Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania

The Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), passed in the small rust-belt city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, in 2006, was a local ordinance that laid out penalties for renting to or hiring undocumented immigrants and declared English the city’s official language. The notorious IIRA gained national prominence and kicked off a parade of local and state-level legislative initiatives designed to crack down on undocumented immigrants. In Undocumented Fears, Jamie Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton’s controversial ordinance as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide-and-conquer politics. He shows how neoliberal ideology, misconceptions about Latina/o immigrants, and nostalgic imagery of small-town America led to a racialized account of an undocumented immigrant “invasion,” masking the real story of a city beset by large-scale loss of manufacturing jobs. Offering an up-close look at how the local debate unfolded in the city that set off this broader trend, Undocumented Fears makes an important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality

A \u27Revolution of Values\u27 in Immigrant Rights Advocacy (abstract)

We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights,” Martin Luther King Jr. told Southern Christian Leadership Conference members in 1967 as they prepared to launch the Poor People’s Campaign, “an era where we are called upon to raise certain questions about the whole society.” King called for a “revolution of values” and a recognition of the interconnectedness “of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.” The goal of the campaign was economic security for all so that poor people can maintain dignity and “control their own destiny.” This paper lays out advocacy strategies applicable to the struggle for immigrant rights in the United States. Consistent with King’s vision and arrived at through previous ethnographic research on the politics of anti-immigrant backlash, such strategies – which include participatory action research (PAR) and grassroots political education – extend beyond the traditional focus on eliminating brutalization and encouraging “integration,” moving toward what King called “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” I argue several recent developments justify this shift: massive wealth inequalities, the continued exploitation of immigrant labor, the ‘de-democratizing’ nature of neoliberalism, and the political tendency to racialize and scapegoat immigrants in a way that ‘divides and conquers’ working people. I discuss how PAR produces and disseminates knowledge with relevance to people’s lives and has the capacity to create political subjects immune to elite manipulation. Grassroots political education – particularly when it focuses on issues of race and political economy – similarly prevents the misattribution of social problems and makes ordinary people aware of how race has historically kept poor people divided and thus politically weak and easily exploitable. In combination, these strategies have the potential to unite immigrants with other poor and working people, generating the political power required to make the economic demands needed to restore human dignity

Promoting Immigrant and Human Rights at the Local Level: A Case Study of the Welcome Dayton Initiative (abstract)

Hazelton, Pennsylvania and Dayton, Ohio represent contrasting examples of community reactions to increases in immigrants. Both cities have experienced de-manufacturing in recent decades. In reaction to an influx of Latinos, Hazelton enacted the 2006 Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA) which placed severe restrictions on the rights of undocumenteds. In contrast, the Dayton City Commission passed the Welcome Dayton: Immigrant-Friendly City initiative in 2011 with the goal of facilitating the integration of immigrant residents. Hazelton’s developers used tax incentives to establish warehouses, distribution centers, and a meatpacking plant, resulting in a significant demographic change. However, in adopting a neoliberal approach, the developers failed to provide support for emerging Latina/o-owned small businesses. The results have implications for economic justice and the protection of the rights of immigrant laborers. Also, Hazelton illustrates the limitations of legal challenges to restrictive legislation. Although the law was challenged and subsequently ruled unconstitutional, a local White-Latina/o organization attempting to \u27build a bridge\u27 between recent immigrants and local residents/institutions has been constrained from raising issues like race and immigrant rights. Consequently, the dominant narrative goes unchallenged and core factors — racial and economic inequality — remain in place. In contrast, the Welcome Dayton initiative was resulted from ongoing efforts by numerous local organizations, including those of immigrants and refugees themselves, to assist recent immigrants and protect their rights. When the City’s Human Relations Council initiated community conversations on immigrant issues, there were many participants with experience to guide the writing of a comprehensive report with extensive recommendations for institutional change. Once begun, Welcome Dayton’s initiatives have partnered with local organizations. Whether intentional or not, Dayton and cities with similar initiatives are acting in accord with the U.N.’s 1990 International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, especially the articles specifying equal access to educational, vocational and social services and equality of living and working conditions and employment contracts. These two cases reflect the contrast between citizen rights, which often stress individual rights and sometimes pit groups against each other, and human rights based on principles of social justice and the well-being of the human person

Exploiting Borders: The Political Economy of Local Backlash against Undocumented Immigrants

Four years prior to Arizona\u27s passage of one of the most far-reaching pieces of anti-Latino immigrant legislation signed into law in decades,3 demands to seal off the border 4 were being made thousands of miles from the U.S.-Mexico divide. In 2006, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, passed equally harsh legislation aimed at keeping undocumented immigrants out of their community. During this time, commentators described the local backlash in Hazleton and other small cities across the United States as akin to the opening of a deep and profound fissure in the American landscape 5 wherein all immigration politics is local. 6 Yet, as the so-called immigration problem returns to its point of origin and the actual U.S.-Mexico border reclaims its place as the popular political referent from the more imaginary yet equally racialized borders of homogeneous interior cities, it appears that neither the Arizona law nor previous local-level legislation represent a new trend but rather an intensification of America\u27s growing anti-Latino immigrant backlash

Migration and Mortality: Social Death, Dispossession, and Survival in the Americas

This panel presents research from the new edited volume Migration and Mortality (edited by Longazel and Hallett, Temple University Press, 2021). Death threatens migrants physically during perilous border crossings between Central and North America, but many also experience legal, social, and economic mortality. Rooted in histories of colonialism and conquest, exclusionary policies and practices deliberately take aim at racialized, dispossessed people in transit. Once in the new land, migrants endure a web of systems across every facet of their world—work, home, healthcare, culture, justice—that strips them of their personhood, denies them resources, and creates additional obstacles that deprive them of their ability to live fully. As laws and policies create ripe conditions for the further extraction of money, resources, and labor power from the dispossessed, the contributors to Migration and Mortality examine immigration policies as not only restrictive, but extractive. The work presented denounces the violence of such policies and critiques the inadequacy of current human rights protections, while nonetheless highlighting the power of migrants’ collective resistance and resilience. The case studies and theoretical interventions presented in this panel explore the complicity of mainstream human rights discourses with global apartheid and examine the limitations of liberalism and minimal humanitarianism, as well as describe the oppressive system itself from points all along the migrant trail from Central America north. Ultimately, these examples of oppression and survival contribute to understanding contemporary movements for life and justice in the Americas

Fairness at Trial: The Impact of Procedural Justice and Other Experiential Factors on Criminal Defendants' Perceptions of Court Legitimacy in Poland

A large body of research supports the procedural justice hypothesis that quality of treatment matters more than outcomes for institutional legitimacy. How fairness matters across legal institutions and geographic settings remains an open question, however. This article uses a survey of criminal defendants to test the factors associated with perceived legitimacy of courts in Poland, a country whose judiciary is currently subject to intense political contestation. The findings confirm the primacy of procedural justice, while also illustrating the influence of instrumental performance factors such as time and court organization. This suggests that in contexts of political transition with disputed legal institutions, citizens’ contact with procedurally fair, operationally efficient institutions can support the legitimacy of authorities and strengthen the rule of law

Subordinating Myth: Latino/a Immigration, Crime, and Exclusion

Rhetoric about “crime-prone immigrants” has contributed to increased enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border, the passage of punitive immigration laws, and state and local efforts to make life difficult for new arrivals. Yet scholarly research refutes the notion that immigrants commit more crime. How do we explain this glaring contradiction? By reviewing recent research on immigration, crime, and social control in the context of racial stratification, this article describes the criminalization of Latino/a immigrants in the U.S. as a subordinating myth; that is, a falsity used as part of a larger effort to misallocate material, political, and cultural resources. Four ways in which the criminalization of immigrants contributes to racial exclusion are discussed: the profiting from immigration detention; the political scapegoating of racialized immigrants; the degrading of racialized bodies in enforcement efforts; and the literal control of exploitable populations. The article concludes with a call to develop further our understanding of the relationship between immigration and crime from this critical perspective in order to subordinate the myth of immigrant criminality

Moral Panic as Racial Degradation Ceremony: Racial Stratification and the Local-level Backlash against Latino/a Immigrants

State- and local-level ordinances attempting to crack down on undocumented immigration have been proliferating across the United States. Hazleton, Pennsylvania’s Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), passed in 2006, was one of the most visible of these laws. Using the events leading up to the passage of the IIRA as a case study and integrating racial stratification and moral panic theories, I conceptualize passage of this punitive law as a racial degradation ceremony performed in the wake of allegations of a Latino-on-white homicide and amid local demographic shifts and economic decline. Specifically, by comparing local media coverage of two homicides committed in Hazleton (one that led to the passage of the IIRA, a second that was far less impactful) and studying official discourse at city council meetings where the ordinance was introduced and passed, I find that officials relied heavily on the racialized tropes of the war on crime in constructing an ‘illegal’ immigration ‘problem’, thus degrading the city’s new immigrants, symbolically uplifting the white majority, and in turn reaffirming the racial order

Rhetorical Barriers to Mobilizing for Immigrant Rights: White Innocence and Latina/o Abstraction

In the summer of 2006, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA). In this article, the politics that emerged in that law\u27s wake are used as a case study to identify the rhetorical tools that justify and help achieve white dominance in local struggles over immigration in the United States. In tracing three successive waves of post-IIRA activism, what legal scholar Thomas Ross has termed white innocence/black abstraction—a racial narrative that absolves whites of wrongdoing and obfuscates minority suffering—is shown to be a central theme in the discourse of Hazleton\u27s white majority. This colorblind rhetoric is used to make exclusionary legislation appear justifiable and to curtail the efforts of immigrant rights activists. By bringing Ross\u27s insights into a new substantive context (i.e., immigration) and outside the confines of formal law (i.e., legal mobilizations rather than judicial opinions), this article demonstrates the centrality of innocence/abstraction in on-the-ground efforts to defend existing social arrangements