Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens: The Cost of Immigration Reform in the 1990s by Christina Gerken (review)

In the mid-1990s, the 104^th Congress debated and passed three laws that would have a profound impact on U.S. immigration policy: the Illegal Immigration Reform & Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA). The deliberation of these three pieces of legislation involved wide-ranging congressional and media debates about U.S. immigration policy and how it ought to be reformed. In Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens Christina Gerken argues that these debates constitute “a complex discursive field” (69), which can be analyzed with a Foucauldian approach “to examine how exactly the 1990s immigration reform discourse produced a consensus that stricter immigration laws … were necessary, rational, and economically profitable” (7).

Ultimately, Gerken argues, the 1990s immigration reform discourse focused on two main discursive threads: 1.) a neoliberal logic that made economic concerns primary in determining U.S. immigration policy and 2.) a sharp contrast between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants, involving tightening restrictions for the former and broad dehumanization and criminalization of the latter.

First, these three immigration-related reforms reflected a neoliberal effort to shift economic responsibility for social welfare from the state to individuals and families. For example, PRWORA restricted immigrant access to benefits and made immigrant sponsors legally responsible for immigrant support. The 1990s immigration reform discourse emphasized that the privilege of immigration should be reserved for individuals and families who not only demonstrated the correct morality (heteronormative family values and respect for immigration law), but who also demonstrated rational pursue of economic opportunity (strong work ethic, pursuit of education, and maintenance of small, cohesive families). Gerken concludes that immigration reform “attempted to reorganize the U.S. immigration system as a market-like structure. Under this neoliberal project, potential immigrants were regarded as customers who wished to obtain a desirable commodity—an immigrant visa. In order to obtain this commodity, individuals had to follow certain rules, accept personal responsibility, and provide proof that they were unlikely to become a financial burden or a security threat” (38).

Second, Gerken explores the growing discursive divide between the representations of “legal” versus “illegal” immigrants during the mid-1990s. She is interested in “how politicians and the mainstream media juxtaposed an idealized image of responsible, self-sufficient legal immigrants who eagerly adhered to heteronormative family values with altogether negative depictions of undocumented workers who were commonly perceived as an unassimilable underclass” (7–8). One of the main strengths of the book, however, is Gerken’s attention to the fact that positive representations did not protect legal immigrants from tightening restrictions nor from increased penalties for those who stepped out of line. Specifically, she examines AEDPA’s new definition of “aggravated felonies,” crimes for which legal immigrants could be deported after serving their sentence. Gerken notes that this category of crime was meaningless outside of immigration law and included nonviolent and non-felony offenses such as shoplifting. Like much of 1990s immigration reform, these increased penalties concretized the idea that “immigration was not a right but a privilege” (103).