Subnational Migration States and the New Politics of Immigration

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...

Immigration enforcement has been expanded from the borders to the interior of the United States. Restrictive immigration control has subjected more immigrant detainees to private prison facilities. While existing scholarship has paid attention to the correlates of these expansions in immigration enforcement, we still lack information about the consequences of interior immigration enforcement and the unique financial partnerships between private prison corporations and the government. This dissertation includes a series of three papers that can address these remaining questions. In the first paper, I provide a comprehensive review of the history of U.S. immigration politics and policies. By drawing on theories in the sociology of punishment, I offer theoretical frameworks to explain the expectation of restrictive immigration enforcement in the United States, particularly over the past 40 years. "Prevention through deterrence" is a fundamental idea in restrictive U.S. immigration control policies, which hopes to reduce undocumented immigrants' illegal entry to the United States and discourage their staying in the country. Despite the ineffectiveness of restrictive immigration enforcement, we have seen growing numbers of policies that seek to control immigration in recent decades. Using the threat perspectives, I argue how perceived criminal threats by immigrants lead to public demands on more punitive approaches in immigration control. Additionally, I discuss the roles of laws and media for constructing criminalized immigrants in the United States. The second paper examines the impacts of interior immigration enforcement on migratory behaviors. The Secure Communities (S-comm) immigration program has allowed local law enforcement officers to identify non-citizen arrestees for deportation in local jails, greatly expanding immigration enforcement within the interior United States. Although S- vi comm’s purpose is the reduction of undocumented immigrants, its effectiveness has not been fully studied. The second paper in this dissertation analyzes data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) to understand whether undocumented Mexican-born immigrants likely to leave the United States to avoid the punitive S-comm enforcement. Results from discrete-time multilevel survival models show that S-comm has had no meaningful impact on undocumented Mexican immigrants' self-deportation. Rather, S-comm has had unintended consequences, including encouraging documented Mexican immigrants in border states to leave the United States. Together, these results highlight a mismatch between the intention of the policy and its consequences, suggesting the potential for future immigration policy reform. In the third paper, I examine the effects of immigration politics and policies on private prison corporations (PPCs)’ business. Although theories suggest political influence in the operation of PPCs, it is less known about the effects of immigration politics on PPCs’ business. Using stock market data (2001 through 2020), I examine how different kinds of U.S. immigration politics can shape PPCs’ stock values. Results show that restrictive immigration politics create favorable conditions for PPCs, leading to increased stock values. Yet, sanctions threats to PPCs lead to decreased stock values by creating market uncertainty. These results are replicated using theoretically comparable digital security companies. However, only meaningful changes are found in PPCs, holding a unique business partnership with governments. Overall, these findings highlight more consequential effects of national-level politics and sanctions threats on PPCs, suggesting policy implications.

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 problem Both Europe and the United States are “countries” of immigration. Each year about 1.5 million immigrants legally enter the countries that comprise the European Union (the EU-15), with considerable variation among countries. A generation ago, the most important differences within Europe were between countries that had historically needed and received immigrants (France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom), and those that had been the providers of immigrants (Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal). Now, however, all of the senders are receivers, and the variation is among the levels of immigration. Indeed, Europe now receives between 4.7 immigrants per thousand population on the high end (1992) – 3.9 on the low end (2001), compared with about 3.8 per thousand in the United States (SOPEMI 2004: 305–10). The most important differences between Europe and the United States are not those of levels of immigration, but differences in the politics of immigration: immigration policy and the dynamics that drive this policy. The United States has a relatively open immigration policy, one that sets a (flexible) ceiling on the number of legal immigrants admitted each year, the basis on which they are to be admitted, and the principle criteria that govern admission. Although the ceilings set on immigration never exactly correspond to the actual number of immigrants admitted to the United States each year, there is a general relationship between the intent of the law (to admit and limit immigrants) and the results.

The impact of electricity market reform and subnational climate policy on carbon dioxide emissions across the United States: A path analysis

Although the Statue of Liberty, one of the premier symbols of the United States, welcomes “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” America’s relationship with its immigrants has long been ambivalent. Throughout the United States’ history, there have been persistent and charged debates over the nature and consequences of immigration. At times, America has greatly restricted the number and characteristics of newcomers, despite its aspiration to be identified as a “nation of immigrants” and a “melting pot.” The heated, contentious debate over who should be included in the United States, and how they should be included, persists in the halls of Congress, the judiciary, the executive branch, and at the state and local levels. The literature related to history and contemporary debates regarding immigration politics and policy in the United States is expansive. This article addresses scholarship on a number of specific policy debates, as well as popular reactions to these polemics. The works below focus on three overarching themes. First, we discuss scholarship about the policies themselves. This research includes a historical perspective, looking back at early immigration policies that were characterized by a quota system and the exclusion of Asian immigrants, as well as a view on contemporary policy debates emerging since the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This significant piece of legislation overturned the system of national origin restrictions and led to the development of the current immigration policy regime. The second broad theme explores the immigrants themselves, including demographic trends, political and economic incorporation, and political participation. The final major theme includes reactions to contemporary policy debates by both the public and the press. Works in this area focus on public opinion about immigration policy, social movements emerging in response to the immigration debate, the anti-immigrant backlash, and media coverage of immigration politics. The end of this article also highlights key data sources for those wishing to conduct additional research in this area.

The Politics of Immigration Development of French Immigration Policy Understanding French Immigration Policy Politics of Immigration in France Development of British Immigration Policy Understanding British Immigration Policy Politics of Immigration in Britain Development of US Immigration Policy Understanding US Immigration Policy Politics of Immigration in the United States

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).

In recent years, Republicans and Democrats have drifted toward polarized immigration policy positions, forestalling congressional efforts at comprehensive reform. In this book Gary M. Reich helps explain why some states have enacted punitive policies toward their immigrant populations, while others have stepped up efforts to consider all immigrants as de facto citizens. Reich argues that state policies reflect differing immigrant communities across states. In states where large-scale immigration was a recent phenomenon, immigrants became an electorally-enticing target of restrictionist advocates within the Republican party. Conversely established immigrant communities steadily strengthened their ties to civic organizations and their role in Democratic electoral and legislative politics. Reich contends that these diverging demographic trends at the state level were central to the increasing partisan polarization surrounding immigration nationally. He concludes that immigration federalism at present suffers from an internal contradiction that proliferates conflict across all levels of government. As long as Congress is incapable of addressing the plight of unauthorized immigrants and establishing a consensus on immigration admissions, state policies inevitably expand legal uncertainty and partisan wrangling. The Politics of Immigration Across the United States will appeal to scholars and instructors in the fields of immigration policy, social policy, and state government and politics. The book will also encourage public policy practitioners to reflect critically on their work.

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.

Law and politics are inextricably entangled in the immigration policymaking domain, as a range of actors mobilize and respond to judicial engagements with immigration and asylum questions. Leveraging a comparative analysis of three national case studies, we examine the differing registers through which judicialized immigration politics has been enacted in the United States, France, and Switzerland. Our empirical analysis of participants’ shared understandings of what is happening when immigration policy is judicialized lifts up the shared repertoires that emerge from routinized interactions between repeat players in this field. In the United States, we find that the judicialization of immigration policy centers on open confrontation between litigators and administrators. In the French context, by contrast, the judicialization of immigration politics is performed in the register of instruction and collective adherence to legal formalism. Finally, in Switzerland, the judicialization of asylum policy consists of the massive individual appeals against administrative decisions and centers on competing assertions of expertise, particularly over country conditions information. This comparative analysis, drawing on a relational and pragmatist methodology, reveals that the register through which judicialized immigration politics is enacted varies substantially across national contexts and also demonstrates the extent to which these distinct registers are self-reinforcing.

When it comes to immigration policy, nation-states generally have the power to exclude, admit, or expel noncitizens from their territories. On the other hand, subnational jurisdictions have more often been given the task of formulating and implementing immigrant policy, which entails the incorporation of immigrants into local communities. This division of labor has recently come under intense scrutiny. The local and state politics of immigration and immigrant integration in the United States has been documented in the scholarly literature, focusing on topics such as California’s Proposition 187, the disparity between the national benefits and local costs of immigration, and the increasing role played by nongovernmental organizations and other nonstate actors in the integration of immigrants at the local scale. Four categories of local immigrant and immigration policy have been studied: policies that arise from the devolution of select powers over noncitizens; grassroots policies on areas such as education and human trafficking; policies that are more explicitly about a politics of immigration control; and policies that engage with a politics of immigrant integration. However, there are still avenues that require further investigation so as to better understand the growing involvement of subnational governments in the formulation and implementation of immigrant and immigration policy. For example, more research is needed in which policy outcome is taken as the dependent variable and to document and understand the dynamics of local immigrant integration and immigration policy formation in developing countries.

In the United States the baby boom generation will officially enter into retirement in 2010 as massive numbers of retirees will leave the labor force for the next twenty years until 2040. Europe and Japan's baby boomers will retire about ten years later. As a consequence, massive labor needs will make immigration an issue of intense political scrutiny and debate in the first half of the twenty first century. Even before these demographic shifts, immigration has proven to be an explosive issue, with antiimmigrant parties and attacks on foreigners in Europe and the withdrawal of welfare benefits and new forms of human smuggling in the United States. Whether shielded or exacerbated by the business cycle, the politics of immigration will be a cauldron of emotions and wills for the next half century. But sociological theories explaining the politics of immigration and naturalization are not well-developed. Kingsley Davis calls explanations of international migration “opaque to theoretical reasoning in general” (1988:245) and Barbara Heisler states that “we still lack a formal theory of immigration and immigrant incorporation” (1992:638). Randall Hansen says that the “study of Commonwealth immigration and UK migration policy has been theory poor; many if not most accounts are descriptive” (2000:10). And in a recent review of theories of immigration policy, Eytan Meyers says that immigration policy “lacks … attempts to debate the relative merits of various schools of thought” (2000:1246).

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.

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 immigration. Dauvergne's foresight is commendable.