Undocumented : How Immigration Became Illegal (9780807001684) (25 page)

It is also a mirror image of the United States’ relationship with the countries—primarily Mexico, Central America, and other Latin American countries—from which the undocumented come. In every case, the products and profits accumulated in the sending countries are a major source of the abundance and affluence in the United States. A quick review of any supermarket or clothing or electronics store reveals the Third World and often Latin American origins of many of the products we consume. More invisible are the mines, oil wells, multinationals, and profits behind the products. But the flow of resources is undeniable.

The history that is drummed into the heads of US schoolchildren insists that the “country of immigrants” was founded and built by Europeans. The invisible underside of this narrative is the imperial narrative of conquest and dispossession that continued until the end of the nineteenth century and upon which the new “country of [white] immigrants” was built.

The country-of-immigrants narrative is very much a narrative of race. Immigrants were conceived as white Europeans (the only people allowed to naturalize), and their presence and comfort depended upon the labor of people who were legally excluded from the polity. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, Mexicans, like African Americans prior to 1868, were accepted as a necessary evil for their labor and considered unthreatening to the white nature of the country that viewed them as exploitable workers rather than as potential citizens. The history of reliance on Mexican labor coupled with the refusal to grant rights to Mexican workers is a long one indeed.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase (La Mesilla Purchase of 1853) offered US citizenship to Mexican citizens resident in the territories newly taken. By specifying “Mexican citizens,” the laws excluded the Native American population resident in the area. And by offering citizenship to Mexicans at a time when citizenship was restricted to whites, the laws implied that Mexicans would be considered white. In the midcentury, then, “it was possible . . . to be both white
and
Mexican in the United States.”
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However, as Katherine Benton-Cohn explains in her detailed study of four Arizona border towns, Mexican nationality became racialized as nonwhite during the nineteenth century through work. Where Mexicans were workers, rather than landholders, they came to be legally defined as racially Mexican and disqualified from citizenship.

“Where Mexicans owned ranches and farms, racial categories were blurry and unimportant. But in the industrial copper-mining town of Bisbee, Mexican workers were segregated economically by their lower pay (‘Mexican wage’) and geographically by new town-planning experiments. To most non-Mexican residents of Bisbee, Mexicans were peon workers or potential public charges, not neighbors or business partners, not co-workers or co-worshipers, and certainly not potential marriage partners.” In these areas, where Mexicans became defined as racially Mexican through their laboring status, “‘American’ increasingly equaled ‘white,’ and so ‘Mexican’ came to mean the opposite of both.”
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Nicolas De Genova notes the “longstanding equation of Mexican migration with a presumably temporary, disposable (finally, deportable) labor migration predominated by men (who were predominantly single or left wives and children behind).”
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The 1911 Dillingham US Immigration Commission argued that “while [Mexicans] are not easily assimilated, this is of no very great importance as long as most of them return to their native land. In the case of the Mexican, he is less desirable as a citizen than as a laborer.”
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“One way or the other, then,” De Genova concludes, “US policy would ensure that ‘most of them’ proved to be sojourners.”
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The laws that restricted citizenship to whites did not restrict the right to work to whites. On the contrary, Congress has repeatedly created new categories of nonwhite people who were specifically cast as workers. (Slave laborers comprised the original worker-but-not-potential-citizen category.) Deportability became a crucial factor in cementing the association between Mexican-ness as a race and legal status as a temporary worker. The threat of deportation worked to institutionalize the fragile character of Mexicans’ claims to rights in the land where they came, invited, to work. It could be used to accommodate the changing needs of employers, and it could also be used to discourage union organizing or other forms of social protest.
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Until the 1960s, racial justifications seemed sufficient for legal discrimination against Mexicans.

MAKING IMMIGRATION ILLEGAL

After the 1960s, when race was finally rejected as a rationale for excluding people from access to public spaces, citizenship, or entry into the United States, new forms of legal and legalized exclusion took its place. The last two major immigration reforms, in 1965 and 1986, turned Mexican migrant workers into “illegal” workers and used that legal status to justify discrimination. They also, paradoxically, helped to greatly increase both the immigrant and the undocumented population.

The 1965 law is generally seen as a civil rights triumph. One typical account explains that it “ended discrimination” and “represented a significant watershed in US immigration history and particularly in its explicit reversal of decades of systematically exclusive and restrictive immigration policies.” Immigration scholars agree that the climate of the civil rights movement of the 1960s set the context for the 1965 immigration reform.
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Despite this generous interpretation, the 1965 law was actually “distinctly and unequivocally restrictive” when it came to Mexican migrants.
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Through the 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were crossing the border as braceros or alongside the braceros each year. Then the Bracero Program was ended and Mexican immigration was suddenly capped. By 1976, a cap of twenty thousand immigrant visas a year was enforced. The seasonal, circular migration of Mexicans over many decades that had attracted little national attention suddenly became “a yearly and highly visible violation of American sovereignty by hostile aliens who were increasingly framed as invaders and criminals.”
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If the new restrictions were intended to lower migration from Latin America, they failed miserably. Instead, all types of immigration from Latin America rose after 1965: temporary and permanent, legal and illegal. Legal immigration from Latin America grew from about 450,000 between 1950 and 1960 to over 4 million between 1990 and 2000, while the number of undocumented Latin Americans living long term in the United States grew from almost none in 1965 to close to 10 million in the first decade of the new century.
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Further “unintended consequences” flowed from the greatly increased border enforcement of the 1990s and 2000s. As border crossing became more difficult, more dangerous, and more expensive, seasonal migrants began to change their patterns and stay on in the United States, sometimes bringing their families as well. The undocumented population grew rapidly in those decades, not because more immigrants were arriving, but because fewer were leaving. “It was thus a sharp decline in the outflow of undocumented migrants, not an increase in the inflow of undocumented migrants, that was responsible for the acceleration of undocumented population growth during the 1990s and early 2000s, and this decline in return migration was to a great extent a product of US enforcement efforts.”
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Starting in 1990, a series of laws made life even more difficult for noncitizens, including green-card holders (legal permanent residents). Family reunification privileges favored citizens over legal permanent residents. In 1996, legal permanent residents were barred from receiving most social services, while the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act made noncitizens deportable for a wide range of crimes, even if they had been committed in a distant past. Then, in 2001, the USA-PATRIOT Act made deportation and arrest possible for virtually any noncitizen, based only upon the US Attorney General’s decision.
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In response to the increasingly punitive climate for noncitizens, more immigrants chose to naturalize. As new citizens, they were now able to take advantage of the family preferences created by the 1965 law and petition for their family members, thus contributing to an increase in overall immigration.
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STRUCTURAL CAUSES OF INCREASED MIGRATION

While US legislative changes played a large role in increasing both documented and undocumented immigration, the enormous political and economic convulsions that wracked Latin America in the post-1965 era and the shifts in the global economy were also important. Political movements for social change were crushed as a wave of extraordinarily repressive right-wing dictatorships spread through the continent. Supply-side economics and structural adjustment programs tore apart social safety networks and spurred export-oriented extraction and production. The new policies disrupted traditional economies while creating expectations and hopes that couldn’t be fulfilled at home. Meanwhile, both consumption and inequality shot up in the United States, creating massive demand for cheap immigrant workers. Globalizing technologies and migration chains transformed the possibility of migration from remote to realistic. The forces behind the rise in Latin American, especially Mexican and Central American, migration were multiple indeed.

Even as US politicians railed about illegal immigration and border control, they pursued policies that served to increase migrant flows. Policies imposed on Latin America that destroy subsistence farming and degrade agricultural work, and limit employment opportunities and social services, set the stage for out-migration. Policies at home that create demand for low-wage, immigrant workers and establish recruitment networks structure the destinations of migrant flows. These are precisely the policies that the United States has implemented.

Over the past century, the United States has consistently promoted export-oriented economies in Latin America based on foreign investment. It has opposed and overthrown Latin American governments that have tried to take control of or redistribute their countries’ resources. During recent decades, US policies promoting neoliberal austerity measures and market fundamentalism have had noxious effects on Latin American society. They undermine subsistence agriculture, employment, and the social safety network, while increasing structural and individual violence in Latin America. The United States has used international institutions, military interventions, trade agreements, and corporate privilege to arrive at a situation in which it, with 4 percent of the world’s population, consumes between 25 percent and 50 percent of the planet’s major resources, while simultaneously creating an enormous demand for low-wage, informal, and seasonal labor. Thus, the United States continues to set the stage for large migrations from Latin America.
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Perhaps the advocates of border control believe that while the open border worked in the past, these structural changes have made it untenable in today’s world. A focus on securing—or more accurately, militarizing—the border, though, only serves to reinforce the structural conditions behind migration. As Jacqueline Stevens argues, “Illegitimate regimes benefit from the restrictive immigration policies of their neighbors. In most countries run by tyrants, emigration is not curtailed by the regimes themselves, which often lack the resources to police wide swaths of their borders. Rather, neighboring countries fearing the incursion of political and economic refugees take care of this.”
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In the case of the United States and Latin America, Stevens’s argument must be refined. It is not pure coincidence that poor and violent countries in Latin America coexist alongside the overconsuming United States. Deliberate US policies, from invasions and occupations to military aid to loans and investments, have created the Latin American polities and economies and the disparities that are now the roots of today’s migrations. Attempts to seal the border only reinforce the very inequalities that contribute to migration.

CHALLENGING DISCRIMINATION

The campaigns to strengthen immigration law and make it harsher are fairly well known and have been related to the successive punitive measures against undocumented immigrants since the 1980s. But organizations that defended the rights of immigrants and, in particular, the undocumented also grew in the last decades of the twentieth century.
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While nativism has been part of US society and culture since the country was founded, specifically anti-
undocumented
sentiment and movements date to the post-1965 and especially the post-1986 period. The Republican Party first mentioned immigration enforcement in its 1980 national platform and in 1984 first “affirmed the right of the United States to control its boundaries and voiced concern about illegal immigration.” The Democratic Party first mentioned illegal immigration in its 1996 platform.
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Popular movements for the defense of the rights of the undocumented also grew this period.

Mexican American rights organizations like LULAC have taken mixed stances on the undocumented and even on immigrants in general over the course of the twentieth century. Mexican Americans sought to claim their rights by demonstrating their patriotism and distancing themselves from new arrivals, even as their communities, friends, and families included both documented and undocumented new immigrants.
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Even the United Farm Workers union, made up primarily of immigrants, was hesitant to defend the rights of the undocumented.

However, Mexican American rights, immigrant rights, and the rights of the undocumented have also been intertwined. The Chicano movement of the 1960s and ’70s rejected the emphasis on patriotism and assimilation of earlier generations, and insisted on a cultural nationalism that united people of Mexican origin, regardless of status. (The movement adopted the name Chicano to emphasize the indigenous roots of Mexicans and the difference in their historical experience from that of European immigrants.) “Chicano families became the new underground railroad,” explained Alma Martínez evocatively, referring to the ties that bound US-born Chicanos to new, including undocumented, immigrants.
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Even as politicians and the media raised their voices against the undocumented, networks and organizations grew to defend their rights.