This chapter explores the application of Anglo-American ‘psy’ expertise to displaced persons (DPs) in post-war Europe and in their countries of resettlement. Military and relief personnel theorised that DPs were susceptible to distinctive psychopathologies, many of them caused by relief camp environments that fostered apathy and criminality. Apprehensions about certain DPs’ psychiatric status also influenced resettlement decisions and how reception countries perceived assimilation and integration. In this landscape Jewish relief agencies navigated a particularly delicate balance between advocating for vulnerable DPs and avoiding detrimental pathologisation. Two case studies illustrate how diagnostic ambiguity could either facilitate or obstruct resettlement. Overall, the chapter suggests that the wartime psychiatric frameworks emphasising adjustment, adaptation and self-control extended into post-war humanitarian and immigration contexts.

The principle of facial neutrality in evidentiary rules rests on an appealing premise: that equally applicable standards ensure fairness between opposing parties. However, this premise overlooks the enormous power disparities that can exist between parties. This dynamic is uniquely apparent in United States Immigration Courts, which have virtually no rules of evidence and consequently allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to leverage its institutional advantages against asylum seekers. This chapter takes hearsay as a case study. It examines how the hearsay evidence rule, which prohibits parties from introducing out-of-court statements to prove the truth of what is asserted in those statements, may favor powerful parties when applied symmetrically. Through the specific example of DHS Form I-213, Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien, a DHS form that records border interviews, I suggest that the Immigration Court’s permissive approach to hearsay evidence, though it applies equally to asylum seekers and the DHS, enables the DHS to introduce unreliable documents produced through coercion while affording those documents presumptive credibility.

Citizenship deprivation is often justified as a symbolic sanction that helps to reassert the values of the national community. From this perspective, those who are deprived of their citizenship are people whose bad conduct is deemed to threaten the nation-state. By nation-state, I mean the state as a sovereign, self-governing political community held together by narratives of togetherness. As with empires, the nation-state has been populated by many categories of citizens, with varying rights and duties. How were these categories created and justified? What was their status in law and what were the relationships between them? What purposes did they serve? These are the questions that this chapter focuses on. These categories of citizens included, at different times, not only the politically (in)active citizen, women, slaves, the ‘crazy’, the poor, the criminal, and the Catholic priest but also the foreigner who was granted citizen’s rights without shedding his or her foreign status or the ‘second-generation citizen’ whose claim to belonging and rights was deemed suspicious.

This chapter lays out the problem for the book: when injustices have been done to and by many generations in the past, is there anything that people in the present can or must do to address them? This chapter introduces my family background and history – my family immigrated to the United States from Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My family were not enslavers or genocide perpetrators. What, if anything, does a family situated such as mine need to do to address historic injustices?

Romani people have been present in the United States since its earliest days, yet public awareness of Romani lives and experiences remains limited to episodic reporting often highlighting negative interactions with the public. Drawing upon two episodes of Romani interactions with non-Roma, separated by almost a century, this chapter argues that American Romani experiences, memories and kinship connections illuminate the complex character of American immigration controls for individuals who were often deemed to be “undesirable.” Moreover, this chapter highlights the power of strategic actions and claims of belonging by American Roma pursuing their dreams for a new home in the United States. Utilizing both archival documentation and oral history, this chapter shows how American Romani persistence and tenacity, built upon years of effort, have pushed new forms of kinship and social memory around the Atlantic.

This Introduction provides a condensed telling of five hundred years of Romani history within an Atlantic context. It illustrates that Romani people have been part of the modern Atlantic world and that the Atlantic world has shaped the Romani diaspora and Romani people’s sense of who they are. Stories of Atlantic circulations, interactions, connections and exchanges show how Romani people and ideas held about them, transcended empires, nations and borders. The Introduction specifically contextualizes three moments of visibility. During the early modern era, Romani people experienced (often forced) population movements as part of imperial expansions and prompted the translation of European antigypsyism in the context of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, Indigenous genocides and emerging racial thought. At the turn of the twentieth century, nationalistic immigration controls provoked a heightened recognition of Romani people that impacted their experiences, forms of sociability and strategies of mobility. After World War II, as transnational migrants and refugees, they garnered new attention and built diasporic communities in the face of novel and changing international circumstances. Adding Romani people to Atlantic history allows us to think differently about the Atlantic world and transforms our understanding of Romani lived experiences.

Somewhere outside the laws and statutes regulating immigration to the United States, lies practice. While there was nothing on the books during the early 1900s that should have prevented Roma from entering the US at immigration ports, many faced draconian scrutiny upon arrival, whether they claimed to be “Gypsy” or not. These immigration challenges were fueled by a concerted behind-the-scenes effort to constrain their entry. Archival case files that shadow attempts Roma made while trying to enter North America unmask tactics deployed by US and Canadian authorities to exclude Roma, as a people or type, from entry. Decidedly unhidden, however, was press coverage of Romani immigration and settlement. This chapter analyzes the attempts made by several Romani groups to enter the United States during the early 1900s through transatlantic and transcontinental crossings, and which foreshadowed an increase in Romani exclusion, surveillance and public harassment.

My results about denial, deterrence, and disenchantment provide empirical support to how a push-retain-pull-repel model can help us understand why many remain ambivalent (im)mobile and never immigrate. I also review how my findings about each mechanism demonstrate how socioeconomic resources and social ties both facilitate and increase the costs of migration due to an interaction of immigration policy and social forces in society that incentivize individuals to establish stable ties to their society rather than migrate. This (im)mobility paradox makes international migration a far more difficult decision and unlikely event than many in migrant-destination countries perceive it to be. Finally, I reflect on how my data from the PIS the interaction of immigration policy and social forces stratifies potential immigrants who never immigrated due to deterrence, denial, and disenchantment into respectively an under-class, a lower class, and an upper class in the origin society, mirroring the stratification of immigrants through different pathways of assimilation in the migrant-destination society.

Based on C. Y. Lee’s novel The Flower Drum Song, Flower Drum Song (1958) is significant in the history of Broadway for its inclusion of Asian heritage characters and, likewise, a predominantly Asian cast. The story concerns Chinese immigration to San Francisco, assimilation and intergenerational relations. Directed by Gene Kelly and with a book co-written by Hammerstein and Joseph Fields, the cast included Miyoshi Umeki (who reprised the lead role in the 1961 film version), Pat Suzuki, Jack Soo and the African American actor Juanita Hall. The chapter also discusses David Henry Hwang’s revised version, which opened on Broadway in 2002 starring Lea Salonga.

This chapter analyzes the patterns of antigypsyism suffered by Romani migrants from Europe at the port of Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1950. The control and expulsion of European Roma was a recurrent practice there and was conditioned by their ethnicity and the particular context of Argentine history. Since the nineteenth century, Argentine nationalists imagined creating an ideal nation that was white, healthy, safe and wealthy. As a result, people considered non-white, diseased, criminal and impoverished were racialized and rejected. Problematized populations included Indigenous people, Black Argentines as well as Romani people, who like other would-be immigrants encountered both official and unofficial desirability thresholds they had to breach in order to immigrate. The logic that distinctively problematized Romani ethnicity can be seen in immigration reports and data and suggests that antigypsyism colored the way authorities identified Roma (Gitanos), which then impacted their immigration experience.

This chapter explores the debates over Romani assimilation during the period between World War I and World War II. The debates pitted Gypsylorists and literary figures such as Konrad Bercovici (1882–1961), a popularizer of Romani culture through some forty books, against Romani activists and leaders who sought to improve the lives of their community members. Most notable among the latter group are Steve Kaslov (ca. 1888–1949), who as a leader of various Romani communities in New York City accepted that change was inevitable, and Marco, a Russian Romani who responded to Bercovici’s question, “What made you come here,” with a question of his own: “And why shouldn’t I have come? Because there was a strip of water between this country and the one I was last in?” For the latter, the Atlantic was neither a barrier nor an assimilator, but a conduit to new worlds and new identities.

The focus of this chapter is on theories of diversity management, including assimilation, multiculturalism, and omniculturalism. The psychological foundations of these theories are critically assessed, with reference to empirical research. Intergroup contact theory is also examined, with reference to different types of contact, such as imagined contact, extended contact, and vicarious contact. Recent meta-analystic research suggesting that intergroup contact is benefiicial irrespective of the conditions is also critically examined. In contexts characterized by diversity, individuals face the challenge of balancing ‘standing out and standing in,’ and. this challenge is discussed with reference to optimal distinctiveness theory.

Although never cast as central to the cultural history of New Orleans and sometimes scarcely legible, the presence of Asian immigrants in the New Orleans area reaches perhaps as far back as the 1760s when enslaved Filipinx trafficked by Spanish colonial interests found a home in the swamps east of the city among the maroons, Los Isleños, the Choctaw, and the Chitimacha, all of whom flourished together in complicated alliances at a distance from the center of colonial power. But the “Manilamen” were not the only Asian group weaving themselves into the city’s intricately multicultural mix: two different Chinatowns rose and fell in the city from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth century; and today the Vietnamese enclave east of the city has produced two major novels in the last ten years.

Chapter 2 draws attention to rapid pre-1930 Southeast Asian growth based on globalization, frontier land, mass migration and often minimal capital. The chapter discusses Malayan settlement patterns and intra-regional trade.