JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES
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mostly focused on citizens with dual nationality, and, within this group, on naturalised
citizens from Muslim-majority countries. For these immigrants, then, even citizenship
status remains precarious and potentially temporary.
Overview of contributions
The articles in this Special Issue all hold in common an engagement with questions of discrimination, stratification, and precarity in varying migration contexts. Daniel Tichenor
and Robin Jacobson’s (2020) comparative historical study of New Mexico’s and Arizona’s
territorial incorporation in the late 19th and twentieth century reveals the impact of racial
hierarchies on nation-building in the United States. Rather than asserting a universal
pattern of race relations, Tichenor and Jacobson identify distinct models of racial inclusion
and exclusion, shaped by the intersection of race and class. Because New Mexico’s large
population of Hispanos of Mexican descent included many economically successful
upper-class families, race relations were marked by interethnic power sharing and linguistic inclusion. In Arizona, by contrast, Anglo settlers encountered few influential Hispanos
and were able to put into place a regime of racial subjugation that resulted in the shrinking
of the territory’s non-white population and the development of an English-only language
policy. When the two territories aspired to statehood – a status that connoted membership, rather than mere territorial domination – elites had to satisfy federal demands
about ethno-racial control and persuade Congress of each territory’s worthiness of membership based on its ethno-racial composition. Faced with Congressional opposition to the
incorporation of territories with large non-white populations, the two territories pursued
different strategies of incorporation. Given its track record of racial subjugation, Arizona
faced weaker opposition and its elites were able to reassure bipartisan Congressional
majorities that Mexican descendants would either remain under the control of white
elites or leave the territory. New Mexico’s regime of ethnic power-sharing, by contrast, elicited more Congressional suspicion and it was only after its elites successfully reframed
Hispanos as Americans of Spanish ethnic descent with ‘pure’ racial, cultural, and linguistic
identities akin to those of other ethnically European Americans, that Congress decided in
favour of incorporation. Thus, while both territories were eventually successful in their
quest for incorporation, their differing incorporation strategies reflected the intersection
of Hispanos’ varying class positions with deeply entrenched racism.
Erin Chung’s (2020) analysis of South Korean visa categories shifts the study of
migration, racial politics, and social hierarchies into the present. Drawing on Charles
Tilly’s theory of categorical inequalities which posits that the pairing of social categories
with organisational hierarchies creates categorical inequalities ‘so pervasive and decisive
that “ordinary observers” will mistake the “consequences of categorical organization’ as
‘results of variation in individual talent or effort”’ (2499), Chung challenges liberal conception of contemporary visa categories as race- and gender-neutral. Instead, she shows
how the proliferation of visa categories created to accommodate labour shortages in
South Korea has led to development of noncitizen hierarchies in relation to residency
status, prospects for citizenship acquisition as well as access to rights, services, and geographic mobility. Based on interview data and government documents, Chung’s analysis
exposes the intersection of race, gender, and class in shaping the meaning of visas for coethnic immigrants and so-called marriage migrants. These group-specific meanings reflect