Chapter Twelve. Immigration Politics and Restrictionism, 1970–2001

Reviewed by: The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman Kathryn Schumaker (bio) The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America. By Sarah Coleman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. $35.00 cloth; $35.00 ebook) Historians of immigration in the twentieth-century United States have long noted how restrictive policies created a class of unauthorized people who lived in the shadow of the law. At the same time, the 1960s spurred a revolution in individual rights, expanding the scope of claims all persons—including noncitizens—could make through the Fourteenth Amendment. Sarah Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America examines the people caught in between these two important developments, exploring the battles over the rights of unauthorized immigrants. This well-written and thoroughly researched book tells an often-surprising story that reveals how the states—and not the federal government—were frequently the laboratories of restrictive immigration policies in the late twentieth century. Coleman begins with Plyler v. Doe (1982), a landmark United States Supreme Court case that questioned the constitutionality of a Texas state law that allowed school districts to charge tuition to students who could not prove their legal status. The Supreme Court had ruled a decade earlier that the Fourteenth Amendment did not include a constitutional right to education. Could Texas charge tuition to unauthorized families or exclude them from public schools entirely? The first two chapters examine how these questions vexed the Carter and Reagan administrations, where officials saw unauthorized children as sympathetic figures, but also recognized that immigration [End Page 449] was a hot-button issue with voters. Though unauthorized immigrants were a convenient political target for members of state legislatures—especially in their inability to respond at the ballot box—officials were wary of punishing children. The Supreme Court eventually ruled the law unconstitutional in 1982. But the concerns about childhood that restrained some policymakers and judges in Plyler did little to deter efforts by state legislatures to target adults. Amid press warnings that linked rising unemployment rates to unauthorized workers, states passed laws criminalizing the employers who hired them. The next two chapters examine how this issue scrambled traditional partisan divides. The Chamber of Commerce and many Republicans opposed a federal law because it targeted business owners. Latino advocacy groups recognized that the law risked the possibility that, fearful of prosecution, employers could refuse to hire any identifiably Latino person. Ultimately, these concerns contributed to the passage of the 1986 federal immigration law that included (largely unenforceable) sanctions for employers, but also prohibited discrimination on the basis of alienage and national origin in hiring. The final chapters focus on the 1990s, when both political parties lurched rightward on immigration. The fifth chapter examines how immigration again came to the fore amid an economic downturn, culminating in Clinton-era welfare reform that ended the ability of noncitizens to access public benefits, including cash assistance and food stamps, regardless of their legal status. The final chapter explains how states paved the way for new restrictive immigration policies, leading Congress to ultimately buttress the authority of state and local officials to carry out immigration enforcement in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The Walls Within is a story of lawyers, judges, policy advisers, senators, and other elites as they made immigration law and policy in courtrooms and offices. Unauthorized immigrants existed abstractly for these people, especially for politicians who sought to use [End Page 450] immigration policy to woo conservative white voters (in the case of Clinton) or appeal to Latino voters (as Reagan did). The book, therefore, has less to say about how these legal and policy changes affected immigrants' everyday lives. Nonetheless it offers a clear policy and legal history of the fraught issue of immigrants' rights in the modern United States, especially in its contributions to the growing scholarship on federalism and immigration. [End Page 451] Kathryn Schumaker KATHRYN SCHUMAKER is a historian at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s and is at work on a new book project about interracial families in...

The paper explores the role of radical right parties in the politicization of immigration. In scholarly literature, radical right parties are viewed as the owners of the immigration issue and as drivers of its politicization. Against this prevalent view, we argue that the significance of radical right parties in politicizing immigration is overrated: (1) Radical right parties only play a subordinate role in the politicization of immigration, whereas the contribution of mainstream parties to raising issue salience has been underestimated; (2) the politicization of immigration is not related to radical right strength in the party system. The findings are based on media data from a comparative project on public claims-making on immigration in Western European countries (SOM, Support and Opposition to Migration). We discuss our findings in comparison to the relevant literature and suggest avenues for further research.

Center for Migration Studies special issuesVolume 19, Issue 1 p. 73-120 Free Access CHAPTER III: IMMIGRATION AND LOCAL POLITICS IN THE CITY OF AMADORA First published: 18 July 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2050-411X.2004.tb00340.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume19, Issue1Special Issue: Contested Citizenship: Immigration Politics and Grassroots Migrants' Organizations in Post‐Colonial PortugalJanuary 2004Pages 73-120 RelatedInformation

Immigration and Immigration Politics

This review of Catherine Dauvergne’s The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Society summarizes the contribution of the book to the changing global migration landscape. The review outlines the three shifts observed by Dauvergne in the new politics of immigration in a post-post-colonial era. There is a tie-in between Dauvergne’s thoughts on the impact of the fear of Islamic fundamentalism connected to immigration politics and the Trump administration’s evolving stance on immigra...

Using Catherine Dauvergne's The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Society (2016) as a starting point, this article explores subnational policy dynamics in Canada, Australia and the United States. It considers whether the trends associated with legalization, two‐step programmes, rapid policy changes and economic discourses are present in Canadian provinces as well as in U.S. and Australian states. It shows that the forces described by Dauvergne contribute to a further rescaling of policymaking and to the emergence of subnational migration states. However, this article also demonstrates that this common movement varies in its consequences and identifies two central subnational policy responses typical of the new politics of immigration: 1) the “economic subnational migration state” (Canada and Australia) and 2) the “access subnational migration state” (United States). The models and the global trends described in this article have implications for immigration policymaking in federations.

Current debates around immigration are informed by hierarchies of belonging, with some groups seen to belong more, and therefore deserve more, than others. This link between belonging and entitlement has been predominantly analysed in relation to struggles over access to key material benefits, such as jobs, housing, healthcare and so on. This paper will argue that these struggles also point to the continuing relevance of nationhood to many people's sense of self, community and place and the value that comes from being positioned, and recognised, as part of a group that lies at the heart of national life and culture. In other words, the ‘politics of immigration’ is about the anxieties and concerns of those who no longer feel ‘at home’ in what they consider to be ‘their’ country.

This article follows from the workshop that Professor Mireille Paquet organized in Montreal in June 2018, to discuss my book, The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies (Cambridge, 2016; Dauvergne 2016). In relation to this event and the articles of this special issue, this paper embarks on revisiting The New Politics of Immigration, now more than three after it first appeared in print. In this paper, I reflect on whether my arguments stand up to the test presented by the events of the past three years. Recent events lead me to nuance some of my original arguments, but on the whole even the most recent surprises fit well into the New Politics framework that points to increasing salience, legalization and urgency in politicizing immigration.

Although politics play pivotal roles in the emergence and operation of private prison corporations (PPCs), less is known about the effects of politics on PPCs’ financial performance. This paper examines the economic consequences of US immigration politics on PPCs using stock market data. Results show that PPCs benefit from restrictive immigration politics through increased stock values and certainty of future profitability. In contrast, their stock values are more likely to fall when the federal government announces sanctions threats on PPCs. These immigration politics only shape PPCs because of their unique business partnership with governments, but do not have meaningful impacts on private security companies that hold weak commercial interests in immigration politics. Finally, this study offers policy implications by revealing consequential effects of national-level politics on PPCs’ financial performance, suggesting future directions for federal roles in regulating PPCs.

Reviewed by: Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, And Immigration Politics in The Age of Security by Anna Sampaio Francisco Delgado TERRORIZING LATINA/O IMMIGRANTS: Race, Gender, And Immigration Politics in The Age of Security. By Anna Sampaio. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 2015. Anna Sampaio's Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, And Immigration Politics in the Age of Security provides a comprehensive and engaging analysis of how Latina/o immigrants exist in a paradox: in that, they are portrayed as terrorists by a nation that in fact terrorizes them. [End Page 123] While steeped in contemporary concerns about the enforcement policies of such agencies as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), the book effectively links these phenomena with the nation's history of dealing with Latina/o persons, beginning with the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, which created the U.S.-Mexico border we know today, up until the DREAM Act. In the process, Sampaio successfully links the experiences of immigrants with the plight of other immigrant groups that endured exclusionary legislation fueled by racism, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1917. Thus, while the book is primarily concerned with the issues faced by Latina/o communities, its conscious efforts to link these issues with those endured by other communities will fascinate students and scholars of ethnic American history, culture, literature, and film. Sampaio also successfully shows how race and gender intersect in the persecution—or, to paraphrase her title, the terrorizing—of Latina/o communities. This is especially evident in the second chapter, in which Sampaio argues that the nation's security discourses rely on rhetoric of "masculine protectionism, demonization, and de-Americanization in ways that constitute Latina/o immigrants as foreign and threatening, positioning them as potential terrorists" (21). In other words, the United States positions itself as the masculinized protector, thus relegating its own citizens (as well as women and children abroad) as feminized dependents, while demonizing and de-Americanizing Latina/o immigrants. The author's analysis of the intersectionality of race and gender continues in chapter 6 through its three case studies of Jose Padilla, Yaser Hamdi, and John Walker Lindh. In one of its most compelling arguments about how racism operates in the treatment of individuals accused of treason, she points out that of the three individuals examined here, Lindh in fact was the only one "who admitted to working on behalf of the Taliban [and] to fighting against the United States" (127), yet "retained the rights of political agency of a citizen" (113) due to his status as a white, middle-class man. The author uses critical race studies, feminist theory, and intersectional analysis to complement her background in political science, thus differentiating her work from preexisting scholarship, which Sampaio writes "leaves unexamined the way that racialization and gendering processes have operated in tandem to construct Latina/o immigrants as potential terrorists and to legitimize their terrorization via restrictive state practices" (8). In addition to these methodologies, Sampaio also uses newspaper articles in her study. While some may criticize her reliance on newspapers, the author strategically explains that her use of such sources stems from the lack of documentation by the DHS, ICE, and the CIS. By drawing our attention specifically to this lack of documentation from government agencies, Sampaio highlights the dangers of the restrictive legislation and practices of the U.S. and state governments towards Latina/o populations, including natural born citizens as Sampaio shows in chapter 6. For students and scholars seeking a carefully-researched and nuanced study on the issues facing Latina/o immigrants, Sampaio's book is worthwhile reading. Francisco Delgado University of New Haven Copyright © 2018 Mid-America American Studies Association

Introduction -- The Migratory Process and the Formation of Ethnic Minorities -- International Migration before 1945 -- Migration to Highly-Developed Countries since 1945 -- The Next Waves: The Globalisation of International Migration -- New Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region -- Migrants and Minorities in the Labour Force -- The Migratory Process: A Comparison of Australia and Germany -- New Ethnic Minorities and Society -- Immigrant Politics -- Conclusion: Migration in the New World Order.

Reviewed by: Help (Not) Wanted: Immigration Politics in Japan by Michael Strausz Susanne Klien (bio) Help (Not) Wanted: Immigration Politics in Japan. By Michael Strausz. SUNY Press, 2019. xvi, 197 pages. $95.00. cloth; $32.95, paper. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown, once again, that Japan is still light years away from the status of a "de facto immigrant nation," as previously argued by Gracia Liu-Farrer.1 After all, in contrast to those of other advanced industrialized nations, Japan's borders were closed to foreign nationals with residence status for six months in 2020 while holders of Japanese [End Page 202] passports continued to be eligible for free movement into and out of Japan. Non-Japanese academic faculty working in Japan who wished to return in March 2020 from overseas business trips and many foreign students who had been granted scholarships by the Japanese government were refused (re-)entry; precarious foreign pretenure academics had to wait for many months for permission to enter Japan to take up their scholarships. The fact that Japanese citizens were granted re-entry after overseas trips without PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests in the initial phase of the pandemic provides strong evidence of the continuing idea of the soto/uchi (inside/outside) binary. These episodes make Michael Strausz's recent analysis of Japan's immigration policy extremely timely. Although written well before the onset of COVID-19, this monograph helps understand the historical and socioeconomic background of Japan's restrictive policies with regard to migrants. Admittedly, the country has gradually accepted more immigrants in the last decade; the reality is, however, that the overall share of non-Japanese residents accounted for just 2.25 per cent of the total population of 127 million in 2020. The key question is evidently why the Japanese government has continued to be so reluctant to admit more immigrants despite pervasive issues of demographic decline and aging and a resulting acute labor shortage in many sectors. Given the fact that the number of Japanese citizens fell by more than 500,000 from the previous year in 2020, a rethinking of immigration policies and visions seems urgently needed. The book consists of seven chapters. After the introduction, the author outlines immigration restriction policies, providing institutional explanations. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Japan, political scientist Strausz compellingly argues that Japan's restrictive immigration policy is due to two main reasons: first, the failure of labor-intensive businesses such as construction, farming, and care work to defeat anti-immigration circles in the Japanese government and, second, the lack of elite support for viewing immigration as beneficial for the country. In contrast to countries such as Germany, in Japan immigrants are associated with potential unrest and threat to the social order in the eyes of such elites, many of whom continue to embrace the ideology of Japan as a one-ethnicity country. Chapter 3 dissects minority rights and minority invisibility, focusing on oldcomer Koreans and their calls for access to legal rights and protections, for example voting rights for foreign residents in Diet elections. Strausz offers insightful analysis of how, in the 1960s, governing elites including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to realize they might need to revisit the separatist idea about Japan's national identity, that is, assumptions about Japan's ethnic homogeneity as a source of national greatness and the inclusion of only ethnically Japanese in the definition of Japanese citizens. This section introduces the groups of the "assimilation optimists" [End Page 203] and "assimilation pessimists" that discussed whether it was possible and/or desirable to assimilate oldcomer Koreans and other foreign residents of Japan (p. 49) in the Japanese government, business, and media, showing the persistent prevalence of the key idea of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Entitled "The Crow is White: Foreign Labor and the Japanese State," chapter 4 provides information about foreign laborers and visa categories for foreign residents in Japan, discusses the types of labor shortages currently faced by the island nation, and examines decisions to admit (or not to admit) foreign laborers. Japan revised the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act in 1989, introducing a new...

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the role of immigration politics and group consciousness in Hispanic and Asian American vote preferences in a Southern US statewide election. Using a single public opinion data set that allows for a unique, comparative study of both Latino and Asian American likely voters, I explore the development of group consciousness through immigration politics and ethnic media and test the effects of group-conscious voting (motivation to vote to support one’s ethnic community) on support for Democrats. Through this two-part multivariate analysis I identify immigration politics as central to the development of group consciousness for Latinos but not for Asian Americans, while ethnic media predict group-conscious voting for both highly heterogeneous groups. While group-conscious voting is a strong predictor of both Hispanic and Asian American support for a Democratic candidate in a statewide race, only Latinos link immigration salience to Democratic support. This research contributes to the literature on minority politics in the New South.

Investigations of immigration politics usually focus on national scale debates and policy initiatives. Immigrant settlement, however, is often highly concentrated in select regions and cities and it is in these places that immigration politics is most contentious. This paper examines these subnational politics of immigration in the United States and explores their relation to national immigration politics. The concentrated geography of immigrants in the United States intersects with a federalised system for dispersing welfare and other social costs of immigration. This creates tension between a central government with the responsibility for controlling admission and state/local governments who pay the social costs of immigrant incorporation. This dynamic of conflict has been exacerbated in recent years by the neoliberal governance strategy of downloading. Geographic concentration has other consequences for the ways in which immigration politics develops, specifically the challenges that visible difference in the landscape poses to national identity. In regard to the latter, the paper echoes Vron Ware by suggesting that an important challenge for diverse immigrant societies is to reimagine all of the nation's territory as multiethnic/multicultural, not just the locations where immigrants cluster.

Immigration is among the most transformative experiences of postwar Europe. It has reoriented political parties, restructured the European party system, and given birth to new political parties, namely far-right exclusionary populist parties. Alongside these political changes, immigration presents innumerable social and economic challenges that have forced political elites to face hard questions about national belonging, economic growth, and demographic realities in aging nation-states. Reflecting the scale of this challenge, there are several branches of scholarship that strive to understanding and contextualize immigration in the European political landscape. There are three, general areas of immigration-related fields: immigration policy, immigration politics, and migrant politics. Immigration policy studies examine the rules and procedures that facilitate the entry, settlement, integration, and citizenship of a migrant. This is an admittedly maximalist definition—one can reserve the term “immigration policy” merely to the process and dynamics of admission. Yet, the reality of immigrant-related policy design and implementation shows policies as joined-up, aligned, and mutually reinforcing. As such, “immigration policy” incorporates all policies that address the condition of and consequences of migration. This body of work traditionally examines political, economic, and social determinants of policy and the effects of immigration policy on a variety of attitudinal and behavior outcomes, among both immigrant and native populations. The second group of scholarship looks at immigration politics. This body of work considers how political parties and elections structure and mobilize around immigration issues and saliency. Work within this strand may range from studying public opinion and electoral data to interviews that capture elite or other stakeholder (e.g., firm) preferences. This strand stretches across multiple levels of analysis, from the very local—like neighborhoods and city blocks, to regions, to national politics, to the supranational European Union. A final strand of literature looks at migrant politics. These are studies that look specifically at the formation of political identity, migrant political behavior, and migrant representation. Of course, these three strands of immigration studies are not mutually exclusive and often overlap, e.g., studies on how policies affect immigrant political behavior. Immigration politics is a critical factor shaping domestic politics and foreign policy alike. As immigration continues to fundamentally transform the European political space—immigration from both within Europe and without—we identify a number of critical pieces that help shape our understanding of this transition here to which scholars that seek to understand European politics today ignore at their own peril.