum, tends to reduce the employment probability differentials.

Purpose: To describe some of the tensions that both unaccompanied and accompanied immigrant children and youth face when reuniting with family members living abroad after years of living apart, separated by borders and anti-immigrant policies are described.

Methods: Fifty-eight interviews with immigrant minors from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala and the tensions they reported having after moving in with their biological parents or legal sponsors in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area are drawn upon.

Findings: Youth reported that getting used to cohabitation and in-person relationships with their parents or other sponsor was difficult at first, though it improved over time. Despite the biological, emotional, and financial bonds, minors had to learn how to relate to new authority figures and follow their rules. Many reported feeling lonely and missing grandmothers and other family members and friends left behind in the country of birth.

Research implications: Interviews with counselors and local authorities that interface with these families show that parenting and youth programs in the places of settlement can become effective interventions to improve relations between children and parents recently reunited, which can indeed help with scholastic achievement and socio-economic advancement.

Value: The interview extracts bring a window into intrafamily dynamics, often overlooked in discussions of the integration of immigrant children and youth into their new homes and communities.