Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

(cultural, linguistic, and even religious) resources. The former rationalize their persecution of the latter as a legitimate defense against the actual or perceived threat to their (birthright) entitlement to these resources. Moreover, the arena of competition and conflict over vital social resources is demarcated by shifting boundaries of meaning, values, and attitudes that are imbued with the perceptions of foreignness that are attached to groups of newly arrived immigrants. Nativism and Immigration is one of those rare academic gems that is absolutely timely in its topicality, highly readable and lucid, intellectually nuanced, and methodologically honest (more on this later). It is a must-read for elected officials, policy practitioners, and activists/allies who embrace either the restrictionist or expansionist discourses on immigration policy. Liberal arts undergraduates in sociology and political science will be hard pressed to find a more concise, and theoretically sophisticated, exposition of the ideological and institutional underpinnings of nativism, and their intersections with successive phases of immigration policy in the United States (especially chapter 2, “Theorizing Nativism” and chapter 3, “A Brief History of American Nativism”). Graduate students in the social sciences will benefit immensely from the methodological discussion in chapter 4, “Nativism and the Politics of Immigration Reform”. Fry avoids the propensity among many academic and policy researchers to conflate correlation with causality when analyzing the linkages among various elements of social phenomena. He does not presume to identify the motives that cause immigration activists to advance either a restrictionist or expansionist response to immigration. Instead, Fry outlines the “vocabularies of motives” that are associated with the perceptions, justifications, and rationalizations employed by adherents of each response. These vocabularies are illuminated by analyzing three crucial dimensions of immigration discourse. The first is the multiple points of entry through which activists engage competing visions of immigration policy, e.g., an overriding concern with overpopulation or the contribution immigrants make to the economic growth and prosperity of the nation. The second dimension centers on whether the limits of the relationship between humans and nature (i.e., an environment of depleting resources) requires restrictive immigration policies. Proponents of this view argue that unfettered immigration undercuts the “carrying capacity” of Americans to sustain their way of life. In contrast, expansionists believe that higher levels of immigration can be reasonably accommodated through the nurturance of technological innovation and social compassion. The third dimension of vocabularies of motives refers to whether immigration activists frame their competing approaches to immigration according to national self-interests or the logic and inevitability of globalizing economic forces. It is intellectually lazy to simply dismiss proponents of punitive immigration ordinances in various American municipalities as rabid, racial nativists or myopic economic nativists. Fry’s interviews with advocates on both sides of the proverbial immigration “fence” offers a compelling alternative. Expansionists and restrictionists owe Fry a debt of gratitude for challenging them to engage their opponents’ positions as frameworks of meaning that are not reducible to nefarious motivations.