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Steven J. Gold, Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City By Elizabeth M. Aranda Sallie Hughes, and Elena Sabogal Rienner Publishers. 2014. 367 pp. $68.50 hardcover, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 4, June 2016, Page e117, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sov007
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Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City is an in-depth, multidimensional study of diverse migrant groups' experiences of arrival, adaptation to, and in some cases, exit from contemporary Miami. Studies of migrants' lives in specific cities generally, and in Miami in particular, are not new topics for sociological research. Nevertheless, this is a groundbreaking report. What makes this book singular is the authors' use of Anthony Giddens's concern with risk and security: “how economic globalization and regional geopolitics restructured social conditions across space, creating new forms of security and insecurity that immigrants embody in lived spaces that include their home countries and … Miami” (4).
By taking this approach, the authors challenge the assumptions—widely held in popular culture, policymaking, and academic discourse—that individualism, detachment, and the emotional costs of migration are to be tolerated in pursuit of “the goal of getting ahead” (3). Rather than accepting the inevitability of this trade-off, the authors conceive of migration as involving the always problematic exchange of ontological security (associated with home-based relationships and worldviews) for other forms of security that are required for survival and which, due to political, economic, and personal crises, are no longer available in the country of origin. As such, the book contributes much to our understanding of migrant transnationalism.