Table Of ContentModel Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens
This page intentionally left blank
Model Immigrants and
Undesirable Aliens
The Cost of Immigration Reform in the 1990s
Christina Gerken
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “U.S. Immigration Policies: 1986–
2008,” in Immigrants in American History: Arrival, Adaptation, and Integration, ed. Elliott
Barkan. Copyright 2012 by Elliott Barkan and ABC- CLIO. Reproduced with permission
of ABC- CLIO, Santa Barbara, California.
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Th ird Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gerken, Christina.
Model immigrants and undesirable aliens : the cost of immigration reform in the
1990s / Christina Gerken.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7472-5 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-7473-2 (pb)
1. United States—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. 2. United
States—Emigration and immigration—Political asepcts—History—20th century.
3. Immigrants—Government policy—United States—History—20th century.
4. Emigration and immigration law—United States—History—20th century.
5. Immigration enforcement—United States—History—20th century.
6. United States—Politics and government—1993–2001. I. Title.
JV6483.G47 2013
325.7309'049—dc23 2013030778
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
Th e University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Building a Neoliberal Consensus 1
1. Exclusionary Acts: A Brief History of U.S. Immigration Laws 19
2. Family Values and Moral Obligations:
Th e Logic of Congressional Rhetoric 73
3. Dehumanizing the Undocumented:
Th e Legislative Language of Illegality 111
4. Manufacturing the Crisis: Encoded Racism in the Daily Press 151
5. Entrepreneurial Spirits and Individual Failures:
Th e Neoliberal Human- Interest Story 195
Conclusion: Legacies of Failed Reform 235
Acknowledgments 251
Notes 253
Bibliography 287
Index 309
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Building a Neoliberal Consensus
Congressional debates from the mid- s suggest that the U.S. immi-
gration system had reached a point of crisis. According to the dominant
political rhetoric, immigration laws failed to protect U.S. citizens from
an overwhelming infl ux of undesirable immigrants who, unlike previous
generations of newcomers, were reluctant to blend in with the majority
culture and contribute to the economy. Politicians frequently referred to
this seemingly unprecedented crisis in their calls for immediate and dras-
tic immigration reform measures. For example, when Senator Richard
Shelby (R- AL) spoke in favor of the Immigration Control and Financial
Responsibility Act of (S. ), he argued that immigrants “put a
crippling strain on the American education system” and placed a bur-
den on taxpayers by committing crimes, displacing U.S. workers, and
using public welfare services, including emergency medical care (United
States Congress, Senate, April , ). In a carefully worded remark
(interspersed with proclamations that he was neither anti- immigrant nor
racist), Senator Shelby also contended that current immigrants were less
desirable because they were culturally and ethnically diff erent from “our
domestic population” and were thus slower to assimilate, especially in a
society where “multiculturalism is favored over the ‘melting pot’ concept”
(United States Congress, Senate, April , ).
Over time, many have pushed to reduce overall admissions and reform
admission criteria because of the changing cultural and ethnic heritage of
immigrants; this idea is far from original. In the late nineteenth century,
the New York Times expressed a similar concern over the increasing num-
ber of Eastern and Southeastern European immigrants. In an article from
, the New York Times argued that past generations of Northwestern
European immigrants “were readily assimilated and made good citizens.”
However, with a new wave of immigrants, “new and unclean fountains burst
in the east and southeast, the swelling streams pouring in a people wholly
1
2 · INTRODUCTION
diff erent in race, character, traditions, purpose and social life” (“Immigra-
tion Problems,” Th e New York Times, November , ). In the s, in
an eff ort to justify the passage of a national quota law, politicians warned
of the potentially disastrous eff ects of turning America into a “conglom-
eration of racial groups each advocating a diff erent set of ideas and ideals
according to their bringing up” (James Davis, “One Hundred Years of
Immigration,” Th e New York Times, February , ). But despite obvious
similarities, Senator Shelby’s comments are also fundamentally diff erent
from his predecessors’ concerns. Not only is Shelby careful to refrain from
using openly racist language by focusing on the damaging eff ects of mul-
ticulturalism instead of race/ethnicity itself, but he expresses his views on
the racial/ethnic makeup of the immigrant population as part of a much
larger concern about the economic and social consequences of large- scale
immigration.
Th is book argues that the immigration reform discourse of the mid-
s represents a new way of thinking and talking about immigration.
In particular, later chapters discuss the productive tension between Con-
gress’s pronounced eff ort to discuss immigration reform as an economic
issue and the underlying anxieties about immigrants’ race, class, gender,
and sexuality. As part of a larger neoliberal reform process in the mid-
s, politicians linked proposals to develop a nationwide system to
identify “legal” and “illegal” immigrants with welfare legislation, measures
that were supposed to prevent/fi ght terrorism, encourage economic secu-
rity, and provisions concerning marriage/family structure. Within this
larger reform discourse, immigrants were repeatedly cited as one of the
principal causes of the nation’s high poverty rate, the increasing costs of
social welfare, a decline in traditional values, and the need to pass ever
more invasive and restrictive immigration and welfare reform measures.
Th e legal discourse— congressional debates, committee reports, and
speeches by politicians— contained little specifi c information about who
these immigrants were. In an attempt to appear nondiscriminatory, politi-
cians developed an elaborate, abstract way of talking about immigrants
without directly addressing the dynamics of race and gender. Instead
of directly addressing these issues, the discourse contained a variety of
code words, metaphors, and images alluding to racial characteristics. For
example, similar to Senator Shelby’s aforementioned remarks, countless
politicians juxtaposed past immigrants’ eagerness to assimilate quickly
with the unwillingness of contemporary immigrants to give up their own
INTRODUCTION · 3
customs, religious beliefs, and languages. Instead of joining the melting
pot—a n outdated, problematic metaphor oft en used in congressional
debates— recent immigrants were portrayed as reluctant to assimilate. Th is
kind of rhetoric downplays the fact that most immigrants do not refuse
to assimilate; deep- seated prejudices, structural discrimination, and rac-
ism eff ectively prevent immigrants, especially immigrants of color, from
“blending in” with the majority. Even more important, this seemingly
race- neutral language about multiculturalism, assimilation, and the melt-
ing pot was used to keep up the pretense that concerns about immigration
were not about race or racist anxieties but about immigrants’ willingness
and ability to behave a certain way and adhere to the expectations of the
general population.
In contrast to this general reluctance to talk openly about race, congres-
sional debates and media representations of immigrants and immigration
reform were heavily infl uenced by a larger discourse about “family val-
ues.” Th e concept of family values is inherently fl exible and dependent
on a society’s economic, political, cultural, and religious systems and
beliefs. In a U.S. context, the phrase family values has been used to justify
a wide variety of perspectives— everything from conservative Christian
values (e.g., promarriage and traditional heteropatriarchal gender roles
and opposition to cohabitation, premarital sex, and abortion) to calls for
parent- friendly employment laws, aff ordable child care, access to birth
control and abortion, and support of alternative family and kinship struc-
tures. By the mid- s, family values became largely synonymous with a
conservative ideology that promoted the traditional nuclear family as the
only living arrangement worthy of governmental support and protection.
Th e Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) became law in , and family-
values issues also became prevalent in a number of other public policy
debates. Most prominently, the U.S. government decided to use the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of (IIRIRA)
and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act of (PRWORA) as a way to force immigrants (and poor citizens,
in the case of the Personal Responsibility Act) to conform to heteronor-
mative notions of the family. Th e acts eff ectively imposed restrictions and
limitations on people who were unable to adhere to the neoliberal norm
of living in self- supportive family units with minimal needs for public
assistance.
