Immigrants Under Threat

Risk and Resistance in Deportation Nation

Greg Prieto

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479853144
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

A portrait of two Mexican immigrant communities confronting threats of deportation, detention, and dispossession Everyday life as an immigrant in a deportation nation is fraught with risk, but everywhere immigrants confront repression and dispossession, they also manifest resistance in ways big and small. Immigrants Under Threat shifts the conversation from what has been done to Mexican immigrants to what they do in response. From private strategies of avoidance, to public displays of protest, immigrant resistance is animated by the massive demographic shifts that started in 1965 and an immigration enforcement regime whose unprecedented scope and intensity has made daily life increasingly perilous. Immigrants Under Threat focuses on the way the material needs of everyday life both enable and constrain participation in immigrant resistance movements. Using ethnographic research from two Mexican immigrant communities on California’s Central Coast, Greg Prieto argues that immigrant communities turn inward to insulate themselves from the perceived risks of authorities and a hostile public. These barriers are overcome through the face-to-face work of social-movement organizing that transforms individual grievances into collective demands. The social movements that emerge are shaped by the local political climates in which they unfold and remain tethered to their material inspiration. Immigrants Under Threat explains that Mexican immigrants seek not to transcend, but to burrow into American institutions of law and family so that they might attain a measure of economic stability and social mobility that they have sought all along.

1

Ghost in the Deportation Machine

A Brief History of Immigrant Inclusion through Exclusion

We Want Your Labor, but We Don’t Want You

Héctor is soft-spoken and measured, choosing his words carefully. He keeps his hands, slightly weathered and the color of mahogany, folded on the table in front of him as we talk. His was the single interview I conducted in my apartment. He had insisted it was not inconvenient to come to me. Without my eyes moving over the intimate topography of someone else’s interior life, I focused squarely on Héctor. He wore dark jeans and a button-down, thick dark hair combed to one side. Having interviewed other respondents immediately after a shift, I note that he has not come directly from work. He cleaned up and dressed for the interview. As we talked he exuded a sense of reliability and purpose born of an unwavering commitment to provide for his daughter whom he raises alone. His wife died when his daughter was two years old, motivating him to make the journey northward. He came to Central California from Oaxaca, Mexico, without authorization in the early 1990s. He describes what happened to his job prospects when, as a consequence of Proposition 187, California law changed to begin requiring that Californians demonstrate proof of legal residence in order to obtain a driver’s license. Faced with this new requirement, Héctor, undocumented, was unable to renew his license: a legal shift that had profound consequences for his ability to earn a living.

Well, in the first place I lost my job, and I was earning a lot of money because I was a driver with a company and I had several years in that company, I was established there and that was a job that . . . a requirement of my two jobs were to have a driver’s license. So, I had several years there and I had a good salary and I was full-time in these two jobs and when I lost my driver’s license I couldn’t work. I was really affected because I had to learn other occupations. I had to learn about construction, painting and carpentry, now I’m a handyman and I work a part-time job in a restaurant, too. I get some money as a handyman because I work as an independent contractor. I’m my own boss, but I had to spend a lot of years to learn my new occupation and that was an obstacle. That situation was difficult for me. I think that has affected everyone, and I only have one daughter, but there are people with three children and a wife and parents to support, too.

—Héctor, Mexican, undocumented, South City, 40–50, handyman and restaurant employee

Héctor’s job loss evidences the way that immigrants are simultaneously included and excluded in the United States. This contradiction lies at the heart of the Mexican immigrant experience. US immigration policy has long suffered from a kind of political schizophrenia: while immigrant labor is critical to the functioning of the US economy and global capitalism, and has been actively recruited by the state and by industry, immigrants are nonetheless targeted as undeserving interlopers. They are portrayed in the media and in politics as undeservedly availing themselves of America’s largesse, a portrayal that erases their contributions to American prosperity in the first place. They find work, but not broader social acceptance; they are permitted employment, but not membership. Consequently, Mexican immigrants find their economic mobility stunted and their avenues for meaningful social and political integration blocked.

In Héctor’s case, a change in state law jeopardized his fragile and hard-won economic stability. He cherished this stability in no small part because it allowed him to support his only daughter to whom he is devoted. This law does not exclude him exactly. Instead, the socially necessary labor that he provides is subordinated by various exclusionary campaigns, like Proposition 187, that stunt his physical and socioeconomic mobility. Héctor’s experience throws into relief the central theme of this brief history of immigration policy: what Nicholas de Genova has called “inclusion through exclusion.”1

While certain racialized groups were utterly excluded in early American history—black slaves, Chinese, Japanese, etc.—Mexican immigrants are better understood as simultaneously included and excluded: a historical condition that sustains their vulnerability and shapes their politics in the present. Mexican immigrants are incorporated into the socioeconomic life of the nation, but at its lowest rungs. The US economy from the settler period forward has relied on the labor of immigrants, a relationship often explicitly facilitated by state-sponsored labor-importation schemes. But to the extent that immigrants are incorporated into the economic, social, and political life of the nation, their “incorporation is persistently beleaguered with exclusionary campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself a form of subjugation.”2 This exploitative relationship, this condition of inclusion through exclusion, sustains a pool of cheap and mobile immigrant labor on which global capitalism relies to reproduce itself.

The subordination of immigrant labor and the marginalization of immigrant communities are not, as I stressed in the introduction, the centerpiece of this book. And yet, tracing the contours of their exploitation is critical for defining the social location out of which immigrant agency and immigrant social movements arise. Immigrants are indeed haunted by the collective political choices of the past, and the horizons of their expectations for the future, as with a palimpsest, bleed through this history. Significant transformations occur, and yet the residue of what has come before abides. So it goes with the history of immigration to the United States. What has come before—ideology, politics, and law—continues to exert an influence on what happens and what is thought possible in the present. While the general thrust of this book is toward a consideration of situated agency and resistance, this necessary genealogy of exploitation aids in denaturalizing taken-for-granted assumptions about the US “immigrant problem” and outlining the historical conditions that produce immigrants’ precarity and their power.

Historical Transformations in Immigration and Enforcement in Four Waves

The history of US immigration policy unfolds in cycles of repression and liberalization that are inspired, in large part, by domestic and foreign policy priorities of the United States. Drawing on Martin’s periodization,3 I briefly summarize four key transformations in US immigration policy from 1780 through the present, culminating in a “deportation regime” that is historically unprecedented in its geographical reach and enforcement capacity.4 I emphasize the history of Mexican immigration specifically, given the focus of this ethnography.

Beginning with the period from 1780 to 1875, a laissez-faire approach to immigration policy dominated. States, private business, and railroad companies actively recruited immigrants. This immigration was facilitated by the federal government, which provided subsidies for railroad construction and maintained high tariffs on European goods, spurring demand for labor on railroads and in US factories. Immigrants represented a significant proportion of soldiers in the army. They were also recruited as a part of the settler colonialist project and helped to push the American frontier westward.

Some immigrant groups, however, were completely barred from participation in this American expansionist project. For instance, while Mexicans after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and blacks after the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment could become naturalized citizens, the 1790 Naturalization Act as amended in 1870 created a special legal designation for Asian immigrants: “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” The law effectively created a class of immigrants who could only be temporary workers. While this period was marked by fewer and less stringent immigration restrictions than in subsequent periods, the earliest versions of US immigrant policy were marred by racial exclusion.

During the 1840s, following a large influx of Irish and Catholic immigrants to the United States, the first organized anti-immigrant group, the American Native (“Know Nothing”) Party, emerged. The moniker referred to the response that members of the movement were instructed to give when asked about their activities: “I know nothing about it.” While the Know Nothing Party made a strong showing in the congressional elections of 1854, it was not enough to enact their anti-immigrant program. Slavery soon came to dominate the political agenda, eclipsing the immigration issue.

Beginning in the 1870s, qualitative restrictions were introduced to halt the migration of groups deemed undesirable by the state, including convicts and prostitutes. “Paupers” and “mental defectives” were added to the list with the Immigration Act of 1882. And, for the first time, an entire country was barred from entry: China. The infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 remained in place until its repeal in 1943.

Regarded as “not fit for our society,”5 these early immigrant groups were perceived as “the dregs”—criminals, morons, paupers—of the countries from which they hailed, incapable of playing a role in fulfilling the destiny of an emerging United States. “Driven to the New World by their misfortunes or their misconduct,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1840s, these immigrants were variously perceived as savior and scourge.6 They helped build the new capitalist economy and fulfill America’s manifest destiny,7 and yet nativists believed “that some influence originating abroad threatened the very life of the nation from within.”8

At the turn of the century, the growing congressional concern with the influx of immigrants from Southern Europe seeking economic opportunity and immigrants from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution, in particular Jews fleeing a wave of pogroms, sparked another wave of restriction. Beginning in 1897, Congress attempted three times to pass a law requiring literacy tests for entry, but these were vetoed by three successive presidents, beginning with Grover Cleveland. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the bill twice, but his veto was overridden in 1917, passing into law the Immigration Act of 1917. Thereafter, anyone over the age of 16 who could not read in any language was refused entry. The law further established the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” barring immigration from much of Asia and the Pacific Islands, but not the Philippines or Japan (already voluntarily barred by the Japanese government as part of the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907).

The early 1900s were characterized by the first set of quantitative restrictions, inaugurated by the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act (and its precursor, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921). This legislation functionally excluded migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, preserving an “imagined community”9 of US whites who viewed themselves as descended from Northern and Western Europeans.

The act did three things. First, it excluded all immigration from countries whose inhabitants were “ineligible to citizenship”: a euphemism for Japanese exclusion.10 Second, in deference to the labor needs of southwestern agriculture and due to US trade and diplomatic interests with Mexico, it placed no numerical limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. Third, it effectively capped immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and privileged Northern and Western European immigrants by applying a discriminatory quota formula.

This final element lies at the centerpiece of the legislation. In the wake of increased immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century, restrictionists were eager to curb any further inflow from these countries, whose inhabitants they regarded as mentally inferior and, consequently, incapable of full membership. The national origins formula mandated that no country could send more than 2 percent of the total number of immigrants already residing in the United States in 1890. The National Origins Act, passed in 1924, could have used the 1920 census as its baseline, but Congress chose instead to use the 1890 census because, at that time, US citizens of Northern and Western European descent predominated. Consequently, the quota for Northern and Western Europeans was quite large, while that for Southern and Eastern Europeans was much smaller.

While the Johnson-Reed Act put in place a hierarchy of desirability among European nations, those undesirable Europeans were still eligible for citizenship, while other groups, Asians in particular, were indefinitely barred from citizenship. The effect was the consolidation of whiteness in immigration law. As Ngai argues, the law constructed a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not white. In the construction of that whiteness, “the legal boundaries of both white and nonwhite acquired sharper definition.”11 The 1924 act was a key moment in a genealogy of racial formation that brightened the boundaries of whiteness, even as whiteness itself contained its own internal strata.12

Notably, no country-based restrictions were placed on the Western Hemisphere since legislators from the West and Southwest insisted on the ready availability of Mexican immigrants to perform agricultural labor:13 a relationship established at the turn of the 20th century and reinforced during World War I, which largely halted European immigration to the United States, deepening American dependence on Mexican immigrant labor. Indeed, the Immigration Act of 1917 permitted the secretary of labor to waive the restrictive provisions of the act, including the literacy test, for temporary agricultural laborers from the Western Hemisphere. One month after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, the secretary exercised this power in response to petitions from agricultural interests in the Southwest who predicted labor shortages.14

During the 19th century, immigration from Mexico was relatively light. The flow of migration from Mexico changed dramatically at the turn of the 20th century in response to economic development both in northern Mexico and in the southwestern United States, labor shortages that stemmed from the bars on Asian immigration established at the end of the previous century, and the increased numbers of war refugees and political exiles fleeing the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). In 1900, the number of Mexican nationals living in the United States reached 100,000 for the first time, and ballooned to 639,000 in 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression. Growing migration entangled further the economies and peoples of the United States and Mexico as Mexican immigrants swelled the ranks of the US labor force.

While labor shortages generated by a world war and racist policy making created the historical conditions for an increased reliance on Mexican immigrant labor, this should not be taken to mean that Mexican immigrants were welcomed with open arms. Though the Western Hemisphere was exempt from the numerical restrictions of national origins, consular officials used immigration policies that were alr...