Abstract
Many studies about immigration are about the settlement and integration of newcomers. These analyses often enter a vexed debate on the myths and realities about immigration: do immigrants pay taxes, are they a boon or drain on the economy, is the government deporting hardened criminals or just working parents of U.S. citizens? Philip Kretsedemas’ The Immigration Crucible: Transforming Race, Nation, and the Limits of the Law is a different kind of immigration text. It is topically written around a series of concealed trends, enforcement relationships, and theoretical frameworks. Importantly, Kretsedemas breaks from the “myths and facts” binary, and more pernicious, the demons-or-heroes debate used to vilify or praise immigrants and their families. These dualities pervade the immigration debate and polarize the discourse.
The Immigration Crucible, therefore, addresses more “submerged processes” out of view in mainstream immigration discourse rather than attempting to set the record straight or factualize common myths about immigrants (p. 9). As such, the book moves beyond the “surface-level immigration debate” (p. 138) in order to “pluralize” the discourse beyond economic determinism or status quo models of assimilation theory (p. 147). Kretsedemas is more concerned with “migrant marginality” (p. xii) and how social inequalities relate to legal constructs of citizenship and national economic wellbeing. He suggests that migrant marginality subsidizes the wealth of citizens in good economic times and protects against downward pressures during our ongoing recessionary period. In either case, the migrant is a marginal and necessary figure. The author illuminates how this marginality—both social and economic—is maintained by legal and administrative forces and is a central feature of immigrant incorporation to the United States.
A critical contribution of this book is its focus on obscured features and forces in immigration and immigration enforcement. Chapter Two, for example, addresses “nonimmigrants,” or temporary visitors, who represent a flow of persons into the nation that is largely unaccounted for, but often settles permanently in the United States. As Kretsedemas reveals, nonimmigrants (temporary arrivals, workers, or students on restrictive visas) represent “the vast majority of people who have physically migrated to the United States [but] have not been legally defined as immigrants” (p. 16). The “nonimmigrant visa has become the primary gateway” (p. 24) to the United States, and adjustments of status from temporary visa to lawful permanent resident or green card holder (through marriage, one’s employer, or from refugee status) outnumber new immigrant arrivals annually (pp. 22–23). Kretsedemas refers to the nonimmigrant category as “the dark matter of the U.S. immigration system, a vast, amorphous flow that is exponentially larger than the immigrant or the ‘illegal’ population but that is rarely addressed (as a distinct class of persons) in the public debate on immigration” (p. 16). Outnumbering the growth of immigrants by 30 to 1 (p. 17), nonimmigrant adjustments quietly facilitate historic racial preferences for European migrants—representing 40 percent of this population (p. 39)—and are seemingly reflected in increased efforts at interior immigration enforcement.
Chapters Three and Four explore the veiled execution of Congressional immigration powers through the executive branch and state, county, and municipal authorities. Whereas traditional analyses of immigration policy trace Congressional power over immigrants, Kretsedemas looks to the “special powers of the executive office” (p. 50) as well as conceptions of “local sovereignty” (p. 92) leading to state and municipal laws affecting immigration enforcement, rental and business contracting, and hiring. These are stealth elements of immigration policy, crafting policy by managing the execution of laws at the executive level and dispersed to local authorities. The executive branch can affect immigration in numerous ways, including enforcement practices, granting relief from deportation, or securing labor. Kretsedemas lists the Bracero Program, Operation Wetback, and Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals as “creatures of discretionary executive authority” (p. 68). According to him, “Like the foreigner/newcomer, these are phenomena that are alien to the law, things that hail from a wider unknown” (p. 50). As well, local immigration policies and enforcement may also be consistent with federal legislation, but also counter to it, leading to ongoing tensions with federal authorities akin to struggles with “state’s rights” in the Jim Crow era.
In Chapter Five, Kretsedemas explores the transition from scientific racism to theories of multicultural pluralism, permitting nonwhite immigrants a pathway toward recognition and assimilation, but one with few guarantees of racial parity or protection from longstanding racial and ethnic hierarchical structures. He explores a range of thinkers of U.S. immigration and belonging, from Park and Huntington to Nietzche and Zizek to emphasize the importance of social theories and popular discourse about immigrants that often get ignored due to the economic determinism in immigration debates. As he points out, varying forms of liberal multiculturalism dovetail with neoliberal trends, facilitating the recruitment of nonwhite skilled immigrant labor and continued incorporation of unskilled nonwhite labor with the presumption, even structural preservation, of their marginality.
Finally, Kretsedemas expresses deep concerns about the status quo in mainstream immigration debates, in particular the “proimmigration, proenforcement formula” (p. 141) popular with all administrations over the last forty years. If the contemporary debate about comprehensive immigration reform remains grounded in this formula—that is, securing labor, maybe granting amnesty of some sort, and beefing up the border—then there will be little change in the national approach to immigration. But if we consider some of the blind spots explored thoughtfully in The Immigration Crucible, then shifts in immigration policy might be more dramatic—that is, comprehensive and reformative—and the debate will be more complex, contradictory, and productive.