Beyond the ethnic lens : locality, globality, and born-again incorporation

Migration studies have focused attention on ethnic institutions in global and gateway cities. This ethnic lens distorts migration scholarship, reinforcesmethodological nationalism, and disregards the role of city scale in shaping migrant pathways of settlement and transnational connection. The scaleof cities reflects their positioning within neoliberal processes of local, national, regional, and global rescaling. To encourage further explorations ofnonethnic pathways that may be salient in small-scale cities, we examine born-againChristianity as a means of migrant incorporation locally and transnationally in two small-scale cities, one in the United States and the other in Germany.