The rise of UKIP began in the 1990s under the leadership of Nigel Farage, another admirer of Powell. From the 1990s on, prominent Conservative Party figures spoke against what they regarded as the foreignization of Britain, sometimes overtly sometimes by insinuation. The latter approach was continued in the malevolent poster slogans of the Conservative campaign during the 2005 general election. After the Conservatives gained power, this activity continued in the even more aggressive ‘hostile environment’ campaign. By the time of the 2016 referendum, anti-immigrant sentiment was mobilised in various ways that included hints and allusions, the citing of misleading statistics, emotive metaphor and barefaced reiteration of untruths. The most blatant example was the pro-Leavers’ assertions that Turkey was about to join the EU, contrary to the well-known fact that Turkey’s application was indefinitely stalled because of its human rights record. In Brexit propaganda, the danger of Turkish accession was tacitly racist, and represented in terms of an ‘invasion’ of the British Isles. The workings of these various types of truth-twisting are examined in depth in this chapter.

This chapter focuses on social individual differences in relation to second language learning. It explores how the social, cultural, and political context that a learner is situated in affects their success of second language learning. The chapter begins by explaining how society and social interaction that second language learners encounter influence the access they have to second language education. This includes the differences between foreign vs. second language learning contexts. It then focuses on social identity theory, acculturation theory relevant to immigrant learners, and transdisciplinary framework (by Douglas Fir Group). The chapter covers other socially constructed individual differences related to intersectionality, diversity–equity–inclusion (DEI), and heritage language learning. The chapter also addresses socially constructed biases related to race and ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and LGBTQ+. The chapter ends with a series of pedagogical recommendations that mitigate the impacts of socially constructed biases on second language learning in the classroom.

First-generation immigrants and refugees (newcomers hereafter) enroll in college at high rates often motivated by high aspirations and optimistic views about the potential for education to stimulate social mobility in the United States. In their pursuits, however, newcomers face many obstacles to completing their degree. This chapter draws on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to explore the postsecondary aspirations and experiences of eighteen current and recently graduated newcomer college students. Through in-depth interviews, participants documented the challenges they faced during their transition to college. This chapter draws attention to the social and structural challenges facing newcomers as they transition to college as well as the resources on which they may draw in their educational pursuits. For instance, while participants demonstrated fortitude and determination to succeed in college, many also expressed concerns that they would not be able to fulfill their career goals and high aspirations. The findings offered in this chapter have practical implications for educators and policymakers seeking to improve the completion rates of newcomer college students.

Immigrant college students represent a diverse population across the United States. In this chapter, Michelle Leao and Stephen John Quaye engage in a quest to use our own immigrant stories to enrich the larger narrative of immigrant college students in the United States. We utilized a duoethnography to capture our higher education experiences through our undergraduate and graduate experiences. From our conversations, we focus on four themes: studying people around us, assimilating and fitting in, using our accent and language, and developing our immigrant identities. With those themes in mind, we close by offering recommendations for policy and practice to support immigrant college students.

The eight chapters in Part II focus on the most sedentary portion of Ilf and Petrov’s journey, the month they spent in and around New York City in fall 1935 hobnobbing with literary celebrities and immersing themselves in American popular culture. Investigating Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with renowned American artists and authors offers a way of tracing the transnational networks that connected Soviet and American cultural producers. How and what did they learn from each other? Where and why did they fail to understand one another? The role of immigrants in these networks looms large and allows consideration of how Soviet art and Russian artists become “American.” How did Ilf and Petrov make Soviet sense of American culture and American consumption?

The meteoric growth of the platform economy, its economic underpinnings as well as the accompanying human practices, have provoked academic debates as well as shone a light on its praxis. In this gig economy, the conditions of work have significantly changed from what used to be relatively stable markets, moored self- and work identities, with predictable technological cycles, established jobs in which individuals were ‘tied’ into roles and their organisations-of-employ, sufficient income during work and non-work periods, and with substantive protections through employment rights and social protection – also known as the standard employment relationship (SER). The gig economy has introduced efficiencies in engaging customer segments and supply chains, however its non-standard forms of employment (NSFE) which includes part-time, temporary, and zero-hour contracts and dependent self-employment, has brought with it: low pay, insufficient and variable hours, short-term contracts, and limited social protection rights (Rubery, Grimshaw, Keizer & Johnson, ). The majority of employees, migrants and foreigners, remain dependent on in-country structures to grant them SER rights – in many countries, though, they do not have the power to engage with those structures and no way to build on and improve their rights. The emerging story of the gig economy divides scholars, particularly in relation to the distribution of the economic and social benefits of this ‘new economy’, as well as international relations (IR) scholars in that race and indigeneity, and its intersections, have been missing in many of the debates. The challenge remains to upend the coloniality and neoliberal nature of work, and create a more democratic and inclusive labour market, in which more of the economic benefits are fairly distributed among those who participate in the gig economy and not just for indigenous citizens exclusively.

This chapter will lay out a potted account of the literature of New York and its relationship to world literature braiding two main themes: first will be that of New York as a center of self-invention, a place that was primarily commercial at its inception but progressively expanded to embrace diverse forms of ethnic, cultural, sexual, and urban interactions. And second will be to focus on the significance of neighborhoods and sweatshops as the spatial vectors through which immigrants and diasporics gain a sense of New York. The bulk of the chapter and will be devoted to a close analysis of the chronotopes of the neighborhood and the sweatshop in Toni Morrison’sJazzand Melissa Rivero’sThe Affairs of the Falcónsrespectively as a means of grasping the relationship between localized foci of individual mobility, identity, and alienation in the literature of New York and the ways in which we might also discern these as key organizing principles of world literature.

The LLAMA tests have been widely used in aptitude research since their development in the early 2000s, but almost exclusively with (highly) educated adults (college students or immigrants with a college degree). Following the idea that research in the humanities suffers from an over-representation of Western undergraduates that may bias some of its results, we discuss the difference in the scores on the LLAMA tests obtained by the participants of a recent study on new immigrants when compared to the scores of a number of former studies on other populations. We also discuss the predictive effect of these aptitude measures on the development of proficiency in the majority language by the same participants and argue for more research with under-served populations.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.