Abstract
In Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law, Dr. Angela García contributes to the literature on immigration enforcement by showing how immigrants respond to pro- and anti-immigrant policy at the local scale. The book’s most direct target is attrition through enforcement. As discussed in Chapter 3, “attrition through enforcement” is a mosaic of anti-immigrant policies implemented by state and local jurisdictions across the United States and is animated by the idea that creating an inhospitable pro-enforcement climate will compel immigrants to leave a given jurisdiction or even the country itself. In Legal Passing, for instance, we learn that Escondido, California, limited undocumented immigrants’ access to rental properties, partnered with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to create an arrest-to-deportation pipeline, and used so-called quality-of-life property ordinances as a pretext to police Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. Immigrants in Escondido experienced these strategies as a “heightened sense of deportability” (115). This is attrition through enforcement par excellence. But do attrition-through-enforcement policies work as intended? And what are their effects on immigrants’ lives?
To answer these questions, Legal Passing first uses a set of multi-sited surveys and follow-up interviews to contrast the effects of state policies on Mexican migrants at a time when Oklahoma implemented anti-immigrant policies and California implemented more accommodating policies. The survey results indicate that Oklahoma’s attrition-style policies did not lead to relocation or shorter stays, contrary to expectations. The surveys also show that across three California cities—Anaheim (anti-immigrant), Inglewood (neutral), and Los Angeles (welcoming)—city-level policies did not determine immigrants’ destination or duration of stay either. The main take-away here, supported by interview data, is that although immigrants’ social lives are unquestionably affected by local policy (a point taken up later in the book), anti-immigrant policies do not necessarily lead immigrants to “self-deport.” Economic and social factors, as well as the legally contested status of these policies, are stronger than policy at binding immigrants to place.
The results are convincing, and it struck me how creative, yet rare, this approach is in research on local enforcement. It was sophisticated, and it drew on multi-sited and multi-scalar policy analysis, and first-hand observations within immigrant communities. It was also confusing. For example, Chapter 2 provides a clearly articulated description of two key research sites: Escondido, with a history of anti-immigrant policies, and Santa Ana, with pro-immigrant, “sanctuary city”-style policies. Chapter 3, however, immediately cuts away, focusing on entirely different sites and scales, each of which requires its own cramped introduction and policy analysis in order to set up the surveys. Chapter 4 takes us back to Escondido and Santa Ana, but the cities are re-introduced such that on page 100, the reader is still learning basic information about 287(g), Secure Communities, and the Priority Enforcement Program—three policies that form the backbone of local immigration enforcement. It’s not that Legal Passing gets any of this wrong; the disappointment is that it gets so much spot-on but also tries to cover too much territory (literally and figuratively) without a structure that would have made it possible.
That said, Chapters 5 and 6 form an exceptional crux to the book. To understand how immigrants’ lives are shaped by “attrition through enforcement” policies, Legal Passing introduces (belatedly) its core concept. Legal passing is “a normalized way of being and thinking in hostile destinations, simultaneously contributes to cultural assimilation…and [yet] detracts from well-being” (174). In practice, legal passing is a way of conceptualizing immigrants’ self-conscious adjustment of what they do, how they dress, what kind of car they drive, and how they think in order to avoid contact with law enforcement. It implies a recognition of the racialized and class dimensions of how police target undocumented immigrants. Collectively, these nuanced practices of legal passing are created and proliferated through social networks and are passed down from parents to children and from older to younger siblings in ways that virtually guarantee, sadly, multi-generational disciplinarity and social control. It points both to the law’s power to structure everyday life and to the slippage between the law’s alleged intent and its effects.
Legal passing—or “looking less illegal,” as one respondent says (151)—is a productive and provocative concept. In the book, legal passing is rooted in Goffman’s research on the ‘presentation of self,’ but the concept might be much more fertile alongside a theoretically robust account of immigrant social and racial control, governmentality, and the navigation of “risk and surveillance” (167). Legal Passing implies these connections, but there is considerable opportunity to work them out in future publications.
Although the book’s structure was challenging and key points fell short of more developed theoretical arguments, Legal Passing productively challenges and deepens our understanding of the effects of local immigration enforcement policy.