The Borderlines of Family Reunification

This chapter explores the importance of family in 1980s immigration discourse. While family reunification has been the primary focus of immigration policy since 1965, in the context of the “immigration emergency,” some lawmakers viewed Asian and Latin American immigrant families as threats to American “family values” and the economy. This chapter traces backlash against multiculturalism and second-wave feminism as it arose in “family values” rhetoric. It also comparatively traces the “nation of immigrants” narrative in television shows that represented white ethnic immigrant families as industrious additions to the nation who overcame poverty with nothing but hard work. While these non-nuclear families sometimes seemed to be queer, the chapter argues that racially differentiated discourses about immigrant families reflected and created a flexible neoliberal narrative of “personal responsibility” that erased or glossed over the racial politics affecting Asian and Latin American immigrants and the global forces underscoring immigration.

Inaugurating Neoliberal Crimmigration

This chapter examines the criminalization of Latin American immigrants and Latina/os in media, policy debates, and law, and in relation to the prison-industrial system. In 1980s films, romanticized Italian American mafia families contrasted media alarm—the continuation of the “immigrant emergency”—over unmarried Latino gangbangers in films and television shows. This was largely accomplished by portraying Latina/o family and gender arrangements as dysfunctional deviations from “family values.” In martial arts films, Asian men were cast as exotic and often family-less crime fighters, again occupying a place between Latin American immigrants and Latinas/os and white ethnics. Focusing on increased border control and punitive immigration law that targeted undocumented immigrants and functioned increasingly like criminal law, as well as on racialized tropes of immigrant criminals in media, this chapter asserts that racially disparate discourses of immigrants and crime produced, justified, and negotiated racist and sexist social relations for neoliberalizing America.

Conclusion

This chapter examines the legacy of Reaganite immigration discourse in policy and popular culture. With consideration of more recent discourse about immigrants in policy debate and media, it is shown that the gender and racial issues underscoring Reagan-era immigration debate have not been resolved, nor have the “immigration emergency” and “nation of immigrants” tropes been abandoned, even after the “War on Terror” following 9/11 altered immigration discourse. Identifying continuities in legislation and media, it argues that nation-based rights are worthless under neoliberalism, given that the system and immigration itself is by definition transnational and unequal, and makes a case for queering immigrant rights in policy and culture to obviate the lingering hegemony of de/valuing immigrants on the basis of personal responsibility, hard work, race, and adherence to conventional gender and sex roles.

Over-Looking Difference

This chapter links the celebration of Latina/o culture and especially Latina bodies in the 1990s explosion of Latina/o pop culture to democratic rhetoric surrounding the Immigration Reform and Control Act’s amnesty program. Media framed Latina/o stars as immigrants in celebratory manner, while amnesty was touted as a democratic watershed for undocumented immigrants who were mostly of Mexican descent. The chapter argues that in affectively mobilizing the “nation of immigrants” discourse to portray America as the globally exceptional guarantor of democratic rights and equal access to economic mobility, both the Latina/o Explosion and amnesty erased the material realities of immigration, sexism, and racism. It considers the appropriation of the language of feminism and multiculturalism in each case in order to show that with a cosmetic rather than redistributive equality, both “nation of immigrants” strains powerfully masked the exploitation and violence that are constitutive of neoliberalism.

Exiled Mothers and Mothers of Exiles

This chapter develops leftist feminist scholarship on welfare: it shows that that Reagan-era immigration discourse was crucial to the establishment of a neoliberal welfare regime. Welfare cuts under the Immigration Reform and Control Act and later laws minimized the social and economic costs of Latin American and especially Mexican-origin immigrants’ reproduction and family formation while exploiting their labor. Meanwhile, American popular culture delineated a hierarchy of maternity that featured condemnatory portrayals of Latina mothering while blatantly imperfect white ethnic immigrant mothers were idealized. Exoticized Asian mothers were placed between white ethnic and Latin American immigrant and Latina mothers, engaging the “model minority” and “nation of immigrants” tropes and thereby rationalizing the erosion of the welfare state. This chapter argues that language and policy about welfare inaugurated in immigration debates and in racially coded media representations of immigrant mothers created the paradigm for neoliberal welfare discourse.

Immigration as Emergency

This chapter discusses the 1980 Mariel Boatlift to show how policy and popular culture worked dialectically in matters of immigration. Media coverage was initially positive, framing President Jimmy Carter’s welcoming of Cuban refugees as an example of America’s generosity in contrast to Cuba’s Communist regime. Yet when news broke that the Mariel Boatlift included refugees who had been released from Castro’s prisons and mental health facilities—and as refugee numbers grew—the media spectacle became alarmist. News media and popular culture made it clear that the United States was under siege in an “immigrant emergency” that originated south of the border, manifested itself in gendered ways, and necessitated action. This chapter explores, in conversation with media, the proposed solution, the Immigrant Emergency Powers Act of 1982, which would have given the president unilateral powers in the face of an “immigration emergency,” and situates these developments in immigration history.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the social, historical, and political elements of 1980s immigration debates in both policy-making and popular culture. Drawing on scholarship in American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies, Critical Legal Studies, and Media Studies, it outlines the two central tropes in 1980s immigration debates that culminated with the passing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the “nation of immigrants” and “immigration emergency” tropes. It argues that in response to the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, gendered Reagan-era discourse about Latin American, Asian, and white ethnic immigration was a crucial ingredient in the forming of the neoliberal idea of democracy. The history of immigration and popular culture is outlined, as is the book’s methodology, which blends feminist media studies with critical legal analysis to dialectally examine significant moments in immigration policymaking and contemporary popular culture.