In Print: The Politics of Immigration in America

An excerpt from Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States.

Today, we are seemingly at the crest of [a] sea change in immigration and immigrant [political] incorporation. The warm afterglow of a post–civil rights era open-door policy is slowly shifting to a palpably chillier climate of restrictions on immigrant services and benefits, fueled in part by economic recessions, the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector, and the gradual but systematic dismantling of affirmative action programs, racial redistricting, and other hard-won successes of the Great Society. Most recently, the real and perceived threats to the security of the nation and the safety of its people after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have led to a curtailing of immigrants’ political rights, the absorption of the Immigration and Naturalization Services under the administrative aegis of the new Department of Homeland Security, and a generally pervasive jingoistic milieu—witness the emergence of the vigilante Minuteman Project in the U.S. Southwest border with Mexico and congressional legislation pushing states to link drivers licenses with proof of legal status in the United States.

At the same time, the closing of America’s borders (both literal and figurative) is by no means inevitable… Changes in the rules and the players of the political game are occurring at the same time as these other changes in the politics of immigration in America. Immigrants continue to act as vital agents of their own destiny (and that of their coethnics), echoing Oscar Handlin's observation that “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history” (1973 [emphasis in original]). Many immigrants and their advocacy groups have responded in kind to the current environment of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies by naturalizing as citizens, registering as voters, organizing as activists, and ultimately, moving up the rank-and-file of parties and other institutions into elite positions of power within the political system. Yet... immigrants are far from having an equal voice in the politics and policies of the United States.

The political incorporation of immigrants today therefore proceeds in a paradoxical context, where immigration is allowed and processes of acculturation and political socialization are ongoing, but immigrants are warily received and accorded partial rights and access to social benefits…

First among these ongoing changes is the growing complexity of race and ethnicity as concepts and as social categories. Even the tasks of “seeing like a state”—of making changes in society legible to the modern administrative state—have become increasingly complex. With the marked changes to our systems of ethnoracial classification over the last few decennial censuses, for instance, come new questions about the collection of government data, the administration and enforcement of race-sensitive and immigration-specific policies, and the resulting access of emerging immigration-based communities to group-based rights and social benefits. Which rights and benefits should immigrants be eligible for, and should these vary according to legal status and visa category? Also, should multiracial/multiethnic persons benefit from race-sensitive policies, and should first- and second-generation immigrants be treated differently from Native Americans and descendants of American slaves?

Continued immigration also underscores the fact that citizenship is not a universal, unchanging concept. It brings into the fore questions of who is eligible for citizenship and what are the legitimate avenues toward its attainment. The explicit barter of service is again seen as a legitimate means to citizenship. Enlistment and active duty in the military is one such form of service, but questions still remain as to why other types of activity fall below the mark—for example, participating in parent-teacher associations, working in public-sector jobs, or volunteering for a religious charity. Even beyond the question of service is the more general matter of vestment in and contribution to American society, such as living in a community, raising children, contributing to Social Security, Medicare, and varied other forms of taxation without representation.

Increased complexity, furthermore, is not confined to issues of racial categorization or citizenship. The labels we use to define ourselves politically—“Democrat,” “Republican,” “liberal,” “conservative”—are both less familiar to new Americans and more open to redefinition. Not only are Latinos and Asian Americans more inclined to reject partisanship (as either a Democrat or a Republican) as the sole marker for political self-identification, but they are also more inclined to build their relationship with the two-party system on something other than a liberal-conservative ideology or the partisan habits of their parents. Thus questions remain as to how Asians and Latinos will balance their economic well-being, foreign policy preferences, home country politics, civic morality, and the like as the basis for their political interests. Also, this relationship is built concurrently with others—based on neighborhood, country of origin, pan-ethnic race, multiracial ties, gender, sexual orientation, religious faith, professional life, civic voluntarism, and so on—with both uncertainty and potential for what will result.

Similarly, the influx of new immigrants changes, and is likely to continue to change, the political calculus of partisan and nonpartisan elites. In strategizing over whom to mobilize, certain segments of the electorate are targeted, while others are neglected. Moreover… the effectiveness of Get Out the Vote efforts is contingent on the quality of contact and the selection of mobilization targets. This selection, in turn, is dependent on immigrants’ shares of relevant electorates, their vote histories, and the perceived competitiveness of elections. Hence, certain segments of the immigrant population are trapped in a vicious cycle of nonparticipation and nonmobilization, while others are selectively and strategically targeted for mobilization, sometimes based on stereotypes about immigrants, sometimes based on election-specific opportunities.

This is a status quo that Republican and Democratic party elites have an incentive to perpetuate, but not without challenges from nonpartisan elites struggling to pry open the political process to more fully include and incorporate immigrants. It remains to be seen whether parties will pay attention to such nonpartisan mobilization efforts—for instance, with efforts by organized labor in Los Angeles to elect progressive candidates to state and local office. Finally, perceptions of social or political threat activate individual immigrants to seek political recourse through naturalization, registration, and voting even in the absence of elite efforts.

Conceptions of what constitutes politically relevant participation have also changed because of immigration. Existing studies of voluntarism among immigrants and their connection to political participation, for instance, do not adequately capture the experiences of immigrants today, including transnational activities, extended kinship networks, and varying conceptions of what constitutes public and private goods, charity, and volunteering. Future studies in immigrant political participation also need to consider how the pathways to political participation from civic voluntarism may differ according to factors such as nativity, immigrant legal status, and ethnic residential concentration.

More generally, most political science research on political participation focuses principally on voting in national elections—with a residual focus on “nonvoting” as a general class of political action (for example, working on campaigns, exhibiting a button or bumper sticker, writing to elected officials and newspaper editors, attending a rally) and an even more peripheral glance at informal, voluntary, civic spheres of engagement. It is increasingly evident, however, that the concepts of “nation” and “state” impose arbitrary boundaries on what constitutes participation. Specifically, as a burgeoning literature shows, immigrants retain, sustain, and even rediscover their ties to their home country through multiple modes of transnational activism—sometimes in ways that divorce their loyalties between nations, but at other times enabling flexible forms of citizenship and the engagement of activism without borders...

E. E. Schattschneider (1960) famously claimed that the choir of the great American pluralist heaven sang with a distinctly upper class accent. So too it may sing with a distinctly native-born accent... This disparity in citizen influence may result from gaps in voter turnout, but it may also result from prevailing stereotypes and institutional biases that are part of the long history of racial discrimination and nativism in the United States... It is unsurprising, then, that striking and durable disparities remain in the representation of Latino, Asian, and black immigrants among the ranks of elected and appointed officials, from the national level down to the state and local levels...

What, then, can be done to address these disparities in political incorporation? Many immigrant advocacy groups are already engaged in protests, letter writing campaigns, and mobilization drives to bridge gaps in participation across racial groups and immigrant generations. But these are not enough... there also need to be changes in institutional practices, including: reforming the naturalization process...; reducing linguistic barriers to civic and political participation...; increasing party contact...; prodding elected officials to pay more attention ...; and encouraging mainstream civic organizations to do more active outreach... so that first- and second-generation immigrants also benefit from having access to City Hall, the state capital, and Washington, D.C.

[Needed too are] changes in the enduring stereotypes and ideologies that sustain and re-inscribe the prevailing inequalities in participation and representation between immigrant America and native-born America, including underlying beliefs about who constitutes the body politic; what bounds the political sphere; which groups and identities organize our social, economic, and political life; and whether political participation legitimates or challenges the status quo. If the past is prologue, such changes will not take place without coordination and contestation—from partisan and non-partisan elites, civic and political institutions, and the ordinary citizens and non-citizens themselves. Until and unless that story unfolds, the promises and perils of immigrant political incorporation remain a story half-told.