How Immigration Became Illegal Analysis

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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
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