The Role of Rallies and Raids in Identifying New Latino Immigrant Settlements

THE ROLE OF RALLIES AND RAIDS IN IDENTIFYING NEW LATINO IMMIGRANT SETTLEMENTS Emily Skop University of Colorado at Colorado Springs Kendall Zanowiak-Antonelli American Gateways Introduction In the spring of 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and supporters demonstrated in cities and towns across the United States to protest potentially harmful legislation proposals being debated in Congress. The most visible participants (dominating media coverage) were those of Latin American descent waving flags of both the United States and their home countries. Consequently, the April 10th and May 1st rallies began what has been termed by some “the birth of a new civil rights movement” for the Latino population in the United States (Cooper 2006). Arguably, this statement has yet to come to fruition since no meaningful immigration reform legislation has yet to be passed by Congress. Still, what is certain is the widespread media coverage the protestors demanded and received during the rallies. Latino and Latin American immigrants of all ages, as well as immigrants from other countries and supporters, rallied in massive numbers—walking through downtowns, by public and governmentowned places, and to capital buildings—to advocate for their rights. Regional mobilizations in traditional immigrant gateways like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York attracted thousands of immigrants and supporters of immigration reform (see Figure 1). For example, 400,000 and 500,000 individuals participated in the Los Angeles rallies on April 10th and May 1st , respectively (Gorman, Miller, and Landsberg 2006). While the sizes of these demonstrations were impressive, they were not viewed as surprising by the media, since the cities that hosted these protests were well-known as centers of Latino immigrant settlement. But when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators showed up in “unlikely” places, a new story began to emerge. For example, throughout Nebraska, a state not traditionally considered home to substantial immigrant populations, a striking 20,000 people marched on April 10th (Gonzalez and Burbach 2006). These rallies, including the number and composition of immigrant participants, were greatly covered in the press. All of the sudden, many newly emerging Latino destinations in the Midwest and South, once under the radar, now appeared in the limelight. C  2011 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 111 The Latin Americanist, December 2011 Figure 1. Immigrants’ Rights Rally on April 10, 2006 in Austin, Texas. The rallies were intended to highlight the power of the immigrant population, especially the undocumented. But in the following year, a potentially unintended consequence was the anti-immigrant backlash, particularly in communities where the native-born either previously denied or were unaware of the growing Latino immigrant population prevalent there. A systematic review of media reports and government documents reveals a dramatic increase in the number of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids searching for illegal immigrants, both in traditional settlement areas and in those “unlikely” destinations. It appears as though, instead of highlighting the needs of Latinos in the U.S., the original protests might have instead created new targets for raids by ICE. While invisibility might have had its own disadvantages for those immigrants living in new destinations, at least it provided some shroud of protection against nativist backlash and government raids. Thus, a key question is whether the rallies served to identify the growing immigrant population and thus attempts to curtail it. To answer this question, this paper has two purposes. The first is to identify emerging trends in immigrant settlement patterns using two unique methods of locating concentrations of immigrants, that is, by mapping the locations of the rallies as well as the locations of raids that occurred throughout the following year to reveal areas of immigrant settlement, what we term 112 Skop and Zanowiak-Antonelli “unlikely” gateways. The second purpose is to measure whether any patterns exist between the increasing visibility of immigrants in “unlikely” gateways with subsequent raids and other attempts to purge immigrants from these places. Results support previous studies which argue that new patterns of Latino immigrant settlement are shifting away from traditional gateway states along the U.S. – Mexico border and away from traditional gateway cities like New York and Los Angeles. Additionally, this paper identifies growing areas of immigrant...