“Fear, Anxiety, and Immigration: Barriers and Belonging in the United States and Western Europe”

Jean Monnet Distinguished Lecture

After more than fifty years of large-scale immigration, the U.S. and Western European countries have been dramatically transformed by the huge inflows that have altered the composition of their populations in profound ways and created remarkable — new — ethnic, racial, and religious diversity.  Why have fears and anxieties about immigrant origin populations and their incorporation taken different forms on the two sides of the Atlantic — with the religious divide more central in Europe and race and legal status especially pronounced barriers in the U.S.?  How can we account for the fact that the U.S. frames national identities in a way that is more inclusive of immigrants and their children than Western European countries do?

Nancy Foner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  She has written extensively on immigration issues, with her current work focusing on comparing immigrant minorities in the United States and Europe, the immigrant experience in various American gateway cities, and immigration today with earlier periods in the United States.  The author or editor of eighteen books, the most recent are Strangers No More: Immigration and the Challenges of Integration in North America and Western Europe, co-authored with Richard Alba (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity:  Immigration and Belonging in North America and Western Europe, edited with Patrick Simon (Russell Sage Foundation, 2015).  Among her many honors, she received the 2010 Distinguished Career Award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association and in 2011 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This talk is funded by the Erasmus+ Program of the European Commission. It is co-sponsored by the Jean Monnet Chair, The Center for European Studies (CEUS), and the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.

For more information, contact Deborah Reed-Danahay at der5@buffalo.edu