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Reviewed by:
  • Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal by Aviva Chomsky
  • Rupaleem Bhuyan and Adriana Vargas
Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Boston, Beacon Press, 2015)

Two thousand and fifteen is the year Donald Trump, a leading Republican Presidential candidate, infamously calls Latinos “violent criminals,” “drug runners,” “rapists,” and diseased. He promises to build an impenetrable wall if elected to the US presidency and as late as December 2015, seems to have won the approval of many American voters. Anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Latino sentiment is not only prevalent, but overt and vitriolic racism is a mainstay in US media and politics. In the past decade, a growth of scholarship and immigrant rights activism in the United States has raised attention to systemic racism, harassment, and the specter of deportation that marks the daily lives of millions of undocumented immigrants. In this context, Chomsky’s book offers a timely and comprehensive view into the economic and legal instruments that produce undocumented immigration in the United States.

Chomsky offers a broad perspective of the historical linkages between colonization, immigration, labour, and race-thinking in the United States. She presents this book as a counternarrative to deeply entrenched myths that characterize Mexican and Central American immigrants as “illegal” and thus outside the American story. The book effectively argues how “changes in the law deliberately created illegality and did so for the purpose of keeping Mexican workers available, cheap, and deportable.” (22) Chomsky poses the question, “Where did illegality come from?” to illustrate the role that race-thinking plays in the social construction of “illegality,” specifically with regard to US dependence on migrant labour.

The book is divided into eight chapters which address histories of migration [End Page 323] to the United States, specifically from Mexico and countries in Central America. In her discussion of “True Refugees of the Border Wars,” (3) Chomsky counters the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the United States by showing the efforts made by grassroots organizations on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Non-profit organizations, the Catholic Church, and even the Mexican government offer basic necessities for survival for people who are deported by US authorities. This section reveals the social costs of the deportation, which is often obscured by laws that construct people as illegal. The remainder of the introduction and Chapter 1 address the role that immigrants have played in the creation of the United States as white settler nation. Chomsky argues that inclusion of migrants into the body politic produced a dual labour market linked to racial order. Industrialized labour, which involved immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe, enabled upward mobility, especially during the strengthening of labour organizing and unionized work forces in the early 20th century. In contrast, racialized labour has been organized through racial logics, justifying chattel slavery up until the mid-19th century, then Jim Crow laws across the American south, and the influx of Mexican labourers through the Bracero program, through which Mexicans were permitted to work seasonally but were unable to become permanent residents of the United States. This dual labour market disenfranchises racialized workers and structures their labour through relations of inequality that undermine labour organizing for basic rights.

In Chapters 2 and 3, Chomsky draws our attention to the legal instruments that render hundreds of thousands of migrants from Mexico and Central America as “illegal,” “criminal,” and thus deportable. To illustrate, Chomsky revisits the impact of immigration policies in 1965, which marked the end of overt racial bias in immigration law and which is attributed to dramatically shifting the demographics of who could immigrate to the United States. Certainly, the removal of racial exclusions and introduction of a new national quota system meant that new waves of immigrants from countries in Asia, Africa, and South America would be permitted to immigrate to the United States in ways that was impossible before. The impact of national quotas for immigrants from Mexico coupled with the end of the Bracero Program, however, meant that thousands of Mexicans lost their legal right to work in the United States. The need for their labour, however, did not abate giving rise to a new era of “undocumented” work.

Chomsky compares the...

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