Recession and the risks of illegality: Governing the undocumented in the United States

New Political Science

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 541-554

  Boehme, Eric ^a  

^a DENISON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84858643201     PISSN: 07393148     EISSN: 14699931     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2011.619824     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
2. Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000)
3. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2006).
4. Jeffrey Passel and D'Vera Cohn, Trends in Unauthorized Immigration: Undocumented Inflow Now Trails Legal Inflow (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, October 2, 2008), p. 1.
5. I prefer to use the term "undocumented" or "irregular" rather than "illegal" to refer to persons. I use this language for normative reasons that respect the dignity and personhood of all people regardless of their legal status.
6. Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
7. Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. Emphasis in the original. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 8.
9. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien, p. 38.
10. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien, 4. Emphasis in the original.
11. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien, Emphasis in the original, 68. Emphasis added.
12. "Governmentality" is the term used by Foucault and other scholars to discuss how governance of the modern subject has proceeded "at a distance" where individuals (rather than the state) govern themselves indirectly through making themselves responsible for their own health, safety, and welfare. Much of the way individuals become "responsible" is by learning, knowing, and disciplining oneself to behavioral and cultural norms. Michel Foucault, "Governmentality,"
13. in James D. Faubian (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1994), pp. 201-222.
14. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, Mauro Bertoni and Alessandro Fontana (eds) (New York: Picador, 2003)
15. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991)
16. Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
17. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1999)
18. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
19. Jonathan Xavier Inda, Targeting Immigrants: Government, Technology, and Ethics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006)
20. Kathleen R. Arnold, America's New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)
21. Majia Holmer Nadesan, Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2008).
22. Sassen, The Global City, p. 321.
23. Sassen also predicted the recession based on speculative financial instruments as early as 2000 by characterizing the jobs in this sector as "competitive and often highly unstable markets."
24. Sassen, Cities in the World Economy, p. 121.
25. Philip Martin, "Recession and Migration: A New Era for Labor Migration?," International Migration Review 43:3 (Sept 2009), pp. 671, 688.
26. Philip Martin, "The Recession and Migration: Alternative Scenarios," January 28, 2009, http://www.age-of-migration.com/uk/financialcrisis/updates/1c.pdf., p. 14.
27. Rakesh Kochhar, Latino Workers in the Ongoing Recession: 2007 to 2008 (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, December 2008).
28. Rakesh Kochhar. Latino Labor Report, 2008: Construction Reverses Job Growth for Latinos (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, June 2008).
29. Martin, "Recession and Migration," p. 677.
30. Across the globe, construction jobs are held by "perhaps 15 percent of the 100 million migrant workers."
31. Across the globe, construction jobs are held by "perhaps 15 percent of the 100 million migrant workers, 676.
32. Most legal immigration to the US is based on family reunification. Thus, changes to the rules and procedures for family reunification determine the rises or drops in the number of legal immigrants. Also, because most legal immigrants are already involved in a long-term process of naturalization, economic recessions do not impact the levels of legal migration.
33. See Demetrios G. Papademetriou and Aaron Terrazas, Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis: Research Evidence, Policy Challenges, and Implications (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, January 2009), p. 5.
34. Papademetriou and Terrazas, Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis, p. 3.
35. Papademetriou and Terrazas, Immigrants and the Current Economic Crisis, 10.
36. According to Kochhar et al., during the 2009-2010 recovery, wages for nativeborn workers remained steady while foreign-born worker wages continued to fall by 4.5%.
37. Rakesh Kochhar, C. Soledad Espinoza, and Rebecca Hinze-Pifer, After The Great Recession: Foreign Born Gain Jobs, Native Born Lose Jobs (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, October 29, 2010), p. 7.
38. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien, p. 4.
39. See David Cole's Enemy Migrants: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New York: The New Press, 2005) for the standard work on how 9/11 led to a policy shift in investigating, pursuing, and detaining potential terrorists toward national origins and racial profiling, in effect conflating "immigrants" and "terrorists."
40. Jeffrey Kaye, Deeper Into the Shadows: The Unintended Consequences of Immigration Worksite Enforcement (Washington, DC: Immigration Policy Center, February 2011). One can track the progress of the recession through Julia Preston's reporting on workplace raids.
41. See Julia Preston, "U.S. Set for a Crackdown on Irregular Hiring," New York Times, August 9, 2007
42. Julia Preston, "Revised Rule for Employers that Hire Immigrants," New York Times, November 25, 2007
43. Julia Preston, "270 Irregular Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push," New York Times, May 24, 2008
44. Julia Preston, "Meatpacker is Fined Nearly $10 Million," New York Times, October 30, 2008
45. Julia Preston, "Large Iowa Meatpacker in Irregular Immigrant Raid Files for Bankruptcy," New York Times, November 6, 2008
46. Julia Preston, "Immigration Crackdown With Firings, Not Raids," New York Times, September 30, 2009
47. Julia Preston, "Irregular Workers Swept From Jobs in 'Silent Raid,'" New York Times, July 9, 2010.
48. Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 17.
49. Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 19.
50. Nina Bernstein, "Immigration Detention System Lapses Detailed," New York Times, December 3, 2009.
51. Since 2003 there have been 107 deaths of unauthorized immigrants detained in jails.
52. Nina Bernstein, «Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail,» New York Times, January 10, 2010.
53. Paul Vitello, "Path to Deportation Can Start with a Traffic Stop," New York Times, April 14, 2006.
54. Arizona's SB 1070 was passed in April 2010 and signed by Governor Jan Brewer. Utah, Georgia, South Carolina, and Indiana have all passed versions of Arizona's SB 1070. Alabama's House Bill 56 passed in June 2011and became the harshest anti-immigration law in the nation.
55. The Alabama law makes it illegal to live, work, and go to school in the state if one is undocumented. It requires verification of immigration status for all children attending schools, makes certain contracts signed by the undocumented unenforceable, and criminalizes renting a house or even giving a ride to someone who is known to be unauthorized.
56. Deborah Sontag, "Immigrants Facing Deportation by US Hospitals," New York Times, August 3, 2008.
57. Michael Fix, Randy Capps, and Neeraj Kaushal, "Immigrants and Welfare: Overview," in Immigrants and Welfare: The Impact of Welfare Reform on America's Newcomers (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009), pp. 18-19.
58. See this entire volume in general, but specifically Michael J. Wishnie, "Welfare Reform after a Decade: Integration, Exclusion and Immigration Federalism," in Immigrants and Welfare, pp. 69-90.
59. Fix, Capps, and Kaushal, "Immigrants and Welfare: Overview," p. 19.
60. President Obama quoted these words in his July 1, 2010 speech on immigration. Yet the Obama administration has continued the policies of workplace raids by ICE, the Secure Communities program allowing police to check the immigration status of people booked into local jails, and mass deportations of the undocumented. In fact, deportations are at an all-time high at 392,862 persons deported in 2009.
61. Julia Preston, "Deportations From U.S. Hit a Record High," New York Times, October 6, 2010.
62. All noncitizens have due process and criminal procedure rights. See Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien, p. 49.
63. Kari Lydersen, "Documents Reveal Pressure to Comply With Program to Deport Immigrants," New York Times, March 26, 2011.
64. Many leading anti-immigration think tanks and research institutions characterize themselves as "centrist" but are behind the generation of academic studies and public policy discussions that racialize the undocumented and immigrants in general. The three main think tanks are Numbers USA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and the Center for Immigration Studies. All three of these institutions were nurtured and developed by a relatively secret anti-immigrant nativist, John Tanton.
65. See Jason DeParle, "The Anti-Immigration Crusader," New York Times, April 17, 2011.
66. See footnote 7 above.
67. Governing illegality makes visible the problems "caused" by the unauthorized by creating expert knowledge about these problems, recommending policies to bureaucracies about how to manage these problems, and creating political rationalities justifying the state's intervention into the area defined as a problem. Making visible involves tracking the population of the undocumented and generating knowledge through estimates of the numbers of the undocumented, through arrest or apprehension records, health records, and social science statistics.
68. See specifically Inda, Targeting Immigrants for a discussion of the technologies that constitute something as a "problem" and how those problems are "made visible."
69. Foucault, "Governmentality."
70. With limited space, this paper unfortunately cannot address the relationship between anti-immigrant nativism and the current attacks on labor rights and labor unions as one anonymous reviewer suggested. Certainly breaking up labor unions is part of the neoliberal agenda and creating "the responsible individual," but there are many other factors at work here that need to be analyzed. Businesses want to keep wages low and workers in competition with each other. Unions and immigrants are potential Democratic Party constituencies, yet many sectors of the economy (like construction, agriculture, meatpacking) continue to rely heavily on immigrant labor. These business interests have been fighting laws like Arizona's SB 1070 and Alabama's HB 56 because there will be no one to build houses or harvest the crop. Needless to say, these relationships need further study.
71. Rose, Powers of Freedom, pp. 68-69, 154-155
72. Dean, Governmentality, pp. 150-175.
73. Biopower is the term Foucault and a number of other theorists use to talk about the overall "life-force" of a nation and the complex mechanisms of knowledge-power that calculate and track the health, life, and death of a nation's population.
74. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, [1978] 1990), pp. 140-143.
75. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage Publications, 1999), p. 122.
76. Anti-immigrant books have become a major cottage industry. A sampling of the more journalistic, impressionistic, and polemical literature without the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and citations includes: Peter Brimelow, Migrant Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster (New York: Harper Collins, 1995)
77. Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002)
78. Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006)
79. Jon E. Dougherty, Irregulars: The Imminent Threat Posed by Our Unsecured U.S.-Mexico Border (Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004)
80. Jim Gilchrist and Jerome R. Corsi, Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America's Borders (Los Angeles, CA: World Ahead Publishing, Inc., 2006)
81. Heather MacDonald, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steven Malanga, The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2007)
82. Mark Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Irregular (New York: Sentinel 2008)
83. Michelle Malkin, Invasion: How American Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2002).
84. More scholarly works include: Stanley A. Renshon, The 50% American: Immigration and National Identity in an Age of Terror (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005)
85. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)
86. Otis L. Graham Jr., Unguarded Gates: A History of America's Immigration Crisis (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004)
87. Steven A. Camarota and Karen Jensenius, Trends in Immigrant and Native Employment (Washington, DC: Center for Immigration Studies, 2009).
88. As one might expect, a number of these books move seamlessly between detailing the threat of Mexican invasions and linking the invasion to the global threat of terrorism. In fact, many of the authors do not even break sections or paragraphs as they move from describing the threat of invasion by Hispanic others to the border security threat of infiltration by terrorists. The only detail that changes within the paragraph is a shift in the anecdotes away from Latino surnames to Arabic and Middle Eastern surnames. In particular, Malkin, Buchanan, Dougherty, Renshon, and Graham employ this rhetorical strategy.
89. Huntington, Who Are We?, p. 256.
90. Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 23-30.
91. Sarah Hill, "Purity and Danger on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1991-1994," South Atlantic Quarterly 105:4 (Fall 2006), pp. 777-799.
92. Sarah Hill, "Purity and Danger on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1991-1994," South Atlantic Quarterly 105:4 (Fall 2006), 785.
93. Sarah Hill, "Purity and Danger on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1991-1994," South Atlantic Quarterly 105:4 (Fall 2006), 786.
94. Hill discusses the historical basis for these stereotypes. Unlike the immigrants entering Ellis Island who were inspected for disease, Mexican immigrants in the early twentieth century were presumed to be infected by filth diseases.
95. Hill discusses the historical basis for these stereotypes. Unlike the immigrants entering Ellis Island who were inspected for disease, Mexican immigrants in the early twentieth century were presumed to be infected by filth diseases, emphasis in the original. Also see Alexandra Stern's work discussing how the official government view of Mexicans as dirty led to the creation of the US Public Health Service. Alexandra Minna Stern, "The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease," Milbank Quarterly 80:4 (2002), pp. 757-788.
96. Chavez, The Latino Threat, p. 184.
97. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.
98. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998)
99. Kathleen R. Arnold, America's New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
100. Sassen, Globalization, p. 34.
101. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, Raising the Floor for American Workers: The Economic Benefits of Comprehensive Immigration Reform (Washington, DC: Immigration Policy Center, January 2010).
102. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda and Marshall Fitz, A Rising Tide or a Shrinking Pie: The Economic Impact of Legalization Versus Deportation in Arizona (Washington, DC: Immigration Policy Center, March 2011), p. 16.
103. Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda and Marshall Fitz, A Rising Tide or a Shrinking Pie: The Economic Impact of Legalization Versus Deportation in Arizona (Washington, DC: Immigration Policy Center, March 2011), 15.
104. Data given are for the year 2000 and apply to men aged 18-39.
105. Ruben G. Rumbaut and Walter A. Ewing, The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation: Incarceration Rates Among Native and Foreign-Born Men (Washington, DC: Immigration Policy Center, Spring 2007).