Book Review: Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics
Book Review by Paul McDaniel, published online December 30, 2018, in International Migration Review:
Alexis M. Silver. 2018. Shifting Boundaries: Immigrant Youth Negotiating National, State, and Small-Town Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 200 pp. $27.95 paperback.
In Shifting Boundaries, Alexis Silver contributes to scholarship on the perspectives and experiences of immigrant youth in the context of immigrant incorporation, integration, and immigration federalism in the United States. Through in-depth qualitative interviews in Allen Creek, a pseudonym for a small town in rural North Carolina, Silver reveals examples of the shifting ground which immigrant youth must navigate throughout their daily lives and which prevents them from establishing a firm foundation.
Through this work, Silver offers new insight into understandings of international migration and immigration federalism by contributing the concept of “tectonic incorporation” to theoretical discussions about the shifting, multi-layered, and multi-scalar contexts of immigrant integration, incorporation, and reception. Much like the concept of Earth’s tectonic plates, Silver describes “tectonic incorporation” as a metaphor for the political and institutional structures that often move unpredictably as immigrants navigate the ever-changing context of immigration policy. As policies at different levels — local, state, and federal — shift in different directions, immigrants must reassess their situations, regain their footing, and change plans to accommodate new policy landscapes…
Continue reading the full book review here in International Migration Review.
Originally published at https://journals.sagepub.com on December 30, 2018.
