“Race”, Belonging and Emancipation: Trajectories and Views of the Daughters of Western Africa in Spain

Young Spanish Black people born to migrant parents continue to be either invisible or problematized in public discourses, which project a monocultural and phenotypically homogeneous Europe. Research in countries with a long immigration history has shown that in the process of othering minorities, gender ideologies emerge as ethnic boundaries and feed the paternalistic treatment of women while accusing their families and communities of harming them through atavistic traditions. However, little research has focused on girls’ and young women from West African immigration and Muslim tradition in Spain, a country where they represent the first “second generation”. In order to gain a deeper insight into their processes and views, this paper describes and analyses the educational trajectories and transitions to adult life of a group of young women with these backgrounds who participated in a multilevel and narrative ethnography developed in the framework of a longitudinal and comparative project on the risk of Early Leaving of Education and Training in Europe (ELET). In the light of the conceptual contributions of the politics of belonging and intersectionality, the responsibilities regarding the conditions for gaining independence are relocated while assessing the role of the school in the processes of social mobility and the development of egalitarian aspirations in the labor market and in the family environment. The findings show how the limits encountered by these young women in their trajectories to an independent adult life are mainly produced by processes of racialization conditioned by class and gender, ironically in key spaces of social inclusion such as schools and the labor market rather than, or mainly by, an ethnic community that subjugates them.

African Immigrants in Russia

While the Russian migration literature captures well social and economic realities of Central Asian labour migrants, it takes only an infrequent notice of other less visible groups of immigrants. One of such groups, African immigrants, is estimated to consist of about 40,000 individuals, mainly from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper looks at the African immigrants in Russia. After identifying the African immigrants, the article focuses on refugees and economic migrants in more detail. Who are the African immigrants in Russia? How do they see Russia and Finland as the countries of immigration? The study is based on scholarly literature of African immigration to Russia and asylum interview documents of the African asylum seekers in Finland. The most prominent group of Africans in Russia are immigrants distributing advertisements at metro stations in large cities such as Moscow. However, these immigrants struggling with their poor status are only part of the Africans in Russia. The highly educated African diaspora and businessmen trained in the Soviet Union, as well as the staff of the delegations, live well- off lives in Russia and there is little interaction between the above-mentioned “new” immigrant groups. In this article, we focus especially on the “new” immigrants who arrived in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union and their stories of everyday insecurity. International crime and human trafficking enable asylum seekers to move around in Europe today. At the same time, it puts several groups of people, such as women, children and the low-skilled, particularly vulnerable to various forms of exploitation during the journey.

COVID-19 and African immigrants in North Africa; A hidden pandemic in a violent region.

Since being declared a pandemic in March 2020, COVID-19 has brought difficult situations for citizens of nations worldwide. The effects, however, may be more severe for vulnerable communities such as immigrants, who are already in desperate situations and under deteriorating conditions. There are still very limited data on how the pandemic is impacting immigrant communities. Immigrant camps are fostering an environment that poses a great threat to the health of their inhabitants, especially at the time of a pandemic. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate healthcare, and difficulty containing contagious diseases are well documented in African immigration detention centers [1]. Furthermore, they are unlikely to take priority in a moment in which governments are mobilizing all resources to care for their citizens. Their situation is even more complicated if they are hosted in courtiers plugged by war, as in North Africa[2,3].

Couscous

This article proposes to consider couscous, a North African specialty and a favourite dish of the French, as an edible site of memory. Displacing the focus from gastronomy, a discourse of national culinary superiority, to a single dish, I retrace the irresistible ascent of couscous to fame in the French culinary pantheon. The military conquest and colonization of Algeria familiarized French diners with the dish and associated it with forms of racialized and sexualized colonial burlesque in songs and vaudeville. Settlers appropriated it as terroir to claim their “Algérianité.” North African immigration and decolonization created a de facto market of consumers in France, while the industrialization of food production made this preparation into a valuable commodity and a ready-made meal, obfuscating its colonial roots. The French’s affection for couscous is often hailed as a sign of tolerance in an otherwise divisive and fraught public conversation about immigration, identity, and discrimination. However, couscous’ colonial baggage and racialized legacy continue to resonate, shaping tastes, and informing political rhetoric as well as cultural hierarchies. The (after)taste of empire lingers on at a granular level, as edible memory.

Cultural Profiling During Passport Control: Ugandan Migration Officers’ Informal Selection Practices

Recently, northern Uganda has become a destination for inner-African immigration. As a result of new security policies, passport controls are intensifying at border posts and are being expanded across the country. During passport checks, officers often refer to natio­nal-cultural stereotypes in order to verify statements in identity documents. Stereotyping and profiling of ‘Somalian terrorists’ or ‘militant South Sudanese’ are used as pre-selection tools. At the same time, officers try to establish informal networks with immigrants as informants to make use of their cultural and linguistic expertise. The article is based on an ethnographic study of Ugandan police and immigration officers in 2014. Keywords: Uganda, South-South migration, profiling, citizenship, passport

African Christian Immigrants

The latent functions of African immigration are often overlooked. Over the years, these functions have produced scenarios worth researching. Many people migrate from Africa to the West looking for greener pastures with the goal of economic upliftment. Amid this venture, however, the African immigrants come along with skills, talents, academic potentials, and religious beliefs. Most African immigrants associate with Christianity and deem it a spiritual mandate from God to impact their sphere of influence during their expeditions. Thus, these groups of immigrants raise churches, form prayer groups, preach the gospel, and create mission fields. The focus of this article is threefold. First, to examine how the religiosity of African Christian immigrants have influenced their lives and in turn impacted the American Christian landscape. Second, how immigration legislation of the United States has revolutionized the lives of African immigrants. Third, how pull and push factors have become a source of motivation for African immigration.