Migration and Racialization Part II: The Light and Shadow of Inclusion

The five articles in this second of a two-part special issue on racialization and migration ¹ discuss how racialization is not exclusively linked to the exclusion of migrants, at least not explicitly so. They challenge “crimmigration,” which sits at the center of many pieces in the first part, as the core of migrant racialization in two ways. First, they speak to how organizations or contexts seemingly welcoming to migrants can (often unintentionally) reify the same racializing logics of the xenophobic social or legal regime that exclude migrants as disposable and exploitable. Or, more precisely, they demonstrate how the “inclusion” and “exclusion” of migrants are not contradictory or even in tension with each other but instead mutually constructive (De Genova, 2013). Second, they raise questions about what racialization is/does from the perspective of the migrants and consider migrants as not only the objects but also subjects of racialization. Both of these perspectives add nuance to the race and racialization scholarship by illustrating that racialization is not a status of being but a process of becoming and a process full of contention and inconsistency.

This collection of articles empirically attests to the elasticity of hegemony and the complex struggle for a just or radical future. In “Building and Wedging Strategic Alliances: Racial Framing Contests in the Immigrant Rights and Nativist Counter-Movements,” Hajar Yazdiha (2022) establishes the pivotal role of racial meaning in immigration politics by examining the hermeneutic interaction between immigrant rights and nativist movements in two mobilizations: the 2012 “No Papers, No Fear Ride for Justice” during the Obama Era and the 2018 “Family Separation Protests” during the Trump Era. She finds that rival movements adopt strategic racial framing in response to one another, attempting to compromise the effectiveness of counter-frames. This study highlights the complexity of racial framing: it can amplify or obfuscate racial meaning, and when racial meaning is amplified, it could establish either racial analogy or racial incongruence. As such, depending on who uses the racial framing and how, it can challenge or reproduce the racial status quo. The strategic configuration of these dimensions characterizes the contentious processes of racial (re/de)formation.

In contrast to many pieces in part 1 and resonating specifically with Vaquera et al. (2022), Yazdiha demonstrates that racialization is not necessarily a passive structural process of migrant “downward assimilation” into the racially coded “impoverished underclass.” Migrants don’t merely accept the constraints of the white supremacist racial hierarchy; instead, they strategically use racialized systems to build interracial bridges and challenge the racial status quo. As such, racialization can involve intra-group formation for collective action purposes and inter-group collaboration for the purposes of challenging racist and nativist movements. Combining critical race theories with immigration and social movements scholarship, the article shows how racialized systems shape inter-movement alliance-building dynamics and processes. By explicating racial meanings as “constitutive of American law and culture” and migrants’ agency in recognizing and molding racial meanings, the author alludes to migrant movements’ transformative potential in building emancipatory futures as well as the constraints and traps that lie in their way.

Then, in “Chasing Respectability: Pro-Immigrant Organizations and the Reinforcement of Immigrant Racialization,” Hana Brown and Jones (2022) examine the media campaign of an immigrant advocacy organization in response to mainstream racialization of Latinx immigrants as drunk drivers. Instead of rejecting this image altogether, the group utilized it to shame Latinx migrants, especially Latino men, buying into respectability politics and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes of Latinxs. Their study illustrates that, despite their benign intentions, pro-immigrant organizations can inadvertently repeat (and even amplify) the same racializing tropes perpetuated by mainstream media when they design their own strategies mainly as responses to mainstream culture and policies. One could view El Pueblo, the organization studied by Brown and Jones, as an example of successful maneuvering of strategic racial framing as it secured governmental endorsement and funding. Yet the limitation, or even danger, of this “success,” is obvious. Instead of exposing and dispelling the racial meaning embedded in U.S. law and culture, El Pueblo acquiesced to work within its narrow parameters and in so doing, fortified its reality.

Through illustrating the use of respectability politics by immigrant rights activists, the authors establish an unambiguous link between immigration politics and racial politics, specifically with white supremacy, at their core. The unspoken “respectable standards” Black middle class and Latinx migrants strive to live up to cast a long shadow where “unrespectable” and therefore “undeserving” members of the communities are exiled. In this way, this work also speaks to and expands a growing body of literature on how the construction of deservingness permeates migrant advocacy and limits its radical potential.

Anthony Jimenez (2022) adds to this conversation by further challenging the boundary between “exclusion” and “inclusion” in his article, “All Are Deserving’: Immigrant Racialization in a Catholic Worker Movement-Inspired NGO.” Jimenez does so by setting his research in a context of radical rejection of the “deservingness” hegemony, which nonetheless highlights the centrality of whiteness in the racialization of migrants. Conducting his research in a migrant-serving organization (JyP) that explicitly argues “all are deserving,” Jimenez finds that migrants are accepted as “deserving” only when their racially subordinate positions can be assured. Their labor as workers benefits the material interests of the white suburban elite and their impoverishment as indigent subjects serve to enable the spiritual salvation of the predominantly white volunteers. Using Derrick Bell’s (1980) theory of interest-convergence, which argues that whites engage in advocacy when it aligns with and supports their interests, and color-blind racism, Jimenez explains that the “all are deserving” framework exemplifies color-blind racial ideology. By ignoring race, racial domination, and the system of white supremacy, JyP fails to engage in critical anti-racism. As such, even though the organization identifies with radicalism (or radical egalitarianism), it operates in a color-blind fashion and adopts color-blind narratives.

In comparison to El Pueblo, the organization at the center of Brown and Jones’ piece, JyP appears to have gone further in terms of conscientiously setting itself apart from the “deserving versus undeserving” binary. Yet in practice, it continues to reproduce racial subjugation of migrants. It seems to suggest that distancing oneself rhetorically from mainstream messages (i.e., where El Pueblo failed) is not enough. The question remains: what else is needed to fully articulate and materialize anti-racist strategies in immigrant advocacy?

Victoria Kurdyla’s (2022) article, “Advocating for Transgender Immigrants in Detention Centers: Cisnormativity as a Tool for Racialized Social Control,” advances a potential response. Kurdyla compared the framing strategies of two legal advocacy groups around the issue of transgender migrants in detention. She finds that while both groups work with the same intention to advocate for migrants, including transgender migrants, their approaches differ. The ACLU rarely discusses transgender immigrants and when it does, it refers to transgender identity as a singular issue in isolation from other facets of migrant identity. As such, it not only neglects but also reinforces cisnormativity as an integral element of racialized social control. The TLC, on the other hand, frames immigration detention for transgender immigrants as part of a larger web of oppression. This intersectional approach allows the organization to avoid pitfalls of conventional binary logic that set “deserving/worthy” migrants against the “undeserving/unworthy” ones by transcending individual level analyses.

Focusing on a group (transgender migrants in detention) receiving little scholarly attention, this study not only consolidates the racializing nature of immigration control found throughout this issue, but also theoretically enriches the race and racialization scholarship by underlining the multi-layered and intersectional impacts of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and cisnormativity. It answers the call to (re)introduce settler colonialism as an ongoing social structure in the analysis of U.S. race and gender formation (Glenn, 2015) and in so doing provides a peek into an alternative future for migrant advocacy that targets structural violence in addition to individual sufferings.

Finally, in “Varied Racialization and Legal Inclusion: Haitian, Syrian, and Venezuelan Forced Migrants in Brazil,” Katherine Jensen and Dias (2022) challenge the assumed relationship between (negative) racialization and legal exclusion. The authors examine racialization of immigrants from Haiti, Syria, and Venezuela in the context of legal inclusion in Brazil. They find that despite favorable asylum and immigration policies, these groups have been disparately racialized in the public sphere in fashions consistent with the existing racial hierarchy within the receiving society.

This research accentuates the necessity of situating critical migration study and critical race study in conversation with each other. The inconsistency between the legal regime and social reality identified by the authors mirrors the relationship between de jure versus de facto racism. In the area of migration studies in the U.S., one of the motivations for shifting focus away from assimilation and towards racialization is due to a fundamental flaw in the assumptions of assimilation: that the goal of becoming “similar” (aka white) is normative and that acculturation will lead to socioeconomic success, such that former immigrant communities will over time become indistinguishable from the dominant group (white people). But this simply is not true, as demonstrated by centuries of racism of Black and Brown people, irrespective of legal and immigration status, and more recently, demonstrated by continued racism in the “post-Civil Rights” era.

Studying racialization within the field of migration challenges the normativity of whiteness and pushes us to investigate this process further in different spheres, institutions, and at different levels. The context of Brazil is without doubt distinct from post-Civil Rights U.S. and while we do not assume commensurability, Jensen and Sousa Dias’s research nonetheless contributes to our understanding of how formal legal equality and a rights framework are limited in redressing racism and other forms of oppression. The authors’ findings in how racialization is relational and multi-dimensional once again speaks to the on-going mutability and complexity of racialization.

In summary, the five articles in this second part of the special issue point to the problem of race-neutral logics of neoliberal multiculturalism. Brown and Jones’ and Jimenez’s research pulls apart the “deserving/undeserving” dichotomy, which is foundational to the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism and shows how even the most migrant-centered organizations struggle to find alternatives. Studies by Kurdyla and Yazdiha suggest the utility of intersectionality (and perhaps its birthplace, critical race theory) as both an analytical tool and a mobilization strategy. Kurdyla shows that intersectionality can be used to articulate the racial meaning woven into U.S. law and culture (as identified by Yazdiha) and the structural nature of violence against migrants; Yazdiha argues for intersectionality in building inter-group solidarity. And, given the important questions raised by Jensen and Sousa Dias’s critique of formal legal approach towards the racialization of migrants in Brazil, we see how racism can persist despite formal legal racial equality. In fact, racism can persist because of formal legal racial equality. The inclusionary challenges of the pro-immigrant initiatives and organizations discussed in this issue highlight the formidable struggle of racialization and, at the same time, the absolute necessity to continue to search for a truly radical path towards racial justice.