The Other Immigrants: 21st Century White Immigrants and Migration Studies in the U.S.

Tanya Golash-Boza
Sociology
UC Merced

This short-term research residency enabled participants to work on contemporary “white” immigrants in the United States. Most studies of contemporary immigration ignore white immigrants. However, precisely because immigration scholars primarily focus on non-white immigrants, they rarely consider how whiteness is constructed in the contemporary era. Our goals were to: 1) provide new theorizing around immigrant “incorporation” and its relationship to the construction of “whiteness;” 2) develop new ways of thinking about immigration and racial formation; and 3) collect, code, and present new data focused in immigrants classified as “white” in the U.S.