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Experiencing Everyday Discrimination: A Comparison Across Five Immigrant Populations

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Abstract

Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, this article explores and compares the subjective experiences of everyday discrimination articulated by immigrants across five different national origin populations. The comparison reveals that discrimination is perceived, encountered, and experienced differently by immigrants from various national origins backgrounds. Further, from the perspective of immigrants themselves, discrimination is not just about phenotypical racial characteristics, but also about language abilities, class position, immigration status, foreignness, and personhood. The article describes some of the contexts or settings within which discrimination is encountered, including a discussion of both mainstream and minority contexts. The latter is rarely addressed in the literature on discrimination. Finally, using some hypothetical scenarios, it examines how immigrants of different national origins say they might react to discriminatory behavior. This exercise not only illuminates some intriguing variations across the five populations but also addresses broader discussion of confrontation as opposed to forbearance in the literature on discrimination.

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Notes

  1. All names are pseudonyms.

  2. The project was supported by the Cultural Anthropology Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF/BCS 0003938). Other investigators involved in the project were James F. Hollifield, Dennis Cordell, and Manuel Garcia y Griego. The data were collected between 2002 and 2005. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

  3. For further discussion of recent immigration to DFW see Brettell (2008a, b). DFW has been identified as a new immigration gateway (Singer et al. 2008).

  4. Where totals do not equal 100% respondents said they did not know, could not say, or refused to respond.

  5. Temporary Protected Status is extended to foreign nationals when conditions in a home country (armed conflict, environmental disaster, other extraordinary events) prevent them from returning there safely or when the country is not able to adequately handle their return. TPS does not by itself result in a green card, but someone in this status may immigrate permanently under other legal provisions. See http://www.uscis.go.

  6. These remarks offer more support to previous observations about Asians being “forever foreign” (see Tuan 1998). Purkayastha (2005: 55–56) has argued that racialization is clearly crucial “in keeping the South Asian Americans ‘ethnic,’ in spite of their integration in terms of residence, education, and related facets of their lives.” Khandelwal (2002: 172) describes attacks on Indians in New Jersey by so-called dotbusters New Jersey in the 1980s.

  7. For further discussion see Chavez (2008).

  8. See Shih (2007) for a discussion of “job-hopping” as a way to surmount the glass ceiling phenomenon.

  9. Bollillo is a slang term like gringo used to refer to whites. Fregado refers here to the people who are toast or dead meat.

  10. Several inner ring suburban communities in the DFW area have implemented Federal 287 (g) legislation to verify the immigration status of individuals stopped by police for other reasons. See Brettell and Nibbs (2011) for a discussion of Farmers Branch, Texas.

  11. These intra-group prejudices have deep historical roots in US immigration, especially in the treatment for those who come later by those who come first. They are encoded in terms such as “FOBs” (fresh off the boat) or “Greenhorns.”

  12. For analysis of the Rodney King incident and other conflicts between Asians and African American see Cheng and Espiritu (1989), Abelman and Lie (1995), Park (1996), Johnson et al. (1997), Lee (2002), and Lie (2004).

  13. If the answer did not closely conform to one of the pre-determined categories, it was coded as “other.” It is important to note that some respondents had difficulty relating to a hypothetical. Interviewers also probed for why people responded as they did.

  14. In March 2010, some apartment complexes in Euless, Texas (a DFW area suburban community), were turning away potential tenants who had Asian or Middle Eastern sounding names. A local citizen was quoted as saying “I was told that no one else wanted to live by these people. That they were dirty and they cooked with curry” (Smith 2010)”.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX, 75275, USA

    Caroline B. Brettell

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  1. Caroline B. Brettell
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Correspondence to Caroline B. Brettell.

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Brettell, C.B. Experiencing Everyday Discrimination: A Comparison Across Five Immigrant Populations. Race Soc Probl 3, 266–279 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-011-9055-1

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