Elizabeth Aranda

Racism, the Immigration Enforcement Regime, and the Implications for Racial Inequality in the Lives of Undocumented Young Adults

The current immigration enforcement regime embodies a colorblind racial project of the state rooted in the racial structure of society and resulting in racism toward immigrants. Approaching racism from structural and social process perspectives, we seek to understand the social consequences of enforcement practices in the lives of undocumented immigrant young adults who moved to the United States as minors. Findings indicate that although legal discourse regarding immigration enforcement theoretically purports colorblindness, racial practices such as profiling subject immigrants to arrest, detention, and deportation and, in effect, criminalize them. Further, enforcement practices produce distress, vulnerability, and anxiety in the lives of young immigrants and their families, often resulting in legitimate fears of detention and deportation since enforcement measures disproportionately affect Latinos and other racialized immigrant groups in U.S. society. We conclude that policies and programs that exclude, segregate, detain, and physically remove immigrants from the country reproduce racial inequalities in other areas of social life through spillover effects that result in dire consequences for these immigrants and their kin. We argue that immigrant enforcement practices reflect the nation’s racial policy of our times.

The Spillover Consequences of an Enforcement-First U.S. Immigration Regime

In our introduction to this special issue, we describe how the immigration enforcement-first regime has consequences that extend beyond the supposed target population of undocumented immigrants and spill over to other groups, including legal permanent residents, U.S.-born Latinos/as, and other U.S.-born residents. The papers in this special issue address whether and how spillover effects exist and the form that they take. Often they include social, psychological, and in some cases, physical harm, and together they illustrate that directly or indirectly, U.S. policy’s emphasis on interior and external border enforcement affects all of us.

“Doing Race”: Latino Youth’s Identities and the Politics of Racial Exclusion

For most Latino youth, Latinos constitute a separate, while diverse, racial group. Our study demonstrates that, when asked about their identities, Latino youth do not follow conventional U.S. racial categories. Although they prefer to identify by national origin or panethnicity, they consider themselves to be part of a racial group rather than an ethnic group, as the U.S. Census designates them. Using findings from in-depth semistructured interviews with two samples of young adults in Chicago and Central Florida, this research joins the long-standing debate on the conceptual division between race and ethnicity arguing that there is a mismatch between existing sociological understandings of race and ethnicity and the current racial ideas and racial practices among Latino youth. There is also a mismatch between institutional measures of “race,” such as those found in the U.S. Census, and Latinos’ self-understandings of where they belong in the U.S. racial hierarchy. We suggest that not being officially designated as a racial group leads to the erosion of perceptions of belonging among Latinos to a nation in which being a member of a racial group allows for visibility and claims-making in a multiracial society.

Unwelcomed Immigrants: Experiences With Immigration Officials and Attachment to the United States

In this article, we argue that efforts at increased immigration control have consequences for immigrants’ affective attachments to the United States. Based on data from the Immigrant Transnationalism and Modes of Incorporation (ITMI) Survey that was administered to a random sample of South Florida immigrants (N = 1,268), we examine qualitatively and quantitatively how immigrants’ negative experiences in the United States with immigration officials, at the point of entry and during their residency in the country, impact their affective attachments to the United States. Examining the effects of negative experiences with immigration officials, both isolated incidents and patterns of treatment, reveals that immigrants with negative experiences are less attached to the United States. We suggest that how immigrants are treated in their countries of destination is likely to affect their approaches to other government officials and more broadly, their patterns of incorporation into U.S. society.

Patterns of Incorporation of Latinos in Old and New Destinations From Invisible to Hypervisible

This special issue introduces a range of articles that analyze patterns of incorporation among Latinos living in the United States. We discuss the importance of race and institutionalized discrimination across various social institutions and through legislation and policies that promote and/or blunt Latino incorporation. Building on the findings of the studies in this special issue, this introduction considers how race and racialization shape the lives of Latino youth and adults through directives and policies emerging from a range of institutions—from the U.S. Census Bureau to State Courts, and state and federal legislative bodies. Mediating incorporation is legislation such as the Affordable Care Act and administrative changes such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which, while promoting inclusion of Latino populations into the U.S. body-politic, also render some Latinos part of a class of people that are subjugated based on their origins. We conclude this introductory article with an assessment of how this structural discrimination results in various forms of incorporation that include marginalized belonging, blocked mobility, and both the invisibility and hypervisibility of Latinos in the United States.

Personal and Cultural Trauma and the Ambivalent National Identities of Undocumented Young Adults in the USA

Using data from 41 in-depth interviews with undocumented young adults, we examine how they define what it means to be an American and explore whether and to what extent they identify as ‘Americans’. Framing our analysis in theories of personal and cultural trauma, we illustrate how undocumented youth experience double-consciousness that compounds their approach to national identities. Respondents express ambivalence towards adopting an American identity, recognising their commitment to American cultural values, yet continuously feeling repelled by laws that position them as outsiders to US polity. In spite of this, undocumented youth contest their liminal status by working towards full participation in civil society. Their activities, actions, and levels of civic participation demonstrate that even though they are barred from US citizenship, they work towards embodying what they believe a true American should be.

An ethnoracial perspective: response to Valdez and Golash-Boza

ABSTRACT Valdez and Golash-Boza argue that scholarship on race and scholarship on ethnicity have been divorced from each other and call for researchers to put these two paradigms in conversation with one another. I address some of their assertions using previous work, including my own, that has merged racial and ethnic literatures and that has shed new light on old theories, as well as opened the path toward new theories and methods. I argue that an ethnoracial perspective can be leveraged to better understand global racial and ethnic inequalities.