Doris Marie Provine

Race and the Response of State Legislatures to Unauthorized Immigrants

Increasingly, state legislatures are enacting laws to regulate immigrant populations. What accounts for these responses to foreign-born residents? To explain legislative activity at the state level, the authors examine a variety of factors, including the size and growth of foreign-born and Hispanic local populations, economic well-being, crime rates, and conservative or liberal political ideology in state government and among the citizenry. The authors find that economic indicators, crime rates, and demographic changes have little explanatory value for legislation aimed at restrictions on immigrant populations. Rather, conservative citizen ideology appears to drive immigrant-related restrictionist state legislation. Meanwhile, proimmigrant laws are associated with larger Hispanic concentrations, growing foreign-born populations, and more liberal citizen and governmental orientations. These findings suggest that ideological framing is the most consistently important factor determining legislative responses to newcomers. These findings are in line with the relatively scarce empirical literature on legislative tendencies associated with vulnerable populations.

A Multilayered Jurisdictional Patchwork: Immigration Federalism in the United States

This paper focuses on the immigration-related demands currently being placed on local police in the United States, and the emergence of what we call a “multilayered jurisdictional patchwork” (MJP) of immigration enforcement. The evolving relationship between layers of government involved in enforcing immigration laws, sometimes dubbed “immigration federalism,” has so far received more attention from legal scholars than from social scientists. Against this backdrop, we report results from nationwide surveys of city police chiefs and county sheriffs and intensive fieldwork in three jurisdictions. The enforcement landscape we describe is complicated by the varying and over-lapping responsibilities of sheriffs and city police, and by the tendency for sheriffs to maintain closer relationships with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities. We highlight the contradictions inherent in this patchwork through case studies of Mesa, Arizona; New Haven, Connecticut; and Raleigh, North Carolina. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of the MJP - for immigrants, for their communities, and for the evolving relationship between levels of government in the federal system.

The Criminalization of Immigrants as a Racial Project

Contemporary policy responses to unauthorized immigration, we argue, reinforce racialized anxieties by (a) focusing attention on physically distinctive and economically marginalized minorities who are defined as the nation’s immigration“threat,” (b) creating new spaces of enforcement within which racial anxieties flourish and become institutionalized; and thereby (c) racializing immigrant bodies. We examine three federal enforcement policies: (a) the physical border buildup that began in the 1990s, (b) partnerships with local police, and (c) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiatives to enhance interior enforcement. The result has been the construction of a landscape of institutionalized racial violence embedded in our current immigration regime.

On the frontier of local law enforcement: local police and federal immigration law

Purpose – Some local governments are asking their police departments to enforce federal immigration law more aggressively. However, there is little research or policy guidance available to assist police in balancing local immigration enforcement with the norms of community-oriented policing. Methodology – This paper presents results from a national survey of municipal police chiefs. Findings – The survey responses indicate substantial differences in the way that police departments are approaching unauthorized immigration. Implications – The highly varied nature of policing practice on this issue is a function of the lack of clear policy guidance and models for local enforcement of immigration law.

Suspecting immigrants: exploring links between racialised anxieties and expanded police powers in Arizona

Immigration enforcement has become an important site of expanded police powers to stop and search as the USA attempts to remove more unauthorised immigrants from its interior. Arizona has enthusiastically embraced this approach, treating Latino immigrants as a quasi-criminal element. State legislation requiring municipal police to engage in immigration enforcement, along with past local police practice directed at immigrant removal, strident political rhetoric, and the federal governments own deportation initiatives, have legitimised an enforcement regimen that: (1) blends techniques of control used on the border with those used in interior enforcement; (2) mixes criminal and administrative approaches to apprehension, detention and deportation; (3) invokes national security as a rationale for strict, uncompromising enforcement and (4) hypes the violence aspect of human smuggling and border crossing to support more aggressive interior enforcement. This policy mix, current practices suggest, encourages entho-racial profiling, hyper-surveillance, abusive stops, problematic searches and unwarranted detention of suspected unauthorised immigrants.

Immigrants and civil rights in cross-national perspective: Lessons from North America

The degree to which a nation envisions civil rights as applying to all residents offers insight into its commitment to and capacity for immigrant inclusion. A much-debated question is whether there is a trend toward convergence in national policies around immigrant inclusion, given globalization and the rise in human rights norms. Or do institutional legacies and domestic politics tend to preserve old approaches? This issue has been investigated most thoroughly in European contexts. Here we examine the cases of Canada and the United States. We find that while Canada and the United States, both settler societies, have much in common, they differ significantly in their historical experience with civil rights, which helps explain differences in how they approach the inclusion of immigrants in their societies. While civil rights has more potential for advancing immigrant concerns in the United States, neither country readily envisions immigrant inclusion as a civil rights issue.

Institutional Racism in Enforcing Immigration Law.

The United States is committed to aggressive efforts to remove unauthorized immigrants while honoring its commitment to race neutrality. Yet immigration enforcement has disproportionately targeted Mexicans and Central Americans. The racial bias can be found at both the federal and local levels, where local police are becoming increasingly involved in locating unauthorized immigrants. The local example featured here is Arizona because of its historical relationship with Mexico and its enthusiasm for immigration enforcement. I find that the current mix of federal and local enforcement discriminates racially through profiling, hyper-surveillance, abusive stops, problematic searches, and unwarranted detention.

Balancing Pollution and Property Rights: A Comparison of the Development of English and American Nuisance Law

With the profound changes wrought by rapid industrialization and urbanization in nineteenth century England and America, came a fundamental reorientation of much previously entrenched common law doctrine. The transformation of once-familiar nuisance principles to accommodate the fruits of the Industrial Revolution was a particularly striking element of this legal reorientation because nuisance doctrine had fully incorporated the previous agrarian status quo. In this field of law as in others, however, English and American judges drastically altered the rights of litigants, while at the same time disavowing any intent to rewrite the common law. The tort of nuisance, as it matured in pre-industrial society, protected landholders against certain interferences with the enjoyment of their property. Such interferences included vibration, fumes, poisoned water, and loud noises. While only serious irritations were actionable, property holders attempting to use their land in ways their neighbours found obnoxious were to a substantial extent bounded by nuisance doctrine. The legal axiom: one must use ones property so as not to injure that of another, was the touchstone upon which judges based their decisions in favour of nuisance plaintiffs. This axiom survived the Industrial Revolution, but it lost its original vitality as judges, like the rest of society, began to make special allowances for those who used their land for enterprise. Because of dissimilarities in their legal institutions, English and American judges responded somewhat differently to the overwhelming pressure to remold nuisance law so that it did not permit litigants to interfere unduly with economic development. This paper compares these two routes by which a common law doctrine changed to fit the transformation from agrarian to industrial society. The refashioning of the common law was, of course, only one aspect of laws response to economic change in the United States and England. The accommodation also required legislation to grant positive new rights to developers, such as franchises and the power of private eminent domain. Changes in the common law, on

SB 1070: Testing the “Frustration” Hypothesis

Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, popularly known as SB 1070, is the first state law to directly challenge the federal government’s claim of plenary power over enforcement of its immigration law. Arizona’s law is justifiably famous (or notorious) for that accomplishment. But every milestone has its history. This chapter is about that history, specifically the history of Arizona’s efforts to inform the federal government of its concerns as a border state coping with unauthorized immigration.