Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens

Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens
Author: Christina Gerken
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0816686351

During 1995 and 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law three bills that altered the rights and responsibilities of immigrants: the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, the Personal Responsibility Act, and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens examines the changing debates around immigration that preceded and followed the passage of landmark legislation by the U.S. Congress in the mid-1990s, arguing that it represented a new, neoliberal way of thinking and talking about immigration. Christina Gerken explores the content and the social implications of the deliberations that surrounded the development and passage of immigration reform, analyzing a wide array of writings from congressional debates and committee reports to articles and human-interest stories in mainstream newspapers. The process, she shows, disguised its underlying racism by creating discursive strategies that shaped and upheld an image of “desirable” immigrants—those who could demonstrate “personal responsibility” and an ability to contribute to the U.S. economy. Gerken finds that politicians linked immigration to complex issues: poverty, welfare reform, so-called family values, measures designed to combat terrorism, and the spiraling costs of social welfare programs. Although immigrants were often at the center of congressional debates, politicians constructed an elaborate, abstract terminology that appeared to be unrelated to race or gender. Instead, politicians promoted neoliberal policies as the avenue to a postracist, postsexist world of opportunity for every rational consumer with an entrepreneurial spirit. Still, Gerken concludes that the passage of pathbreaking legislation was characterized by a useful tension between neoliberal assumptions and hidden anxieties about race, class, gender, and sexuality.

Impossible Subjects

Impossible Subjects
Author: Mae M. Ngai
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2014-04-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400850231

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Unwanted

Unwanted
Author: Maddalena Marinari
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1469652943

In the late nineteenth century, Italians and Eastern European Jews joined millions of migrants around the globe who left their countries to take advantage of the demand for unskilled labor in rapidly industrializing nations, including the United States. Many Americans of northern and western European ancestry regarded these newcomers as biologically and culturally inferior--unassimilable--and by 1924, the United States had instituted national origins quotas to curtail immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Weaving together political, social, and transnational history, Maddalena Marinari examines how, from 1882 to 1965, Italian and Jewish reformers profoundly influenced the country's immigration policy as they mobilized against the immigration laws that marked them as undesirable. Strategic alliances among restrictionist legislators in Congress, a climate of anti-immigrant hysteria, and a fickle executive branch often left these immigrants with few options except to negotiate and accept political compromises. As they tested the limits of citizenship and citizen activism, however, the actors at the heart of Marinari's story shaped the terms of debate around immigration in the United States in ways we still reckon with today.

The Good Immigrants

The Good Immigrants
Author: Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu
Publisher: Princeton University
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: China
ISBN: 9780691164021

Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites-intellectuals, businessmen, and students-who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness.The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act.Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

Defectives in the Land

Defectives in the Land
Author: Douglas C. Baynton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2016-08-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022636433X

“Baynton argues that screening out disability emerged as the primary objective of U.S. immigration policy during the late 19th and early 20th century.” —Journal of Social History Immigration history has largely focused on the restriction of immigrants by race and ethnicity, overlooking disability as a crucial factor in the crafting of the image of the “undesirable immigrant.” Defectives in the Land, Douglas C. Baynton’s groundbreaking new look at immigration and disability, aims to change this. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Baynton explains, immigration restriction in the United States was primarily intended to keep people with disabilities—known as “defectives”—out of the country. The list of those included is long: the deaf, blind, epileptic, and mobility impaired; people with curved spines, hernias, flat or club feet, missing limbs, and short limbs; those unusually short or tall; people with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities; intersexuals; men of “poor physique” and men diagnosed with “feminism.” Not only were disabled individuals excluded, but particular races and nationalities were also identified as undesirable based on their supposed susceptibility to mental, moral, and physical defects. In this transformative book, Baynton argues that early immigration laws were a cohesive whole—a decades-long effort to find an effective method of excluding people considered to be defective. This effort was one aspect of a national culture that was increasingly fixated on competition and efficiency, anxious about physical appearance and difference, and haunted by a fear of hereditary defect and the degeneration of the American race.

The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration

The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration
Author: Leah Perry
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2016-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479828777

How the immigration policies and popular culture of the 1980's fused to shape modern views on democracy In the 1980s, amid increasing immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the circle of who was considered American seemed to broaden, reflecting the democratic gains made by racial minorities and women. Although this expanded circle was increasingly visible in the daily lives of Americans through TV shows, films, and popular news media, these gains were circumscribed by the discourse that certain immigrants, for instance single and working mothers, were feared, censured, or welcomed exclusively as laborers. In The Cultural Politics of U.S. Immigration, Leah Perry argues that 1980s immigration discourse in law and popular media was a crucial ingredient in the cohesion of the neoliberal idea of democracy. Blending critical legal analysis with a feminist media studies methodology over a range of sources, including legal documents, congressional debates, and popular media, such as Golden Girls, Who’s the Boss?, Scarface, and Mi Vida Loca, Perry shows how even while “multicultural” immigrants were embraced, they were at the same time disciplined through gendered discourses of respectability. Examining the relationship between law and culture, this book weaves questions of legal status and gender into existing discussions about race and ethnicity to revise our understanding of both neoliberalism and immigration.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies

The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies
Author: Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 2037
Release: 2022-11-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1071829017

Filipino Americans are one of the three largest Asian American groups in the United States and the second largest immigrant population in the country. Yet within the field of Asian American Studies, Filipino American history and culture have received comparatively less attention than have other ethnic groups. Over the past twenty years, however, Filipino American scholars across various disciplines have published numerous books and research articles, as a way of addressing their unique concerns and experiences as an ethnic group. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies, the first on the topic of Filipino American Studies, offers a comprehensive survey of an emerging field, focusing on the Filipino diaspora in the United States as well as highlighting issues facing immigrant groups in general. It covers a broad range of topics and disciplines including activism and education, arts and humanities, health, history and historical figures, immigration, psychology, regional trends, and sociology and social issues.

Voices of the Border

Voices of the Border
Author: Tobin Hansen
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1647120845

Powerful personal accounts from migrants crossing the US-Mexico border provide an understanding of their experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy

The Paradox of Citizenship in American Politics

The Paradox of Citizenship in American Politics
Author: Mehnaaz Momen
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2017-08-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319615300

“This remarkable book does the unusual: it embeds its focus in a larger complex operational space. The migrant, the refugee, the citizen, all emerge from that larger context. The focus is not the usual detailed examination of the subject herself, but that larger world of wars, grabs, contestations, and, importantly, the claimers and resisters.”— Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA This thought-provoking book begins by looking at the incredible complexities of “American identity” and ends with the threats to civil liberties with the vast expansion of state power through technology. A must-read for anyone interested in the future of the promise and realities of citizenship in the modern global landscape.— Kevin R. Johnson, Dean, UC Davis School of Law, USA Momen focuses on the basic paradox that has long marked national identity: the divide between liberal egalitarian self-conception and persistent practices of exclusion and subordination. The result is a thought-provoking text that is sure to be of interest to scholars and students of the American experience. — Aziz Rana, Professor of Law, Cornell Law School, USA This book is an exploration of American citizenship, emphasizing the paradoxes that are contained, normalized, and strengthened by the gaps existing between proposed policies and real-life practices in multiple arenas of a citizen’s life. The book considers the evolution of citizenship through the journey of the American nation and its identity, its complexities of racial exclusion, its transformations in response to domestic demands and geopolitical challenges, its changing values captured in immigration policies and practices, and finally its dynamics in terms of the shift in state power vis-à-vis citizens. While it aspires to analyze the meaning of citizenship in America from the multiple perspectives of history, politics, and policy, it pays special attention to the critical junctures where rhetoric and reality clash, allowing for the production of certain paradoxes that define citizenship rights and shape political discourse.

Children of Immigrants

Children of Immigrants
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 673
Release: 1999-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0309065453

Immigrant children and youth are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and so their prospects bear heavily on the well-being of the country. Children of Immigrants represents some of the very best and most extensive research efforts to date on the circumstances, health, and development of children in immigrant families and the delivery of health and social services to these children and their families. This book presents new, detailed analyses of more than a dozen existing datasets that constitute a large share of the national system for monitoring the health and well-being of the U.S. population. Prior to these new analyses, few of these datasets had been used to assess the circumstances of children in immigrant families. The analyses enormously expand the available knowledge about the physical and mental health status and risk behaviors, educational experiences and outcomes, and socioeconomic and demographic circumstances of first- and second-generation immigrant children, compared with children with U.S.-born parents.