Abstract
Ever since Donald Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign with a sulfurous tirade against Mexican immigrants, immigration—a battleground in U.S. politics for over half a century— has been at the crux of the right wing’s nativist agenda to “Make America Great Again.” Under the guises of protecting national security from Islamist terrorism, bringing jobs back to Americans, or providing health care only to qualifying U.S. citizens, the Trump administration undertook over 400 executive actions on immigration—changes that include border and interior enforcement, refugee resettlement and the asylum system, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the immigration courts, and vetting and visa processes (Pierce and Bolter 2020). These changes irreversibly transformed U.S. immigration to an even more restrictionist regime and have unleashed humanitarian crises that have affected some of the most innocent and vulnerable: 545 migrant children separated from their families at the border are still missing their parents, who were deported and now cannot be located (Dickerson 2020a). And U.S. border authorities have expelled migrant children from other countries indiscriminately to Mexico, where the children are not likely to have any family (Dickerson 2020b).
Yet 47.2 percent of voters—arguably almost half the country—cast their ballots in favor of Trump in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, narrowing the margin of Biden’s victory to but 3.8 percent (CNN 2020). Even more paradoxically, these voters were not only white non-college-educated men—the most receptive audience to the “immigrant threat narrative” (Milkman 2020)—but also included more Latino, Asian, and black voters than in 2016 (The New York Times 2020, 2016; al-Gharbi 2020). Regardless of the explanations that pundits will surely offer in the years to come, the signs that we see now are clear. Despite overwhelming evidence that the economic benefits of immigration outweigh its costs, the right-wing narrative that immigrants are to blame for the economic anxieties of Americans—hardships that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic—has secured an ever-more-formidable hold on mainstream society and politics. Like it or not, the “politics of resentment” empowered by the four years of the Trump presidency is here to stay.
Ruth Milkman’s Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat presents a forceful argument against the immigrant threat narrative, meticulously dismantling its central logic and the perception that immigrants (read: non-white “foreigners”) are taking Americans’ (especially white, working-class Americans’) jobs away. The central argument of the book is that while low-wage immigration and the deteriorating situation of the U.S. working class are indeed intricately intertwined, immigration is not the “cause either of the massive economic restructuring that began in the 1970s or of the accompanying growth of economic inequality and labor degradation; rather, the influx of low-wage immigrants was a consequence of those developments” (p. 12). In other words, contrary to the right wing’s nativist propaganda, the causal link goes from economic restructuring in the United States to the inflow of low-skilled immigration, not the other way around.
Based on this key argument, the book seems to have two objectives. One is social justice-oriented, which is to provide a counternarrative to the immigrant threat discourse. The other, an intellectual objective, is to demonstrate that millions of immigrant workers did enter the bottom rung of the U.S. labor market, but that they did so after employers had degraded the conditions and wages to such a degree that U.S.-born workers rejected them wholesale and exited entire sectors in massive numbers.
Milkman makes this intellectual argument over the course of five substantive chapters bracketed by an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter begins in the twenty-first century with Milkman critically interrogating the popular claim that “immigrants are taking away Americans’ jobs.” Similar to the dynamics that many other scholars have also observed (Piore 1979; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Waldinger and Lichter 2003), Milkman shows that low-wage immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, are concentrated in a limited number of occupations and industries and hardly ever compete with U.S.-born workers, who reject most “brown-collar jobs” as unacceptable.
The book’s second chapter sets this immigration debate in historical perspective to show that it was the United States, driven by employer demand in the nineteenth century, that actively recruited foreign-born workers to fill the low-wage and low-skill jobs that U.S.-born workers refused. The chapter traces the consequences of the New Deal, as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, previously relegated to the bottom of the labor market, were able to move into the social and economic mainstream because of a revitalized and more inclusive labor movement. It closes just as the New Deal began to unravel in the late twentieth century and the demand for low-wage immigrant labor again surged in the face of rising income inequality.
Chapter Three picks up this thread, but with a focus on gender. As employment conditions worsened and wages declined in several industries—industries with predominantly male workers—U.S.-born workers abandoned those jobs. Immigrants were quick to fill those positions and replace them. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986, which aimed to stem undocumented migration, ended up unintentionally exacerbating it instead. The degradation of employment conditions at the end of the twentieth century caused a resurgence of demand for low-wage labor also in the female-employing service sector. And Chapter Four shifts the focus to what was unfolding in these industries during that time. African American women began leaving low-wage domestic jobs just as growing income inequality, rising maternal employment, and the population age led to an increase in demand for care labor. Newly arrived Latinx and Caribbean immigrant women, especially those unauthorized, soon replaced them. As economic disparities continued to widen, services such as high-end restaurants and nail salons—labor sectors that thus far had been the domain of African American women—became increasingly affordable for the affluent, thereby expanding the demand for low-wage labor in those industries. The influx of Latinx and Southeast Asian immigrant women, eager for a foothold in the United States by taking any job available, filled those positions.
It is admirable how effortlessly Ruth Milkman narrates these complex historical trajectories. The pieces fall so neatly in this seemingly predetermined course of events that one wonders at this point in the book about the agency of the people involved. As if to preemptively address the reader’s question, Milkman devotes the last substantive chapter to how immigrant workers themselves struggled to improve their pay and working conditions. Contrary to employers’ perceptions that immigrants, especially those who are unauthorized, would avoid risking their livelihoods by joining unions and workplace protests, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries showed that foreign-born workers were more engaged in labor movements than their U.S.-born counterparts.
So, what exactly is “new” about the “New Precariat”? Milkman does not directly answer this question. As both Milkman and other immigration scholars have noted, the immigrant threat narrative as championed by Trump is not new. Despite the richly nuanced and detailed substantive chapters, the reader already steeped in immigration scholarship struggles to determine what exactly is novel or surprising about the book’s premise and arguments. Several times throughout the book, Milkman states that “the primary driver of labor migration, past and present, is economic demand” (p. 13). And the book meticulously provides evidence to support this claim. However, this explanation of migration is arguably one-dimensional, when in fact scholarship recognizes that the sources of migration are multi-dimensional. These multi-faceted accounts undoubtedly include economic factors, such as the mobilization of migration by receiving-state employers, but also encompass other aspects of globalization.
To this reader, from a strictly scholarly perspective, this overemphasis on economics comes at the expense of other important, related dimensions, namely geopolitics, which has generated a population of 79.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide (UNHCR 2020). Milkman, however, places geopolitics firmly on the sidelines. Geopolitics is hardly ever discussed but for a cursory mention in the introduction, when Milkman notes in parenthesis, after the above quote on economic demand, “refugees fleeing war, violence, ethnic cleansing, political persecution, climate change, or natural disasters are another matter” (p. 13).
Yet these geopolitical dimensions are intricately tied to the immigrant threat narrative. In Trump’s announcement speech for his presidential candidacy in which he denounced Mexican and Chinese immigrants for ostensibly taking Americans’ jobs away, words like “Islamic terrorism,”“the Middle East,”“Syria,” and “Iraq” came but four sentences later (The Washington Post 2015). And Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” came but six months after he launched his presidential campaign with that speech. Other Republican candidates quickly followed suit. Catering to the right-wing populist surge, Ted Cruz, for instance, pushed for religious tests to vet incoming Syrian refugees into the United States, showing a willingness to allow entry to those who were Christian but not those who were Muslim (Sorkin 2015). Given that one of this book’s goals is to counter the immigrant threat narrative, the omission of the geopolitical dimension is arguably a glaring gap in the analysis.
Geopolitical causes are important to consider also because they include facets of migrant agency. Even those migrants who are considered “unskilled” are not pawns on a checkerboard being moved around by bosses who deploy labor as they wish or by unions leaders struggling to mobilize the working class; rather, these migrants are people who take initiative and assume the risks entailed in moving across state borders in order to better their lives and those of their families (Hagan, Hernández-León, and Demonsant 2015). Migrant agency explains why once started, migrations are so difficult to stop: migration networks take on a dynamic of their own, in which migrants (and refugees) do not simply support the arrival of those left behind but use their contacts and newly acquired competencies to branch out to better jobs beyond those for which they were recruited. Even when migrants are most controlled—as in guest-worker programs—some tend to drop out and strike out on their own. The book does acknowledge the importance of migrants’ social networks, but only in the context of their facilitating role in immigrant labor organizing by unions. This one-dimensional attention at times feels constricting.
In addition, similarly to a significant selection of works in immigration studies, this book focuses much too narrowly on the hostland. Consequently, it also overlooks how events unfolding outside the United States nonetheless influence contexts within it by disrupting the larger international order (I call these “exogenous shocks”; see Shams 2020). For instance, Trump’s “America First” agenda was, at the core, also a reaction to what was going on outside the hostland’s border. Neoliberalism and market competition, made even more intense by globalization, have led to the outsourcing of various manufacturing and service-sector jobs to peripheral and semi-peripheral countries. This dynamic has fueled Trump’s narrative of “bringing back jobs to America,” a slogan at the heart of his populist propaganda. Moreover, Trump’s reactionary platform that incited America’s politics of resentment emerged at a time when other parts of the world were also undergoing a resurgence of right-wing populism. The United Kingdom’s decision to “Brexit” from the European Union, for example, was a reaction against immigration and globalization. Had this book added a global dimension, it could have taken an all-too-familiar narrative on U.S. immigration in a new analytical direction and provided both scholars of migration and left-wing politicians (arguably two of the book’s main audiences) with new insight to understand the current face of U.S. immigration.
These observations, however, should not distract from what is clearly the book’s most important contribution, which is translating the scholarly, often abstract, and taken-for-granted discourses about immigrants and labor migration to audiences beyond the ivory tower. This becomes especially clear in the conclusion, in which Milkman calls for a “left-wing populist” approach. Milkman urges that instead of rejecting the low-wage immigrant who arrived in the United States due to the very neoliberal structuring that has also caused the degradation of the American working class, U.S.-born workers should direct their rage at employers who have diminished the quality of working conditions in previously desirable jobs and at the political system that is driven primarily by business interests.
Indeed, a strength of this book is that it speaks to academics and non-academics alike. For the reader just beginning to enter the field of immigration scholarship, this short, easy-to-read book breaks down the key issues, debates, and history of U.S. immigration and delves into issues that regularly appear in the news. For progressive politicians, policy-makers, and activists, this book offers a powerful counternarrative to the immigrant threat discourse. Its forceful argument, written in a style that can appeal to a general audience, gives progressives the tools to cultivate a left-wing populism, which Milkman argues is not only more “humane” (p. 19) but also represents the common interests of all working people far more than the right-wing alternative. Moreover, Milkman’s careful documentation of labor migration and how it has historically intersected with class, gender, and race make Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat an essential read, one that will likely be a staple in graduate and undergraduate introductory immigration courses for years to come.