Abstract
Reviewed by: Leanne Weber, Monash University, Australia
Although the presidency of Barack Obama promised a more progressive and socially just future for American citizens, it will be remembered by many for ushering in an era of unprecedented mass deportation. Dreams and Nightmares: Immigration Policy, Youth and Families meticulously dissects the evolution of deportation policy during this period, including the inability of the Obama administration to pass legislation that would have offered some respite to undocumented migrants who entered the United States as children. The book takes its title, in part, from the acronym for that stalled legislation – the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. Against a backdrop of political failure to instigate fundamental reform at the federal level, Zatz and Rodriguez systematically document the nightmare of family destruction and return to danger that was the ultimate result.
Major works on deportation policy and practice have slowly begun to appear within the immigration control literature (e.g., De Genova & Peutz, 2010 in the US, Nicholls, 2007 in Australia, and Pratt, 2005 in Canada). What sets this book apart is its sustained focus on the deportation of children and their families. With the exception of Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age by Jacqueline Bhabha (2014), cited by Zatz and Rodriguez, there is a paucity of scholarship on migration control that places children and families at the forefront of analysis. Dreams and Nightmares therefore stands out as a unique book written with a clear purpose. Beginning with the dedication, and continuing throughout its 216 pages, Zatz and Rodriguez express their resolve to see the wellbeing of children placed at the heart of policy making in this arena.
The authors draw on 40 intensive interviews with attorneys, advocates, and former government employees, many of them involving multiple follow-ups and ongoing dialogue; extensive archival analysis of government documents; plus observations from major meetings and forums, to provide a sound empirical foundation for the narrative. The book is socio-legal in its approach, focusing on law and policy in action (and the absence of law), and identifying the role of discretion in shaping deportation practice. The analysis is structural rather than ethnographic, avowedly particularist, and deeply rooted in the contemporary political and legislative context within the United States, making little or no reference to comparative material or wider global trends. In line with its agenda to achieve policy impact, each chapter ends by identifying systemic factors that either mitigate or exacerbate harm to young people and their families.
The opening chapter sets the scene, explaining that many children and families live in a state of ‘liminal legality’ (p. 2) in which the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion remain central to decisions about who is included and who is excluded from the nation. Decades of piecemeal reforms have left the US immigration system full of complexity and contradictions, exacerbating uncertainty. In the acknowledgements, the authors describe their efforts to document the tightening of immigration law from around 1996 as like trying to ‘tame an octopus’ (p. x). However, by employing the concept of prosecutorial discretion as the ‘backbone’ or structuring principle for the analysis, they have managed to produce a concise and valuable account of the major developments. Their central argument is that failure to achieve meaningful reform at the federal level led to a wave of restrictive legislation by individual states from around 2005, which produced a massive rise in deportations. According to the authors, the Obama administration took a hard line on immigration enforcement from the outset, gambling that this strategic move would placate hard liners while opening a window of opportunity to make possible comprehensive immigration reform reaching even beyond the confines of the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act, while limited in scope, promised to place the rights of the child at the centre of state action. However, the failure to enact the legislation has left undocumented young people in a precarious position, with only the consolation prize of prosecutorial discretion offering possible relief from enforcement action.
The second chapter presents a detailed analysis of prosecutorial discretion as it has played out in practice, highlighting the benefits but also the limits of this compromise position. The authors claim this aspect of their work as unique, pointing out that previous scholars have tended to focus on the law as enacted, or on the lived experience of undocumented migrants caught up in enforcement processes, rather than explaining the role of discretion in shaping immigration enforcement practices. While immigration officials have complained that the policy amounts to an amnesty, Zatz and Rodriguez demonstrate that it has had a devastating impact on families and children. Prosecutorial discretion has encouraged the prioritisation of those seen to be presenting the greatest public safety threats, such as criminal convicts, and therefore directed some attention away from young people. However, it has allowed the mass deportation of adults with US-citizen children, leaving behind shattered families and fuelling considerable anger among migrant communities and their supporters.
The following three chapters focus on specific groups of young people who have been particularly affected by deportation policies, namely young people facing deportation themselves, often referred to as ‘DREAMERs’ (chapter three); children affected by the deportation of one or both parents (chapter four); and unaccompanied minors forced to face the might of the US immigration enforcement machinery on their own (chapter five). Chapter three examines the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. This was the compromise put in place by the Obama administration when it became clear that the DREAM Act was unlikely to pass. While maintaining their focus on the structural level, Zatz and Rodriguez note that DREAMers and their supporters have put a human face to all the young people who had lived in the shadows but were now coming forward to claim their rights as long-term residents. In chapter four, the authors consider the ‘collateral consequences’ (p. 13) to children when one or both of their parents are deported and conclude that prosecutorial discretion is not working as hoped to keep families intact. The very poor articulation between immigration and care systems, the limited discretion available for immigration judges, and the precarity of policy reforms that rest on executive action rather than law, have created a perfect storm of fear and family disruption. In chapter five, the authors turn their attention to the ‘humanitarian crisis’ (p. 148) that is apparent in the greatly increased arrivals of unaccompanied minors, many from trouble spots in Central America. The study was not designed to assess the plight of young people turned away at the border, and the authors focus instead on the unique challenge presented by undocumented young people who are present within US territory, for whom the state is widely understood to have a special responsibility. Zatz and Rodriguez note that this effectively requires the state to protect unaccompanied children from its own actions. While they identify some measures based on the ‘best interests of the child’ that have proved beneficial, they conclude that better legal representation is desperately needed to protect the interests of this particularly vulnerable group.
In the final chapter, the authors assess opportunities for policy action and identify the book’s major contributions. They note that comprehensive immigration legislation – if it should eventuate – would likely provide a fast-tracked pathway to citizenship for those who came to the United States as young children, and possibly for agricultural workers whose labour is in demand, while allowing all those without criminal histories to regularise their status as a first step towards citizenship. However, as welcome as this may be, Zatz and Rodriguez note that it would still leave the children of convicted non-citizens and unaccompanied minors in a precarious position. The need to balance the competing desires for an orderly immigration process with the imperative to keep families intact therefore remains a consistent theme throughout the book. Rather than claiming to resolve this conundrum, the authors assess their contribution as ‘[s]hining a light on how such discretion plays out in policy and practice’ thus enabling ‘a more comprehensive understanding of the circumstances confronting youth and families’ (p. 165). Their wider achievement, they suggest, is to have connected legal analyses (focused on law and rights) with social science perspectives (focused on immigrants, crime, and integration) through an ‘overarching’ analysis focused on the systemic mechanisms that reduce or exacerbate harm for young people and families.
Dreams and Nightmares: Immigration Policy, Youth and Families is a tightly focused social, political, and legal analysis that achieves its primary ambition to shed light on this controversial and contradictory period in the enforcement of US immigration law. Moreover, it does so from the unique perspective of children affected by these practices. For followers of US immigration and border control policy, this book will stand as a seminal work that fills a distinct gap in the understanding of these policies and goes some way to explaining how harmful consequences can follow from even well-intentioned (if not well-executed) reforms. The book will also be a valuable reference, and strike a cautionary note, for readers from countries such as Australia that often follow the US policy lead, and for others with a comparative interest in immigration policy. Dreams and Nightmares also has the potential to cross disciplinary boundaries to appeal to readers with a more general concern for the much vaunted but seldom realised universal rights of children.
It might be argued that the focus on practical analysis and policy impact in Dreams and Nightmares has limited the contribution the work could have made in a number of theoretical areas. The authors acknowledge that their empirical findings have relevance for the ‘crimmigration thesis’ (Stumpf, 2006) and for the study of racial and other forms of discrimination, but do not develop these themes in any depth. One could also point to the copious literature on socio-legal theories of discretion, which is not explicitly applied. However, none of this detracts from the core achievements of the book, which stands as a thorough and insightful analysis within practical and conceptual boundaries that are clearly stated by the authors. When the wellbeing of all children and the preservation of families become principles that are strong enough to outweigh the exclusionary sentiments that characterise this moment in history, this book will have fulfilled its ultimate purpose.