Icy Walls Appear

This chapter explores evangelical responses to undocumented immigrants from the 1990s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It argues that most mainstream evangelicals adopted the Republican Party’s hard-line stances on immigration (as exemplified by California’s Proposition 187) and introduced them into their theology by emphasizing biblical passages like Romans 13, which underlines the need to obey the government. Reflecting their strengthening ties to the GOP, evangelical leaders brought their theology in line with their politics. They argued that the Bible verses about welcoming the “stranger” were only applicable to legal immigrants, not to undocumented immigrants. This new differentiation between legal and undocumented immigrants marked much of the evangelical discourse on immigration in the next two decades. The competing interpretations of the biblical record translated into deep divisions within the evangelical movement, as Latinx and progressive evangelical leaders urged their evangelical coreligionists to speak out for undocumented immigrants.

Immigrant Sanctuary or Danger

Hospitals have for centuries been considered safe havens for immigrants and people on the move. However, immigrants and migrants who seek health care have also been targeted for exclusion and deportation. This article discusses the history of how hospitals and health care facilities in the United States have acted both as sanctuaries and as sites of immigration enforcement. This debate came to a head in California in the 1970s, when conservatives began attacking local public health facilities’ informal sanctuary practices. Following the California battles, which culminated in Proposition 187 in 1994, immigrant rights movements have increasingly connected calls for sanctuary with demands for a right to health care.

Local and State Politics of Immigration

When it comes to immigration policy, nation-states generally have the power to exclude, admit, or expel noncitizens from their territories. On the other hand, subnational jurisdictions have more often been given the task of formulating and implementing immigrant policy, which entails the incorporation of immigrants into local communities. This division of labor has recently come under intense scrutiny. The local and state politics of immigration and immigrant integration in the United States has been documented in the scholarly literature, focusing on topics such as California’s Proposition 187, the disparity between the national benefits and local costs of immigration, and the increasing role played by nongovernmental organizations and other nonstate actors in the integration of immigrants at the local scale. Four categories of local immigrant and immigration policy have been studied: policies that arise from the devolution of select powers over noncitizens; grassroots policies on areas such as education and human trafficking; policies that are more explicitly about a politics of immigration control; and policies that engage with a politics of immigrant integration. However, there are still avenues that require further investigation so as to better understand the growing involvement of subnational governments in the formulation and implementation of immigrant and immigration policy. For example, more research is needed in which policy outcome is taken as the dependent variable and to document and understand the dynamics of local immigrant integration and immigration policy formation in developing countries.

Latinos Define “American”

Non-Hispanic white focus-group participants rejected their parents’ Anglo-Saxon nativist definition of American and used the new nativist definition, one based on work ethic, rejection of welfare, strong families, and patriotism. In the aftermath of the pro-Proposition 187 messaging, they felt that Latinos were poor because they lacked ambition and were unpatriotic because they spoke Spanish—and hence might not be truly American. Both US-born and immigrant Latino focus-group participants felt that they were fully American, but they were aware that many non-Latinos did not think that they were, indeed, fully American.

Times of Crisis

In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles civil disturbances, nativists blamed “illegal immigrants” for California’s many woes, and they successfully convinced the state’s electorate to approve Proposition 187, a broadly worded initiative that would deny public services, including education, to undocumented immigrants, US-born children of undocumented immigrants, and persons suspected of being undocumented immigrants. The initiative’s passage stung Latinos into action: US-born Latinos registered to vote—and immigrant Latinos naturalized—in unprecedented numbers. By the end of the decade, an enraged Latino electorate had found its voice, and Latino voters increasingly held sway at the ballot box.

Immigration Politics and Partisan Realignment

This article demonstrates how the party identification of various demographic groups in California and Texas changed in response to the gubernatorial campaigns of Pete Wilson and George W. Bush. Using aggregated time series of Field Poll, Texas Poll, and Gallup data, difference-in-differences results show that Wilson’s embrace of Proposition 187 was followed by significant Hispanic movement toward the Democratic Party in California. Time series analysis substantiates that this action led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California’s Hispanics. This suggests that state-level actors can influence partisan coalitions in their state, beyond what would be expected from national-level factors.