Search Results

After the abolition of slavery, this chapter observes, agricultural and industrial employers used a variety of “back-door” techniques to bypass restrictions on immigration and bring temporary Asian, European, and Mexican workers to the United States. Contract labor and the Mexican bracer program allowed agricultural employers simply to import workers, like goods, and export them when they were no longer needed. This chapter points out that the Constitution as written, considered imported laborers a category of imported things, not people. When restrictionist policy made labor scarce, for example, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the 1924 Restriction Act reduced Asian and European labor supplies, employers found substitutes, such as Mexican laborers.

This chapter focuses on three overarching points of concern to students and advocates of migrant rights. U.S. foreign policy has contradictory global effects on migrants. Rather than curbing unauthorized entry, the erection of heightened security barriers around U.S. borders has only deflected immigrants into the grip of smugglers. It highlights draconian U.S. foreign and immigration policies under which migrants seek to cross borders. Restrictionist immigration and border control policies find a compatible and effective accomplice in the free-market restructuring of various countries' economies, which has increased rates of female poverty and with it, heightened women's vulnerability to the tactics of slavers posing as labor recruiters. Post-9/11 U.S. government actions have extensive precedents and deep historical roots and the measures taken in the name of U.S. national security after 9/11 have significantly worsened the picture.

This chapter introduces a discourse of environmental restrictionism that is typically, and problematically, ignored by opponents: ecocommunitarianism. Ecocommunitarianism provides a forceful critique of neoliberalism, brings nonhumans and future generations into its discussion of political community, and makes repeated reference to saving “wild places.” Ecocommunitarians also move beyond the neoracism of nativist forms of restrictionism. The ecocommunitarian restrictionists thus discuss race constantly, but in a way that is rhetorically distanced from the logic of ecocommunitarianism itself. This chapter observes that, for environmental restrictionists, ecocommunitarianism represents the next logical strategic step beyond econativism, but also signifies anideological breaking point. Race is displaced to such an extent that it becomes illegitimate to talk about, yet the policies supported by ecocommunitarians further entrench the racialized structures producing environmental injustice—thus threatening to shatter the very postracial narrative that ecocommunitarians rely upon. The shattering of this narrative is not preordained, however; it requires opponents who can articulate an alternative vision of the relationships between nature, sovereignty, and race. The problem is that the ecocommunitarian logic has received little attention from opponents of restrictionism despite the fact that it is the discourse of environmental restrictionism that is most likely to persuade social progressives and mainstream environmentalists.

The conclusion discusses how this book has suggested that “nature”—constructed as a source of intrinsic value—is today emerging as a prominent site of discursive struggle that is deployed by societal interests of many stripes. It also reflects on how each of the environmental restrictionist discourses that the author has outlined relies on a construction of crisis, and yet each conceptualizes and works to reconfigure the relationship between nature and sovereignty in ways that differ dramatically. The conclusion ends by thinking about how as the realities of climate change become ever more apparent, climactic shifts will begin to disrupt geopolitics and profit making as usual, and migrants seeking refuge from areas that are increasingly difficult to inhabit will foster social animus in their receiving communities. To counter the drive for border walls gone green, environmental politics requires a radical reformulated way of thinking about communities that includes a variety of cultures and non-humans.

It traces the historical trajectory of the relationship between nature and immigration restrictionism, asserting that commitments to nature and restrictionist politics are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive. Therefore, articulations between nature and sovereignty create space for political maneuver, playing the ostensibly “cultural” politics of sovereignty off against the “natural” politics of the environment in ways that justify social hierarchies while speaking in languages that seem color-blind.The history of racism, coupled with the continually shifting terrain of race, has ensured that racial hierarchies are at times reflected in both “natural” and “cultural” concepts. Out of this history has developed a seemingly contradictory conjuncture. Most American environmentalists have adopted core cultural commitments that place them on the left of the American political spectrum and lead them to extend some form of ethical and political recognition to immigrants. But, on the other hand, contemporary commitments to nature remain bound up in epistemologies that have close historical linkages with conservative, restrictionist politics.Contemporary political debates are still filtered through this dichotomous nature. Creating an ambivalence that cuts to the core of American political debates and rendering nature a pivotal site of discursive struggle.

This chapter questions whether the new immigrants are really so different from the lionized immigrants of yore by giving a more sociological twist to the popular query. It explains that the current debate hinges on the question of how today's immigrants differ from earlier ones and restrictionists usually make two distinctions between the post-1965 immigrants and the earlier waves of European immigrants. It argues that differences between them may lie in the social circumstances that shape their absorption into American life. It explains that today's immigrants arriving after the rise of the welfare state are not encouraged to work as hard as previous immigrants, who did not enjoy such government help. It further explains that the immigrants themselves are different because the government admits racially different groups into a society that no longer advocates assimilation.

In spite of their limited numbers and altogether unthreatening character, the international anarchist groups in Britain came to play a significant role in the redefinition of the country's immigration and asylum policy. Both the presence of the anarchists and the use of police surveillance posed problems as they contradicted Britain's traditionally liberal asylum policy, a matter of great national pride, perceived as a pillar of national exceptionalism. The early 1890s witnessed the emergence of a loose ‘restrictionist’ party advocating stricter policing and limitations on immigration and asylums, basing its arguments on fears of economic and racial decline through the uncontrolled immigration of radical foreigners. In 1898, the international conference on the policing of anarchism held in Rome resulted in agreements which laid down the basis for Interpol; however, Britain and France refused to enter these in the name of national autonomy of action. The agreements were strengthened in 1902 and 1904, but Britain still refused to enter any formal arrangement. The turning point came in 1905, with the passing of the Aliens’ Act, restricting entry into the country for the first time since 1826.

Chapter 2 offers an account of how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates, sensing the inevitability of further restriction, pragmatically decided to work with legislators in the early 1920s to mitigate some of the more punitive features of the national origins quota system. When the literacy test passed in 1917 failed to halt immigration from eastern and southern Europe significantly, restrictionists in and outside of Congress began pushing for quantitative immigration restriction. In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which imposed the national origins quota system for immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere and a near ban on immigration from Asia. The only issue on which restrictionist legislators and Italian and Jewish anti-restrictionists could find common ground when it came to immigration reform was family reunification, but legislators refused to budge on the discriminatory national quotas imposed on European immigration. Although scholars usually present the 1920s and 1930s as the height of immigration restriction, these negotiations over family reunification, along with the exemption of the Western Hemisphere from the quota system, allowed for exclusion and inclusion to continue to coexist in U.S. immigration policy.

What does “gun control” mean? The author describes a class of legislation that lies at the heart of the debate between advocates and opponents of gun control. Some legislation aims to restrict the availability of guns. As such, it is based on an attitude toward guns as a bad thing to have around, at least if they are “too readily available.” In this sense, gun safety regulations are not cases of gun control, nor are laws that prohibit them for a dangerous class of users (such as children). Thus, in part I of this book, advocates and opponents of gun control are referred to, respectively, as “gun restrictionists” and “anti-restrictionists.” This introductory chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the strongly anti-restrictionist environment in which the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was framed.