The Latino Threat

Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation, Second Edition

Leo Chavez

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804786188
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Émigration et immigration

News media and pundits too frequently perpetuate the notion that Latinos, particularly Mexicans, are an invading force bent on reconquering land once their own and destroying the American way of life. In this book, Leo R. Chavez contests this assumption's basic tenets, offering facts to counter the many fictions about the "Latino threat." With new discussion about anchor babies, the DREAM Act, and recent anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and other states, this expanded second edition critically investigates the stories about recent immigrants to show how prejudices are used to malign an entire population—and to define what it means to be American.

Part 1

CONSTRUCTING AND CHALLENGING MYTHS

1
THE LATINO THREAT NARRATIVE

It is time we stopped thinking of our nearest neighbors [Canada and Mexico] as foreigners.

Ronald Reagan

By a psychological and cultural mechanism of association [with ‘alien’ and ‘illegal’ undocumented workers] all Latinos are thus declared to have a blemish that brands us with the stigma of being outside the law. We always live with the mark indicating that whether or not we belong in this country is always in question.

Renato Rosaldo

Despite Ronald Reagan’s plea for a more civil political discourse,¹ the tone of the public debate over immigration became more alarmist between 1979 and 1999, when the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo commented on the stigma accorded all Latinos,² and this trend has continued up the present time.³ The events of September 11, 2001, heightened a public discourse on the dangers the United States faces in the contemporary world. President George W. Bush developed a general strategy for the national security of the United States while critics focused on the dangers inherent in forging an empire in the modern world.⁴ Americans seemed willing to allow the constitutional rights of foreigners and immigrants to be diminished so long as those of citizens appeared to remain intact, a dangerous bargain at best.⁵ But if there has been one constant in both pre- and post-9/11 public discourse on national security, it has been the alleged threat to the nation posed by Mexican and other Latin American immigration and the growing number of Americans of Mexican descent in the United States. The themes in this discourse have been so consistent over the last forty years that they could be said to be independent of the current fear of international terrorism. However, the events of 9/11 “raised the stakes” and added a new and urgent argument for confronting all perceived threats to national security, both old and new.

The Latino threat, though old, still has currency in the new, post-9/11 world. Consider Samuel P. Huntington’s views expressed in an article in the March–April 2004 issue of Foreign Policy. Huntington compared Latinos, especially Mexicans, with earlier waves of European immigrants and found that “unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream.”⁶ He also made these assertions: “Demographically, socially, and culturally, the reconquista (re-conquest) of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is well underway”; “In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of those immigrants compared to black and white American natives.”⁷

Huntington’s statements are all the more remarkable given the historical context in which they were made. At the time, the United States was waging war in Iraq, deeply involved in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, and still searching for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda operatives worldwide. And yet amidst all these crises, Huntington singled out Latin American, particularly Mexican, immigration as America’s most serious challenge. But this threat did not suddenly surface after 9/11; Huntington had raised the alarm a year before the attack on the World Trade Center. In 2000, Huntington wrote in the American Enterprise: “The invasion of over 1 million Mexican civilians is a comparable threat [as 1 million Mexican soldiers] to American societal security, and Americans should react against it with comparable vigor. Mexican immigration looms as a unique and disturbing challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity, and potentially to our future as a country.”⁸

Rather than discarding Huntington’s rhetorical excesses as bombastic hyperbole, we are better served by attempting to clarify the social and historical context of such pronouncements. How did Mexican immigration, the Mexican-origin population, and Latin American immigration in general come to be perceived as a national security threat in popular discourse? Such ideas do not develop in a vacuum. They emerge from a history of ideas, laws, narratives, myths, and knowledge production in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the media, and the arts. In other words, they exist within a “discourse,” a formation or cluster of ideas, images, and practices that construct knowledge of, ways of talking about, and forms of conduct associated with a particular topic, social activity, or institutional site in society.⁹ As Stuart Hall has noted, “These discursive formations, as they are known, define what is and is not appropriate in our formulation of, and our practices in relation to, a particular subject or site of social activity; what knowledge is considered useful, relevant and ‘true’ in that context; and what sorts of persons or ‘subjects’ embody its characteristics.”¹⁰

Mexico, Mexican immigrants, and the U.S.-born of Mexican origin are the core foci of the Latino Threat Narrative, but the threat is often generalized to all Latin American immigrants and at times to all Latinos in the United States. In the discursive history of Mexican immigration, specific themes of threat emerge, become elaborated, and are often repeated until they attain the ring of truth. This is a story with a number of interwoven plot lines, or narrative themes: the construction of “illegal aliens” as criminals, the Quebec model, the Mexican invasion and reconquista (reconquest) of the United States, an unwillingness to learn English and integrate into U.S. society, out-of-control fertility, and threats to national security. An examination of these themes provides the necessary context for understanding the debates over citizenship and immigrants’ rights in the United States that are discussed in the following chapters.

CONSTRUCTING THE “ILLEGAL ALIEN”

Restrictions on immigration and citizenship have always been about how we imagine who we are as a people and who we wish to include as part of the nation, whether this is explicitly recognized or not. Underscoring this observation is Mae Ngai’s authoritative history, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, which concentrates on the early twentieth century but illuminates much that is being debated in the early twenty-first century. The immigration reforms of the 1920s created major restrictions in the flow of immigrants, in the process producing hierarchies of people and nationalities. Western and northern Europeans were the desired immigrants, and their movement hither was the goal of the national origins quotas. Southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans were less desirable, even when demand for their labor made their immigration necessary. The 1920s also witnessed a profound new importance placed on the territorial imperative of national borders, which coincided with new techniques of surveillance, the creation of the Border Patrol, and immigrant health examinations. Out of this new order of border control emerged the “illegal aliens,” those who bypassed border controls and found ways to enter the country. The large-scale restrictions of the 1924 immigration law “generated illegal immigration and introduced that problem into the internal spaces of the nation.” As Ngai argues, “Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights.”¹¹

Mexican immigrants quickly became associated with the term illegal alien. According to Ngai, “As numerical restriction assumed primacy in immigration policy, its enforcement aspects—inspection procedures, deportation, the Border Patrol, criminal prosecution, and irregular categories of immigration—created many thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants.”¹² However, it was ironic that Mexicans became so closely identified with the term illegal, since they were not subject to numerical quotas and were defined as “white,” unlike Asians, and thus were not excluded as racially ineligible for citizenship. The “whiteness” of Mexicans was a legal definition that was a by-product of Mexico’s signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War. Mexicans living in what was now U.S. territory were allowed to become U.S. citizens, a privilege reserved for “white” immigrants at the time. Despite such legal definitions, Mexicans were still considered “not-white” in the public imagination.¹³ Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a similar problem. Their racial designation was ambiguous in that they were viewed as undesirable and inferior to earlier waves of northern and western European immigrants, yet Italian “whiteness” in contrast to African, Asian, and Mexican Americans was never in doubt.¹⁴

Asians and Mexicans became legally racialized ethnic groups.¹⁵ I use racialized here to indicate that these are not genetic-based categories of race but, rather, labels that are socially and culturally constructed based on perceived innate or biological differences and imbued with meanings about relative social worth.¹⁶ Asian immigrants were denied a pathway to citizenship, and Mexicans were associated with illegal alien status and subjected to Jim Crow segregation throughout the U.S. Southwest. Legally racialized because of their national origin, Mexican and Asian immigrants found themselves cast as permanently foreign and faced obstacles to their integration into the nation.¹⁷ For example, in 1925, David Starr Jordan, past chancellor of Stanford University and an ardent eugenicist, commented that “the Mexican peon, who for the most part can never be fit for citizenship . . . is giving our stock a far worse dilution than ever came from Europe.”¹⁸ As a result, these racial formations produced “alien citizens”—“Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United States with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the nation.”¹⁹

Such perceptions complicated debates over legalization programs for undocumented immigrants at the time. Some believed that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to legalize their status, while others wanted them deported. Not surprisingly, therefore, legalization programs in the early twentieth century were applied unevenly, reflecting hierarchies of nationality and race. At that time, hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, primarily from Europe, were allowed to adjust their status to that of legal immigrants and eventually citizens. Americans viewed as unjust the deportation of ordinary immigrants with homes and families in the United States. Deportation was justifiable for criminals, but not for otherwise law-abiding immigrants who had established roots in the country. This reasoning, however, did not apply to Mexicans, who also desired to adjust their status. They were subject to a different logic that began with the premise of criminality because of their illegal entry into the nation. As Ngai observed, “By contrast [to European undocumented immigrants], walking (or wading) across the border emerged as the quintessential act of illegal immigration, the outermost point in a relativist ordering of illegal immigration.”²⁰ The current opposition to allowing undocumented immigrants to become legal immigrants (the “pathway to citizenship”) begins with the same association of illegal entry with criminality, and Mexicans are still the prototypical “illegal aliens.”²¹

Also prevalent in the early twentieth century was the belief that providing immigrants with rights, even the equal protection guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, diminished the value of citizenship.²² This belief still has currency in contemporary debates over allowing undocumented immigrants access to driver’s licenses and public...