Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality

Chapter 9. Immigration Enforcement as a Race-Making Institution

/ 257 Chapter 9 Immigration Enforcement as a Race-making Institution Douglas S. massey W ith a population of 50.5 million in 2010, Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, 16.3 percent of the population, versus the African American 12.6 percent. Mexicans alone numbered 31.8 million that year, some 10.3 percent of the U.S. population (Ennis, Ríos-Vargas, and Albert 2011). Although fertility will play a large role in population growth moving forward , through 2008 the main source of Latino increase was immigration (Pew Hispanic Center 2011). From 1970 to 2010, the percentage of Latino foreign born rose from 29 percent to 39 percent and national origins shifted (Acosta and de la Cruz 2011). Whereas in 1970 Mexicans made up just 60 percent and Central Americans only 3 percent of all Latinos, by 2010 the former accounted for 63 percent and the latter 8 percent. South Americans, meanwhile, grew from 3 percent to 6 percent as Latinos of Caribbean origin fell from 25 percent to around 15 percent (Ennis, RíosVargas , and Albert 2011). This shift in origins and nativity was accompanied by a revolutionary shift in legal status. Whereas Latino immigrants from the Caribbean are overwhelmingly either legal residents or U.S. citizens, 58 percent of all Mexican immigrants in 2010 were unauthorized, compared with 57 percent of those born in El Salvador, 71 percent of those from Guatemala, and 77 percent of those from Honduras. Even considering everyone of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran origin, the unauthorized proportions were 21 percent, 38 percent, 50 percent, and 51 percent , respectively, in 2010 (Massey and Pren 2012a). Illegality has thus become a fundamental condition of life for sizeable shares of Mexicans and Central Americans living in the United States. As Latinos grew in number and visibility in the United States after 1965, they were subject to a systematic process of racialization—a dedicated campaign of psychological framing and social boundary construction intended to position them as a stigmatized out-group in American social cognition (Lee and Fiske 2006; Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality 258 / Massey 2009, 2011). In the media, they were demonized as a grave threat to the American culture, society, and the economy (Santa Ana 2002; Chavez 2008). In the legal realm, they were systematically excluded from rights, privileges, and protections extended to other Americans (Legomsky 2000; Zolberg 2006; Newton 2008). In the domain of public policy, they were subject to increasingly harsh and repressive enforcement actions that drove them ever further underground (Massey, Durand , and Pren 2009; Massey 2013). The net effect was to place Latinos in a uniquely tenuous and vulnerable position that pushed them steadily downward the socioeconomic hierarchy (Massey 2007; Massey and Pren 2012a). Although the racialization of Latinos goes back to 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought some fifty thousand Mexicans into the United States, the contemporary era of racial formation can be traced back to the 1960s, when the United States adopted a new set of immigration policies that made it difficult for Mexicans and other Latin Americans to enter the country legally (Massey and Pren 2012a). Although the number of Latino arrivals changed little in subsequent years, their composition after 1965 shifted dramatically from documented to undocumented (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2009). The rise of mass undocumented migration offered political entrepreneurs a tempting opportunity to mobilize antiimmigrant sentiment for their own purposes by framing Latinos as “illegal” “lawbreakers” and thus inherently dangerous, threatening, and inimical to American values. Between 1965 and 2000 a new “Latino threat narrative” came to dominate public debate and media coverage of Latinos in the United States (Chavez 2001, 2008) and U.S. policymakers responded by launching what Jeffrey Rosen called in a 1995 New Republic article a “war on immigrants” (“The War on Immigrants: Why the Courts Can’t Save Us,” January 30). This so-called war involved an unprecedented militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border, a massive expansion of the immigrant detention system, and a return to mass deportations for the first time since the 1930s (Massey and Sánchez 2010). Government repression accelerated markedly after September 11, 2001, as the war on immigrants was increasingly conflated with the war on terror (Massey and Sánchez 2010; Massey and Pren 2012b). By 2010, America’s immigration enforcement apparatus had become a central racemaking institution for Latinos, on a par with the criminal justice system for African Americans. maNuFaCTuRINg IllEgalITY Latin American migration to...