Immigrant Advocacy Research Articles

Immigration Advocacy as Labor Advocacy

[Excerpt] In this Article, we call for a comprehensive analytical framework that views immigration advocacy as labor advocacy. This framework has implications for the existing scholarship described above and for doctrinal analyses of legal cases relating to employees.’ immigration advocacy efforts.

Undocumented Status and Schooling for Newcomer Teens

In this ethnographic study, Elaine C. Allard describes and analyzes the characteristics and experiences of undocumented newcomer adolescents attending a US suburban high school. She considers the ways in which newcomer adolescents show agency in their border crossing, prioritize work over formal education, and express transnational identities. She contrasts their experience with the predominant narrative of DREAMers, undocumented childhood arrivals who are often characterized as migrating to the United States “through no fault of their own,” who prioritize professional aspirations through schooling, and who are “American in spirit.” Allard calls attention to a subgroup of undocumented students who may benefit from different approaches by educators and immigrant advocates.

Symposium on the Politics of Immigration: Introduction

Political scientists have the potential and responsibility to illuminate distinctive dimensions of immigration politics. The papers in this Symposium do so by mapping the persistence of anti-immigrant stereotypes and “strange bedfellow” immigration politics; the neglected history of state and federal struggles for immigration policy control; the rise of new immigrant advocacy forces; and the manner in which policymakers use facially neutral means, such as measures of time, to pursue controversial ends.

Immigrant children in the age of educational reform

Immigrant children are the fastest growing subgroup among United States schoolchildren today. This paper explores how the new testing movement affects these students, many of which are English language learners.The passage of new federal laws mandating that all students be tested within one year of entrance into a U.S. school is refuted by long standing research. Studies have demonstrated that it takes five to seven years for students to attain the academic language necessary to achieve success in educational settings.This paper explores the instructional program options for immigrant students and advocates for changes in the current testing protocol for them.

‘They come here to work’: an evaluation of the economic argument in favor of immigrant rights

Advocates commonly highlight the exploitation that hard-working undocumented immigrants commonly suffer at the hands of employers, the important contribution they make to the US economy, and the fiscal folly of border militarization and enhanced immigration enforcement policies. In this paper, I unpack these economic rationales for expanding immigrant rights, and examine the nuanced ways in which advocates deploy this frame. To do so, I rely on statements issued by publicly present immigrant rights groups in six places: California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Washington, DC. I also draw on interviews with immigrant advocates in San Jose, CA and Houston, TX, press releases from two alternative national immigrant rights organizations, and an ethnographic photo-documentation of immigrant rights mobilizations in 2012–2014. Economic rationales, I emphasize, can be found in each of these contexts, but are not mutually exclusive to other justifications, including narratives about civil, human, and family rights for immigrants. However, I argue that an economic framing of immigrant rights nonetheless runs the risk reifying work over conventional understandings of criminality, often relies on a narrow definition of economic worth, and could have negative consequences for coalition building.

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis?

The U.S. Immigration Crisis and a Call for the Church's Lifeworld Politics: Why Should Hauerwas Collaborate with Habermas on the U.S. Immigration Crisis? Ilsup Ahn Introduction: Saying “No” to the State's Biopolitics Against the Undocumented Migrants According to the recent survey report published by the Washington, D.C.‐based Public Religion Research Institute, throughout 2013, there has been consistent bipartisan and cross‐religious support for creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States. While 14 percent percent of Americans support allowing undocumented immigrants to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, 63 percent favor providing a way for immigrants who are currently living in the United States without legal documentation to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements. They also discovered that nearly two‐thirds of Americans believe that the U.S. immigration system is either completely broken (34 percent) or mostly broken but working in some areas (31 percent). The report also shows that 41 percent of Americans believe immigration policy should be an immediate priority for President Obama and Congress, while roughly as many (42 percent) say it should be a priority during the next couple of years. Interestingly enough, only 14 percent of Americans say it should not be a priority at all. Despite the majority of the U.S. citizens favor some sort of comprehensive immigration reform, the Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul to date largely due to the House Republican leaders, who recently unveiled their principles for an overhaul for the nation's immigration laws. These principles, however, do not clarify whether most undocumented immigrants would ever be able to become legal residents or U.S. citizens, while they would require tighter border security and more interior immigration enforcements. These principles seem to reiterate the problematic anti‐immigration mantra to continuously militarize our borders as well as to criminalize undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration has been increasingly criticized in regard to the inhumane deportation of many undocumented people, especially those parents whose children are U.S. citizens. Critiques argue that President Obama has overseen record levels of deportations, with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) repatriating about 2 million undocumented people since he took office in January 2009 (roughly 400,000 a year or 1,100 per day). Amid the increasing political turmoil relating to the immigration reform, the public media begin to notice that the real winners in immigration control are the prison industry. The Atlantic, for example, reports that since 2003, when ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was created and government crackdowns on undocumented aliens increased, private prisons have gained business, with industry profits more than doubling. Damon Hininger, CEO of CCA (Corrections Corporation of America), said during a conference call with investors in May 2010 that between 2007 and 2009, when earnings for the S&P dropped by 28 percent, the company's earnings drew by 18 percent. According to The Atlantic, the government spends more than $2 billion a year on immigration detention, while spending only $72 million on alternatives to detention. It also reports that the private prison industry, such as CCA, has spent more than $1 million on lobbying. Although private prisons say that their lobbying efforts are aimed at promoting their services, not shaping immigration policy, immigrant advocates argue that the private prison industry is always lobbying for more detention beds. Given that the cost of detaining an immigrant averages $159 a day and half of 34,000 beds are operated by private prison corporations, it is not difficult to see the connection between the interests of the private prison corporations such as CCA and the Geo Group and the criminalization of undocumented migrants. According to Lee Fang of The Nation, the controversial Arizona SB1070 was developed in consultation with private prison lobbyists through a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Unfortunately, as Aubrey Pringle reports, several pending immigration bills would increase the number of incarcerated immigrants even more. The ongoing political struggles related to the increasing border militarization, the widespread criminalization of undocumented migrants, and the massive deportation of undocumented parents are the explicit exemplification of what philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben call the...

Undocumented No More: The Power of State Citizenship

An estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. These individuals have become integral members of American families and vital components of the American economy. Yet repeated efforts to meaningfully reform the nation’s immigration laws — to more fully integrate these individuals into American society — have failed to garner sufficient political support in Congress. The prospects for significant congressional action on immigration remain bleak into the foreseeable future because our nation’s debate on immigration has been warped by powerful, but largely inaccurate, themes of criminality, lax border enforcement, and national security threats. These themes have been crafted and cemented in large part by aggressive restrictionist state immigration laws in places like Arizona and Alabama. Until recently, integrationists have failed to similarly capitalize on the power of states to shape both the nation’s policies and, perhaps more importantly, the nation’s discourse on immigration. Recently, however, immigrant advocates have begun looking to the power of inclusive state citizenship schemes to reorient our nation’s immigration conversation.This article explores the outer boundaries of state power to promote the integration of immigrants and to reorient the nation’s conversation around more accurate and helpful themes of family, democracy, and economic vitality. Specifically, I explore the constitutional power of states to extend state citizenship to undocumented immigrants. The article argues that the federalist structure enshrined in the Constitution and prevailing interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment leave untouched the historic power of the states to define the boundaries of their own political communities more generously than the federal government. In addition, the article argues that such state citizenship schemes could deliver substantial tangible support for the integration of undocumented immigrants though traditional levers of state power: granting state political rights, granting access to state programs and benefits, and granting state protections against discrimination and mistreatment. Perhaps most importantly, state citizenship could be a powerful expressive tool for states to reorient our national conversation on immigration in ways that may, in the long term, be the key to eventually unlocking substantial federal reform.

Assembling insurgent citizenship: immigrant advocacy struggles in the Washington DC metropolitan area

This article examines the political and spatial registers of struggles against exclusionary local immigration policies and for more welcoming policies in the Washington DC metropolitan area, one of the hotspots for both local anti-immigration policies and immigrant advocacy in the United States. We conceptualize immigrant advocacy not simply as an alliance, but instead as an assemblage that brings together a diverse set of differently positioned actors and nonhuman actants. The assemblage enacts a diverse politics that deploys different forms of activism, while engaging different publics (e.g., religious communities, unions, the larger public sphere in public spaces, etc.) and the state in complex ways. From acting outside the state to engaging in claims-making towards the state, immigrant advocates are making claims and actions that challenge and go beyond dominant conceptions of citizenship rights and liberal democratic politics. The spatial register is similarly diverse. The immigrant advocacy assemblage is confronted with and enacts a different politics of place in central cities and inner- and outer-ring suburbs. Contestations of exclusionary local policies, however, are not simply about a local politics of place. To the contrary, some actors and actants in the assemblage are actively involved in extra-local networking, collaborating across jurisdictional boundaries—between central cities and inner-and outer-ring suburbs within the Washington DC metropolitan area and across the United States. The complexities of these contestations call into question post-political narratives of “proper” politics, underscoring the need for an empirically grounded critical theory of democracy. This article contributes to this task by providing a geographically and historically sensitive analysis of the immigrant advocacy assemblage.

Safe Third Country Agreement: Closing the Doors on Refugee Women Seeking Protection

This article examines the shortcomings of the Safe Third Country Agreement between Canada and the United States in protecting refugee women from rape, torture, and domestic violence. It also outlines efforts that benefit all refugee women, particularly women of color seeking protection in Canada and the United States. The article concludes that social workers, lawyers, medical and health care workers, nongovernmental organizations, and immigration advocates should collectively lobby to change the existing refugee processes that disqualify and refuse protection to bona fide refugee women of color. The recommendations involve convening a standing committee to review decisions that deny protection to refugee women survivors of violence. Also, social work research on the determination process can identify how legal and cultural representation can benefit refugee women.

Spaces of Immigrant Advocacy and Liberal Democratic Citizenship

Challenging representations of immigrants as victims of the biopolitical power of the state, and of citizenship as reinforcing such repression, this article interrogates how immigrant advocacy has been contesting the proliferation of exclusionary immigration policies in the United States and in the course of this pushing against the boundaries of formal liberal democratic citizenship. Using Washington, DC, as a case study, and deploying the concept of insurgent citizenship to theorize these actions, we examine the polyvalence of immigrant advocacy, paying particular attention to the spaces and scales of struggle and flexibly networked mobilizations. Insurgent citizenship creates new political spaces that exceed the national territorial framing of liberal democratic citizenship, that focus on civic action rather than simply relying on the electoral process, and that lay claim to new values and criteria for citizenship.

A History of Exclusion: U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882

Despite immigrant-friendly rhetoric, President Obama has deported more immigrants than any other President in history, with a whooping record of almost 2 million deportations in the past 6 years. This seems quite contrary to America’s self-identity as a nation of immigrants and a beacon for the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” While the politics of 9/11 have led to the conflation of immigrants with national security issues, the whooping number of people deported by the son of a Kenyan immigrant can only be fully understood through a legal history of U.S. immigration policy, and specifically, U.S. deportation policy. Quite simply, the gates to the American dream have not always been open to all. Throughout history, U.S. deportation policy has been governed by larger social trends and social mores. In National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy Since 1882, Deirdre Moloney explores the intersection of race, class, gender and religion in constituting United States deportation policy, and contextualizes deportation in the larger social trends of the times, with an emphasis on immigrants and immigration advocacy groups. It is through the social and legal history that Moloney charts that one can begin to understand current immigration policies, which serves to exclude immigrants on the basis of arbitrary crimes, subject immigrants to mandatory detention without procedural due process, punish employers for hiring undocumented immigrants while conducting record numbers of deportations.

Notes from the Editors, December 2013

buy this issueThe AFL-CIO held its annual convention this past September in Los Angeles. Many commentators hailed this meeting as historic, one in which the nation's major labor federation finally came to grips with the near disappearance and growing political irrelevance of unions. Union density is abysmally low and declining, with an astonishing 6.6 percent of private sector employees now organized, lower than at any time in the past century. And, with rare exceptions, labor's ability to influence legislation and workplace regulation is nonexistent. It could not even prevent passage last year of a right-to-work law in Michigan, the cradle of industrial unionism. All of this has translated into falling wages and benefits for union and nonunion workers alike, since the union threat effect on nonunion employers has diminished dramatically.… To reverse course, AFL-CIO leaders laid out a plan to broaden the federation's membership base to include nonunion workers and members of fraternal groups, such as immigrant advocates and environmental organizations.… While we should applaud… [their] efforts, they leave important questions unanswered.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Beware of notarios: Neoliberal governance of immigrants as crime victims

Drawing on David Garland’s (1996, 2001) observations about the ‘limits of the sovereign state’, we seek in this article to develop a critical understanding of the recent response in the USA to ‘notario fraud’—an unlawful act committed when a non-lawyer poses as an immigration attorney. While efforts to protect immigrants from fraud on their surface represent a counter to recent anti-immigrant policies, our analysis of materials distributed by what we term an anti-notario fraud apparatus suggests that such activity amounts to neoliberal governance. Specifically, we study immigrant advocacy groups’ discourse around the issue and argue that anti-notario efforts are akin to responsibilization. We also study how law enforcement officials discuss the issue and theorize how a one-dimensional framing of notarios as villains supports the neoliberal regime by protecting the state’s sovereignty to manufacture what Nicholas De Genova (2002) has called ‘deportability’.

Marginalised, yet mobilised: The UGTSF, African immigration, and racial advocacy in postcolonial France

The Union Générale des Travailleurs Sénégalais en France (UGTSF) and its leader, Sally N’Dongo, sought to raise awareness and provide assistance that would create greater understanding, decrease racism, and promote equality and opportunity in postcolonial France. The UGTSF’s rise to prominence signified the emergence of a postcolonial African trade union movement that provided advocacy and support. Through the UGTSF, African immigrants involved themselves in some of the most important debates of the era, while addressing critical issues such as racial discrimination and exclusion, the politics of social welfare for immigrant workers, and the challenges of integration.

Human Rights Advocacy: An Introduction for Immigration Advocates

Human rights advocacy can be a useful tool for those who seek to advance the cause of social justice for immigrants in the United States. This article summarizes the basic ways in which domestic immigration advocates can effectively incorporate human rights norms and strategies into both individual case and policy advocacy. It provides an overview of relevant international human rights standards and tribunals, strategies for incorporating human rights norms into more traditional advocacy, and the basics of how to bring a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). To demonstrate how human rights advocacy can intertwine with domestic advocacy on behalf of immigrants, case examples are discussed as well.

Critical agrarianism

AbstractThis paper develops the concept of ‘critical agrarianism’ to describe and advance the pursuit of land-based work as a means of realizing social justice and environmental sustainability. Encouraging new agrarianism to more carefully scrutinize its agenda, critical agrarianism celebrates the promise of a close working relationship with the natural world while insisting that a return to the land—per se—is insufficient. In the practice of linking people and land, past and present, critical agrarianism continually questions and reshapes the very category of agrarian, toward a more equitable and enduring prosperity. I revisit both canonical agrarian writing and its critics, pulling out ‘back-pocket tools’ that can keep critical agrarians on track in building our alternative futures. I then offer several case studies of critical agrarianism in practice, encouraging a move beyond idealized models of agrarian ties, toward an empirical account of who has actually been doing the work to put food on the table. Noting the historical gap between working the landscape and having a property or citizenship right, I call for an agrarianism in which practices—not land title—are the basis of material and social community. Furthermore, I suggest that agrarianism must extend its web outward rather than inward, forging connections to the work of land tenure reform, education, community development, immigrant advocacy and trade policy. To be a critical agrarian is not to preserve fixed social-natural ties, but rather to practice a powerfully open and dialogical engagement with the world and one another.

Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: The Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination by Laurie Arnold

 Reviews ing into account the inextricable relationships between labour and landscape and by accepting Latino immigrants as integral players in forests and rural communities can we hope to have land management policies that promote both forest health and environmental justice” (p. 75). Sarathy effectively demonstrates the pineros’ marginalization, their experience of labor abuses,untimelyorabsentpay,uncompensated injury, and fear of deportation, along with the difficulties they face defending their interests due to language barriers and racial prejudice — including the arguably most benign manifestation of racism in the treatment of Oregon’s Latinos by the mainstream press more as “cultural spectacle” than as full human beings. On that score, Sarathy devotes a chapter to Latino workers’ organizational efforts beyond the southern Oregon woods, ranging from labor unionism — for example, the Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN) — to immigration advocacy and service provision. By drawing regional and occupational comparisons, Sarathy poses provocative questions about the conditions under which self-activity — identifying a problem and taking action on one’s own behalf to address it — is more or less likely to occur. Sarathy’s Pineros is an excellent book, well researched and compassionate. The author holds a doctorate in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California at Berkeley,and her field of expertise has rightfully shaped her approach. A geographer or historian would likely be interested in placing Pineros in a broader spatial or temporal context.Interestingcomparisonsmay be drawn by reading Don Mitchell’s Lie of the Land (Minnesota ,1996) regarding California’s farm workers — a book Sarathy mentions — and another she does not: Gunther Peck’s Reinventing Free Labor (Cambridge, 2000) about immigrant workers and labor contractors in theAmerican West a century ago. Pineros is recommended for anyone interested in labor and immigrant rights and environmental justice. Philip Dreyfus San Francisco State University Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead: the Colville Confederated Tribes and Termination by Laurie Arnold University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2012. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 208 pages. $24.95 paper. At a 1965 Congressional hearing on the proposed termination of the Colville Confederated Tribes, Margaret Piotote boiled down the view of many culturally traditional elders:“We have a beautiful reservation. It is worth more than money” (p. 90). Some readers may be surprised that termination battles continued at such a late date, but the length of the Colville struggle is only one of many important revelations brought forward by Laurie Arnold in her fascinating case study of the post–World War II federal policy that was so destructive to Native peoples. Piotote spoke in opposition to the many members of Congress from both parties who, for over two decades,advocated the end of government support for tribes and the elimination of tribal governments and reservations.Yet she also faced opposition at home:termination was pushed relentlessly over many years by Colville people themselves — or, rather, by certain people and organizations within the diverse and complex reservation community. Arnold’s history reveals that those factions represented a tribal majority from about 1956 to at least 1968, when the elected Colville Business Council drafted the last of the proposed termination bills and resolutions that frame her book. As late as 1967, a Bureau of Indian Affairs poll revealed that 73 percent of enrolled  OHQ vol. 114, no. 1 Colville adults still supported termination. Arnold points out some complications. Many (perhaps most) supporters lived outside the reservation. In addition, 30 percent of tribal members simply did not participate in the 1967, or earlier, surveys. Arnold suggests that many opponents were more oriented to traditional cultural practices and values and may have been expressing their opposition in the old way of withdrawal from the process. Nevertheless,even if all nonparticipants in the 1967 poll were in fact opposed to termination, simple math shows that supporters constituted a majority. Pro-terminationists, furthermore, dominated the elected business council until 1971. More convincing analyses — made by anti-terminationists at the time and by Arnold herself — argue that many pro-termination Colvilles did not understand the full import of the proposed laws. Arnold makes clear that Colvilles were not unique in advocating for their own termination .Majorities expressed support at Klamath, Menominee...

Looking Beyond "Mow, Blow and Go": A Case Study of Mexican Immigrant Gardeners in Los Angeles

Author(s): Huerta, Alvaro | Abstract: Recent research on Mexican immigrants focuses on the working conditions of farm workers, garment workers, janitors and day laborers. This coincides with successful efforts by organized labor and immigrant advocacy groups to organize these marginalized workforces. Little attention, however, has been given to Mexican paid gardeners. As part of the household service economy, paid gardeners represent a difficult labor sector to organize and research because they typically operate as independent contractors in the informal economy. This paper seeks to provide a more holistic picture of this dynamic workforce. Drawing primarily upon ethnographic techniques, the paper documents how this industry operates and its social organization. Based on research conducted in Los Angeles, the paper also demonstrates how a select group of self-employed, Mexican gardeners function as petty-entrepreneurs, benefiting in the informal economy by successfully utilizing their social capital and social networks.

“Asian Latinos” and the U.S. Census

Numbering more than 300,000, “Asian Latinos” are a large but overlooked segment of the Asian American and Latino populations of the United States. Drawing from data generated from the 5 percent Public Use Microdata Samples of the 2000 U.S. Census, this article provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of the Asian Latino community. In particular, it examines the demographic characteristics of population size, geographic distribution, national origin, gender, age, citizenship, and educational attainment. In addition, it examines several policy implications related to Asian Latino coalition building and undocumented immigrant advocacy.

“Asian Latinos” and the U.S. Census

Numbering more than 300,000, “Asian Latinos” are a large but overlooked segment of the Asian American and Latino populations of the United States. Drawing from data generated from the 5 percent Public Use Microdata Samples of the 2000 U.S. Census, this article provides a preliminary quantitative analysis of the Asian Latino community. In particular, it examines the demographic characteristics of population size, geographic distribution, national origin, gender, age, citizenship, and educational attainment. In addition, it examines several policy implications related to Asian Latino coalition building and undocumented immigrant advocacy.