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Reviews
| Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada. By Irene Bloemraad. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xv + 369 pp. Tables, graphs, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).
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In Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada, sociologist Irene Bloemraad seeks to solve a puzzle. What accounts for diverging trajectories of citizenship acquisition and political involvement among immigrants in the United States compared to Canada? Both nations are North American democracies characterized by relatively liberal immigration policies compared to most other countries in the world. Similar systems of naturalization evolved in both places. Both experienced rising immigration over the past four decades. Why, then, have levels of naturalization declined dramatically in the United States since the 1970s and increased in Canada over the same period? |
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Citizenship is an important indicator of political inclusion, and much of Bloemraad's book focuses on the formal process of becoming a legal citizen. But formal citizenship status in the eyes of the state is just one aspect of citizenship. To understand political incorporation more broadly, Bloemraad also examines immigrants' sense of belonging, the degree to which community organizations and leaders advocate for their communities, and immigrants' representation in the electoral arena. In each of these areas, Bloemraad finds that immigrants achieve greater levels of incorporation in Canada than in the United States. |
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Bloemraad dismisses the most popular explanations for the differences in citizenship and political participation with a compelling set of data analyses. First, she shows the gaps cannot be explained by differently sized immigrant streams to each country. Second, because immigrants from places all over the world—including Mexico, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, and Poland—naturalize at a higher rate in Canada compared to the United States, the gap cannot be accounted for completely by the composition of the immigrant streams. Finally, Bloemraad uses empirical data to refute assumptions that differences in the skills and resources of individual immigrants or the costs and requirements for naturalization fully explain the political incorporation gap. |
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Bloemraad argues that too often differences in political incorporation are attributed to individual or group attitudes and resources. Instead, she highlights the central role of state policies in structuring immigrants' political mobilization, participation, and sense of belonging by using an ingenious research design that compares Vietnamese and Portuguese immigrants in two North American cities, Boston and Toronto. These comparisons allow her to separate the often confounding effects of national origin, race and ethnicity, and the policies and culture of reception related to particular places. |
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Canada's official policy of multiculturalism and the greater resources it devotes to organizations and services aimed at all immigrants increase political integration and participation among that country's newcomers by creating a welcoming atmosphere and strengthening social and institutional networks. In the United States, resettlement programs aid those who are admitted as refugees, such as Vietnamese, but no state-sponsored multiculturalism policy or government funds for general immigrant organizations exist. Most U.S. immigrants must rely on piecemeal programs from a more limited number of community organizations. Bloemraad contends that lower levels of symbolic and material government support for immigrant services and the absence of state policies that officially endorse multiculturalism conspire against immigrants' political integration in the United States. Bloemraad's cross-country, cross-group research design allows for these critical insights—missed by other scholars of contemporary immigration. |
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Bloemraad's arguments about the role of race and the racialized welfare state in the United States, whiteness and Portuguese identity formation, and Asian American panethnicity (or lack thereof) could have been developed further in ways that might have strengthened her arguments about race in northern America with more analytic weight. Even without these additions, Becoming a Citizen represents a major advance in the field. Bloemraad's analysis is nuanced and clear, her focus on institutions and policies fills an important lacuna in the field, and her specific findings about Vietnamese and Portuguese immigrants in Boston and Toronto help resolve key questions in the discipline about citizenship and democratic inclusion.
Janelle Wong
University of Southern California
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