Making Immigrants in Modern Argentina

Abstract

This is the best comprehensive review of immigration-related legislation and executive orders in Argentina for the post-1983 period. It reflects extensive research in legislative records, government decrees, and media sources. An appendix helpfully lists all legislation analyzed. A second appendix addresses the author's methodology for examining print media. A third includes a questionnaire issued in 2003–4 to members of Congress and a number of policymakers.Julia Albarracín argues that “empirical works that do not consider the complex nature of immigrants and immigration policies are doomed to have limited explanatory power” (p. 8). For this reason, Albarracín continues, “this book contemplates how economic, cultural, and international factors intersect state decision-making processes in shaping immigration policies” (p. 8). But this statement is not sufficiently clear: Which empirical works are doomed? What complexities? Nor does Albarracín tie economic, cultural, and international factors to decision-making processes in a sustained, compelling analysis. The author comments briefly on her own experience as white in Argentina, what whiteness means in that context, and why Argentines discriminate by race and ethnicity. The comments are impressionistic and herald a skirting of excellent scholarship that addresses problems of race, racism, class, and ethnicity in the making of immigration policy.Making Immigrants in Modern Argentina reflects the multiple solitudes of the academic world. We talk of interdisciplinarity. But we're often stuck in our respective disciplines. The author does draw on secondary sources beyond her political science discipline. But there are glaring omissions, including vital works of sociology and history that specifically address problems approached by the book. One example is Los muchachos peronistas judíos: Los argentinos judíos y el apoyo al Justicialismo by Raanan Rein (2015), which broke new ground in approaching ties between Peronist immigration policy, ethnicity, and national identity, ties that are crucial not only to the 1940s and 1950s but also to the post-2003 period.As attentive as the author is to media sources, there are methodological lapses. Albarracín uses newspapers to make a strong case that the discriminatory belief that early twentieth-century European immigrants were hardworking while more recent arrivals from neighboring countries were less desirable immigrants was widely held in the 1980s. The author reaches conclusions based on a very small sample of articles from the Buenos Aires newspapers Clarín and La Nación. She does not make clear that, even if the articles cited are representative of those publications, their readership was for the most part white, urban, and middle class. Here and elsewhere, missing are the working people of color in the conurbano, in small towns, and in rural areas whose views shaped political discourse on immigration in many ways.It's not always clear to what end Albarracín applies theoretical or methodological frameworks. For example, she cites Teun van Dijk's argument that “immigration news coverage is unsympathetic to immigrants because journalists rarely ask immigrants or immigrant groups for information” (p. 110). Fair enough. Albarracín then searches for a correlation between Argentine news stories sympathetic to immigrants and a reliance on immigrants as sources for those stories. “Surprisingly,” she writes, “I did not find a correlation between the two” (p. 110). Yet it's never clear what motivated Albarracín to focus on van Dijk in the first place. So why the surprise when there was no causal binary connection?The book is strong on how immigration policy was implemented, legally and politically, including the respective roles of the National Congress and the presidency. But again, there's too little analytical nuance. Survey questions for legislators addressing the potentially limited role of Congress and the excessive power of the executive sidestep the dramatic decline of congressional power from 1983 to 2000 and the attendant disciplining of legislators by national party structures, dominated in the case of Peronism by the presidency.A final section on immigration in the past 20 years should be stronger. The author dramatically underplays the significance of a broad range of national political questions in revolutionizing immigration policy and linked Peronist political cultures that took a page from Hugo Chávez's policies in Venezuela by promoting immigration for a variety of reasons. For a book that proposes to link cultural change to policymaking, there is too little on dramatic cultural shifts affected by immigration. These include the exoticizing of Dominican sex trade workers, the emergence of thousands of Senegalese street vendors, and the opening of hundreds of urban grocery stores owned by Chinese immigrants as well as vegetable stands run by Bolivian immigrants.Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The book remains a terrific review of legislative, legal, and executive policymaking. Had the author confined herself to that specific set of problems and left aside the attempt to say something much larger about political cultures, identities, and popular opinion, there would have been little to criticize.