The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America by Sarah Coleman

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...

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...

Since 2005, local governments in southern California’s Inland Empire region have attempted to pass various types of immigration regulation. I examine several cases from this region that symbolize the contemporary national debate on immigration in the U.S. Using a conceptual framework derived from a body of work by critical geographers on immigration, I argue that geography is integral to the construction of immigration politics and policy. Specifically, I use the concepts of spatial targeting and discursive production of scale to understand how local and national immigration politics and policies fit together. Thus, I compare the local case studies from the Inland Empire to national immigration politics and policies. I discuss the Bush administration immigration policies, immigration bills passed in the U.S. Congress since 2005, and their constitutive arguments. I conclude that the contradiction between liberal trade and restrictive immigration policy, which has frustrated the implementation of immigration reform at the national level and has opened the floodgate to local immigration reform initiatives, is creating a complex topography of regulations and enforcement. This new geography of rights and citizenship is a process of spatial targeting whereby local immigration regulations have taken the place of national immigration reform. Like other critical geographers, I argue that these local resolutions to the contradictions of the U.S. neoliberal state allow for the continuation of the current status quo of a flexible labor market made up of undocumented workers with contingent rights.

BackgroundA growing literature has documented the social, economic, and health impacts of exclusionary immigration and immigrant policies in the early 21st century for Latiné communities in the US, pointing to immigration and immigrant policies as forms of structural racism that affect individual, family, and community health and well-being. Furthermore, the past decade has seen an increase in bi-partisan exclusionary immigration and immigrant policies. Immigration enforcement has been a major topic during the 2024 Presidential election cycle, portending an augmentation of exclusionary policies towards immigrants. Within this context, scholars have called for research that highlights the ways in which Latiné communities navigate exclusionary immigration and immigrant policies, and implications for health. This study examines ways in which Mexican-origin women in a midwestern northern border community navigate restrictive immigration and immigrant policies to access health-promoting resources and care for their well-being.MethodsWe conducted a grounded theory analysis drawing on interviews with 48 Mexican-origin women in Detroit, Michigan, who identified as being in the first, 1.5, or second immigrant generation. Interviews were conducted in English or Spanish, depending on participants’ preferences, and were conducted at community-based organizations or other locations convenient to participants in 2013–2014.ResultsWomen reported encountering an interconnected web of institutional processes that used racializing markers to infer legal status and eligibility to access health-promoting resources. Our findings highlight women’s use of both individual and collective action to navigate exclusionary policies and processes, working to: (1) maintain access to health-promoting resources; (2) limit labeling and stigmatization; and (3) mitigate adverse impacts of immigrant policing on health and well-being. The strategies women engaged were shaped by both the immigration processes and structures they confronted, and the resources to which they had access to within their social network.ConclusionsOur findings suggest a complex interplay of immigration-related policies and processes, social networks, and health-relevant resources. They highlight the importance of inclusive policies to promote health for immigrant communities. These findings illuminate women’s agency in the context of structural violence facing immigrant women and are particularly salient in the face of anti-immigrant rhetoric and exclusionary immigration and immigrant policies.

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.

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 this issue of Pediatrics , Cholera et a1 used a controlled interrupted time series design to examine differences in health care use of Latinx children as it relates to federal immigration policy enacted in 2017. Electronic medical record data from four major health care systems in North Carolina were analyzed before and after restrictive immigration policy was enacted after the 2016 election. Among Latinx children in the outpatient setting, they found a sustained increase in visit cancellation for the uninsured subgroup, a proxy for undocumented immigrant children in North Carolina.1 One aim of the study was to explore whether restrictive immigration policy resulted in a “chilling effect” for all Latino children. A chilling effect is defined as a deterring effect on the behavior of an individual or group through fear of legal action.2 Widely used during the 1996 welfare reform, today, like then, it refers to immigrant families’ decision not to participate in the use of public benefits and services out of fear, confusion, or perceived threat. This phenomenon is of particular concern for the public charge rule changes that were enacted in 2019 (but leaked to the public … Address correspondence to J. Raul Gutierrez, MD, Children’s Health Center, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, 1001 Potrero Ave, Floor 06, Room 6E07, San Francisco, CA 94110. E-mail: juan.gutierrez{at}ucsf.edu

While clear evidence indicates that restrictive immigration policies are motivated by fears of potential support for anti-immigration movements, there is also evidence from Austria and Switzerland showing that such policies fail to diminish opposition to immigration. This chapter analyses the seemingly inconsistent relationship between changes in immigration policy and the level of politicization of immigration. Using political claims data from seven Western European countries between 199 S and 2010, the chapter concludes that, whereas the politicization of immigration policies is somewhat responsive to changes in immigration policy, the politicization of integration policies is significantly more responsive to changes in integration policy. The chapter also indicates that these effects are conditional on the perceived position of the party implementing the policy change.

Abstract: Russia's choice to pursue restrictive immigration policies is counterintuitive, given the acute need for labor migrants. This analysis argues that in response to pervasive xenophobia, the state has embarked on a labor migration policy agenda that does not reflect the demographic reality of Russia's rapidly declining working age population. Institutional and societal manifestations of xenophobia work together to demand and justify restrictive immigration policies. The state provokes and reinforces these nationalist attitudes through the media and discriminatory policies and practices such as ethnic profiling and allowing extremist groups to operate with impunity. The literature on migration policy systematically neglects illiberal polities, making this discussion linking the policy input of xenophobia to restrictive policy outputs a unique contribution to the ongoing study of how states respond to immigration. (1) Keywords: demographic crisis, immigration policy, labor migration, nationalism, Russia, xenophobia ********** New migration rules in Russia, enacted on January 15, 2007, are part of an ongoing effort to address the current demographic crisis. In a period of massive population decline, the state has made policy efforts to create balanced immigration by enticing Russian compatriots while limiting migrants from the former Soviet countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). While CIS citizens are not required to have visas to travel to the Russian Federation, the 2007 legislation introduced a quota system limiting the number of work permits available to these migrants. (2) Quota levels have decreased every year since their institution, shrinking incrementally from 6 million in 2007 to 1.3 million in 2010. Furthermore, in the sector of retail trade (almost exclusively manned by immigrants), foreign workers were banned altogether as of April 2007. Why would Russia, whose population is decreasing by 700,000 per year, institute restrictive immigration policies? (3) In fact, many believe immigration is the only source of population growth in Russia. (4) This article argues that in response to growing xenophobia in society, the state has embarked on a labor migration policy agenda that does not reflect the demographic realities present in Russia. Nationalism and xenophobia have a number of manifestations in both the state and society. The state continually reinforces nationalist attitudes through the media and discriminatory policies. These efforts resonate with the public, which passively supports xenophobia, and with nationalist actors who actively promote anti-migrant agendas. Pervasive institutional and societal manifestations of xenophobia work together to both demand and justify restrictive immigration policies. By setting forth the Russian case as an example of a state that uses restrictive policies and nationalist discourse as key components of its immigration strategy, this article contributes to an understanding of how law is affected by the ideological constructs dominant in a state. Toward this goal, the article proceeds in two sections. First, a review of the literature creates a theoretical context for Russia as an immigrant receiving country. Second, an analysis of Russia's current policies and the xenophobia that demands them shows how nationalist sentiment trumps demographic realities in the process of policy formation. Nationalism and Immigration A look at current migration literature justifies the importance of the Russian case. Even though it is the second largest immigrant-receiving country after the United States, Russia does not fall neatly into the parameters of the existing literature. There is, therefore, an opportunity to advance the discourse by identifying gaps that the Russian case can fill. The literature relevant to immigration policy, especially that regulating labor migration, can be broadly categorized into inputs (factors that influence what types of policies will be chosen) and outputs (the policies themselves). …

Why do some authoritarian states adopt more restrictive immigration policies than others? Much of the existing literature focuses on the politics of immigration in democracies, despite the presence of large-scale immigration to autocracies. In this article, I argue that the level of electoral competition can be a key factor in immigration policymaking in electoral autocracies. Autocrats who face high levels of electoral competition tend to impose immigration restrictions as a way of mobilizing anti-outgroup sentiment and boosting their own popularity. I test this hypothesis by conducting comparative case studies on Russia and Kazakhstan, both of which are major immigrant-receiving autocracies. Based on the analysis of original data gathered from 11 months of fieldwork in the two countries, I find that the relatively high level of electoral competition in Russia in the 2010s facilitated increased immigration restrictions, while Kazakhstan depoliticized labour immigrants and enacted a de facto open immigration policy in the absence of electoral competition.

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).

Reconsidering the Domestic Causes of Immigration and Citizenship Policies Miriam Feldblum (bio) Fences and Neighbors: The Political Geography of Immigration Controlby Jeannette Money. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. 247 pp. $40. Immigration and the Nation-State: United States, Germany, and Great Britain, by Christian Joppke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 356 pp. $75. Is national control over immigration diminishing? Are domestic determinants or transnational influences propelling contemporary change in immigration and citizenship policies? Two central debates in immigration studies today revolve around the changing nature of national immigration and citizenship policies. The first focuses on the extent and causes of cross-national policy convergence in immigration and citizenship practices. Scholars debate whether domestic or transnational factors best explain the contemporary patterns of increasing convergence across states. The new trends have displaced the traditional landscape of national policy divergence. The second addresses the changed capacity of state [End Page 205] sovereignty over issues of immigration flows, immigrant incorporation, and membership practices. Scholars debate whether national control over immigration has diminished in recent decades, or to the contrary, been reinforced. Two recent books, Fences and Neighbors by Jeannette Money and Immigration and the Nation-State by Christian Joppke, are very useful comparative studies and ultimately provocative contributions to these debates. Money and Joppke both firmly stress the determinative importance of domestic factors in shaping national immigration policy. They each contend that national control over immigration is undiminished, and that transnational influences are overestimated. From this shared point of departure, both authors strive to identify domestic determinants that are comparable across dissimilar national contexts in order to illuminate the causes as well as the limits of cross-national convergence. Each author has chosen a set of three case studies that mix traditional settler countries with less traditional immigration countries, including examples where post-colonial immigration has been significant. Money’s case studies are Great Britain, France, and Australia, whereas Joppke examines the recent history of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Indeed, both scholars take Gary Freeman’s insight that the concentrated benefits and diffuse costs of immigration in liberal polities generally lead to client-based politics and liberal policies as an important point of departure, before proceeding to offer substantive corrections to his arguments. 1 For her part, Money reconsiders the costs and benefits of immigration from a spatial perspective to demonstrate that the costs as well as benefits of immigration may be concentrated, leading to more restrictive policy outcomes. Joppke focuses on the applicability of a client-based model to European polities in order to highlight other domestic factors that may also explain expansive policy outcomes. Each of these approaches stands in sharp contrast to many recent immigration studies, which emphasize transnational influences and global economic determinants on the one hand, or particularistic national immigration histories and membership model cultures on the other. But there the similarities of the two studies end, and the authors’ respective agendas and frameworks diverge considerably. Jeanette Money contends that geographically concentrated electoral pressures propel change in the measures determining immigration entry. In this narrowly focused study, she concentrates on only one strand of immigration control policy, namely, “state [End Page 206] policies that define the permissible level of resident alien admissions.” The question driving the analysis in Fences and Neighbors appears straightforward: why, Money asks, do some countries with advanced market economies accept large numbers of foreigners while others are “less hospitable,” and what accounts for change in policies over time within countries? The book actually explains less the liberal immigration flow policies than the shift to more restrictive policies in each of the country case studies: Britain, France, and Australia. Choosing countries with very different immigration histories and policy institutions, Money seeks to identify common determinants found across these distinctive national contexts. Her central insight rests on a reconsideration of the benefits and costs of immigration. While Freeman argued that immigration benefits generally are concentrated (in specific groups and sectors) and immigration costs usually are more diffuse, Money persuasively contends that we need to situate both the benefits and costs of immigration geographically. The key, according to Money, is to account for the differential effects of immigration on various regions...

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.

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science by Carolina Alonso Bejarano et al. Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucía López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein, Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 208 pp. Decolonizing Ethnography is both an experiment and an invitation. It is an experiment in ethnographic research design, implementation, and writing that seeks to address and subvert long-standing power inequities in anthropological research relationships. It is also an invitation for readers to think with and critique the authors' "decolonizing" project, which is not presented as a balm for wider inequalities but points toward possibilities for more reciprocal research relationships and the rich understandings such relationships can yield. To carry out these tasks, the book merges decolonial feminist theory and activist anthropological approaches to explore and engage the work lives of undocumented people in New Jersey. Decolonizing Ethnography could stand on its own as a contribution to the growing scholarship on undocumented labor and worker activism. Throughout the book, the authors' ethnographic research illustrates how undocumented workers in pseudonymous Hometown, New Jersey find empowerment in community organizing to respond to a host of gendered vulnerabilities and experiences of violence. In particular, workers featured in the text, including two of the book's co-authors, recount experiences of workplace injury, labor rights violations, partner violence, and prolonged family separation, all of which take place in a broader context of US immigration politics that render undocumented workers especially vulnerable to abuse. Yet the text's focus on worker activism pushes beyondy [End Page 1613] narratives of vulnerability to show how undocumented workers access and disseminate information, build social capital, and develop self-empowerment through community organizing. As outlined in the book's Introduction, another purpose of Decolonizing Ethnography is to depart from the mainstream ethnographic canon and critique not only abusive and exploitative practices of employers and state agents but also the exploitative practices that lie at the heart of anthropological research itself. The first chapter presents an extended review of critical scholarship on academic coloniality and "decolonization." The authors effectively contrast the principles that have guided mainstream or "dominant" anthropology, such as valorization of research with marginalized "others," research for intellectual rather than social goals, and publishing in academic venues, with the principles that have guided activist, engaged, and applied approaches, such as research in service to community-determined goals, more democratized and collaborative research designs, and work that prioritizes social change in addition to, or in lieu of, theory building. Decolonizing Ethnography does not just critique colonialist academic practices, it seeks to do something different. The second chapter describes the trajectories of the book's authors: an unlikely quartet comprising a junior scholar from an elite Colombian family, an undocumented woman worker/activist from Guatemala, an undocumented woman worker/activist from Mexico, and a senior white male US anthropologist. As their paths converged around a shared concern with understanding and addressing challenges facing undocumented workers in New Jersey, the four designed a project that centers the contributions of non-academics in both method and theory. The project's methodology, the subject of Chapter 3, draws on applied and activist anthropological approaches that prioritize the objectives and contributions of community partners. The research, then, incorporated community members as producers of research and was designed to advance their goals. It did not start out this way. Originally conceived by Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as a study of undocumented laborers, the project initially brought two undocumented women workers on board as research assistants. As the relationship among the four deepened, the non-academics became both producers of theory and co-authors of texts in their own right, not in service to academia per se but to advance the immigrant rights movement in their community. In particular, ethnographic [End Page 1614] methods helped them to identify myriad community concerns among undocumented workers in Hometown and also helped them forge relationships with workers and expand workers' rights education. Chapter 4 describes how insights gained from their field experiences informed the book's analytical crux, which foregrounds the theoretical argument...

Since the late 1990s, federal immigration policy has increasingly restricted immigrants’ access to federally funded assistance programs from cash-based assistance to legal representation in immigration court. These restrictions have been particularly damaging to one of the most vulnerable sectors of the population: undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants are immigrants who lack legal immigration status, either from entering the United States without a valid visa or by overstaying a temporary visa. In response to federal restrictions on cash assistance, federal identification, post-secondary education, and legal representation, some states and localities have enacted policies and implemented programs to support undocumented immigrants. Community and grassroots organizations have emerged to respond to undocumented immigrants’ needs at the local and national level. Immigrant rights organizations are a crucial resource for both policy advocacy and distributing needed information regarding undocumented immigrants’ rights to education, protection from law enforcement, and access to state and local assistance. Still, undocumented immigrants and their family members experience a range of wide-reaching consequences due to immigration laws. Though primarily a federal domain, recent efforts (both local and national) have moved to include local police in immigration enforcement activities, which has intensified undocumented immigrants’ vulnerability when undergoing daily tasks. The consequences of immigration law and enforcement are not only experienced by individuals without legal status. Almost 17 million people in the United States live in mixed status families—families in which at least one family member is undocumented. Mixed-status and undocumented families face destabilizing impacts of the looming threat and occurrence of deportation on health and mental health outcomes, employment, transportation, remittances and home country family ties, family separation at the border and through deportation, and limited post-secondary educational opportunities. These outcomes may be amplified for undocumented immigrants who experience social and individual oppression due to their national origin, racial/ethnic identity, and/or sexual or gender identity. Due to these wide-reaching impacts, access to temporary and permanent visas for undocumented immigrants is an integral aspect of protection. Still, avenues for adjustment of legal status are limited, and major immigration reform has yet to materialize. As a result, national immigration policies on undocumented families contributes to children and families experiencing a multitude of marginalizing impacts that if not addressed will continue to exacerbate an already fragile family and social ecosystem.