Notes
Notes INTRODUCTION 1. IRCA sought to reduce undocumented immigration through employer sanctions, an increased budget for apprehending undocumented migrants at the southern border, and by legalizing a large proportion of undocumented immigrants already well established in the U.S., and a proportion of undocumented migrants who had worked in U.S. agriculture. Because of its two legalization programs—the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) plan and amnesty—IRCA became popularly known as the "amnesty law." The media went even further in advancing this representation, as many newspaper articles repeatedly and erroneously reported that the legalizationprogram offered citizenship, when in fact it conferred legal permanent residency status, one constrained by speciallimitations . The general amnesty program required continuous "illegal" residence in the U.S. prior to January 1982 as the major eligibilitycriterion, and the SAW program required applicants to have worked a minimum of ninety days in U.S. agriculture between May 1985 and May 1986. The SAWprogram, with relatively easy eligibilitycriteria, attracted far more applicants (1.3 million)than the number (250,000 to 350,000) which policymakers had anticipated (Cornelius, 1989a:236; Martin and Taylor, 1988). 2. These figures are drawn from "Racial/Ethnic Make-up of Schools," a report sponsored and conducted by the Oakview (a pseudonym) School District. 3. The figures in the text refer to the two census tracts where the commercial core of the barrio is situated. Many Mexican immigrants and their families, however, live in adjacent areas of Oakview, and if the barrio is thus more broadly and inclusively defined, it includes an area of about three square miles with a total population of 31,586, approximately half of whom are of "Mexican-origin " (unpublished data from 1990 Census of Population and Housing CPH-3 100 Percent Data Tables, Population and Housing Characteristics for Census 207 208 Notes to Pages xviii-1 Tracts and Block Numbering Areas. San Francisco, CA: Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area, Table 1 and Table 8). 4. Many of them did become successful candidates in one of IRCA's legalization programs. 5. Conventional random-sampling techniques are not feasible when researching an undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. (Cornelius, 1982), and locating and gaining access to undocumented immigrant respondents is not always easy. I met some of the respondents through previous contacts established when I worked in the community from 1979 to 1982at a nonprofit immigration legal-services agency and in a bilingual-education and literacy-skills program serving parents of Spanish-speaking children. Later in 1983, for my master's thesis research, I traveled to a village in Michoacan, Mexico, where many of the immigrants originate, and these contacts also widened my circle of acquaintances . But it was primarily through my participation in various community organizations during the field research and through persona) reciprocity that I elicited and maintained continuity with respondents. 6. In an article entitled "CanThere Bea Feminist Ethnography?" (Women's Studies International Forum, 11 [1988]: 21-27), Judith Stacey argues that researchers acting as friends or advocates leave subjects open to betrayal, exploitation , and abandonment. This is a complex issue, but I believe that reciprocity in field research can attenuate some of the more asymmetrical aspects of field research. The traditional appeal to nonexploitative research generally argues that the finished research project justifies the means, and the standard humansubjects protocol that I read to all respondents did in fact state that the research might ultimately inform policy and benefit undocumented immigrants. Yet I believe that people participated in the study less in expectation that by doing so they would contribute to new immigration policies than in the expectation that their research relationship with me could be a nonthreatening and perhaps even a personally beneficial one. CHAPTER ONE: IMMIGRATION, GENDER, AND SETTLEMENT 1. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) enacted in 1986 included major provisions in the areas of employment and legalization for undocumented immigrants in the U.S.The employer sanctions provisions require all employers to check the work authorization of all new persons hired, and the regulations impose fines and penalties for those employers who do not comply with the letter of the law. The legalizationcomponent of IRCA allowed undocumented persons to obtain legal resident status if they met a series of criteria.By May 1991, the INS had processed 1.7 million amnesty-legalization applications from people who had lived in the United States unlawfully since January 1,1982, and nearly 1.3 million SAW (Special Agricultural Worker) applications from people who worked in agriculture...
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