Abstract
It is no secret that the United States is a rough place for immigrants these days. A decade ago, public debate focused on undocumented immigrants and DREAMers. Today, top Trump administration officials like Stephen Miller seek to restrict not just undocumented immigration but legal immigration as well, transforming the debate so that many people are publicly questioning whether immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, should be welcome in the United States at all. Immigrant families languish in camps at the U.S.-Mexico border, parents separated from their young children, some of whom have died in U.S. custody. And in recent months, the Trump administration has expanded the so-called “Muslim ban” to include six more countries from which travelers are restricted and has made it harder for poor immigrants to obtain green cards.
Media coverage of the politics of immigration in Washington, DC, including coverage of Trump administration policies, is plentiful. But if we base our understanding of the politics of immigration in the United States on media coverage alone, we might imagine that immigrants themselves are merely victims of an anti-immigrant administration and an anti-immigrant national climate, rather than citizens and residents who are actively combatting these realities. This relative lack of attention to immigrant rights activism makes Walter J. Nicholls’s new book, The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship, important, even just as a corrective to media accounts that often focus more on Trump than on the immigrants he seeks to exclude.
But this book is much more than just a simple corrective to incomplete media accounts of the politics of immigration. It delves deeply into the boundaries of citizenship and the heated struggles during the last thirty years over where those boundaries should lie. In particular, it highlights how many of these battles began in local contexts before scaling up into a national social movement.
In the 1990s, ethnonationalists sought to restrict immigrants from settling in their towns and neighborhoods by passing local ordinances banning actions like soliciting work in public or the use of foreign languages in public records. But these restrictions had unanticipated costs for those who desired them. “The countless small acts of denial, disrespect, and discrimination—whether at a bank, a service counter, a school, a sidewalk, or a job—reinforced stigma and feelings of marginalization” among immigrants in these localities (p. 6). The aggressions experienced by immigrants in their daily lives unintentionally produced in-group solidarity, which planted the seeds for resistance, both at the local level and, eventually, at the national level as well.
Nicholls’s arguments are rooted in a variety of data sources, from interviews with immigrant rights organizers to newspaper accounts to documents from advocacy organizations, all of which are detailed in a thorough methodological appendix. The book is divided into two parts, with the first covering the local origins of the movement from the late 1980s to the early 2000s and the second chronicling the rise of the national immigrant rights movement since the early 2000s. This approach allows Nicholls to trace not only how the national immigrant rights movement developed, but also the various disagreements that emerged among immigrant rights activists along the way, illuminating the roads not taken in framing the movement’s goals and the notions of citizenship undergirding its claims.
This is where the book’s true value lies. Its careful excavation of how local struggles forged solidarity that created possibilities for wider-scale engagement demonstrates the constant tension faced by activists seeking to “change the hearts and minds of average Americans” (p. 13). To speak to people’s hearts and minds, you have to use cultural repertoires that will resonate with them. But this places one squarely within dominant frameworks, making it difficult to challenge the systems of oppression that created the problem to begin with. By depicting immigrants as worthy of rights because of their supposedly “American” qualities, “a movement for the rights of foreigners was paradoxically transformed into another political force contributing to the reproduction of national citizenship” (p. 13). But, as the book shows, this type of movement framing was not the only choice. Many activists opposed the growing movement’s adoption of liberal nationalist discourses of immigrant rights. As a result, the movement’s nationalization process included fragmentations that created critics not only from the right, but from the left as well.
One of the more fascinating parts of the book explores how funding shaped the growing movement’s framing and tactics, an understudied yet essential part of understanding social movements. The book uncovers how moving from local, grassroots organizing models to national politics requires increased capital, capacity, and expertise, typically pushing social movements to rely on funding from foundations. The most prominent funders gave money to immigrant rights organizations that advanced the funders’ strategic priorities—not just in issue focus, but also in organizing style. Funders favored professionalized organizations with access to political elites and wanted them to avoid the kind of unruly behavior that might lead to loss of that access. The book’s insights about the tradeoff between seeking resources and influence and maintaining commitment to more ambitious goals and disruptive tactics are relevant for social movements well beyond the immigrant rights movement. The book doesn’t offer an answer to this conundrum, but it sheds light on the consequences of prioritizing certain choices over others, providing the level of detail that allows readers to draw their own conclusions about what activists should have done instead, or what they ought to do in the future.
The book wraps up on a somewhat dispiriting note, arguing that while Trump’s election had the potential to galvanize immigrant rights activists, it has instead “blown open fault lines between different factions and closed down all room for negotiation” (p. 225). Mainstream activists continue to insist that immigrants are worthy because they are “good Americans,” while more radical activists demand the abolition of ICE. This internal division has made it difficult for immigrant rights activists to connect with other anti-Trump activists; and without large numbers of new activists joining the fight, immigrant rights leaders are experiencing burnout.
If Trump is reelected, will fear unify the movement, or will it cause remaining activists to lose hope, leading to further movement abeyance? And if Trump is defeated, will the new president have enough support in Congress to pass the types of immigration reform that a wide range of activists seeks? Whatever happens in the 2020 election, the divisions between right and left—and within the immigrant rights movement itself—mean we can expect local and national battles over immigrant rights to continue. Students, scholars, and the general public seeking a trustworthy guide to understanding these battles will be well served by Nicholls’s book, which will remain a powerful and relevant resource for comprehending U.S. immigration politics for years to come.