The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States

Explores the racialization of immigrants from post-Soviet states and the nuances of citizenship for this new diaspora.

Mapping representations of post-1980s immigration from the former Soviet Union to the United States in interviews, reality TV shows, fiction, and memoirs, Claudia Sadowski-Smith shows how this nationally and ethnically diverse group is associated with idealized accounts of the assimilation and upward mobility of early twentieth-century arrivals from Europe. As it traces the contributions of historical Eastern European migration to the emergence of a white racial identity that continues to provide privileges to many post-Soviet migrants, the book places the post-USSR diaspora into larger discussions about the racialization of contemporary US immigrants under neoliberal conditions.

The New Immigrant Whiteness argues that legal status on arrival--as participants in refugee, marriage, labor, and adoptive migration-- impacts post-Soviet immigrants' encounters with growing socioeconomic inequalities and tightened immigration restrictions, as well as their attempts to construct transnational identities. The book examines how their perceived whiteness exposes post-Soviet family migrants to heightened expectations of assimilation, explores undocumented migration from the former Soviet Union, analyzes post-USSR immigrants' attitudes toward anti-immigration laws that target Latina/os, and considers similarities between post-Soviet and Asian immigrants in their association with notions of upward immigrant mobility. A compelling and timely volume, The New Immigrant Whiteness offers a fresh perspective on race and immigration in the United States today.

Author: Claudia Sadowski-Smith
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 03/13/2018
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781479806713

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2018

About the Author
Sadowski-Smith, Claudia: - Claudia Sadowski-Smith is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. She is the author of Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States, which won the Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award in 2009. She is also the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders.