The Border Within: Citizenship Facilitated and Impeded

Abstract

Immigration is roiling American politics, with controversy continuing and no clear solution in sight. As all parties concur, the system is broken, frustrating the new, would-be, and established Americans, while yielding sub stantial social costs and tensions from the Mexican to the Canadian border, and just about everywhere in between. Beyond this point of agreement, however, dissonance is all that can be heard. Many voices are shout ing; no one knows where to go. Uncertainty reigns as to how best to con trol the borders. Meanwhile, there is another option which governments in the United States have decided to avidly pursue: name ly, create differences between the people of the state and all other people in the state. Hence, expanding immigrant numbers have gone hand in hand, both with a restriction on immigrants' rights and with a growing diver gence between demography and democracy. While unable to prevent unauthorized immi grants from crossing the border, governments have found it much easier to prevent the il legal immigrants residing on U.S. soil from obtaining public services. As a driver's li cense is too fine a privilege to be granted to the country's 12 million undocumented im migrants-let them take the bus!-an every day illegality involved in living in the United States without authorization has become a tool for deporting the unwanted. Likewise, the divide between citizens and permanent residents, which had narrowed in the after math of the civil rights era, has once again begun to widen, with legally resident non citizens no longer eligible for benefits that are now available to citizens alone, and at risk of deportation should they be convicted of a felony. Though not voiceless, non-citi zens are voteless, at little cost to those Amer icans enjoying the vote. The damage, rather, is to the American democracy, decreasingly a government of and for the people, when barely a third of all foreign-born persons liv ing on U.S. soil are eligible to vote. America's resistance to integration with the world and those of its people that have Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada, by Irene Bloemraad. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. 382pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780520248984.