Abstract
Angela Ju challenges the prevailing assumption that immigrants always desire and benefit from integration into their host nation’s mainstream society. In her book Identities Matter: The Politics of Immigration and Incorporation, Ju examines the case of third-generation Jewish and Japanese immigrants in Brazil. Her argument is simple: experiences of discrimination “activate” aspects of migrants’ ethnic identity, which in turn lead them to highlight these identities in their political engagement and behavior. By emphasizing their differences from the mainstream within Brazil, Japanese and Jewish immigrants choose to highlight existing connections to their heritage countries instead. Ju’s book seeks to determine why this is so and how ideas about identity and belonging can add more nuance to existing migration scholarship.
While the title of Ju’s book generally refers to immigrant integration, her data are mainly focused on questions of political incorporation or how immigrants participate and become part of their host nation’s political arena. Ju bases her arguments on 1998 census data and 60 semi-structured interviews with third-generation Brazilians of Japanese and Jewish descent. She also interviews leaders and members of ethnic organizations representing both Japanese and Jewish immigrants in Brazil. Ju aims to show how the two groups may act upon their identities in divergent ways, depending on the type of discrimination they experience.
Each chapter elaborates different aspects of Ju’s argument. In the first two chapters, she discusses the history behind Japanese Brazilian and Jewish Brazilian identities, disentangling what she calls “ethnic” and “race” categories and identities. Chapters Three to Five reveal how these groups draw from their ethnic identities in deciding how to engage with state politics within Brazil, while also connecting to their heritage countries.
In the case of Jewish Brazilians, Ju argues that ethnicity is more likely to be a marker of difference, given that most members of this immigrant group are likely to identify as “White” (a racial identity that is associated with particular privileges in Brazil). In contrast, Japanese Brazilians are more likely to identify as “Yellow,” a minority status in terms of race. Yet their ethnic identities as Japanese immigrants are accorded more prestige than Jewish immigrants. In line with her argument, Ju argues that this is the reason why Jewish immigrants are more likely to practice “ethnic voting,” while Japanese Brazilians have a higher propensity to support racial quotas in Brazilian policy. Still, the valorization of “Japanese-ness” in Brazil also encourages Japanese Brazilian politicians to emphasize their ethnic identities in differentiating themselves from Brazilian politicians, who are mostly seen as corrupt.
Ju’s book provides an important alternative to the dominant stories of immigrant integration, mostly based in wealthy anglophone nations like the United States and the United Kingdom. In her book, the immigrants are relatively privileged groups whose “heritage countries” (Japan and Israel) have stronger economies than their host society. This perspective is often missing in current migration studies. The focus on third-generation immigrants is also unique, given that ethnic identity continues to play a salient role in their political perspectives and beliefs.
However, some elements of the book’s argument would benefit from more substantial evidence. In Chapter Four, Ju makes an interesting argument about race as an identity separate from ethnicity. She argues that race cannot predict political behavior alone and discusses how Japanese and Jewish Brazilians indicated their race in state surveys. However, using these descriptive survey findings to challenge well-known migration theories of segmented and classical assimilation is hard to achieve without other sources of data.
The book’s qualitative interviews are also limited in that they are mainly focused on how interviewees describe their political beliefs and behavior. We know little about how these interviewees actually engage in political spaces within Brazil. The decision to interview only women—purportedly to control for gender differences—raises questions about whether the study captures only one perspective on political incorporation. While the book claims to have interviewed politicians as well, these data are not so prominent in the text.
The chapter on Ethnic Community-Based Organizations (ECBOs) provides more depth in terms of how one Japanese Brazilian organization and one Jewish Brazilian group engage in different forms of local politics, such as establishing stronger ties with heritage nations and facilitating opportunities for networking and the exchange of knowledge. I agree that these migrant activities do not receive enough attention within the political science literature. However, in sociology, there is already a wide range of studies on political mobilization, social movements, and advocacy. Drawing more from this scholarship could have better illuminated the book’s contributions to existing research.
Overall, Ju’s book raises important concerns about dominant frameworks of immigrant incorporation. Her research underlines how immigrant groups can leverage their ethnic and racial identities as they navigate local politics within their host nations. The cases of Japanese and Jewish immigrants in Brazil challenge dominant theories of immigrant integration, which often assume that migrants’ source countries are more disadvantaged than their destinations. By examining the case of Brazil, Ju’s work invites us to consider an alternative perspective and broadens our understanding of immigrant incorporation.