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

by Claudia Sadowski-Smith

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1479806714
• ISBN13: 9781479806713
• Release Date: March 2018
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"