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Deindustrialization and the New Twenty-First-Century Immigrant

Paul A. Shackel

in Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country

Northeastern Pennsylvania has undergone long-term deindustrialization, and the region has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. In the late 1990s, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ... More

Northeastern Pennsylvania has undergone long-term deindustrialization, and the region has one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. In the late 1990s, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania provided major tax breaks to corporations, and many companies moved their fulfillment centers to the region. Latinos, mostly of Dominican descent, have migrated to the area to fill these low-skilled positions. As a result, Hazleton’s Latino population has risen from 4 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2010, and by 2020 it will be a majority minority community. Fearing undocumented workers, the City of Hazleton passed anti-immigration laws, which have helped fuel anti-immigration sentiment across the United States. The memory of Lattimer and recognition of the undocumented status of the victims have been employed to protest this type of legislation.Less

Reform at Last: A Victory for Whom?

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

Chapter 6 analyzes Italian and Jewish reform advocates’ final efforts to abolish the national origins quota system but also sheds light on the constraints they faced in seeking reform. After pushing ... More

Chapter 6 analyzes Italian and Jewish reform advocates’ final efforts to abolish the national origins quota system but also sheds light on the constraints they faced in seeking reform. After pushing for immigration reform for over forty years, many of them, sensing that the window for reform was closing, realized that they had to compromise to accomplish their goal. Although Lyndon B. Johnson and his administration marginalized the voices of Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates who had long fought for immigration reform, many of these activists remained quiet as the negotiations over the final bill hinged on the imposition of a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. For many of them, in the end, their priority remained the abolition of the national origins quota system, which they regarded as marking them as undesirable, second-class citizens. As many of them had hoped, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the national origins quota system and prioritized immigrants with family ties and skills, but it also imposed global quotas, including on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, which created new barriers for migrants from the Americas and exacerbated the debate over illegal immigration.Less

Almost as Inaccessible as Tibet: Mobilizing under Restriction before World War II

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

Chapter 3 examines how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates adjusted to the new restrictive immigration regime that followed the passage of the 1924 act and how they worked to build ... More

Chapter 3 examines how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates adjusted to the new restrictive immigration regime that followed the passage of the 1924 act and how they worked to build political clout to push for reform under the aegis of Roosevelt’s New Deal. During this period, family reunification remained the only argument that helped them gain some traction with legislators as both groups gained more political visibility with representation at every level of government. Despite the pervasive isolationism, push for assimilation, and the strain from the Great Depression, Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates successfully used family reunification to help more migrants enter the United States as the 1930s came to an end. Those who could not enter often resorted to illegal immigration. The Anti-Semitism that animated many officers in the U.S. State Department, however, made sure that the very generous annual quota for Germany went mostly unfilled for the entire decade even as thousands of German Jews continued to apply for visas for the United States to flee Nazi Germany.Less

A Thing of Shreds and Patches: Challenging Immigration Reform from Within, 1952–1960

Maddalena Marinari

in Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965

Chapter 5 shows that, after the debacle of 1952, Italian and Jewish reformers, along with other advocacy groups, pragmatically focused on pushing for ad hoc legislation and piecemeal immigration ... More

Chapter 5 shows that, after the debacle of 1952, Italian and Jewish reformers, along with other advocacy groups, pragmatically focused on pushing for ad hoc legislation and piecemeal immigration reform to undermine the very premise of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Contrary to what the sponsors and supporters of the 1952 immigration law had envisioned, the number of immigrants entering the United States steadily went up during the rest of the decade in part thanks to many of the small legislative changes pushed by Italian and Jewish immigration reform activists. Many immigrants from Asia took advantage of the preference for family reunification and skill-based immigration and began to change the migratory flows to the United States, thus paving the way for the diversification of U.S. society usually associated with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Nonetheless, while these changes helped immigrants with family ties and desirable skills, they did little to help unskilled temporary migrants or to address the racialization of and violence against immigrants illegally in the country.Less

Introduction

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

The Introduction explains the book’s major arguments, the materials and methodologies that are used, and key historical and contextual information.

Reinforcing the Detention System, 1994–2000

Carl Lindskoog

in Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World's Largest Immigration Detention System

Haitian detention at Guantanamo Bay continued to focus attention on U.S. detention practice in 1995 as the government’s detention of hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian youth generated enormous ... More

Haitian detention at Guantanamo Bay continued to focus attention on U.S. detention practice in 1995 as the government’s detention of hundreds of unaccompanied Haitian youth generated enormous controversy and loud calls for their freedom. Chapter 6 documents this struggle over child detention before it moves to an examination of two key pieces of legislation in 1996 that had a decisive impact on the history of immigration detention in the U.S. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) were measures that consummated the marriage of immigration restriction and mass incarceration, devastated immigrant communities, and led to an enormous expansion of the immigration detention system. Finally, chapter 6 illustrates what the immigration detention system had become by the late 1990s and how, despite the extraordinary power and cruelty of the system, detainees continued to exercise resistance.Less

Reproductive Futurism and the Temporality of Migration Control

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

Chapter Five analyzes the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, which ended the practice of automatically granting citizenship to any child born in Ireland. The Referendum was intended to stop immigration ... More

Chapter Five analyzes the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, which ended the practice of automatically granting citizenship to any child born in Ireland. The Referendum was intended to stop immigration into Ireland by pregnant non-citizen women. But it also radically transformed the meaning of citizenship for Irish people. Moreover, it revealed the temporal—rather than spatial—dimensions of immigration control, which tries to create an exclusionary national future by managing heterosexual reproduction.Less

Introduction

Patrisia Macías-Rojas

in From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America

For many, the punitive turn in immigration stems from the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Although 9/11 linked immigration and national security, this link occurred more in ... More

For many, the punitive turn in immigration stems from the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Although 9/11 linked immigration and national security, this link occurred more in the national imagination than in practice. The day-to-day operations of Border Patrol agents do not involve intercepting terrorists or chemical weapons, nor are border agents apprehending migrants from countries on the “state sponsors of terrorism” or “terrorist safe haven” lists. Despite the rhetorical conflation of immigration with terrorism and national security, what border enforcement looks like in practice is little more than domestic crime control extended to an immigration context. The introductory chapter recounts over a decade of historical and ethnographic research on this new blend of immigration and crime control that began well before the events of September 11.Less

Counternarratives of Migration Law and Childbearing

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

Chapter Two uses interview narratives and participant observation to suggest that Ireland’s immigration and asylum system is reactive, poorly planned, and exclusionary, making it virtually impossible ... More

Chapter Two uses interview narratives and participant observation to suggest that Ireland’s immigration and asylum system is reactive, poorly planned, and exclusionary, making it virtually impossible for immigrants or asylum seekers to gain legal status. Gaining residency through a child provided some migrants with an opportunity to negotiate these barriers.Less

Conclusion

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

The Conclusion brings the book’s arguments together by reviewing how pregnancy became the basis for claiming that certain migrants were “illegal,” and then implementing laws and policies that ... More

The Conclusion brings the book’s arguments together by reviewing how pregnancy became the basis for claiming that certain migrants were “illegal,” and then implementing laws and policies that actually made them so. It then discusses how the figure of the illegal migrant shapes the norm of the desirable migrant and the good citizen, in ways that rearticulate sexualized, gendered, racialized, classed, and geopolitical hierarchies. It suggests that the state’s framework of “national interest,” which legitimizes these policies, remains contested. Yet, questions of sexuality have rarely factored into opposition arguments or alternative visions; what would happen if we were to factor sexuality in?Less

From Childbearing to Multiple Sexuality and Migration Struggles

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

Chapter 6 provides an overview of what happened to migrant parents with citizen children after the passage of the citizenship referendum, and then describes further conflicts over sexualities and ... More

Chapter 6 provides an overview of what happened to migrant parents with citizen children after the passage of the citizenship referendum, and then describes further conflicts over sexualities and migrations—this time involving heterosexual marriage migration, same-sex couple migration, sex work, and domestic work—that emerged.Less

Shift ing Boundaries through Discourses of Childbearing

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

Chapter One analyzes critical speeches delivered by the Minister for Justice, who is responsible for immigration policy, in which he characterizes women’s pregnancy as “evidence” of growing illegal ... More

Chapter One analyzes critical speeches delivered by the Minister for Justice, who is responsible for immigration policy, in which he characterizes women’s pregnancy as “evidence” of growing illegal immigration and describes his strategy for tackling it.Less

The “Right to Life of the Unborn” and Migration Controls

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

Chapter Four centers on a Supreme Court decision involving a Nigerian asylum seeker who tried to avoid deportation by arguing that she was pregnant and the Irish Constitution promises to “defend and ... More

Chapter Four centers on a Supreme Court decision involving a Nigerian asylum seeker who tried to avoid deportation by arguing that she was pregnant and the Irish Constitution promises to “defend and vindicate” the “right to life of the unborn.” I analyze how pro-life discourses shape state immigration and asylum controls; immigrants’ opportunities to resist deportation and acquire legal status; and Irish women’s right to travel overseas, including for abortions.Less

Conclusion

John H. Flores

in The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War

During the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican Chicago was shaped by the ebbs and flows of revolutionary politics. Initially, the liberals, radicals, and conservatives all defined themselves ... More

During the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican Chicago was shaped by the ebbs and flows of revolutionary politics. Initially, the liberals, radicals, and conservatives all defined themselves as patriotic Mexican citizens. The Calles and Cardenas presidencies reinforced the nationalism of the liberals and radicals, while these presidencies and their policies repulsed the traditionalists from Mexico. As traditionalists distanced themselves from postrevolutionary Mexico, they offered Mexican Catholics a deterritorialized brand of mexicanidad that characterized Mexicans as a supranational people. U.S. deportation campaigns only underscored the ways Mexican citizenship could cost traditionalists their Catholic communities. In the end, the liberals and radicals were simply too disenchanted with the United States to become U.S. citizens, while Mexican radicalism and American nativism convinced traditionalists that it was in their best interest to become Americans.Less

Baby Gives Birth to Parents: Direct Provision and Subject Formation

Eithne Luibhéid

in Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant

Chapter Three analyzes how the social welfare system attempts to transform asylum-seeking migrants into dependent, demoralized, and impoverished subjects. That transformation facilitates the state’s ... More

Chapter Three analyzes how the social welfare system attempts to transform asylum-seeking migrants into dependent, demoralized, and impoverished subjects. That transformation facilitates the state’s denial of the vast majority of asylum claims, and asylum seekers’ reclassification as illegal and deportable migrants. Until 2003, however, giving birth to an Irish child enabled some asylum seekers to avoid these outcomes and instead, to become legally resident, independent, and socially valued subjects.Less