Myth and Reality in the U.S. Immigration Debate

Greg Prieto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138656314
• eBook ISBN: 9781317221555
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Immigration Law
• Index: Social Sciences

"What part of illegal don't you understand?" This oft-repeated slogan from immigration restrictionists illustrates the contentious quality of the immigration reform debate in the United States: a debate that has raged on unresolved since at least 1986 when our immigration system was last reformed. This impasse is due, in large part, to widespread misinformation about immigration. This short and accessible textbook takes a critical perspective on immigration law and policy, arguing that immigrant "illegality" is itself produced by law, with tremendous consequences for individuals and families. Across six chapters that examine the conceptual, historical, economic, global, legal, and racial dimensions of immigration to the United States, Prieto argues that illegal immigration is a problem of policy, not people. History and cutting-edge social science data guide an analysis of the actual, empirical impact of immigration on U.S. society. By debunking myths about immigration, the reader is invited to form their own opinion on the basis of fact and in light of the unequal treatment different immigrant groups have received since the nation's founding.

Myth and Reality in the U.S. Immigration Debate synthesizes key lessons from the fields of sociology, law and society, history, economics and critical race studies in a digestible and engaging format. This text will serve as an introduction to the study of immigration and a primer for those who wish to engage in a sober and compassionate conversation about immigrants and immigration in the United States.

Chapter 1

Introduction
The Legal Production of Immigrant “Illegality”

Introduction

The “immigration problem” in the United States is a problem of policy, not people. A commonsense prevails in the mainstream debate about immigration reform: America is like a pie, there is only so much to go around. This commonsense tells us that the more foreigners we let in, the fewer resources citizens will enjoy. Immigrants bring more than a hope for a better life, so the logic goes. They also bring a host of problems along with them. The central argument of this book is that this commonsense is wrong.

The U.S. Immigration Debate draws upon research from economists, sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and historians to challenge the myths that continue to circulate in politics and everyday life. The goal of this book is to offer facts that will enable the reader to better understand and evaluate the U.S. immigration debate. Social scientists studying the impact of immigration and immigrants have argued that much of the popular discourse on the topic is at odds with the evidence.¹ This gulf between the empirical reality and political discourse mirrors a parallel gap between the academy and society. Rigorous research and careful attempts by academics to understand the complex causes and effects of immigration remain isolated in a small number of academic journals and thus rarely enter the mainstream.

On November 6, 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which, in addition to making it illegal to hire undocumented immigrants and required employers to verify immigrants’ employment eligibility via the US Citizenship and Immigration Services Form I-9, offered a pathway to citizenship, or amnesty, to undocumented immigrants who had arrived prior to January 1, 1982. The year 1986 was the last time any major pathway to citizenship was extended to most undocumented immigrants. More than three decades have passed since this last major legalizing act was passed due, in significant part, to misinformation that derails the debate. The notion that immigrants are economic liabilities, job takers, criminals, and unassimilable foreigners are key myths that are trafficked in what passes for debate on this issue. Sold by opportunistic politicians to a beleaguered electorate needing to name the source of its grievances, these tales ring true, but are at odds with the empirical reality.

The consequence of this gulf is not only inaction—the last several decades have seen attempt after attempt at reform torpedoed by aggressive misrepresentation of immigration and immigrants—but also, the passage of national and local immigration policy inspired by inflammatory, unfounded, and xenophobic demagoguery. During his first term, Donald Trump repeatedly dramatized the dangers of (undocumented) immigration to galvanize his supporters, demonstrating the ongoing power of this rhetoric to mobilize a segment of the American electorate.² His now-infamous reference to Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, Mexico’s worst of the worst, has found widespread approval among his growing base of supporters who gravitate to his twin messages of violation and strength.³

These sentiments are hardly new, and policy often follows prejudice. Whether the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 National Origins Act, the mass deportations of Mexicans in the 1930s and 1950s, or the restrictionist bills of the 1990s:⁴ the United States is as much a nation of immigrants as it is a nation of nativism and inviolable borders. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anti-immigrant rhetoric targeted immigrants from Asia and Europe. Europeans were described as poor and illiterate Germans, Papist Catholics, drunken Irish, or hot-blooded Italians, while Asians were caricatured as deceptive Chinese and disloyal Japanese. The demonization, denigration, and caricature of foreigners is as old as the United States itself.

Some liberalizing policies offered a counterweight to these racial and neo-colonial legacies, but as I demonstrate below, even a policy as seemingly pro-immigrant as the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which overturned national origins and inaugurated the family and employer preference system that we have today, had unintended consequences: producing an explosion of undocumented immigration from Mexico and other places in the Western hemisphere.

The human toll of this impasse is considerable, forcing apart families and constricting one of the few mechanisms poor and working people in the global south have to sustain their families. Deportation, in particular, leaves in its wake economic vulnerability and profound personal loss. While deportation numbers have declined in recent years, Barack Obama’s administration oversaw the greatest number of deportations in a single year: 420,000 removed in 2012. As Tanya Golash-Boza notes, “By the spring of 2014, there had been two million removals under the Obama administration—more in just over five years than any previous administration and more than the sum total of all documented removals prior to 1997”.⁵ The scope of the deportation regime in this country is historically unprecedented. Which is to say, the answer to the question of what to do about immigrants and immigration policy is of urgent personal and political import.

If informed debate is the goal, what kinds of questions must we ask and how might we address them? I approach the immigration issue from six related dimensions: the conceptual, the historical, the fiscal and economic, the global, the legal, and lastly the racial. These themes represent the focus of each of the chapters to come. In this introduction, I turn to the first of these: the conceptual.

To conceptualize something is to form an idea of it. Concepts, the ideas we carry around in our heads, provide us with the frames for how we evaluate, interpret, and define a problem, as well as its solution. Without concepts, we cannot understand the origins of a given issue, nor adopt strategies for action. Consider a different social issue—drug abuse and addiction—and two different ways that we might conceptualize the problem. If, for instance, we think of abuse and addiction as a criminal justice issue, then a particular causal story springs to mind and with it comes its attendant sanctions. Drug use, from a criminal justice standpoint, is an individual failure of responsibility—a choice to violate the law. While the problem originates with an individual, it threatens to spillover to the broader community, especially to children and teenagers whose lives might be derailed by drugs.

In response, officials employ a variety of punitive strategies on the street (stop and frisk) and in the courtroom (mandatory minimums), to punish drug users in targeted neighborhoods, typically those where Blacks, Latinos and racialized immigrants live, in order to deter the behavior. The war on drugs, beginning in the 1980s, is a clear example of the conceptualization of drugs as a criminal justice issue.⁶ The results have been devastating for poor communities of color, and Black women in particular.⁷ Though drug use rates between whites and Blacks are similar, Blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug possession, and arrests for simple possession exceed the number of arrests for all violent crimes combined.⁸

In the midst of a contemporary opioid crisis among whites across class backgrounds, a new strategy has been adopted to address these “deaths of despair”: or deaths that result from suicide, overdose, or alcoholism in the absence of educational or employment opportunities that have become rarer as capitalism has matured and globalized. While these trends have long affected poor communities of color, when evidence that increasing numbers of whites in rural and suburban zones were using opioids, a compassionate, rather than punitive approach was adopted. Drug use was re-conceptualized as a public health issue among whites, compared to the punitive treatment of Blacks a generation ago.⁹ In this view, drug abuse and addiction are symptoms of institutional inequality, such as un- or underemployment and a lack of educational opportunity, not a personal failing. Understood as the personal manifestation of a wider social issue, drug use is met with decriminalization and sometimes legalization coupled with treatment and resources. Countries such as Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Uruguay approach drug use in this way, developing needle exchange programs, sanctioned use spaces, and coordinated outreach and treatment programs. The consequences are lower rates of addiction without the collateral consequences of decades of criminalization and incarceration. How we think about a problem radically shapes what we imagine can be done about it.

How can we conceptualize the problem of undocumented immigrants today?¹⁰ One powerful conceptualization of immigrants appears in the oft-repeated slogan, “illegal is illegal” and its corollary “we are a nation of laws.” This call betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about law—its origins, development, and its relationship to politics. These sentiments assume that law is immutable and self-evident. Law is presented as detached from its political origins and the boundary separating legal from illegal is presented as inevitable. How the line is drawn between who or what is legal and illegal is never called into question. According to this logic, undocumented immigrants deserve their lot and, because the issue is presented narrowly as a matter of straightforward legal interpretation and poor personal choices, one might arrive at the conclusion that immigrants have brought their illegality upon themselves. Given the many legal transformations underway at present from gay marriage to recreational marijuana—transformations stimulated by massive collective mobilization—it seems clear that law is closely related to politics. And yet this insight does not enter into the immigration debate.

Compassionate observers may sympathize with immigrants’ plight and even go on to call for reform, without examining the political and legal origins of immigrant illegality. Supporters of reform who nevertheless accept the inevitability of the designation “illegal immigration” will find themselves on weak footing because this support is based upon the belief that immigration reform is an act of charity: a symbol of the beneficence of this nation of immigrants. If we think about illegality as the result of the understandable but still illegal choices of immigrants, then the decision not to deport them is framed as a matter of leniency, not fairness. Their support emerges out of a sense of generosity, easily depleted during periods of economic contraction and quickly abandoned in the face of changing political winds. If we consider the political nature of law, then we can demand reform on surer footing: as a matter of fairness, principle, and evidence-driven good sense.

Law is an arena of struggle: not an edict handed down from on high, but a venue where social conflict unfolds. An alternative way to think about immigration law is to consider the legal production of illegality. Laws are not neutral, rather they are political: simultaneously shaping and shaped by social actors operating from within unequal relationships of power. Consider, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act for its co-sponsors New York Congressperson Emanuel Celler and Michigan Senator Philip Hart. This bill overturned the overtly racist National Origins Act of 1924, which used a discriminatory quota formula to give preference to immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• 1 Introduction: The Legal Production of Immigrant “Illegality”
• 2 A Brief History of Immigration Law and Policy
• 3 Job Takers, Criminals, Fiscal Drains: Fact vs. Fiction in the Immigration Debate
• 4 Harvest of Empire: Globalization and Immigration
• 5 “Get in Line”: The Legal Immigration Queue and the Inequity of Equal Treatment
• 6 Conclusion: Race, Immigration, and the Moral Case for Reform
• Glossary
• References
• Index