scholarly journals The Ordinary and Extraordinary: Producing Migrant Inclusion and Exclusion in US Sanctuary Movements

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Serin D Houston ◽  
Charlotte Morse

This article analyzes the Sanctuary Movement for Central Americans and the New Sanctuary Movement, two United States faith-based social movements, to think through the ways in which these pro-immigrant efforts paradoxically render migrants figuratively mute and often excluded from conceptualizations of the nation and its inhabitants even as they advocate for legal inclusion. We examine this tension of inclusion and exclusion through the frequent representation of migrants’ histories and Christianity as extraordinary in the Sanctuary Movement for Central Americans, and migrants’ lives as ordinary in the New Sanctuary Movement. We identify two key processes by which this framing of migrants as extraordinary or ordinary limits the enactment of full social, political, and economic inclusion: (a) public support is principally granted to certain stories, religions, identities, and experiences; and (b) migrants are consistently positioned, and often celebrated, by sanctuary activists as “others.” The discourses of migrants as extraordinary or ordinary effectively generate broad involvement of faith communities in sanctuary work. Yet, as we argue, this framing comes with the cost of limiting activist support only to particular groups of migrants, flattening the performances of migrant identities, and positioning migrants as perpetually exterior to the US. Reliance on discourses of the extraordinary and ordinary, therefore, can truncate opportunities for making legible a range of migration experiences and extending belonging to all migrants, outcomes that arise in contrast to the purported inclusionary goals of the faith-based sanctuary social movements.

Author(s):  
Sergio González

In the spring of 1982, six faith communities in Arizona and California declared themselves places of safe harbor for the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans and Guatemalans that had been denied legal proceedings for political asylum in the United States. Alleging that immigration officials had intentionally miscategorized Central Americans as “economic migrants” in order to accelerate their deportation, humanitarian organizations, legal advocates, and religious bodies sought alternatives for aid within their faiths’ scriptural teachings and the juridical parameters offered by international and national human rights and refugee law. Known as the sanctuary movement, this decade-long interfaith mobilization of lay and clerical activists indicted the US detention and deportation system and the country’s foreign policy initiatives in Latin America as morally bankrupt while arguing that human lives, regardless of documentation status, were sacred. In accusing the United States of being a violator of both domestic and international refugee legislation, subsequently exposing hundreds of thousands of people to persecution, torture, and death, the movement tested the idea that the country had always extended welcome to victims of persecution. Along with a broad network of anti-interventionist and humanitarian aid organizations, sanctuary galvanized more than 60,000 participants in 500 faith communities across the nation. By the 1990s, the movement had spurred congressional action in support of Central American asylees and served as the model for a renewed movement for sanctuary in support of undocumented Americans in the 21st century.


Author(s):  
Michael B. McElroy

Nuclear power was widely regarded as the Holy Grail for energy supply when first introduced into the US electricity market in the late 1950s and early 1960s— power so cheap that utilities could scarcely afford the cost of the meters needed to monitor its consumption and charge for its use. The first civilian reactor, with a capacity to produce 60 MW of electricity (MWe), went into service in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in late 1957. By the end of 1974, 55 reactors were in operation in the United States with a combined capacity of about 32 GWe. The largest individual power plant had a capacity of 1.25 GWe: the capacity of reactors constructed since 1970 averaged more than 1 GWe. The industry then went into a state of suspended animation. A series of highly publi¬cized accidents was responsible for this precipitous change in the fortunes of the industry. Only 13 reactors were ordered in the United States after 1975, and all of these orders were subsequently cancelled. Public support for nuclear power effectively disappeared in the United States following events that unfolded at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979. It suffered a further setback, not only in the United States but also worldwide, in the wake of the disaster that struck at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in the Ukraine on April 26, 1986. The most recent confidence- sapping development occurred in Japan, at the Fukushima- Daiichi nuclear complex. Floodwaters raised by a tsunami triggered by a major offshore earthquake resulted in a series of self- reinforcing problems in March 2011, culminating in a highly publicized release of radioactivity to the environment that forced the evacuation of more than 300,000 people from the surrounding communities If not a death blow, this most recent accident certainly clouded prospects for the future of nuclear power, not only in Japan but also in many other parts of the world. Notably, Germany elected to close down its nuclear facilities, leading to increased dependence on coal to meet its demand for electricity, seriously complicating its objective to markedly reduce the nation’s overall emissions of CO2.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taoran Liu ◽  
Zonglin He ◽  
Jian Huang ◽  
Ni Yan ◽  
Qian Chen ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectivesTo investigate the differences in vaccine hesitancy and preference of the currently available COVID-19 vaccines between two countries, viz. China and the United States (US).MethodA cross-national survey was conducted in both China and the US, and discrete choice experiments as well as Likert scales were utilized to assess vaccine preference and the underlying factors contributing to the vaccination acceptance. A propensity score matching (PSM) was performed to enable a direct comparison between the two countries.ResultsA total of 9,077 (5,375 and 3,702, respectively, from China and the US) respondents have completed the survey. After propensity score matching, over 82.0% respondents from China positively accept the COVID-19 vaccination, while 72.2% respondents form the US positively accept it. Specifically, only 31.9% of Chinese respondents were recommended by a doctor to have COVID-19 vaccination, while more than half of the US respondents were recommended by a doctor (50.2%), local health board (59.4%), or friends and families (64.8%). The discrete choice experiments revealed that respondents from the US attached the greatest importance to the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines (44.41%), followed by the cost of vaccination (29.57%), whereas those from China held a different viewpoint that the cost of vaccination covers the largest proportion in their trade-off (30.66%), and efficacy ranked as the second most important attribute (26.34%). Also, respondents from China tend to concerned much more about the adverse effect of vaccination (19.68% vs 6.12%) and have lower perceived severity of being infected with COVID-19.ConclusionWhile the overall acceptance and hesitancy of COVID-19 vaccination in both countries are high, underpinned distinctions between countries are observed. Owing to the differences in COVID-19 incidence rates, cultural backgrounds, and the availability of specific COVID-19 vaccines in two countries, the vaccine rollout strategies should be nation-dependent.


1981 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 80-83
Author(s):  
S. Ya. Chikin

In 1977, the US Congress published statistics on the operation of surgical clinics in many cities in the country. These materials cannot be read without a shudder. They once again proved that American doctors are no different from businessmen in their passion for profit. The report's conclusion was very sad. He testified that up to three million unjustified surgeries are performed annually in the United States. Naturally, they are not undertaken for the sake of the patient's health, but in order to present a more weighty bill to the patient, because the cost of the simplest surgical intervention is now estimated at at least $ 1000.


Social Text ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo

The Central American refugee crisis has been aggravated by the Trump administration’s policies, but this administration certainly did not precipitate it. The first half of this article examines the determinant role US policy played—and continues to play—in the violence that has sent tens of thousands of refugees to the US-Mexico border, showing how Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction has repeatedly been used to represent Central Americans as the existential enemy. From Ronald Reagan through Bill Clinton, administrations crafted policies toward the Central American enemy, directly creating the gang violence in the Northern Triangle. This article considers if the cost of security for the US citizenship is borne by the insecurity of Central American citizenship. The second half of the article examines fictionalized accounts drawn from the testimonies of women held in detention at Dilley, Texas, the existential enemy par excellence of the Trump administration. The reasons for their flight elucidate the particular ways in which gang violence against them and their children is gendered, showing how heteropatriarchy is decisive in both Mara violence and ICE and Border Patrol response to that violence, as evidenced in the experience of these women and their families.


2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-95
Author(s):  
Richard Wood

AbstractThis article examines the current debate in the United States (primarily) and Britain regarding government-funded social service provision via faith-based institutions. By highlighting the tension between the 'priestly' and 'prophetic' roles of public religion, it argues for the critical importance of protecting religion's prophetic role even as society moves toward more extensive public financing of priestly social service provision. The article first outlines contemporary prophetic religion in the United States, especially faith-based community organizing (also known as broad-based community organizing) efforts, emphasizing three facets of the field: its scale, its role in building social capital, the issues it has addressed. Secondly, the article argues that, despite the narrow partisan tenor of recent faith-based social service provision in the US, it may have redeeming features that new leaders will want to preserve. However, H. R. Niebuhr's (1951) analysis of the relationship between religion and culture is invoked to characterize four key tensions between priestly and prophetic religion that may be exacerbated by governmental funding. The conclusion outlines several approaches through which practitioners, policymakers, the press, and scholars can help society maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of such funding.


2021 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-275
Author(s):  
Jonathon L. Wiggins ◽  
Mary L. Gautier ◽  
Thomas P. Gaunt

The official, parish-identified, Catholic population in the United States over the past forty years (1980 to 2019) has grown 40 percent, from about 48 million to over 67 million. Such a hearty rate of growth might lead one to assume that the Catholic population is increasing across all parts of the country. This growth, however, has been anything but uniform. From 1980 to the present, the Catholic population in some US Census regions—mostly in the South and in the West of the country—has experienced a boom, while in others—mostly in the Northeast and Midwest—it has experienced a bust. In this article, the growth or decline in the number of Catholics in each of the four US Census regions is explored, using data from the 2020 Faith Communities Today survey as well as data submitted by Catholic dioceses. These analyses give a more nuanced portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States, shedding light on both the challenges and opportunities the US Catholic Church is experiencing in 2021.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-403
Author(s):  
Rihan Yeh

AbstractIn 2018, amid US president Donald Trump’s ongoing calls to “build the wall” along the US-Mexico border, protestors in the Mexican border city of Tijuana took up his incendiary rhetoric and turned it against the caravans of Central Americans on their way to seek asylum in the United States. This essay explores the deeper logics of recent anti-migrant sentiment in Mexico by unpacking a promotional video that was popular there during Trump’s campaign. Though the video ostensibly controverts Trump’s call to “build the wall,” I argue, it ultimately reinforces an underlying distinction between the “we” it convokes and the undocumented labor migrant to the United States. The essay thus seeks the roots of contemporary Mexican xenophobia in older dynamics of class distinction within Mexico. Tijuana, finally, helps grasp how the border exacerbates these dynamics, and why US racism can make distinctions among Mexicans and among Latin Americans fiercer and more pernicious.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam van Noort

American geopolitical power partly relies on foreign public support for its leadership. Pundits worry that this support is evaporating now that the United States—which claims to be the world’s beacon of democracy—has itself experienced democratic back- sliding. I provide the first natural experimental test of this hypothesis by exploiting that the January 6 insurrection of the US Capitol unexpectedly occurred while Gallup was conducting nationally-representative surveys in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Romania, and Vietnam. Because Gallup uses random digit dialing I can identify the effect by comparing US leadership approval among respondents that were interviewed just before, and just after, January 6, 2021. I find that the insurrection had no effect on US approval. If even a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election does not affect US approval abroad it is unlikely that any other domestic anti-democratic event will.


PLoS Medicine ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. e1003534
Author(s):  
Jane J. Kim ◽  
Kate T. Simms ◽  
James Killen ◽  
Megan A. Smith ◽  
Emily A. Burger ◽  
...  

Background A nonavalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has been licensed for use in women and men up to age 45 years in the United States. The cost-effectiveness of HPV vaccination for women and men aged 30 to 45 years in the context of cervical cancer screening practice was evaluated to inform national guidelines. Methods and findings We utilized 2 independent HPV microsimulation models to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of extending the upper age limit of HPV vaccination in women (from age 26 years) and men (from age 21 years) up to age 30, 35, 40, or 45 years. The models were empirically calibrated to reflect the burden of HPV and related cancers in the US population and used standardized inputs regarding historical and future vaccination uptake, vaccine efficacy, cervical cancer screening, and costs. Disease outcomes included cervical, anal, oropharyngeal, vulvar, vaginal, and penile cancers, as well as genital warts. Both models projected higher costs and greater health benefits as the upper age limit of HPV vaccination increased. Strategies of vaccinating females and males up to ages 30, 35, and 40 years were found to be less cost-effective than vaccinating up to age 45 years, which had an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) greater than a commonly accepted upper threshold of $200,000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained. When including all HPV-related outcomes, the ICER for vaccinating up to age 45 years ranged from $315,700 to $440,600 per QALY gained. Assumptions regarding cervical screening compliance, vaccine costs, and the natural history of noncervical HPV-related cancers had major impacts on the cost-effectiveness of the vaccination strategies. Key limitations of the study were related to uncertainties in the data used to inform the models, including the timing of vaccine impact on noncervical cancers and vaccine efficacy at older ages. Conclusions Our results from 2 independent models suggest that HPV vaccination for adult women and men aged 30 to 45 years is unlikely to represent good value for money in the US.


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