Dauvergne, Catherine. — The New Politics of Immigration and the End of Settler Societies

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.

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.

Over the past decade, a global convergence in migration policies has emerged, and with it a new, mean-spirited politics of immigration. It is now evident that the idea of a settler society, previously an important landmark in understanding migration, is a thing of the past. What are the consequences of this shift for how we imagine immigration? And for how we regulate it? This book analyzes the dramatic shift away from the settler society paradigm in light of the crisis of asylum, the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, and the demise of multiculturalism. What emerges is a radically original take on the new global politics of immigration that can explain policy paralysis in the face of rising death tolls, failing human rights arguments, and persistent state desires to treat migration as an economic calculus.

How the Hart–Celler Act Changed America Ruth Milkman (bio) The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah R. Coleman Princeton University Press, 2021, 272 pp. I vividly remember a conversation I had about fifteen years ago with a first-generation Mexican-American student at UCLA. I was stunned when she mentioned that her parents’ favorite U.S. president, hands down, was Ronald Reagan. Before she was born, she explained, her parents had crossed the border without authorization; they then lived as undocumented immigrants for years, until they got amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which Reagan signed into law. Later on, they became naturalized U.S. citizens. Despite their nostalgia for the party of Reagan, by the aughts my student had persuaded her parents to switch their political allegiance to the Democrats. This was a decade before Donald Trump’s fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric propelled him into the White House, but already the Republican brand was tethered to restrictive immigration policies, especially in California, home [End Page 141] to the nation’s largest undocumented population. Agricultural and business interests that depended on a steady supply of low-wage immigrant labor were still influential in the California GOP, but their relatively liberal immigration views were increasingly marginalized by other Republicans riding the wave of popular backlash against “illegal aliens.” That backlash was fueled by what political scientists Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan L. Hajnal have called the “immigrant threat narrative”: blaming the growing immigrant population, especially its undocumented segment, for many of the nation’s social and economic woes. In this view, immigrants were “taking jobs” away from American workers. They were overburdening publicly funded healthcare and social services. And they were contributing to rising crime rates. As I argued in Dissent in 2019, however, immigrants very rarely “take jobs” from U.S.-born workers; more often, employers transform once-desirable jobs into problematic ones by eliminating unions, cutting pay, or degrading working conditions, leading U.S.-born workers to reject those jobs and immigrants to be hired in their place. The other claims in the immigrant threat narrative are also inconsistent with the available facts. Yet that narrative steadily gained public traction in the late twentieth century, repeatedly articulated by conservative political voices and amplified in mass media outlets like Fox News. Historian Sarah R. Coleman’s careful study of the dynamics of immigration politics, The Walls Within, exposes both the forces driving the immigrant threat narrative and the shifting political alignments shaping immigration policy in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Coleman argues that alongside better-known controversies over policing the U.S. border, a crucial debate raged about the extent to which noncitizens (whether undocumented or legal immigrants) should be entitled to access the public benefits—healthcare, education, and food stamps—that were available to the U.S.-born population. The Walls Within also highlights the growing involvement of state and local governments in regulating what had long been an exclusively federal domain. Coleman’s account begins with the passage of the 1965 Hart–Celler Act, which defined the fundamental structure of employment- and family-reunification-based immigrant admissions that exists to this day. (She does not explore refugee admissions or the diversity visa program that began in 1990.) Hart–Celler was among the “Great Society” reforms enacted under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Because it eliminated the restrictive nationality-based immigration quotas that had prevailed since 1924, the law was widely heralded as an anti-discrimination measure. Yet as Coleman notes, “few of the bill’s supporters or opponents anticipated that the legislation would result in . . . a transformed population of unprecedented diversity.” Indeed, upon signing the bill into law, Johnson confidently declared, “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” He was soon proven wrong. Starting in the 1970s, legal immigration from Asia and Latin America spiked upward, as did unauthorized entries across the U.S.–Mexico border. Indeed, Hart–Celler was the start of what would later be called the “browning” of America, and it quickly sparked a nativist reaction. Alongside the rising anti-immigrant movement, which was bolstered by what Coleman calls an “invasion narrative,” a...

Subject Corporate social responsibility. Significance In his first weeks as US president, Donald Trump has shown a clear stance against environmental, social and governance responsibilities being required of business. At the same time, companies increasingly recognise that a record of social responsbibilty, environmental stewardship and corporate ethics makes for good business. During the campaign, scrutiny of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of Trump’s business empire indicated that the primary beneficiaries seemed to be his businesses, raising questions for the philanthropic and social sector, as to whether Trump will continue the White House's past advocacy for CSR. Impacts Causes will become more politicised with contributions increasingly carrying a clear stance for or against issues. The scope and breadth of public-private partnerships may shift from contained pilots and demonstration programmes to larger initiatives. Advancing CSR within companies for employees, through policies such as parental leave and child care, will gain prominence. A worry for the philanthropic sector is whether the politicisation of immigration and welfare may threaten the neutrality of state agencies.

Though Donald Trump popularized the phrase “Build the Wall” during the 2016 presidential election, Sarah R. Coleman's The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America reminds us that immigration has historically taken the forefront of political campaigns, especially during the second half of the twentieth century. Asserting that immigration scholars have primarily focused on external (international) borders, Coleman turns to internal domestic borders to examine federal, state, and local policies that sought to restrict non-citizen rights. Coleman argues, “With the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 and the corresponding shifts in immigration patterns, efforts to restrict immigrants’ access to social welfare programs began to solidify during the 1970s” (p. 106). In this vein, the author sets out to trace the “struggle of politicians, interest groups, courts, activists, and communities to define the rights of immigrants in the United States after the passage of the historic Hart-Celler Act of 1965” (p. 2). Coleman focuses on immigrants’ access to education, employment, and welfare to examine the nation's internal borders.This political history is organized into an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. The first chapter, “The Rose's Sharp Thorn: Texas and the Rise of Unauthorized Immigrant Education,” traces the 1982 landmark Supreme court case Plyler v. Doe, which decided that a Texas statute that charged tuition to non-citizen students violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Chapter 2, “‘A Subclass of Illiterates’: The Presidential Politics of Unauthorized Immigrant Education,” successfully demonstrates how pressures of an impending presidential election influenced the Carter administration's lack of response to Plyler v. Doe and Governor Ronald Reagan's pressure to woo Texas voters.Coleman then examines employment issues in the third chapter, “‘Heading into Uncharted Waters’: Congress, Employer Sanctions, and Labor Rights,” through which she explores how political alliances and parties became divided over employer sanctions. Chapter 4, “‘A Riverboat Gamble’: The Passage of Employer Sanctions,” relies on the passage of employer sanctions to emphasize one of Coleman's core arguments: “policies emerged not out of clear, ideologically coherent policy positions, but instead through tangled political compromises, sometimes crafted to address complex policy questions and, at other times, merely for the sake of incremental political gains” (p. 82).Following conservative fears that immigrants would soon have access to all civic liberties, Coleman examines welfare rights in the fifth chapter, “‘To Reward the Wrong Way Is Not the American Way’: Welfare and the Battle Over Immigrants’ Benefits.” This chapter effectively demonstrates another central premise of the book: “the removal of authorized immigrants from welfare is significant as it highlights the hardening of citizenship as the essential element in determining the relationship between the individual and the welfare state” (p. 108). In this chapter, Coleman most clearly outlines the origins of present-day local and state immigration policy. In regard to the monumental transfer of immigration authority from federal to state, Coleman argues, “Beyond the immediate restrictions, the changes made in the 1990s established a new policy framework that would ultimately reshape immigration policy over the next two decades,” (p. 141). Further illuminating the origins of today's immigration restrictions, Chapter 6, “From the Border to the Heartland: Local Immigration Enforcement and Immigrants’ Rights,” relies on an Iowa court case and the implementation of the 287(g) program to demonstrate how “federal inability to address some of the complicated issues of immigration control opened the window for state efforts at policymaking” (p. 142).The book's strengths lie in effectively detailing how political figures, institutions, grassroots organizations, and federal and state governments treated each court case as a high-stakes entryway into allowing non-citizens access to other civil liberties. Coleman convincingly traces and demonstrates how landmark immigration court cases are never treated as stand-alone issues; politicians are particularly concerned about how one policy could affect others or how their approval for a policy could alienate key constituencies. Sources are another strength, as Coleman balances materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, as well as immigration and civil rights organizations. Although the reliance on a wide array of polls is informative, Coleman does not address pollsters’ demographics. Details such as pollsters’ national origins and socio-economic statuses could strengthen Coleman's argument. The first and last chapters that rely primarily on one court case could be strengthened by further discussing other cases that are mentioned but not used to complicate the evidence.Coleman set out to accomplish the significant feat of detailing restrictions imposed on non-citizens in the United States. The book successfully contributes to the field of immigration studies through its focus on internal borders. Audiences that would benefit from The Walls Within include those seeking to learn about the legislative policy process through history. Coleman puts it best: “This study looks at the entire scale of policymaking that is pertinent to immigrants, showing how local, state, and federal actions shaped policy implementation and politics in distinct ways” (p. 5).

Retaining international students in northeast Ohio: Opportunities and challenges in the ‘age of Trump’

Proposition 187 and Its Political Aftermath: Lessons for U.S. Immigration Politics After Trump

Being a Latinx adolescent under a trump presidency: Analysis of Latinx youth's reactions to immigration politics

This article examines how U.S. immigration and citizenship policies reconcile the tension between capital's demand for exploitable labor and the state's project of racialized national membership, and argues that Trump's second-term agenda pushes this compromise toward breakdown. Drawing on Lisa Lowe's theorization of the capital–state contradiction, the paper traces how laws from the Naturalization Act of 1790 through Chinese exclusion, national origins quotas, and post-9/11 security regimes constructed racialized immigrants as indispensable workers yet perpetually foreign and deportable. It then analyzes the second Trump administration's efforts to undermine birthright citizenship, expand travel bans and racialized refugee preferences, generalize deportability, and normalize emergency authority, showing how these measures collapse boundaries between immigration enforcement, citizenship, and ordinary law. The article concludes with implications for Korean immigration debates, offering the U.S. experience as a cautionary example of how racialized exclusion destabilizes both economy and democracy.

Although former Republican President Donald Trump has been criticized for being xenophobic and racist, surveys and election results show that Latinos are increasingly shifting politically rightward. Such shifts contradict assumptions about race, ethnicity, and immigration politics, puzzling analysts and laypeople alike as to why non-White immigrant voters would support Trump. In this article, I draw upon 66 original interviews with US Latinos to break through scholarly and popular “puzzlement” about US Latino politics. To learn how Latinos navigate the cultural dynamics of political projects, we must talk to Latino voters and reconsider deep-seated, common, and flawed assumptions about this ethnoracial group. I find the following: (1) Latinos have come to directly and negatively associate Latino conservatism with Trumpism, (2) Latino Republican voters actively work to reconcile the perceived contradiction between being Latino and voting Republican, and (3) ethnoracial and political identities are contested within Latino families.

This essay examines the roots, causes, and effects of racism experienced by Latinos in the Trump era. We argue that Trump and his administration were not the origin of Latinos' experiences of racism, but his rise to power was, in part, derived from Latino racialization. Preexisting politics of Latino immigration, Whites' fear of loss of status due to demographic shifts, and historical and contemporary processes of racializing Latinos were seized by the Trump administration and made central features of his renegade presidential campaign and policy agenda. White nationalist racism became the defining feature of the Trump presidency, making Latinos' heightened experiences of racism, and the relegitimization of overt White nationalism, one of its lasting legacies.

In The New Politics of Immigration, Professor Catherine Dauvergne proposes that as migration policies converge at the global level, the traditional difference between settler societies and former European colonies is becoming irrelevant. To test this argument, this article addresses the impact of externalization, militarization, detention and deportation on unaccompanied migrant children along the southern Spanish and US borders. I conclude that the combined used of these strategies is designed to keep all unwanted migrants away from the physical border of the state, regardless of their background, and prevents children from accessing specific protections. Current border policy in these two countries shows the primacy of national security concerns over human rights and supports Dauvergne’s argument that distinctions between former colonies and settler societies are disappearing. The evidence considered here points towards an increasingly restrictive and punitive global border regime, but one with regional variations.

The demise of settler society values and the departure from twentieth-century patterns in Europe together ground the new politics of immigration and point to its future directions. This politics is front and center in prosperous Western liberal democracies, filling the headlines and parliaments. But its effects reach every corner of the globe as these states dominate the global policy arena by virtue of being both the world's most sought after migration destinations and the traditional terrain of migration mythology. The transformation in the values that former settler states and former colonial masters are now pursuing in immigration leads to the competitive migration convergence that has been evident for at least a decade. Increasingly, the immigration laws and policies enacted by Western liberal democracies look alike. This is true whether those states were once settler societies or whether they are among the new nations of immigration in Europe. This truth in and of itself is a challenge to our immigration imagination – to conclude that immigration operates socially and politically the same way in the United Kingdom or Germany as it does in Australia or the United States is significant as it has never been true in any earlier era. The convergence is competitive – all of these states want to attract the same highly skilled workers, and the same agile economic actors, as permanent migrants. All of these states want to keep asylum seekers at arm's length, and to impose limits on family reunification. These goals are broadly shared, even if they are pursued with differing tactics, or alongside some diminishing vestiges of ethnic kinship preferences. In part, the competitive convergence results from taking a “non-discriminatory” posture toward immigrants. The emergence of points systems as the preferred model for economic immigrant selection in Western liberal democracies demonstrates a commitment to ignore cultural, ethnic, and even racial values, and to instead embrace a quasi-scientific or at least “neutral” selection method. This method ensures that the same individuals will end up being top choice immigrants across a range of states. Points systems were invented by settler states seeking to break with their racialized immigration histories. The systems, however, do not remove discrimination, they simply deploy it differently. People who come out at the top of points systems are well educated, multi-lingual, economically successful, and young.

This article describes a typology of international migrants, particularly as applies to the situation in western Europe since World War II, and it discusses the applicability of the various types of migrant categories thus identified for the analysis of immigration policy in France during the 1980s. Approaches and criteria in the political analysis of immigration policy are discussed. The subsequent presentation focuses especially on the orientations about immigration of the country's mainstream right‐wing parties, while in and out of government. In conclusion, the article addresses likely future concerns of the politics of immigration in France, especially in the light of an increasing nervousness that Islamic fundamentalism in former north‐African colonies in the French sphere of influence will lead to greater ethno‐religious tensions in mainland France.