13. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 2.
14. Ibid., 13.
15. Ibid., 4.
16. See ibid., 148. Alexander is quoting Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), 90.
17. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 139. She is quoting Webb Hubbell, “The Mark of Cain,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 2001; Nora Demleitner, “Preventing Internal Exile: The Need for Restrictions on Collateral Sentencing and Consequences,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 11, no.1 (1999): 153–63.
18. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 194.
19. See Eric Schlosser, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” Atlantic, December 1998.
20. Manuel D. Vargas, “Immigration Consequences of New York Criminal Convictions,” November 8, 2011, citing Padilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473, 1478 (2010). http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/4cs/immigration/.
21. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 214.
CHAPTER 1: WHERE DID ILLEGALITY COME FROM?
1. Anatole France, The Red Lily (Winifred Stephens, trans.), in Anatole France, Works, in an English Translation, ed. Frederic Chapman (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1916), 95.
2. “In European eyes most non-Europeans, and nearly all non-Christians, including such ‘advanced’ peoples as the Turks, were classified as ‘barbarians,’” writes Anthony Pagden in The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 13–14.
3. Quoted in Steven Stoll, The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 113.
4. Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 109.
5. Speech at Columbia University, April 15, 1907. Quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 362.
6. Teemu Ruskola, “Canton Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty,” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (September 2005): 860. On the general relationship between US expansion, citizenship, and sovereignty during this period, see also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
7. Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (New York: Viking, 2012), 37.
8. See María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
9. See Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
10. Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 30.
11. See Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999), 167.
12. Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 47.
13. Anderson argues, as others have, that “in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought.” Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 11.
14. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1, 3. He was playing with sociologist Max Weber’s oft-quoted definition of a state as having a “monopoly on the use of violence.”
15. See James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: New Press, 2005).
16. “Under the 1802 Naturalization Act, which remained in force for most of the nineteenth century, to gain formal citizenship foreigners merely had to reside in the country for five years, declare their intent to be naturalized at least three years before admission to citizenship (but at any point after residence), pledge an oath of allegiance to the federal Constitution, and give minimal proof of good character. Critically, this process was available only to ‘free white persons’” (Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 115–16). Women, too, were nonvoting citizens. “Rather than a right that attended to all subjects of a sovereign power, suffrage was granted only to specific categories of citizens” (229).
17. Ibid., 237.
18. Ibid., 239.
19. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9.
20. Ibid., 7–8.
21. Helen B. Marrow, New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 253.
22. Ibid., 244.
23. Jacqueline Stevens, States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 52–53.
24. Ibid., 51. See also Joseph Nevins, Dying to Live: A Story of US Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2008).
25. See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
26. Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 188.
27. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 207. She is citing Loïc Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the United States,” New Left Review, 2nd series, no. 13 (February 2002): 53.
28. Nicolas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Duke University Press, 2005), 123.
CHAPTER 2: CHOOSING TO BE UNDOCUMENTED
1. The admonition that the undocumented should “do it the right way” is extraordinarily common in anti-immigrant discourse. See, for example, Mike Huckabee’s statement at On the Issues, http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Mike_Huckabee_Immigration.htm.
2. See Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 26–27.
3. US, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Laws and Regulations of July 1, 1907, 14.
4. Marian L. Smith, “INS-US Immigration and Naturalization Service History,” United States Citizenship, http://www.uscitizenship.info/ins-usimmigration-insoverview.html. See also Mae Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921–1965,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 69–107.
5. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics (September 1931), 281.
6. Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 165.
7. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Handbook of Labor Statistics, 249.
8. His story is recounted on the National Park Service Ellis Island website, http://www.nps.gov/elis/historyculture/upload/Irving-Berlin.pdf.
9. Mae Ngai, “How Grandma Got Legal,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 2006.
10. Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien.”
11. Ibid., 107.
12. Ngai, “How Grandma Got Legal.”
13. Donna Gabaccia, “Great Migration Debates: Keywords in Historical Perspective,” in Social Science Research Council, Border Battles: The US Immigration Debates, 2006, http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/Gabaccia/index1.html.
14. Michael Hoefer, Nancy Rytina, and Bryan Baker, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2011,” Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics, Population Estimates, March 2012.
15. Ibid.
16. Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “
Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38, no. 1 (March 2012): 25, 23, http://wws.princeton.edu/coverstories/Massey_LatinAmericaImmigrationSurge/Unintended-Consequences.pdf.
17. Ibid., 17. See also Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker, “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States.”
18. Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences,” 24.
19. Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010,” part II, Pew Hispanic Center, February 1, 2011, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2011/02/01/ii-current-estimates-and-trends/.
20. Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less,” Pew Hispanic Center, April 23, 2012, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/vi-characteristics-of-mexican-born-immigrants-living-in-the-u-s/.
21. Jennifer Cairns, Francis Smart, William Kandel, and Steven Zahniser, “Agricultural Employment Patterns of Immigrant Workers in the United States,” Selected paper prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association 2010, AAEA, CAES, and WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, Denver, July 25–27, 2010, http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/61327/2/5_2_2010.pdf.
22. Victor S. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” in US Bureau of Labor, Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor (1908): 466.
23. Ibid., 485.
24. Gilbert G. Gonzalez, “Mexican Labor Migration, 1876–1924,” in Beyond La Frontera: The History of Mexico-US Migration, ed. Mark Overmyer-Velázquez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31. A few decades later, railroads would similarly structure the Great Migration of African Americans to the North. Rail lines led blacks from “Tennessee, Alabama, western Georgia, or the Florida panhandle” to Detroit. The Illinois Central took “upward of a million colored people from the Deep South up the country’s central artery . . . and into a new world called the Midwest . . . along with the Atlantic Coast line and Seaboard Air Line railroads, running between Florida and New York, and the Southern Pacific, connecting Texas and California,” they became “the historic means of escape, the Overground Railroad for slavery’s grandchildren.” After the Civil War, “the railroad laid or acquired tracks into the more isolated precincts of Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Louisiana and unwittingly made the North a more accessible prospect for black southerners desperate to escape.” See also Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2010), 178, 190, 191.
25. Gonzalez, “Mexican Labor Migration,” 33.
26. Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 27.
27. Clark, “Mexican Labor in the United States,” 469–70.
28. Ibid., 471.
29. Paul S. Taylor, A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community: Arandas in Jalisco, Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933), 13.
30. Ibid., 35.
31. Ibid., 36.
32. Ibid., 45.
33. Gonzalez, “Mexican Labor Migration,” 39.
34. Taylor, A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community, 36, 40.
35. United States Bureau of Labor, Handbook of Labor Statistics (1931), 281.
36. Taylor, A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community, 41.
37. Ibid., 43.
38. Ibid., 45–46.
39. Aristide Zolberg, “A Century of Informality on the US-Mexico Border,” in Social Science Research Council, Border Battles: The US Immigration Debates, August 17, 2006, http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/Zolberg/.
40. Lytle-Hernandez, Migra! A History of the US Border Patrol, 3.
41. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 11.
42. Gonzalez, “Mexican Labor Migration,” 34.
43. Ibid., 38–39.
44. Ibid., 46.
45. Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal, 1.
46. See Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2.
47. Michael Snodgrass, “Patronage and Progress: The Bracero Program from the Perspective of Mexico,” in Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 252. See also Taylor, A Spanish-Mexican Peasant Community.
48. Ibid., 254.
49. Zolberg, “A Century of Informality.”
50. Snodgrass, “Patronage and Progress,” 254–55.
51. Ibid., 257, 260.
52. Ibid., 261.
53. Michael Snodgrass, “The Bracero Program, 1942–1964,” in Overmyer-Velázquez, Beyond La Frontera, 91.
54. Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, “Introduction: Histories and Historiographies of Greater Mexico,” in Overmyer-Velázquez, Beyond La Frontera, xxxvii.
55. Cited in Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 219.
56. Ibid., 222.
57. Wetbacks is a derogatory term referring to the idea that Mexicans entered the country by crossing the Rio Grande river and avoiding official entry points.
58. Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 124–25.
59. Don Mitchell, They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 223.
60. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 153.
61. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 224.
62. Snodgrass, “The Bracero Program,” 91.
63. See Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 161.
64. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 154. See also Lorena Oropeza, ¡Raza Sí, Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), for an analysis of Mexican American organizations’ aspirations toward acceptance as white in the midcentury.
65. Massey and Pren, “Unintended Consequences,” 22.
66. Overmyer-Velázquez, “Introduction,” xxxviii.
67. Oscar J. Martínez, “Migration and the Border, 1965–1985,” in Overmyer-Velázquez, Beyond La Frontera, 110.
68. Ibid., 106.
69. Ibid., 111.
70. Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, “What We Learned from the Mexican Migration Project,” in Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project, ed. Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), 6.
71. Overmyer-Velázquez, “Introduction,” xlii.
72. Helen B. Marrow, “Race and the New Southern Migration, 1986 to the Present,” in Overmyer-Velázquez, Beyond La Frontera, 130.
73. Philip L. Martin, “Good Intentions Gone Awry: IRCA and US Agriculture,” Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 534 (July 1994): 50–51.
74. See Roberto Suro, “False Migrant Claims: Fraud on a Huge Scale,” New York Times, November 12, 1989.
75. See ibid.
76. Martin, “Good Intentions Gone Awry,” 52.
77. Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 237–381.
78. Durand and Massey, “What We Learned from the Mexican Migration Project,” 11–12.
79. The Mexican governments identifies four regions of out-migration: The Traditional region, encompassing Aguascalientes, Colima, Durango, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nayarit, San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas; the Northern region, comprised of Baja California, Baja California Sur, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leó
n, Sinaloa, Sonora and Tamaulipas; the Central region: Distrito Federal, Hidalgo, México, Morelos, Puebla, Querétaro and Tlaxcala; and the South-Southeast region: Campeche, Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, Veracruz y Yucatán. See Consejo Nacional de Población, “Flujos Migratorios EMIF Norte,” http://conapo.gob.mx/es/CONAPO/flujos_Migratorios_EMIF_NORTE.
80. In Mexico, mestizos generally refers to people of mixed Spanish and indigenous origin.
81. See Overmyer-Velázquez, “Introduction,” xxxii; Angus Wright, The Death of Ramón González: The Modern Agricultural Dilemma (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990; rev. ed., 2005), 138, 309; Jeffrey Harris Cohen, The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), especially chap. 2.
82. Lynnaire M. Sheridan, “I Know It’s Dangerous”: Why Mexicans Risk Their Lives to Cross the Border (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 56.
83. Ibid., 57.
84. De Genova argues that today’s “illegality” is something “produced” by the law, rather than by the actions of individual Mexicans (Working the Boundaries, chap. 6, esp. p. 244).
85. For a historical summary of Mayan migration, see Christopher H. Lutz and W. George Lovell, “Survivors on the Move: Maya Migration in Time and Space,” in The Maya Diaspora: Guatemalan Roots, New American Lives, ed. James Loucky and Marilyn M. Moors (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 11–34.
86. See David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Julio C. Cambranes, Café y campesinos en Guatemala, 1853–1897 (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1985); Lutz and Lovell, “Survivors on the Move,” 32.
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