How, and as what are immigrant minorities incorporated into the political process? A set of prominent approaches focus on the political opportunity structure immigrants encounter. Though promising in many aspects, political opportunity approaches fail to consider the internal heterogeneity of both immigrant populations and opportunity structures. This is partly a result of taking ethnic groups rather than political entrepreneurs as the unit of analysis and of not disaggregating the political context properly. This paper shows how Russian-Jewish immigrant political entrepreneurs in New York City used very di�fferent strategies of ethnic mobilization, each emphasizing a di�fferent ethnic cleavage: one was making claims in the name of Russians, the other downplaying the Russianness and highlighting the Jewish identity dimension. Both strategies had good chances at success thus illustrating that political opportunity structures may encourage di�fferent claims making strategies at the same time. Ethno-political entrepreneurs navigate complex and di�fferentiated political landscapes that are ex-ante only partially transparent.

Theories of migrant transnationalism emphasize the enduring imprint of the pre-migration connections that the newcomers bring with them. But how do the children of migrants, raised in the parents’ adopted country develop ties to the parental home country? Using a structural equation model and data from a recent survey of adult immigrant offspring in Los Angeles, this paper shows that second generation cross-border activities are strongly affected by earlier experiences of and exposure to home country influences . Socialization in the parental household is powerful, transmitting distinct home country competencies, loyalties and ties, but not a coherent package of transnationalism. Our analysis of five measures of cross-border activities and loyalties among the grown children of migrants shows that transmission is specific to the social logic underlying the connection: activities rooted in family relationships such as remitting are transmitted differently than emotional attachments to the parent’s home country.

Politics is an underdeveloped topic in migration studies, a lacuna that derives from prevailing intellectual biases, whether having to do with those that focus on individual action or those that emphasize social processes. This paper identifies the central issues entailed in the study of migrant politics, whether having to do with receiving society immigrant politics or sending society emigrant politics, reviewing and assessing the ways in which scholars have tackled this problem.

This dissertation examines how home country language and religion are transmitted in migrant families. In a set of four essays I examine how these transmission processes are tied to processes of assimilation/acculturation, the maintenance of home-country ties and perceptions of discrimination of the children of immigrants in schools. The starting point of my analysis is that both language and religion, in important and similar ways, function as modes of connection in migrant families with family members and friends who remain in the place of origin. At the same time vis-�-vis in the destination country, language and religion are two key cultural practices that can categorically differentiate immigrants and their children from the national majority populations. Drawing on a recently collected nationally representative survey of immigrants and the children of immigrants in France, the Trajectories and Origins (TeO) project, the first two chapters of this dissertation focus on the processes of intergenerational transmission of language and religion. The third chapter, uses data about the schooling experiences of the second-generation in the TeO to develop and test a set of hypotheses about the incentive structures that migrant parents face when deciding to transmit different cultural practices to their destination-country-born children. A final essay examines how religion and language factor in the continuity of social attitudes in immigrants and their children by analyzing attitudes of immigrant and second-generation respondents from 83 countries around the world living in 23 European countries.

There is a duality at the heart of the migration phenomenon, as the very same people who are immigrants are also emigrants, making a living and possibly setting down roots in the receiving society, but still connected to and oriented toward the home society where their significant others still often reside. While research has shown that home country political conditions and experiences affect immigrant political behaviour in the receiving society, scholarship has yet to ask how those same factors affect the ways in which emigrants relate to the body politic left behind. This paper seeks to fill that lacuna. We find that pre-migration political experiences impart a lasting post-migration interest in home country politics and that such effects are substantial compared with the impacts associated with other cross-border connections, such as remittance sending or return travel.