"Here to Work": Undocumented Immigration in the United States and Europe

SAIS Review ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Samers
1977 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge A. Bustamante

This paper focuses on three aspects of the undocumented immigration from Mexico to the United States. First is presented, a statement on the state of the art regarding the empirical research on this phenomenon; second is, a review of what we know on some of the characteristics of this migration and the presentation of preliminary findings of a survey conducted by the author in nine Mexican border cities, based on interviews with Mexican undocumented emigrants recently deported from the United States; and third is, a discussion on past attempts to solve the problems and some suggestions on how it might be solved.


Author(s):  
David Reimers

Racism and economics account for the first laws directed at Chinese and Japanese. Entering as “picture brides,” Japanese women evaded the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907-1908 between the United States and Japan, but by use of the naturalization qualifications in the 1920s, Congress effectively closed the door to Asian immigration. For southern and eastern Europeans, national-origin quotas of the same decade cut their immigration drastically. After 1945, Congress and U.S. presidents relaxed the tight restrictions, and, in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, which created a new and more liberal system that stressed family unification. Major issues in recent years have concerned terrorism and undocumented immigration. Throughout this period, the results of the laws were often unintended, largely because the flow of immediate family members and chain migration were unseen.


Author(s):  
Sarah C. Bishop

This chapter reveals the centrality of narrative and storytelling to the sociopolitical status of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. It offers a theorization of reclaimant narratives by illuminating the experiential, partial, public, oppositional, and incondensable nature of the stories undocumented activists tell. Despite attempts to essentialize and distill this narrative, the reality of undocumented immigration is a complicated story with no easy one-size-fits all tagline. This reality complicates the process of public education about immigration and works both for and against immigrants who use their stories as activism. The emergence of voices of undocumented storytellers in the immigrant rights movement has the capacity to engender empathy, motivate listeners, and even advance reforms in laws and policy. But these narratives also have the capacity to decelerate the movement by detracting from systematic problems and the tangible actions needed to advance reform.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Deguili

This paper concerns itself with a subset of undocumented immigrants, that of undocumented students in the United States. While many sociologists have engaged with undocumented immigration in general, not much attention has been paid to this growing group and when it has been done these students were treated as a unified and undiversified category. In this letter, instead, I intend to outline some of the ways in which the label of undocumented student and its consequences may vary greatly depending on a number of different elements, among them: the different legal status of various family members, the different methods of entry into the country, family structure, and the influence of the communities that surround them.


The Forum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
Rebecca Hamlin

Abstract From the moment that he first announced his presidential candidacy until his final days in office, Donald Trump’s signature personal political cause was the restriction of immigration. Media coverage and public debate often focused on Trump’s rhetorical invocation of this issue and emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigration in particular, as symbolized by his famous proposal to build a wall across the southern border of the United States. But while the wall itself was not completed, the Trump administration worked aggressively through the federal bureaucracy to reduce all forms of immigration. The Trump administration’s record on immigration should therefore be understood as extending far beyond charged presidential rhetoric and sporadic wall-building efforts, leaving a much more consequential substantive legacy in American immigration policy that will not be quickly or easily reversed by future presidents.


2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
DeAnne K. Hilfinger Messias ◽  
Marylyn Morris McEwen ◽  
Lauren Clark

Author(s):  
Kevin Escudero

This chapter focuses on the case of Asian undocumented youth to explain immigrant youth activists’ efforts to unearth the silenced history of Asian undocumented immigration and to place this history in conversation with current immigration debates. As part of these efforts, activists use storytelling strategies to counteract stereotypes of Asian immigrants as solely high-skilled workers and individuals who have come to the United States to attend college, noting that Asians were and continue to be affected by the issue of undocumented immigration. Asian undocumented activists also strategically draw upon their intersectional identities as both Asian and undocumented individuals in Latinx organizing spaces to work alongside members of a group that is largely invoked in the national imaginary in discussions of undocumented immigration. As part of activists’ efforts to push beyond discussions solely of the need for increased representation of Asian and other non-Latinx undocumented activists, this chapter emphasizes the extensive efforts that Asian and Latinx undocumented organizers have undertaken to employ a broad, multiracial approach to framing undocumented identity.


1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-173
Author(s):  
Karen A. Woodrow-Lafield

Censuses and national surveys are monitoring net immigration to the United States as the twentieth century closes with high immigration reminiscent of the early decades. These demographic studies inferred the legal-undocumented composition for census and national survey estimates for the foreign-born population. For both net immigration and that portion attributable as net legal immigration, an increasing trend is evident since 1970. Uncertainties are abundant about the measurement of net undocumented migration and change over the past two decades. This analysis presents possible upper and lower boundaries on components for estimating legal migration in 1980–1989 and on the foreign-born population in 1990. Positing ranges for net undocumented immigration; between 2 million and 4 million undocumented residents may have been counted in the 1990 census. The total number of undocumented residents may have been as high as 6 million. To more narrowly specify these ranges, greater exercise of judgment would be necessary but not sufficient.


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