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158 chapter eleven Immigrants’ Incorporation in the United States after 9/11 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back Peter H. Schuck The last decade has been momentous for immigrants to the United States and for the course of their integration into U.S. society. If we look for a smooth trajectory , we will be sorely disappointed. Instead, immigrants’ path to integration has been characterized by forward progress interrupted by setbacks and new obstacles. The bitter debate over immigration legislation that has roiled the U.S. Congress since 2005 might seem evidence of another sharp detour in this path. At a deeper socioeconomic level, however, the powerful U.S. assimilatory machine has continued to churn out millions of new citizens and legal permanent residents (LPRs) who identify with the nation, embrace its ideals, and participate in its social, civic, and political life pretty much as actively as did their predecessors—despite the unprecedented conditions surrounding their migration and settlement here. The United States has also attracted an estimated 12 million undocumented migrants as of 2008, whose status raises difficult political and policy questions. If we wish to understand these developments,we must attend both to the eye-catching,headline-grabbing events and to the more opaque, profound, and powerful continuities. The Policy Debate: 1994–2008 The history of U.S. immigration policy is long, complex, and pervaded by paradox (Zolberg 2006). This chapter focuses on the tumultuous period beginning in 1994 with the passage of Proposition 187 in California, a frontal assault on access to social benefits by millions of undocumented aliens in our largest state.The battle over Proposition 187 erupted only four years after the Immigration Act of 1990 had seemed to strike a stable, sustainable policy equilibrium (Schuck 1998). In 1995, a House of Representatives committee held hearings on proposals to reduce legal immigration levels, to withdraw birthright citizenship from the native-born children of illegal aliens, and to strengthen enforcement against undocumented, out-of-status, and criminal aliens. Immigrants’ Incorporation in the United States after 9/11 159 A year later, Congress enacted two laws—the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA)—that imposed tough new restrictions on noncitizens convicted of crimes in the United States or of immigration law violations. These acts were the most radical reform of immigration law in decades—or perhaps ever (Schuck 1998, 143). A third statute—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, or “welfare reform”)—made many LPRs, not to mention undocumented aliens, ineligible for certain federally subsidized public benefits, including cash assistance and many in-kind transfers. The number of states, already a majority, with English-only rules for government business and communications continued to grow. Just because most Americans support the removal of criminal and undocumented aliens does not mean that they are hostile to immigration (Schuck 1998, chap. 5). The goal of these removals, after all, is to prevent the blatant violation of our laws, a goal shared not only by virtually all citizens but also by the vast majority of LPRs who benefit from law enforcement and who, more than Americans generally, are disadvantaged by competition and negative stereotyping resulting from illegal migration . (LPRs are likely more ambivalent about the 1996 welfare reform law because many disabled and elderly LPRs received Supplemental Security Income (SSI), checks under the pre-1996 rules, and many immigrant families include members who are LPRs, undocumented or otherwise removable, and U.S. citizens.) In any event, the political pendulum soon began to swing back toward easing legal restrictions on immigrants. In 1997, the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform submitted numerous policy recommendations to Congress designed to promote Americanization, defined as integrating immigrants while respecting their cultures of origin, increasing family-based immigration in the short-term by focusing on nuclear family reunification, and returning to the level of family admissions that prevailed in the 1980s (U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform 1997). Congress also restored many of the SSI and related benefits to those who had been eligible before 1996 and to the newly disabled and President Bill Clinton vowed to restore food stamps for immigrant families with children, which Congress eventually did. California, New York, New Jersey, and other high-immigration states filled some of the remaining gaps with their own funds. (This refuted predictions that immigrants were so politically friendless that the states would engage in a headlong “race...

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