Dalia Abdelhady

The Lebanese are the largest group of Middle Eastern immigrants in the United States, and Lebanese immigrants are also prominent across Europe and the Americas. Based on over eighty interviews with first-generation Lebanese immigrants in the global cities of New York, Montreal and Paris, this book shows that the Lebanese diaspora – like all diasporas – constructs global relations connecting and transforming their new societies, previous homeland and world-wide communities. Taking Lebanese immigrants’ forms of identification, community attachments and cultural expression as manifestations of diaspora experiences, Dalia Abdelhady delves into the ways members of Lebanese diasporic communities move beyond nationality, ethnicity and religion, giving rise to global solidarities and negotiating their social and cultural spaces.

The Lebanese Diaspora explores new forms of identities, alliances and cultural expressions, elucidating the daily experiences of Lebanese immigrants and exploring new ways of thinking about immigration, ethnic identity, community, and culture in a global world. By criticizing and challenging our understandings of nationality, ethnicity and assimilation, Abdelhady shows that global immigrants are giving rise to new forms of cosmopolitan citizenship.

This article examines the subjective understanding of success among members of three groups of children of immigrants from Mexico, North Africa and Turkey, in Dallas, Paris and Berlin respectively, by accounting for their educational and early labor market experiences. We utilize neo-assimilation and segmented assimilation theories and highlight their divergence with regards to downward assimilation and frames of reference. We focus on the working-class children of immigrants in the three settings, as they are at the highest risk of downward mobility. We find that frames of reference play a significant role in shaping the subjective understandings of success among the three groups. Despite their disadvantaged position, Mexican Americans in Dallas regard their experiences as successful given their significant departure from their parents' low status. French North Africans in Paris, on the other hand, emphasize their limited ability to overcome the restrictions imposed on them by French society and especially schools. Doing so, they compare themselves to their French peers who do not have an immigrant background. Children of immigrants from Turkey in Berlin, by comparison, encounter labor market discrimination but feel successful relative to their parents' generation. We find that the children of immigrants in our study rely on members of their social networks who impact their labor market experiences as their frame of reference. When they compare themselves to their parents or earlier waves of immigrants, the children of immigrants perceive their accomplishments in a positive light. When they compare themselves to mainstream society, however, they emphasize persisting inequalities. Our conclusions emphasize the importance of understanding

Many European countries are becoming multicultural at a previously unseen rate. The number of immigrants including refugees has considerably increased since 2008, and especially after the beginning of the war in Syria. In 2015, 88,300 unaccompanied minors sought asylum in the Member States of the European Union (EU) and most came from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Eritrea. As a reaction to increased immigration, governments in many countries including Germany, Sweden and Norway implemented more restrictive immigration policy. A requirement for all countries, however, is the protection and welfare provision for all arriving children, regardless of their nationality, ensured by international and national legal frameworks. This paper provides an overview of the post 2015 immigration crisis in key European countries with a special focus on current demographics, refugee children, mental health studies, policies and practical support available for refugees.

This chapter provides an understanding of the social construction of the "refugee crisis, " particularly of Syrian refugees, in three countries. 1 Focusing on 2015, the year in which perceptions of the current refugee emergency came to the forefront of public discourse in many countries, the analysis provided here disentangles the crisis discourse and shows its contextual formulation. Through a systematic analysis of the two largest national newspapers in three countries, the argument presented here opposes the assumptions about the representation of a refugee crisis often popularized by politicians and international media. Instead, this chapter shows that contradiction and uncertainty are the main building blocks in the construction of the refugee crisis in 2015. By 2015, many European countries were declared to have reached full capacity and unable to receive more refugees, a process culminating in border closures. As images of undifferentiated masses of Third World refugees arriving illegally to the shores of Europe became an almost daily banality, the "refugee crisis" became a source of concern and popular condemnation for policy and politics at the local, national, and EU levels (Dahlgren 2016). While some of these public criticisms stressed that refugees are better received and settled in hosting countries that share similar cultural and religious backgrounds, a similar problematic was observed in neighboring countries who see refugees as competitors for jobs and as sources of social and cultural conflict. This chapter looks at the specific ways the crisis is constructed, contested, and dealt with in two of the neighboring countries which act as transit points for many refugees (Turkey and Jordan) and one of Europe's most popular destination for refugees (Sweden). 2 While the aim of the three case studies is not comparative, given the disparate stage of media development and freedoms in the three settings, it is important to account for the differences and similarities in media discourses in order to understand the process of framing the current refugee crisis and the associated responses such processes OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF-FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Sep 24 2018, NEWGEN oxfordhb-9780190856908-part-7.indd 635 24-Sep-18 2:12:13 PM

This paper compares the transition from school to work among Mexican-origin youth in the United States and North African-origin youth in France relative to the native-majority youth with similar low-level credentials. The goal is to understand the extent to which these groups experience ethnic penalties in the labor market not explained by social class, low-level credentials, or other characteristics. The patterns of employment for second-generation minorities play out differently in the two contexts. In France, lack of access to jobs is a source of disadvantage for North African children of immigrants, while in the United States, second-generation Mexicans do not suffer from a lack of employment. Indeed, the Mexican second-generation shows a uniquely high level of employment. We argue that high levels of youth unemployment mean greater ethnic penalties for second-generation minorities. Keywords: Second generation, children of immigrants, Mexicans, North Africans, Labor market, Employment

Much to the dismay of many authors who attempted to address the gap in gender analysis in documenting and analysing migratory experiences, much research and theorizing on transnational migration tends to marginalize gender and the experiences of women in their accounts. While the field has seen a significant surge in the research placing gendered experiences at the center stage of migration, more work needs to be done to contribute to our understanding of the gendered nature of migration especially among Arab communities in general and the Lebanese one in specific (for the lack of gendered perspective in this regard see for example Leichtman, and Wald). In this chapter, I explore the transnational aspects of Lebanese immigrant women’s lives in an attempt to contribute to the existing gap and shed light onto some important aspects of the Lebanese migratory experiences in general, and women migrants in specific. While highlighting the experiences of Lebanese women with transnational migration in New York, Paris and Montreal, my analysis will occasionally draw on the narratives of male immigrants in these cities in order to highlight the gendered nature of the experiences. My analysis is inspired by Pessar and Mahler’s framework for examining gender across transnational spaces, which they label “Gendered Geographies of Power.”

This article examines the representation of home among members of the Lebanese diaspora in New York, Montreal and Paris. Lebanese immigrants view home as both a concrete reality that is achieved physically or in relation with others and a symbolic reference point that ...

Résumé/Abstract This article explores the ways Lebanese disaporic artists contribute to the construction of collective memory in their homelands and among the diaspora community. Portraying the homeland is an important theme in the works of these artists. However, these portrayals are influenced by the context of their reception and racial structures in their host societies. The civil war is a focal point in the works of these artists. In addressing the civil war and recounting their personal experience of it, these artists challenge Lebanese national ...

An influential perspective on contemporary immigration and the US-born generations issuing from it originates with the theory of segmented assimilation (Portes and Zhou 1993; see also Gans 1992). It sees the descendants of today's immigrants as at risk of what has been called “downward assimilation”: a failure to advance beyond the humble status of the immigrant generation, which is then transformed into a negative self-evaluation because of a change in frame of reference, from that of the origin society to that of the receiving one. ...

Abstract This article examines the representation of home among members of the Lebanese diaspora in New York, Montreal and Paris. Lebanese immigrants view home as both a concrete reality that is achieved physically or in relation with others and a symbolic reference point that moves beyond territorial boundaries. These overlapping strategies allow them to imagine and recreate their sense of home and belonging (to both a past and present) that provide sources of stability used in dealing with life in the diaspora. However, ...

If it seems obvious that the history of migration is one of instability, fluctuation and discontinuity, it seems also clear for many Third World members of the diaspora that their sense of group solidarity, of ethnic and national identity, has been nourished in the milieux of the immigrant, the refugee and the exiled. Here, identity is a product of articulation. It lies at the intersection of dwelling and traveling and is a claim of continuity within discontinuity (and vice-versa). A politics rather than an inherited marking (Minh-ha 1994: 14).

Generally, arguments on civil society and public sphere have been conceptualized within the framework of existing nation-states. This paper argues that the framework of nation-states is no longer adequate for the definition of the public sphere or addressing “real” civil societies. ...