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Conversations Across Our America is and is not my story, just as it is and is not your story, wherever you position yourself within the debates on immigration. “Latinoization” refers to the ongoing process of cultural, social change occurring in the United States as a result of the profound demographic shifts of the past forty years. Latinoization is not a phenomenon that occurs with the United States as a passive actor; rather it is a consequence of the interconnectedness of imperialism and globalization, processes in which the U.S. plays a central role and of which it is a primary beneficiary. Immigration policy is at the nexus of domestic and foreign policy. As I prepared for my research trip in spring 2007 the nation was in the midst of a heated debate about immigration reform. These debates went to the core of who “we” are as an immigrant nation, the cultural, philosophical , and political qualities that define who “belongs” in the U.S. Between the calls for amnesty, guest worker programs, border walls, and the repeal of birthright citizenship, a rampant xenophobia tinges and informs the debate as many people expressed their fears that Spanish would supplant English as the national language, that a vast conspiracy was at work in which Mexico was planning to retake the southwestern states, that new immigrants were “dumbing down” the nation or stealing jobs, social services, and education without paying taxes—to name but a few of the more salient issues. The anxiety of the mainstream population and social conservatives regarding demographic change has been primarily projected onto the undocumented population of Latinos in the U.S.; this is true, despite the fact that these trends would hold true even if entry into the United States by undocumented migrants was to be stopped completely. Inflammatory rhetoric notwithstanding, the facts of how undocumented immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy are often overlooked or misrepresented. conclusion nuestra américa ahora meditations on latinoization, citizenship, and belonging 274 conversations across our america According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, undocumented workers contribute $8.5 billion to Social Security and Medicare annually—a contribution that supports maintaining the viability of these programs that they will never benefit from. Researchers have verified that at the federal level undocumented workers pay more in taxes than they receive in public benefits and proportionately use less state and local benefits than do other populations.1 A 2007 report from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers notes that “wage gains from immigration are between thirty and eighty billion per year.”2 Recent reports assessing the impact of immigration on local economies, such as the Wilder Foundation’s A New Age of Immigrants : Making Immigration Work for Minnesota, argue that concerns about the competition for jobs between U.S. citizens and undocumented migrants reveals that though it is true that there is likely a negative impact for those workers in direct competition for jobs and those in smaller communities, employers report great difficulty finding native-born applicants for many jobs in agriculture, meatpacking, poultry processing, and manufacturing. This is particularly true in rural areas across the country.3 This, of course, has to be considered in relation to the settlement patterns of contemporary immigrants from Latin America into the U.S. Their settlement in regions of the United States that heretofore had little permanent presence of Latinos has changed the cultural geography of the country. Many of the interviews in this collection exemplify what Victor Zúniga and Rúben Hernández-León highlight in their important anthology, New Destinations, which focuses on the “novel geography of diverse receiving contexts,” where each context “has its own racial hierarchy, history of interethnic relations, and ways of incorporating immigrant workers and their families.”4 As a result of failed efforts to pass comprehensive federal immigration reform in summer 2007, the issue emerged as a heated topic in the then still nascent 2008 presidential elections. This debate was not divided along traditional partisan lines, as it was spurred, in part, by tensions between a normally conservative business sector that benefits from immigrant labor in the manufacturing, agricultural, and construction industries and social conservatives who decried the threat to the fabric of American culture by insurmountable linguistic and cultural differences that were incongruous with American values. Not insignificantly, these concerns have been sparked by the still recent emergence of Latinos as the...

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