Buried voices: Mexican migrants’ views on the question of illegality

Abstract

How do immigrant Mexican workers perceive the policies and social discourses that regulate their insertion into American society as noncitizens and illegals? Using ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, evidence is presented that unauthorized Mexican migrants do not consider themselves lawbreakers but rather moral actors responding to difficult socioeconomic conditions. Informed by a keen understanding of the social forces oppressing them, these migrants articulate a discourse of social justice that works as a powerful counterpoint to the hegemonic ideas of citizenship, belonging, and illegality. A careful analysis of migrant social reflexivity offers a much-needed corrective to the prevailing top-down perspective typically offered among contemporary scholars. By looking at the ways in which migrants make sense of immigration policies and articulate their right to have rights, this examination departs from the widespread tendency among scholars and policy makers of analyzing the migrant’s social and civic status as a matter of assimilation and immigration control.

Keywords:

• immigrant incorporation
• illegal immigration
• Latinos/as
• immigration policy
• citizenship
• social justice
• anti-immigrant discourse

Notes

1. Arizona Senate Bill 1070 signed into law by governor Jan Brewer (R) in April of 2010.

2. I am extending feminist theorists’ insights on the epistemological benefits of partial knowledge emanating from the particular situation of oppressed subjects. Haraway has written that all knowledge is relative, partial and contextually specific to the social positioning of those producing it (see Haraway, 1991; Harding, 2004).

3. Other restrictive legislation included the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan and the 1917 Asiatic barred zone.

4. Emergency Immigration Act of 1921, Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924.

5. These enforcement dimensions included: (1) the use of irregular categories of lawful admission, (2) the establishment of the Border Patrol, (3) inspection procedures, (4) deportation procedures, and (5) criminal prosecution (see Ngai, 2004).

6. In the 1930s and 1940s statutory and administrative reforms as well as discretion procedures allowed the legalization of unauthorized European immigrants who were not seen as ‘illegals’ but as members of society who deserved relief (Ibidem, pp. 76–89).

7. European immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (Slavs, Poles, Italians, Irish, Greeks, Jews) were not considered White at the turn of the twentieth century, and occupied an uneasy ‘in-between’ status. They became White over time by disassociating from Blacks in unions and churches, by benefiting from the economic expansion after WWII, by the hiatus in mass European immigration since 1924, and by moving to the suburbs and intermarrying among themselves (Jacobson, 1998; Massey, 1995; Roediger, 1994; Roediger & Barrett, 2002).

8. The 1965 Act set a ceiling of 120,000 legal visas for the Western Hemisphere. But it is until 1976 when Congress determined a numeric limit by country for this Hemisphere, setting that number to an annual quota for México of 20,000. This number of legal visas was very small when compared to the number of legal migrant workers entering as braceros in the early 1960s: 200,000 (Ngai, 2004, p. 261).

9. Both the Arizona and Alabama laws permit local law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of a person who has been involved in a lawful stop, detention or arrest in the enforcement of any other local or state law – an allowance many immigrants argue will promote racial profiling. Alabama’s HB 56 specifies further regulations for public schools, landlords, and businesses; for instance, the law requires that schools determine whether students are authorized residents of the country; it imposes criminal penalties to any person who harbors or transports an unauthorized alien or who rents property to her/him.

10. Proposition 187 was a ballot initiative titled ‘Save Our State’ (SOS) that California voters passed in 1994. The proposal denied publicly funded social services such as health care and higher education resident tuition rates to unauthorized migrants. The measure also required of local authorities to report undocumented migrant applicants for benefits to federal immigration officials. After a legal challenge, a federal court found the law unconstitutional.

11. The exception were some church-faith organizations that opposed it on the basis of human dignity, others opposed it on behalf of ‘innocent’ children (see Bosniak, 1998).

12. ‘most aliens, including undocumented aliens, are afforded a broad range of constitutional (as well as statutory) rights which in some respects render them indistinguishable from citizens. This is a function of the American constitutional system’s guarantee of rights to persons rather than citizens in most cases—a state of affairs that has been forcefully defended by many scholars over the years. Their basic argument is that personhood embodies a powerful ideal of universality, one which represents a core commitment of our constitutional system’ (Bosniak, 2006, p. 94).

13. One extension of this understanding pertains to the children of unauthorized immigrants or ‘those immigrants who did not break the immigration laws on their own but who were brought here by their parents.’ In this case many argue that these young unauthorized immigrants deserve mercy from the state and an opportunity to regularize their situation. For instance, the President of Arizona State University, Michael Crow, referred to the Dream Act as ‘their pathway to innocence’ (The New York Times, 21 September 2010).

14. Kyle and Siracusa refer to Scott (1998).

15. According to Koulish (2010), since the late 1980s changes in immigration legislation, regulations, and executive power decisions have contributed to the criminalization of immigrants as a form of social control: ‘Such criminalization, for example, includes taking what the law suggests is an administrative offense and turning it into an aggravated felony’ (p. 39).