How Immigration Became Illegal Analysis

Words: 1096
Pages: 5
Open Document
Undocumented Essay In the United States there has been an ongoing debate that has extended for longer than a decade concerning immigration particularly from countries south of the border. Aviva Chomsky gives her opinion on this subject matter in her book, How Immigration Became Illegal, which describes how the illegalization of immigration came to be and how that process has ultimately allowed for the exploitation for these undocumented workers and how this has also created an exclusion of them trying to reach a path of United States citizenship. Chomsky demonstrates within the book how the different laws have effected migration to the United States and the eventual resounding consequences it has had. Chomsky illustrates how citizenship and …show more content…
She has observed how undocumented workers have entered the United States and because of their status they have been able to be used. This is seen in the way that she explains that “By creating a necessarily subordinate workforce without legal status, we maintain a system of legalized inequality” (14). Here, one can clearly see this relationship between citizenship and labor is essentially in terms of legal standing can take two different positions. The first position is that there technically is no relationship as undocumented workers are technically not American but this leads to the second position where because they are undocumented, they can be severely exploited. This exploitation is able to happen through “Fear, marginalization, and exclusion,” (18) where ultimately the criminalization of the undocumented “justifies their location in the lowest ranks of the labor force.”(18) Here, Chomsky demonstrates how this citizenship and labor relation for undocumented workers is ultimately one of coercion in the way that because they are undocumented, they have no citizenship rights yet they are here to work which makes the undocumented a class of people who are forced to endure these coercive practices or face the possibility of being deported. This leads to the question of how this system develop and one answer to that could be the …show more content…
Chomsky explains numerous different laws that have been used to coerce and limit undocumented workers such as the Bracero Program which “was also accompanied by a massive bilateral deportation policy that increased deportations to some seven hundred thousand by the early 1950’s.” (57) This program was one of the first legislations that criminalized coming over the border without any documents even though they were brought in to do work that was much needed. Around this time, “The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 for the first time ever placed numerical limits on Mexican migration.” (59) This was a key law that regulated migration through limiting the number of people that could legally receive documents to come over the border forcing people to find alternative ways to get in to the United States. Because of this, it could have led to the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 which “for the first time made it illegal to employ a worker without proper documents.” (62) This law is one that can lead to the potential coercion in the way that because the undocumented know if they are exposed they can be deported and reported by the people who have employed them. With these many laws, there have also been other tools to help enforce them such as Operation Gatekeeper which “included construction of a wall, massive deployment of Border Patrol
Show More

Related Documents: How Immigration Became Illegal Analysis

Regional Integration For And Against NAFTA Essay

primary factor enabling various U.S. manufacturers to transplant their jobs to Mexico at a lower-cost. The consequence for the manufacturers that remained stateside were forced to lower job wages in order to remain competitive in the industry. It became fat too logical for manufacturing industries to transplant a portion of their production to the cheaper labor force of Mexico than high production costs of the U.S. The U.S. has carried a $97.2 billion trade deficit between the years of 1994 and 2010…

Words 732 - Pages 3

Obama and Immigration Essay

Hussein Obama became the 44th U.S. President in 2009. Since then, he and his administration have dealt with numerous amounts of issues in the U.S., such as: economic policy, military policy, foreign affairs and so on. However, in my view, the biggest issue his administration has attempted dealing with is immigration. According to Homeland Security as of 2012, there are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., and according to an ABC news report titled “Expensive Aliens: How Much Do Illegal…

Words 2418 - Pages 10

Immigration Reform Research Paper

Reform of Detention System for Immigrants Immigration policy is a multi-faceted problem that is incredibly costly to the United States every year. One problem involved in immigration policy is the costly use of detention centers which house immigrants detained by the United States government and are waiting to have their case for staying in the United States reviewed, many of whom are applying for asylum status. Each year, approximately 441,000 illegal immigrants are detained and may of them are…

Words 1379 - Pages 6

Notes On Immigration Reform

possible talking about present day policies, practice and laws… the reason is coming up to the presidential election, I knew that President Obama wanted to talk about immigration reform… and there would be a lot of bizarre rhetoric. Rooted in social and political grounds and economics. Functions of poverty… not only immigration, but poverty in general. Think in terms of docility and citizenship. Temporary citizen or migrant worker, by virtue that they are not a citizen of America… they…

Words 1753 - Pages 8

Immigration From A Sociological Perspective Analysis

my understanding of "immigration today" has grown significantly. At the beginning of the course, my perspective was limited, and primarily influenced by the current media portrayal of immigration as a crisis. However, as we got deeper into the theories of Mills, Gans, and others, my understanding broadened to understand the complex socio-political and economic dimensions of immigration. Using C. Wright Mills' concept of the sociological imagination, I began to see immigration not just as a series…

Words 2239 - Pages 9

ECO 602 Term Paper

Global Context of Business: The Bracero Program Jose M. Padilla National University Table of Contents Abstract 3 Introduction 4 Economic Analysis 4 Conclusion 6 References 8 Tables and/or Figures 9 Abstract The Labor Importation Program (LIP) of 1942-1964 (better known as the "Bracero Program") was a carefully negotiated, bilateral labor agreement between the Mexican and U.S. governments. While the program was aimed at procuring badly needed laborers for U.S. farmers, it also intended to…

Words 1455 - Pages 6

Immigration Policy Reform

Immigration is a controversial topic encompassing the United States. Many people stand for stricter policies, and many also wish to change the policies to make them fairer and less harsh. I personally believe that current immigration policies need to be reformed for the greater good of America. The current system in place is flawed in so many ways, for many are being scrutinized and punished through heavy immigration policies. Immigration policies need to be reformed because immigration is misinformed…

Words 1931 - Pages 8

Prostitution In America

sex then women would give them. Someone would just have to supply the girl and that was the beginning of prostitution. Women in the pre-industrial period were unemployed and started to follow a trend that many western frontier worked in. It wasn’t illegal in those times because the government was actually quite uninterested in the matter but it was disapproved of by a lot of people. However, it was accepted as a fact of life even by those who did not agree. Over time congress in America saw more women…

Words 1208 - Pages 5

Achieving The American Dream

Within America, thousands of different ideals pertaining to the proper way to live as an outstanding citizen exist. The most iconic of these ideas being the American Dream, as it is the impetus of the immigration of millions into the United States. With the term originating from James Adam’s book titled The Epic of America (1931), the American Dream is the ideal which emphasizes that equal opportunities conjoined with equal rights are available for all citizens within the United States meaning that…

Words 1615 - Pages 7

Anti-Mexican Discourse

Many of the anti-Mexican discourses prevalent today became more prominent and highly promoted after the U.S. unjustly took over ownership of the Southwest territory composed of modern day California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico which originally belonged to Mexico. When Anglo-Americans began to settle and inhabit these areas, in the book “Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest” by David J. Weber, he describes how Anglo-American colonist in the Southwestern territory…

Words 1546 - Pages 7