Immigration in the Era of Color-Blind Racism

Abstract

For most of the history of the United States, race played an explicit role in immigration laws that designated only Whites (and later Blacks) as eligible for U.S. citizenship. Today, however, we are in a new era in race relations—one that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva refers to as “colorblind racism.” Color-blind racism provides a critical perspective for understanding the enduring role of race in immigration practices in the post–Civil Rights era. This article illustrates this enduring reality within immigration policies and practices utilizing the color-blind perspective. We begin by summarizing the key tenets of Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism. We then overview immigration policies and practices in effect during the era of explicit racialization. Next, we contrast policies and practices with the more subtle employment of racialization today. The bulk of our article is devoted to illustrating how the racialized impact of immigration policies and procedures serves as a mechanism for the reproduction of color blindness and a racially unequal social order. We conclude with a discussion on the difficulties of grappling with this reality in a racially stratified society that is reluctant to acknowledge it.

Keywords

immigration color blindness racism

Immigration in the Era of Color-Blind Racism

The United States has historically been referred to as a nation of immigrants. This idea is etched in our national consciousness. Historically, shifting population demographics influenced legislators’ responses to immigration policies. This trend continues. Today, like the past, concern regarding immigrant demographics dominates political and social discourse on immigration. More important, the politics of immigration have been imbued with racial meaning. Indeed, prior to the Civil Rights era, legislators overtly worked to preserve the racial status quo through the formation of immigration policies. Policy makers were explicit in their language and intent as they excluded and minimized migration opportunities for the racialized other. Immigrants such as Asians, Jews, Poles, Italians, Slavs, and Irish, were affected by these actions. These immigrants were widely identified as racially inferior and linked to criminality, poverty, and disease. These racist notions guided immigration legislation for most of the 20th century.

In the post–Civil Rights era, many minimize the impact of race in immigration debates, but racism has not disappeared. Despite major transformations in the United States over the last century, the immigration tropes seem remarkably the same. However, there is one critical difference from a century ago that is of particular importance for this article: the racial language that once characterized immigration issues has largely disappeared. Yet it is our contention that race is still very much a part of the immigration landscape. In the post–Civil Rights era, overtly racist language has been replaced by racial euphemisms that serve in their stead. Words like “immigrant,” “illegal immigrant,” and “undocumented immigrant” operate as racialized proxies for immigrants of color, particularly Mexicans and more generally Latinos.

The disappearance of racist language is a relatively new development for throughout much of our history, the United States has not been shy about proclaiming White racial superiority. In fact, the United States has had explicitly color-coded immigration laws that designated only Whites (and later Blacks) as eligible for citizenship. Today, however, we have entered a new era in race relations—one that is more “sophisticated” and “subtle” but nonetheless still as effective as Jim Crow in “maintaining the status quo” (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 25): the era of color blindness. Color-blind racism provides a critical perspective for understanding the enduring role of race in immigration practices in the post–Civil Rights era.

This article aims to illustrate this enduring reality within immigration policies and practices utilizing the color-blind perspective. In particular, we argue that immigration policies serve as a crucial mechanism in the maintenance and reproduction of both color-blind racism and structural racial inequality. We begin with an overview of the key tenets of Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism. We then examine immigration policies and practices during the era of explicit racialization and then contrast this with the more subtle employment of racialization today. The bulk of our work is devoted to illustrating the color-blind mechanisms employed in the contemporary era. As the Supreme Court has affirmed the power of Congress to govern all areas of immigration, immigration debates among lawmakers are a most appropriate forum for analyzing the discourse in immigration debates and will serve as the primary data source for our analysis. Specifically, we select for analysis the statements on immigration of politicians, including key legislators, who introduced immigration legislation to Congress. We conclude with a discussion of the racialized impact of immigration policies and the difficulties in grappling with these issues in a racially stratified society reluctant to acknowledge it.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Color-Blind Racism

For many Americans, the historical signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act signaled an end to the racial struggles experienced by people of color. Indeed, the signing of the Act by President Lyndon B. Johnson attested to many people that the racism experienced by people of color during the Jim Crow Era was over; segregation, discrimination, and other racist acts were believed things of the past. The idea that racial discrimination is an anachronism remains embedded in our national consciousness. Nonetheless, critical race scholars challenge this proclamation through evidence demonstrating the persistence of systemic racism (Feagin, 2006).

The United States operates along racialized social systems where racial categories are created, maintained, and used to place people along economic, political, social, and ideological hierarchies (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Feagin, 2006). Bonilla-Silva (2014, p. 8) notes that the social construction of race and the meaning associated with the hierarchical positioning of people produce a “social reality” for individuals who are racialized along systemically unequal positions based on White supremacy. Furthermore, racist ideas and actions based on the notion of White supremacy are no longer problematized in the same way as they were prior to Civil Rights. The prevailing ideology in the United States after the Civil Rights era holds that race no longer matters (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). In this context, the reality of White supremacy and racial dominance remains hidden or misrepresented.

It is our contention that White supremacy remains at the core of immigration policies and practices. The use of color-blind racism allows people, particularly Whites, to explain racial inequalities through the use of nonracial factors. As such, Whites absolve themselves from critically examining their relationship to the experiences and realities of people of color (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). Accordingly, Bonilla-Silva (2014) suggests that Whites rationalize and frame racial inequalities in various ways: through cultural deficiencies within communities of color, through the use of what are considered to be natural tendencies, or market dynamics. In sum, Bonilla-Silva (2014) argues that we are living in a time of “racism without racists.”

This new racial ideology works through the use of four central frames that filter information regarding racial phenomenon. These frames are abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). Central to the abstract liberalism frame is its association with political and economic liberalism. Abstract liberalism allows Whites to oppose “almost all practical approaches” to dealing with racial inequality by having these oppositions appear as though they are “reasonable” and “moral” (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 76). This occurs in situations where White privilege is defended by the myth of meritocracy or in the name of equality.

The naturalization frame explains racial matters as a consequence of natural occurrences or tendencies. Thus, racially motivated inequalities, like residential segregation, are normalized as people simply wanting to “live among their own kind” instead of as a product of racist structures. The cultural racism frame utilizes cultural arguments to minimize racist patterns. Whites utilize this frame to argue that the racial inequalities experienced by people of color are due to a lack of morals, values, efforts, or pathologies within communities of color (Bonilla-Silva, 2014). For example, the pathology of the Black family is linked to “blacks have too many babies” or to a culture of poverty and welfare dependence thereby rationalizing enduring racial inequality (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 76).

The minimization of racism is the fourth frame in Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind paradigm. This frame is used to posit that discriminatory acts no longer affect the life chances of people of color. Hence, in contemporary times, racial inequalities are minimized as “not being as bad as they were back then (before Civil Rights legislation)” or people of color overreacting or being overly sensitive to racial matters (Bonilla-Silva, 2014).

Color-blind ideology provides a critical understanding of the realities experienced by racial minorities. As we turn to contemporary issues of immigration, we see that these frames are used in many ways to dehumanize and criminalize immigrants in the United States, especially immigrants of color. Indeed, the paradox of U.S. immigration is that while the country is recognized and celebrated as a nation of immigrants, its policies and the everyday lived realities of immigrants are dominated by the dynamics of White supremacy.

To assess the usefulness of Bonilla-Silva’s thesis on “colorblindness,” we analyze the immigration discourse of U.S. political leaders. Given the Supreme Court’s continued affirmation of the power of Congress on matters of immigration, this is an appropriate source of discourse data on immigration. C-Span videos of U.S. House and Senate sessions provide much of the data analyzed below. Other sources include statements of sitting presidents on signing legislation into law and other statements found in newspaper coverage of immigration issues and legislation. Table 1 summarizes the data used in our analyses and provides a brief synopsis of the significance of the source.

Table 1.

Immigration Discourse Sources.

Who	Status	Event/legislation	Source
1. Lyndon B. Johnson	36th U.S. President	1965 Immigration Act signing ceremony	LBJ Library; http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/Johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp
	Democrat
2. Joshua Eilberg	U.S. Representative—Pennsylvania	Sponsor of 1976 Amendment to the 1965 Immigration Act	https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/94/hr14535#overeview
	Democrat	Eilberg statement on bill signing	Shabecoff, Philip. “Ford Signs Immigration Bill Aiding Residents of Western Hemisphere,” New York Times, October 24, 1976. p. 26 & October 31, 1976—New York Times Corrections.
3. Gerald Ford	38th U.S. PresidentRepublican	1976 Amendment to the 1965 Immigration Act signing statement	http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=6495
4. Alan Simpson	U.S. Senator—Wyoming	Cosponsor (with Mazzoli) of 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA)	Labor Law Journal
	Republican	Excerpts from Senator Simpson before the U.S. Senate introducing the IRCA of 1983
5. Ronald Reagan	40th U.S. President	1986 IRCA signing statement	http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/110686b.htm
	Republican
6. Edward Kennedy	U.S. Senator—Massachusetts	Cosponsor (Simpson) of S 358—the Immigration Act of 1990	CSPAN—http://www.c-span.org/video/?8396-1/senate-session
	Democrat	July 11, 1989, Opening Senate debate on S 358 after bill came out of committee
7. Harry Reid	U.S. Senator—Nevada	S. 1351—Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993	https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/103/s1351:
	Democrat	Early federal response to events in California and illegal immigration
	Senate Majority Leader
8. Buck McKeon	U.S. Representative—California	First speaker in support of H.R. 2202 (sponsored by Lamar Smith, Representative from Texas)—Immigration Control and Financial Responsibility Act (the bill was retitled to Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996)	http://www.c-span.org/video/?75436-1/illegal-immigration-debate
	Republican	Bill passed House and Senate. Conference Report reconciling differences between House and Senate versions accepted by the House; Senate scheduled a vote for cloture; however, agreed on components of the bill were incorporated into H.R. 3610, the 1997 Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act (sponsored by C.W. Young) and signed by President Clinton on September 30, 1996
9. Ted Poe	U.S. Representative—Texas	H.R. 5272—To prohibit certain actions with respect to deferred action for aliens (DACA) not lawfully present in the United States (Introduced 7/30/14 by Marsha Blackburn, Republican Representative from Tennessee; passed by House)	C-SPAN: http://www.c-span.org/video/?320818-6/house-debate-immigrant-deportation time: 32:03
	Republican	Poe speaking in support of the bill	Congressional Record: https://www.congress.gov/crec/2014/08/01/CREC-2014-08-01.pdf Page H7232

Immigration Policies and Practices During the Explicitly Racial Era

For most of U.S. history, racially coded immigration and naturalization laws prescribed the race and national origin of the country’s inhabitants. The science of eugenics affirmed the racial superiority of the nation’s initial immigrants originating from northern and western Europe, and was foundational to the construction of immigration and naturalization laws hereafter. U.S. citizenship was definitely a Whites-only privilege inscribed as such in 1790. Eventually, the United States extended citizenship to racial and ethnic groups that had originally been incorporated to the country outside the traditional route of voluntary immigration. The 14th amendment enacted in 1868 extended citizenship to people formerly enslaved following the Civil War. Other groups were granted U.S. citizenship through the backdoor as they were neither Black nor White, including Mexicans who came with Texas when the United States granted it statehood and later others who came with acquisition of Mexico’s territory on the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848; Puerto Ricans who came as part of the Puerto Rico commonwealth and the signing of the Paris Treaty in 1898 following the U.S.–Spanish War; and Native Americans whose land the United States usurped. Asians and Latinos migrating to the United States toward the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century also sought citizenship. While ineligible according to U.S. law, they did take their appeals to U.S. courts most claiming to be White. López (1996) provides an overview of these court cases and the contradictory arguments regarding race that the court used to justify their rulings to claims of whiteness.

The Chinese Exclusion Acts, the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement, the 1917 Immigration Act, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 epitomize the racialization of immigration policies. Indeed, the primary motivation for these policies was race. The Chinese Exclusion Acts are a series of temporal-specific laws designed to stop Chinese immigration. The Geary Act of 1902 extended the ban on Chinese labor indefinitely (LeMay & Barkan, 1999). All told, between 1875 and 1902, Congress visited the issue of Chinese exclusion on seven separate occasions. These immigration restrictions resulted in the annual volume of Chinese immigrants plummeting from approximately 40,000 in 1882 to 23 in 1885 (LeMay & Barkan, 1999). The ban on Chinese labor persisted until 1943 when war-time politics led to its abolishment (LeMay & Barkan, 1999).

Efforts expanded to halt the immigration of other “Asiatics” (Peirce, 1910, p. 381). The Gentlemen’s Agreement curtailed immigration from Japan. Restrictions against other Asians followed a decade later when the 1917 Immigration Act established an “Asiatic Barred Zone” and banned immigration from “any country not owned by the U.S. adjacent to the continent of Asia” from entering the U.S. (U.S. Immigration Legislation Online, 2007). This ban included India, Indochina, the Malays, parts of Russia, and Afghanistan, among others.

Furthermore, the increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe alongside the rise in eugenics contributed to heightened racism and hostility toward these newcomers. In particular, Jews, Slavs, and Italians were considered to be of an inferior racial order. Jewish, Polish, and Italian neighborhoods in New York City were seen as “breeding grounds for poverty, disease and criminality” (Garland, 2014, Kindle location 650) leading Wilbur Carr, the Director of Consular Service, to claim that “they [Russian Poles and Polish Jews] are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits” (Garland, 2014, Kindle location 900).

Immigration officials developed a list of races and employed statistical techniques to analyze immigration. These data supported claims of racial inferiority and justified arguments for immigration restrictions, particularly in the case of European Jews (Weil, 2001). Bolstered by these statistics, immigration restrictionists began making headway in their aim. In 1921, an emergency immigration bill—motivated by fears that the more than a million Europeans rendered stateless by the geographic reconfigurations of World War I would seek refuge in the United States (Ngai, 2007)—was passed. For the first time in U.S. history, an annual numerical cap of 355,000 immigrants was instituted. The intent of this measure was to immediately slow immigration to allow time to develop a more carefully considered immigration law. The result was the 1924 National Origins Act.

Passage of the 1924 National Origins Act ushered in a new era in which immigration and naturalization operated in concert to restrict entry into the United States. The racist intent of the legislation is explicit as the following excerpt from a congressional report reveals: “[The quota system] is used in an effort to preserve, as nearly as possible, the racial status quo in the United States. It is hoped to guarantee . . . racial homogeneity” (quoted in Dobkin, 2009, p. 30). Most quotas were assigned to northern and western European countries (Ngai, 2004).

Although Western Hemisphere residents were not subjected to quotas, Mexicans were singled out by the Coolidge administration with instructions to U.S. consuls to be more stringent in applying the LPC (likely to become a public charge) standard to Mexican applicants. Consequently, as the Great Depression progressed, legal Mexican migration was cut by two-thirds (Daniels, 2004) alongside the Repatriation Program, which expelled approximately 500,000 people to Mexico (Hoffman, 1974). Similar tactics and administrative directives limited Jewish immigration to the United States, and the number of Jews dropped 70% between 1921 and 1924 (LeMay & Barkan, 1999). Furthermore, Jewish refuge to the United States between 1933 and 1944 is estimated to have reached 250,000—quite small given the atrocities against Jews in Europe (Ngai, 2004).

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter Act) marked a transition away from wholesale exclusions of immigrants on the basis of race and opened the door slightly to a few previously excluded categories. The Act reconfigured Asian immigration creating a new Asia-Pacific Triangle granting 100 quotas to each nation in the triangle and a maximum of 2,000 for the triangle region (Reimers, 1983). To control the migration of Blacks, the Act assigned quotas to former British colonies in the Caribbean—most of whom were Black—who in previous legislation had been subsumed under Great Britain’s generous (and unmet) quota.

For European immigrants, the 1952 Act continued the patterns of 1924. Most of the European quotas were assigned to northern and western Europe. One significant change, however, was the assignment of immigration preferences. The first preference designated that at least 50% of the quotas be allocated to highly skilled immigrants; 30% to second preference designees (parents of U.S. citizens); and 20% to third preferences (spouses and unmarried children; Daniels, 2004).

Western hemisphere immigrants under McCarran-Walter remained outside of the quota system. Nevertheless, several provisions were incorporated into the law specifically targeting Mexicans. Provisions from the derogatively dubbed “Wetback Bill” extended the range and authority of the Border Patrol to conduct warrantless searches, and the harboring of undocumented immigrants became a felony offense. Employers were explicitly exempted from this provision as the law made it clear that the employing of undocumented laborers did not constitute “harboring” them (Daniels, 2004).

In sum, racialized immigration laws operated in the United States for well over 100 years. The initial targets were Asians—Chinese and Japanese initially and later expanded to most other Asians. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act explicitly racialized and limited the entry of southern and eastern Europeans and especially Jews. However, the racial distinction between Asians and Europeans was quantitatively different. Per Park (1926),

These laws have created on our Western Coast a barrier to immigration that is distinctly racial. Its purpose is not merely to limit [as with Europe] but to stop immigration from Asia. It is as if we had said: Europe, of which after all America is a mere western projection, ends here. The Pacific Coast is our racial frontier. (as quoted in Ngai, 2007, p. 13)

Although there was pressure after World War II to significantly alter U.S. immigration laws and end the quota system, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 preserved this feature. Another decade would pass before immigration reform would be revisited and the racially motivated quotas finally eliminated in the Immigration Act of 1965.

The Era of Color-Blind Immigration: Immigration Act of 1965 and Beyond

However recalcitrant Congress was toward ending the quota system, as the United States stepped into the world spotlight, the racially discriminatory nature of the law stood in stark contrast to the principles the United States was espousing to the world. Efforts to bring immigration laws in line with these principles, along with righting the wrongs of prior laws, motivated the liberal faction of Congress to begin working on immigration reform almost immediately after their failed attempt to remove the quotas in 1952.

Immigration Act of 1965

The Immigration Act of 1965 was heralded as a major step toward undoing the racial wrongs of the past. As explained by President Lyndon B. Johnson,

This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here. This is a simple test, and it is a fair test. . . . [T]he fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustices of the national origin quota system. Under that system the ability of new immigrants to come to America depended upon the country of their birth. . . . This system violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. . . . Today, with my signature, this system is abolished. . . . We can now believe that it will never again shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege. (Johnson, 1965)

The Immigration Act of 1965 eliminated national origin quotas, but not numerical limits. For the first time in history, the Act established a ceiling of 120,000 on Western hemisphere migrants. It also continued the hierarchy of preferences from McCarran-Walter, although these were reordered. Spouses and unmarried minor children continued to be exempt from preference and numerical restrictions. Four of the first five preferences went to family reunification; skilled and unskilled workers in short demand as established by the Department of Labor dropped to sixth on the list from first in 1952. Furthermore, all quota immigrants required certification by the Department of Labor that their employment would not adversely affect prevailing wages and work conditions of American workers. Skilled labor did not have to enter with a specific job offer (Daniels, 2004).

The “liberalized” Immigration Act of 1965 negatively affected Western hemisphere immigrants. The new ceiling resulted in a 40% reduction in legal immigration from pre-1965 levels and spurred undocumented immigration (Ngai, 2004). Jones-Correa and de Graauw (2013) observe that “visa availability for migrants from Mexico plummeted from 450,000 annual guest worker visas and an unlimited number of residence visas to just 20,000 visas for permanent residence” (p. 187).

No doubt, the Civil Rights era influenced the immigration debates. Nevertheless, there are key differences between the two. First, Civil Rights legislation was intended to redress racial discrimination; immigration reform from the early 1940s to 1965 was meant to address discrimination against Europeans. Second, Civil Rights legislation aimed to extend full citizenship rights to African Americans; immigration reform by definition refers to aliens, not citizens. Finally, as Ngai notes, “When immigration reformers spoke of ‘rights,’ they referred not to the rights of migrants but the rights of existing American citizens, the ethnic Euro-Americans who believed immigration policy was a proxy for their status” (Ngai, 2004, p. 229).

Using the rhetoric of equality—Bonilla-Silva’s abstract liberalism, emphasizing fairness and equality—immigration to the United States for Western Hemisphere immigrants was rendered significantly more difficult. Per Ngai (2004),

By extending the system of formal equality in admissions to all countries, the new law affected immigration from the Third World differently—creating greater opportunities for migration from Asia and Africa but severely restricting it from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. (p. 263)

Furthermore, the coupling of the Immigration Act of 1965 with Civil Rights legislation deflects these disparate racial impacts.

1976 Amendment to the Immigration Act of 1965

Immigration policies since 1965 have been color-blind as the racial language, common to the earlier era, is no longer employed. However, the results of immigration policies remain racialized. Not long after the 1965 immigration bill was passed, agitation began to undo the “liberalizing” effects of the reforms. It was not the liberalizing aspects of the policy, per se, that created concerns but the exemption of Western hemisphere immigrants from preference categories. To critics, this constituted preferential treatment particularly because the migration of preferred status immigrants from the Western hemisphere was being delayed by upwards of 2 years (Harris, 1977). As the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Nationality Joshua Eilberg explained: “For over 10 years, our immigration laws have severely disadvantaged our neighboring countries in the Western Hemisphere and have created hardship and inconvenience to many persons in this hemisphere seeking to join their families in the United States” (Shabecoff, 1976, p. 26). To solve this problem, Eilberg introduced H.R. 14535 that extended Eastern hemisphere immigration conditions to the Western hemisphere migrants. As described by Fragomen (1977), “The stated purpose of this new act [was] to eliminate the last vestige of unequal treatment under our immigration laws through the abolition of the distinction between Eastern and Western Hemisphere immigration systems” (p. 95). Thus, both the skill preference system and the 20,000 annual per nation cap operated equally in both hemispheres (Harris, 1977). This change in policy signaled a shift toward fairness and equality (Shabecoff, 1976). However, the “unjust situation” was not eliminated for everyone as President Gerald Ford (1976) acknowledged:

I am concerned . . . about one aspect of the legislation which has the effect of reducing the legal immigration . . . from Mexico. Currently about 40,000 natives of Mexico legally immigrate to the United States each year. This legislation would cut that number in half.

Another problematic feature of the amendment was the labor certification requirement. In the past, immigrants with minor children who were either citizens or permanent residents were exempt from labor certification requirements. This allowed between 25% and 35% of immigrants without “capital, job skills, or close relatives” to qualify for a visa based on the child (Fragomen, 1977, p. 96). The new amendment required all immigrants to have labor certification, closing yet another avenue of naturalization previously available to Western hemisphere immigrants (Fragomen, 1977).

As with 1965 immigration reform, the principle of fairness and equality were invoked to the effect of tightening and reducing legal immigration options for Western hemisphere immigrants. As President Ford (1976) recognized, most affected were Mexican immigrants, who, facing more arduous avenues for legal immigration, continued their movement to the United States, many among the growing ranks of undocumented immigrants. As Ngai (2004, p. 261) argues, “The imposition of a 20,000 annual quota on Mexico recast Mexican migration as ‘illegal.’”

Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986

With legal avenues constricting, predictably, undocumented immigration grew. The estimated undocumented population tripled between 1965 and 1970 (http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/mexico704/history/timeline.html). This coupled with economic recession kept the issue of immigration and particularly undocumented immigration at the fore of national discourse (Daniels, 2004). President Jimmy Carter proposed a plan to Congress that would increase legal avenues of immigration for Western hemisphere immigrants and curtail undocumented immigration through increased border enforcement and penalties for the employment of undocumented immigrants (Chishti, Doris, & Claire, 2011; Wyloge, 1986). While Congress ultimately failed to act, Senator Edward Kennedy spearheaded efforts to form a Special Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy to examine current laws and propose recommendations for new policies regarding immigrants and refugees (Briggs, 1982).

The Commission’s final report recommended an increase in legal immigration, extra efforts to expedite the backlog of family reunification visas, and the establishment of an independent immigration track exclusive from family reunification. Regarding undocumented immigration, the Commission recommended employer penalties for hiring undocumented labor, stiffer penalties for illegal border crossings, increased funding for border patrol, and greater interior immigration enforcement (Briggs, 1982).

With President Reagan’s willingness to tackle immigration, Senators Alan Simpson and Romano Mazzoli, both Select Commission members, introduced in 1982 the first version of what would become the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. IRCA was heavily modeled after the Commission’s recommendations regarding undocumented immigration, which Simpson (1983) considered to be injurious to American “values, traditions, institutions, and to our way of life” (pp. 195-196). He insisted race was not a determination:

I wish to reemphasize my personal belief that no individual applying to this country lawfully in search of freedom and opportunity and desiring to integrate fully into American society should be discriminated against because of race, color, or religion. . . . I say this because I realize that what I am about to say is directed to a most sensitive and complex issue, and there is every risk in misunderstanding. (pp. 195-196)

The press of immigration is only just beginning. The low economic and high population growth rates of the Third World . . . present a dismal prospect, as does the fact that many developing countries of the world are only a long walk or a short boat trip away. As mortals, we live in a world of limits and, tragically, that must include limits to our charity. This legislation will serve as a symbol of fair reform and one without the repugnant aspects of racism, which has most unfortunately characterized most other reform attempts of our past . . . (p. 200)

Simpson never mentioned any country specifically and instead differentiated immigrants by “low economic” and “high growth rates,” “long walk or short boat trip[s] away,” from the “Third World,” or “of little benefit to the nation as a whole,” and “charity” cases (Simpson, 1983, p. 200). He assured that the bill was free from “the repugnant aspects of racism.” These invocations of deviant cultural frames like “third world,” “short boat trip,” and “charity cases” to describe the immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean is trademark color-blind racism.

In November 1986, President Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzolli bill into law. The law became the first of a series of immigration laws designed primarily to stop illegal immigration. IRCA sanctioned employers for hiring unauthorized immigrants, increased border security, and allowed unauthorized immigrants who had been in continuous residency in the United States since 1982 and for agricultural workers who had worked at least 90 days, to adjust their status and access a path to citizenship.

Immigration Act of 1990

Less than 5 years later, Congress again debated immigration reform. Bill sponsor, Senator Kennedy explained the reason for revisiting immigration:

As we prepare to grapple again with the controversial issues of immigration, I’d like to say to our colleagues who may be asking why additional immigration legislation is needed so soon after the major reform we enacted in 1986. The answer is that Congress dealt in 1986 with half the problem. . . . —the question of illegal immigrants—not the system by which we admit legal immigrants. . . . Our goal . . . is to modify our current immigration system, which hasn’t been changed in 28 years, so that it will more faithfully serve the national interest, be more flexible and open to immigrants from nations which are now shortchanged by the current law.

Our compromise bill will accomplish those objectives . . . without departing from any of the basic goals or fairness established in the 1965 reforms. . . . By redressing some of the imbalances in immigration, which have inadvertently developed in recent years, we will again open our doors to those who no longer have immediate family ties in the United States. By placing more emphasis on the peculiar skills and qualities that these independent immigrants possess we will bring our present immigration laws more in-line with our historic immigration policy. . . (Kennedy, 1989)

Fix and Passel (1994) posit that immigration was revisited in 1988 because the shift away from Europe as a source of immigration was seen as a continuing trend in the reduction of the “quality” of immigration. They note that the Immigration Act of 1990 sought to reverse this with its emphasis on high-skilled workers.

The solution crafted by Kennedy and colleagues was to devise a dual immigration visa system—one for family (previously not subject to a numerical cap) and another for skill-based independent immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1990 established an overall ceiling of 700,000. As described in the New York Times (1990), “the increase would be used, mostly to bring in skilled workers, like scientists and engineers.” It doubled the number of allowable skilled immigrants to 140,000 annually from 54,000. Additionally, the law authorized 130,000 visas for temporary employment immigrants.

While the new law increased the number of visas, it made significant changes in family-sponsored preferences. It increased the number of visas available for minor children and spouses (first preference) of legal permanent residents (LPRs) and reduced visas for adult children, their spouses, and children (second preference; Congressional Digest, 1996). According to Rasky (1989), a General Accounting Office report estimated that under this revised system, the allowable family visas “would be absorbed by immediate family members and that visas available to more distant relatives would shrink to zero” (p. A18). In fact, as reported by the New York Times,

Alan K. Simpson . . . was pleased that the new immigration bill met two of his conditions: increasing the number of skilled workers entering the country and focusing on letting into the country the close relatives of immigrants already here rather than more distant relatives. (Hilts, 1990, p. A1)

Forty thousand “diversity” visas allocated to persons from “traditional source countries” (as quoted in Jones, 1992, p. 290) would assist in bringing present policies “more in-line with our historic immigration policy.” These visas were allocated to persons from “traditional source countries”—particularly Ireland, but also Italy and Poland. When this provision was equated to the national origins act quotas, Senator Kennedy defended the inclusion arguing “we are trying to level the playing field” (Pear, 1990, p. B10).

The emphasis on “diversity” visas designated for Europe broadly, and specifically to allow Irish illegal immigrants to adjust their status to LPR, is a classic example of color-blind ideology. In this instance, words, like “diversity,” typically employed to argue for racial inclusion, were co-opted for the benefit of white Europeans (cf. Hughey, 2012). Furthermore, the Act is careful in maintaining that the “fairness” principles established in the Immigration Act of 1965 were not breached while, at the same time, chipping away at the family reunification provision that has been the primary vehicle for immigration from Latin America, most of which is unskilled.

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996

Nativist discomfort over the increase in legal immigration resulting from the Immigration Act of 1990 and mounting evidence that IRCA of 1986 had not successfully stopped unauthorized immigration (cf. Donato, Jorge, & Douglas, 1992) were key factors in keeping immigration issues alive. However, it was California Governor Pete Wilson’s high profile attack on undocumented immigration in 1993 that not only revived his sagging re-election campaign, it propelled the issue of immigration to the national forefront.

Rocked by military base closures and recession, California’s economy during the late 1980s and into the 1990s was struggling and the state budget was severely constrained. Searching for ways to stretch the budget, Wilson began a campaign—both legal and public—to force the federal government to pay the costs that California incurred providing federally mandated benefits (health care, education, and incarceration) to undocumented immigrants. The Save Our State Initiative provided Wilson the perfect platform to continue his crusade against unauthorized immigrants. In 1993, Governor Wilson sent President Clinton an open letter urging immigration reform. Wilson urged, among many things, that citizenship be denied to U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrant parents and that undocumented immigrants be ineligible for health and education benefits (Jacobson, 2008). The debate in California quickly transformed into a national one.

The Save Our State initiative, or Proposition 187, proposed a state-wide ban on all state-supported social services, including public education and health care, to undocumented immigrants. Proposition proponents gathered enough signatures to let voters decide its fate. In November 1994, California voters overwhelmingly affirmed Proposition 187. A district court judge immediately ruled it unconstitutional and halted its implementation (Jacobson, 2008).

Democratic Senator Harry Reid (future Senate Majority Leader), using almost verbatim Pete Wilson’s talking points, spearheaded the first national response. He introduced in Congress the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993 designed “to curb activity by aliens, to defend against acts of international terrorism, to protect American workers from unfair labor competition, and to relieve pressure on public services. . . .” (S. 1351 (103rd), 1993).

Reid informed his colleagues that “the American people are demanding reforms to restore order to an immigration system that is out of control” (C-Span, 1993, 04:32:36 on video). He argued that immigration reform was not racially motivated:

These are not racist people who are raising these issues. Everybody in this country, of course except for the Native Americans, is of immigrant stock. My father-in-law was born in Russia, my grandmother in England. We understand our own family backgrounds. We understand the immigrant struggle.” (C-Span, 1993, 04:33 on video)

He also assured members of Congress that the American people support reform: “All polls show Americans want lower levels of immigration and the border secure. This includes majorities of Latinos, 65% of whom believe there are too many immigrants” (C-Span, 1993, 04:38:40 on video).

Reid, as Wilson, claimed that undocumented immigrants were consuming disproportionate shares of resources; were drags to society; and, were coming into the country unabated taking jobs from needy citizens.

The most recent study show [sic] that the net cost to illegal and legal immigration to all levels of government will be 45 billion dollars over the next decade. And this figure takes into account the taxes paid by these immigrants. (C-Span, 1993, 04:34:43 on video)

In 1986, we granted amnesty, and I voted against that provision in the law, we granted amnesty to 3.2 million illegal immigrants. After being in this country for ten years, the average amnesty recipient had a sixth grade education, earned less than $6 an hour, and presently qualifies for the Earned Income Tax Credit. (C-Span, 1993, 04:35:32 on video)

Last year alone, the Immigration Naturalization Service estimates 3.5 million illegal border crossings occurred. . . . Of course, INS apprehended only a million. These aliens came from 52 different countries, but . . . most . . . came from Mexico. (C-Span, 1993, 04:36:10 on video)

When it comes to enforcing laws against illegal immigration, we have a system that will make you recoil in disbelief. We now have a permanent illegal alien population of 4 million people . . . more than two times larger than the state I represent, the state of Nevada. Four million people. And the illegal alien population is growing by more than a quarter of a million people a year. . . . Yet we are doing nothing to encourage these people to go home or even to deter them from coming here in the first place. (C-Span, 1993, 04:42:51 on video)

In many parts of the country, we actually make it easy to be an illegal alien. . . . And if making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant. No sane country would do that. Right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides. And, that’s a lot of services. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense at county run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers? (C-Span, 1993, 04:43:36 on video)

Jacobson (2008) contends that debates over Proposition 187 in California fundamentally reconfigured old racial immigration tropes (unassimilability, dirtiness, backwardness, hostility to American values, sexual immorality, and criminality) in new color-blind ways. Color-blind conservatism (similar to Bonilla-Silva’s abstract liberalism)—the idea that race is no longer relevant; individualism and equality are—is held alongside “racial realism” suggesting that “race is a fundamental dividing category in society and races have singular interests that compete with the interests of other races” (Jacobson, 2008, Kindle location 553). When bridged a new racial vocabulary is produced including “native,” “foreigner,” “newcomers,” and “illegal aliens” (Jacobson, 2008, Kindle location 553). Racial realism and the new color-blind immigration vocabulary (law, fairness, fairness to taxpayers, assimilation to a single culture, speaking English, concern for population growth, and the natural environment) allow the illusion that comments like “controlling the border” have nothing to do with race; when in fact, left unsaid and unacknowledged is the fear of a Latino invasion and loss of “American” culture.

This new racial vocabulary is frequently invoked in contemporary immigration debates. Reid mixes the new racial vocabulary with old immigration tropes. Part of his solution (immigration stabilization) is to cut legal immigration to what he terms “historic” immigration levels harkening back to the racially restrictive quota years when admission to the United States was limited primarily to Whites. Furthermore, we are to be indignant toward law-breaking illegal aliens consuming resources that rightly belong to citizens who are footing the bills. And, although he did not directly say it was illegal Mexican women who were giving birth in Los Angeles, he invoked the racial “anchor baby” stereotype associated with Mexican women. Reid painted a picture of a border out of control. Though unstated, it is widely understood that it is the Mexican border that is the problem. Finally, he employed two common tactics in color-blind racism, invoking people of color and referencing his own immigrant heritage—in this case, Latinos who agree with his position and a Russian father-in-law and English grandmother—to bolster his contention that he is not racially motivated but is, instead, empathetic toward immigrants.

Reid’s bill ultimately did not make it out of committee, and while Proposition 187 was declared unconstitutional, it served as the litmus test for future immigration restrictions. Others, including Representative Lamar Smith from Texas, jumped at the chance to act on immigration reform. Smith’s H.R. 2202 had strong bipartisan support including 129 co-sponsors and emerged as a frontrunner with regard to immigration reform in the 104th U.S. Congress. Much of the language used to justify Reid’s bill was incorporated in Smith’s as well. Speaking in support of H.R. 2202, California Representative Buck McKeon praised the harsh treatment to be meted out to unauthorized immigrants:

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this conference report and commend Chairman Smith for his great leadership in bringing this bill to the floor. As legislators, we work on an endless number of issues but today, we are addressing one of our nation’s most critical—that of protecting our borders. H.R. 2202 not only secures our borders with the addition of 5,000 new border patrol agents, it also streamlines the deportation of criminal aliens; protects American jobs, and holds individuals responsible to support immigrants that they sponsor; and, fundamentally eases the tax burden on all Americans. It is no longer possible to ignore the magnitude of the illegal alien problem. These reforms will go a long way towards restoring reason, integrity and fairness to our immigration policy and to controlling our borders. (C-Span, 1996, 00:42 on video)

While the Senate tentatively scheduled a cloture date for H.B. 2022 indicating a vote was eminent, officials were also simultaneously working to include a version of the legislation in a continuing resolution bill the deadline of which was looming if another government shutdown was to be avoided. In fact, major features of H.B. 2022 were incorporated into a defense appropriations bill (H.R. 3610) and on September 30, 1996, President Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 into law.

The new stock immigration tropes—a border out of control, protect the border, ease tax burdens of Americans, fairness and integrity, and deportation of criminal aliens—were again employed to defend harsh sanctions on unauthorized admission by primarily Mexicans. According to Schuck (2001), IIRIRA may well be “the most radical reform in immigration law in decades—or perhaps ever” (Kindle location 1484). As Bonilla-Silva (2014) and Jacobson (2008) argue, color-blind conservatism (integrity and fairness) and racial realism (border security and criminal aliens) joined to produce the racial vocabulary of immigration.

Passage of IIRIRA financially bolstered immigration enforcement. Immigration authorities, now called Customs and Border Protection, implemented new border security measures including the Secure Borders Initiative. As summarized by the National Immigration Forum (2010), Secure Borders Initiative includes increased border patrols, expanded detention and removals, technology upgrades, infrastructure expansion, workplace raids, and continued erection of the border wall. Furthermore, a host of operations have been undertaken to secure the border including: Operation Hold-the-Line, Operation Gatekeeper, Operation Firewall, Operation Community Shield, and Operation Arizona Denial, among others. Unlike Operation Wetback of the 1950s, which employed explicitly racial language, these operations are careful to avoid derogatory language. However, all of these efforts operated only along the southern border (National Immigration Forum, 2010).

In a report titled “Immigrant Enforcement Actions: 2012,” the Office of Immigration Statistics stated the following:

Each year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) undertakes immigration enforcement actions involving hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals. These actions include the apprehension or arrest, detention, return, and removal from the United States of foreign nationals who are removable under U.S. immigration law. (Simanski & Sapp, 2013, p. 1)

Apprehension statistics for the past 3 years for which data are available show that in 2010, Mexicans accounted for 79.5% of all the “foreign nationals” apprehended; in 2011, 76.3%, and in 2012, 69.7%. Thus, immigrant enforcement actions principally target Mexicans.

Nearly two decades after passage of the IIRIRA, immigration continues to be at the forefront of national discourse. Indeed, attitudes have grown even harsher toward unauthorized immigrants. While there are repeated calls for comprehensive immigration reform to address the “illegal immigration” problem, Congress has become extremely polarized with deep divisions within political parties resulting in national paralysis. In the void, states have stepped into the immigration arena passing punitive measures along the lines of Proposition 187. Again, the courts have intervened to halt the most egregious aspects of these provisions, nevertheless, leaving other questionable elements, like racial profiling, intact.

Summer 2014 witnessed unprecedented numbers of children, primarily from Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras), crossing the U.S.-Mexican border seeking refuge from violence in their home countries and/or to reunite with family living in the United States. California was again the epicenter of hostility and debates over “illegal immigration” as citizens in the town of Murrieta staged a blockade to keep apprehended children from entering their town. In explaining the action, the mayor of Murrieta said “Murrieta expects our government to enforce our laws including the deportation of illegal immigrants caught crossing our borders, not disperse them into our local communities” (Hansen & Boster, 2014).

The divided Congress responded with similar rhetoric. For example, Texas Representative Ted Poe opined:

You have to be there to know what’s going on. I went up and down the Rio Grande River with some law enforcement officers from the state of Texas. And we see the people on the Mexican side, and I think the Mexican government is complicit, just waiting for us to pass, and then they start coming across. The other side talks about it just being one group of people, children. Well that’s just not true. Because the people being apprehended are not just children. A lot of them are teenagers. A lot of them are older. . . . why is everyone coming to America through south Texas? Because they believe where they start out, whether its kids in Honduras looking for a better life, or terrorists, or Ukrainians, or someone else, they believe that this president, this administration says, you get to America, we are going to let you stay . . . and Americans will take care of your needs. And the reason they believe that is because the rule of law is not being enforced in America. . . . And who is benefitting from all this? Well, it’s not the kids. As pointed out, many of them are dying and getting hurt. It’s not America. It’s not legal immigrants. Who is benefitting? It’s the drug cartel; the criminal gangs, the gulf cartel, MS-13 gangs. They are making money off of the fact that the rule of law in this country . . . because the rule of law is not enforced when it comes to the sovereignty and security of the nation. And that’s all we’re asking. Let’s have some rules and follow them so that people all over the world who want to come to America, let them know there is a right way to come . . . and that’s why we have the chaos, that’s why we have the 50 to 60,000 people crossing in south Texas . . . let’s not treat different people from different countries differently. Let’s treat them all the same. (C-Span, 2014, 03:40:31 on video)

The U.S. House of Representatives was not debating the emergency border spending bill to address the children from Central America—their original reason for convening—but a hastily introduced new bill that would reverse the administratively enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA;C-Span, 2014). As Ngai (2004) argues, laws made “illegal immigrants.” Laws can unmake them as well. DACA takes a tiny step in this direction, but this is not what Poe and others advocated. Instead, Poe sought to preserve a racial status quo by reinstating a prior law that maintained the marginality (and deportability) of unauthorized young people brought into the United States as children.

Jacobson (2008) points out that what the opponents take as immutable does not stand the historical test:

Supporters argue for enforcement as a universal idea, not for a particular law or against a particular group of immigrants, and therefore understand their action as supporting a color-blind society. In doing so . . . they ignore how history, culture and politics produce immigration laws, migration patterns, and enforcement of the law. Similar to other color-blind conservative projects, through universal and transhistorical premises of equality, supporters of this measure are able to understand themselves as color-blind and their opponents as race-conscious. (Kindle locations 903 and 910).

Conclusions

For much of U.S. history, immigration has been color coded; passage to the United States and subsequent citizenship favored Whites. Racially explicit immigration policies endured until the mid-20th century when quota systems were dissolved. In the new immigration era, immigration discourse has taken a new, supposedly nonracial—color-blind—form. Nonetheless, immigration policies developed since the 1960s have been anything but nonracial. Rather, the principles of abstract liberalism and cultural racism emphasizing fairness, equality, and unassimilability have been used in the creation and marginalization of people of color as both undesired and unqualified for U.S. citizenship.

In this article, we have examined the discourse of members of Congress surrounding immigration policies since the mid-20th century. This examination shows the color-blind nature of these discussions and the advantaging of some groups of immigrants—primarily European—and the disadvantaging of others—particularly Mexicans and other Latinos. In particular, this Congressional discourse and interactional script for how to treat non-White immigrants has functioned as a significant reproductive mechanism of racial inequality in an ostensibly “post-racial” or “colorblind” era. While a new immigration principle has emerged in the era of color-blind racism—equal treatment of all immigrants from all nations—a new script framed “illegal aliens” as the current culprits for all of the nation’s woes and includes: they take jobs away from deserving citizens, utilize scarce resources, and have no respect for the rule of law, and so forth. Such a blueprint for interracial and cross-cultural interaction certainly stifles, if not erodes, actual fair and equal treatment in the lived experiences of non-White immigrants to the United States.

In many respects, the color blindness of immigration resembles the color blindness of race relations. Indeed, as civil rights and to a certain extent immigration policies opened up opportunities for people of color, Whites marshalled forces to overturn these gains motivated by the faster population growth of non-Whites—particularly Latinos—relative to Whites. The reversals of civil rights and immigration opportunities for people of color have been defended invoking the principles of fairness and equality. People of color are depicted as receiving unmerited advantages, which clash with the nation’s ideals, thereby allowing Whites to claim (ironically) that they are injured by the policies and programs stemming from civil rights and immigration mandates. Thus, they advocate for a color-blind balance—in essence, a restoration of white superiority.

As is the case with the erosion of Civil Rights legislation, efforts to overturn color-coded citizenship have been color-blind. For example, while laws that have criminalized immigrants since the 1990s have been completely color-blind, they have targeted primarily Mexican and other Latino immigrants and since 9-11 Middle Eastern immigrants. During this era, terrorism and immigration have been fused resulting in the funneling of billions of dollars in federal funds to bar terrorists from entering the United States—not at its northern border with Canada where some of the 9-11 terrorists entered the United States, but at the southern border with Mexico. Moreover, immigrants of color—especially Mexicans and other Latinos—have been disproportionately among immigrants held in detention centers and among those who have been deported (Douglas & Sáenz, 2013).

Nonetheless, while the color blindness of race relations and immigration share some commonalities, there are also important differences. For example, while the complete abolishment of immigration quotas with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 have been associated with the Civil Rights era opening up opportunities for people of color, a closer examination of the Act reveals significant differences. In fact, this policy set severe limitations on Western hemisphere countries with Mexico being particularly disadvantaged. The Immigration Act of 1965 and later provisions facilitated the rise of undocumented Mexican immigrants, as the numerical limits for Mexico became much smaller than the actual volume of immigration, a situation that President Ford presaged.

In addition, there are significant differences in the level of subtlety in contemporary racism toward racial groups and toward immigrants. For race relations in general, the new racism has been subtle—in marked contrast to the blatant, in-your-face vile racism prior to the passage of Civil Rights legislation. Indeed, there is a certain degree of censure of Whites who speak in overt racist fashion against African Americans, in particular. There is a line of Whites who have been sanctioned for speaking and behaving as racists: Paula Deen, Don Imus, Don Sterling, and so forth. On the other hand, these sanctions do not seem to extend to individuals who use racist talk to describe Mexican immigrants. Mexicans are commonly referred to, with great ease, as “criminals,” “breeders,” “narcos,” “terrorists,” and “revolutionaries” in the mass media (see Chavez, 2013; Santa Ana, 2002).

In sum, despite assertions from color-blind proponents, race continues to be a prominent feature of life in the United States. While racial discourse today is more subtle than half a century ago, it continues to set parameters, along racial lines, on people’s access to opportunity structures. Racists clad in white sheets armed with nooses no longer sustain the U.S. racial system. Today it is bolstered by privileges and advantages that typical Whites receive combined with the prevailing notion that race has nothing to do with their favorable standing. It is difficult to bring about reform to improve the situation of immigrants of color and to provide them with a route to citizenship status when so many Americans—from corporations to consumers—gain because immigrants’ racialized and/or undocumented status maintains their vulnerability.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Karen Manges Douglas is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Sam Houston State University. Her areas of concentration include race and ethnicity, immigration, and social inequality. She has published in these areas including “The Criminalization of Immigrants & the Immigration-Industrial Complex (with Rogelio Sáenz). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Rogelio Sáenz is Dean of the College of Public Policy and Peter Flawn Professor of Demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He has published extensively in the areas of demography, race and ethnic relations, Latinos, immigration, inequality, and human rights.

Aurelia Lorena Murga is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research and teaching broadly encompass issues of social inequality, and center around studies of race/ethnic inequality, (im)migration, Latina/o sociology, labor (day labor), and social justice. Her research agenda focuses on the Latina/o experience in the United States particularly in terms of the racial, gendered, and legal systems impacting the population.

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