Policy and Media in Immigration Studies

Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. By Joseph Nevins. New York: Routledge, 2002; pp vii + 286. $17.95 paper.

Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187. By Kent Ono and John Sloop. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002; pp vii + 253. $19.95 paper.

Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty 1890-1990. By Cheryl Shanks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001; pp vii + 390. $59.50 cloth.

Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation. By Leo Chavez. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001; pp ix + 342. $19.95 paper.

By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. By Greg Robinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001; pp 322. $27.95 cloth.

U.S. immigration policy has reflected the status, development, and challenges of nation building throughout the four major waves of immigration that have defined American immigration history. From the colonial period to eras of policy restriction (1917-64) and liberalization (1965 to the present), immigration has posed unique political, economic, and social challenges for citizens and immigrants alike.¹ The contemporary context also portends an unprecedented number of increasingly divisive issues that will not only prompt national debate but will also require creative policy responses. Illegal immigration, for example, will require both an evolving federal policy response and the enactment of state policies on topics ranging from the issuance of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants to the expanding role of local and state police in enforcing federal immigration laws. Anxiety over the nation's changing ethnic demographics, characterized in the popular press as "the browning of America," provoked varied institutional and cultural responses during the 1990s, including the passage of antibilingual education propositions in California and Massachusetts.² Findings from the 2000 census suggest that exigencies of bilingual education will extend throughout the United States. Finally, although the expanding scope of immigration enforcement efforts began well before September 11, 2001, enforcement efforts (under the administrative umbrella of Homeland Security) may soon extend to an entry-exit system based on biometric identifiers of all noncitizens.³ In short, the need for scholarly reflection on the logics of immigration policy debate and reporting has never been more pressing.

The diverse topics in immigration studies traditionally bear the disciplinary imprint of fields other than rhetoric. Within policy studies, however, renewed interest in argumentation theory has reestablished the value of deliberative (rather than neopositivist) modes of domestic and foreign policy analysis.⁴ More generally, the present ubiquity of constructivist epistemology across the social sciences and humanities has normalized rhetorical conceptions of the nation, borders, and citizenship, thus elevating the status of discursive analysis in immigration studies. The five works reviewed herein indicate how such paradigm shifts enrich our understanding of the complex process of policy debate and reporting.

Despite focusing on different aspects of immigration politics and diverse eras in U.S. immigration history, the authors considered in this review similarly emphasize the role that rhetoric plays in the formation of policy and culture. Political scientist Cheryl Shanks's Immigration and the Politics of American Sovereignty, 1890-1990, examines the symbiotic relationship between immigration policy and sovereignty by comparing shifts in the appeals and reasons underpinning twentieth-century congressional arguments over immigration. In Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary, geographer Joseph Nevins traces the evolving logic of regional border control to demonstrate how discursive binaries such as legal/illegal and citizen/alien naturalize militaristic approaches to border control. Anthropologist Leo Chavez's Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation considers how media images about immigration reflect and reinforce national identity by analyzing the visual rhetoric of national magazine cover stories since 1965. Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187, by Kent Ono and John Sloop, addresses the competing discourses that shaped media coverage of California's Proposition 187...