Mixed signals: Understanding the democratic work of narratives in pro-immigrant protests across local policy environments

Abstract

The question of how to alter undemocratic environments from within is a central concern of activists and theorists interested in radical democratic change. Illuminating this issue, geographers and others have studied how immigrant rights activists make claims in hostile environments. This scholarship tends to privilege the work of organizations in national or specific metropolitan contexts. We broaden the discussion by attending to hostility in subnational immigration policy environments across the United States and by comparing the “narrative signals” that protesters send in more and less hostile environments, regardless of organizational affiliation. Results show that narratives are shaped by the environments in which they circulate. In hostile environments, however, narrative signals include a broader variety of justifications than the extant literature emphasizes. In such environments, activists justify protest both with appeals to notions of universal human rights and with more limited articulations of community concerns and specific immigrants’ attributes. We argue that while the type of narrative justifications observed in more hostile local environments can undermine democratic politics, they can also disrupt official orderings and contribute to more robust public formation around immigrant rights. Where dehumanizing policy is sharpest, they can amplify immigrant voices in the public sphere and they can draw in participants who might otherwise see themselves as disconnected from immigrant rights struggles. In shedding new light on the geography of environment-narrative dynamics, this article contributes to ongoing explorations of emplaced experiences of political work and the democratic potential of that work in hostile environments.

Keywords

Democracy local immigration policy immigrant rights movements narratives hostile political environments

Introduction

In the United States, depoliticizing mechanisms associated with neoliberalization (e.g., Swyngedouw, 2007, 2010; Mouffe, 2005) dovetail with efforts to delegitimize the claims-making of immigrants (e.g., Nicholls, 2013; Finley and Esposito, 2019). In this context, public attention is directed away from dynamics that produce inequality and hardship; animosity is directed at symptomatic “threats” that, it is argued, must be excised. Immigrants are often targeted by such rhetoric and the policies it ratifies. Though the Trump administration was arguably a particularly overt and intense iteration, U.S. immigration policy, past and present, often makes migrants vulnerable to intersecting exclusionary, extractive, and punitive tactics including deportation and detention, unstable and exploitative employment, denial of public services, and discrimination in multiple spheres (Menjívar and Kanstroom, 2013; Paret, 2014). In addition to these hardships which can have a chilling effect on participation in public life (e.g., Coleman, 2012a; Nguyen and Gill, 2016), dehumanizing rhetoric and policy portraying migrants as “polluting agents” undercut rights claims and delegitimize attempts to make such claims at all (Nicholls, 2013).

Scholars of immigrant rights movements argue that although activists pursue more just arrangements despite these barriers, activists’ efforts are shaped by the hostile environment in which they work. We focus in particular on the work of Walter Nicholls, who has done extensive work on the impact of national hostility on the narratives and frames produced by activists (e.g., Nicholls, 2014; Nicholls and Uitermark, 2019). Nicholls (2013) argues that hostile environments constrain the narratives circulated; the more hostile the environment, the more likely activists are to develop nationalistic narrative claims for deservingness in which immigrants are portrayed as conforming to national norms.

We find these arguments compelling. But in this article, we extend existing analyses of the dynamic relationship between protesters’ work and environment by broadening our focus to include narratives not necessarily connected to singular social movement organizations and by providing more granular insight into the environments in which protesters operate. This allows us to see more clearly how people’s experiences in place shape their political work. Mapping “narrative signals” generated through widespread protests across an uneven geography of immigration enforcement policy reveals how protesters across the United States articulate and legitimate their claims in relation to their particular local policy environments. In shedding new light on the relationship between the geography of immigration enforcement policy and protesters’ narrative signals—particularly their scalar and emplaced themes—we contribute to ongoing explorations of the possibilities for democratic work in hostile environments.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we position our study in relation to key arguments in the democracy and immigrant rights movements literatures. Following the presentation of our data and methods, we show where protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, the federal agency responsible for enforcement of immigration laws) occur in relation to county-level cooperation with ICE. We then explain how protesters justify speaking out across unevenly hostile environments. We find a wide variety of signals used. While there are overlaps, we see markedly different themes emerge in the most- and least-hostile environments. In hostile environments, protest is often justified through appeals to both universal and community-based norms. We discuss how our findings resonate with existing theoretical arguments; but also argue that subnational variation within the generally hostile nation fosters more and different narrative options for legitimizing claims than is typically described. The combination of narrative signals observed in hostile environments may not resonate with dominant models of radical democratic action (Mouffe, 2005; Ranciere, 2001). However, it does potentially support the important democratic process of public formation. To conclude, we point to the dynamism of the relationship between narrative, environment, and political possibility. We suggest that even imperfect openings can lead to more and different kinds of action.

Narrative, environment, and democratic work for immigrant rights

Geographers and others interested in democratic threats from neoliberalization have pointed to a suite of governance techniques that cut off possibilities for political contestation in general. These techniques include shifting responsibility for properly political questions to quasi-public governance bodies insulated from political pressure, instituting sham consensus-oriented engagement processes disconnected from circuits of decision-making, circulating narratives that paper over the inherent conflicts associated with political issues by framing them as personal and/or technical problems, and pointing to supposedly external, ostensibly shared crises as a means to manufacture (false) social unity and support for non-democratic “solutions” (Mouffe, 2005; Žižek, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2007). As Swyngedouw (2010: 222) argues, in this “post-political” environment, problems are not positioned as “the result of the ‘system,’ of unevenly distributed power relations, of implicit or explicit silences and marginalization, of the networks of control and influence, of rampant injustices, or of a fatal flow inscribed in the system, but are blamed on an outsider, a ‘pathological’ syndrome that can be cut out without affecting the functioning of the system.”

These dynamics impede transformative political contestation across the board, but are especially detrimental to the political work of particular groups. The figure of the “immigrant,” for instance, is commonly invoked in post-political narratives as a contaminant from outside that threatens the health of the social body. Dealing with such “contaminants,” it is suggested, does not require internal political contestation over the systemic features that produce unjust arrangements; indeed, democratic practices are portrayed as far too slow and uncertain to meet the urgency of the threat. Instead, the health of the social body can only be restored by excising the contaminant. As a result, people associated with the “pathological syndrome” that Swyngedouw describes are often not only denied membership to the national community but also treated as polluting agents with no legitimate claim to basic human rights and no legitimate voice in the public sphere.

Scholars of immigrant rights struggles have argued that efforts to justify immigrant rights claims are particularly influenced by national institutions, discourses, and understandings of immigrant inclusion and/or exclusion from the broader community (Koopmans et al., 2005; Giugni and Passy, 2004: 52–53). Undocumented migrants and their allies are often portrayed as threats to the sanctity of the United States and the nation’s rule of law. These narratives work in concert with national policies that produce precarity and position immigrants outside of state protection. Those fighting for immigrant rights therefore operate within a national environment that limits options for constructing effective legitimizing frames (e.g., Bloemraad et al., 2016).

Even under these circumstances, however, immigrants have unsettled existing orders (Zepeda Millan, 2017). Scholars of immigrant rights activism have extensively documented a constantly evolving array of tactics aimed at challenging state regulation of citizenship, rights, and belonging (Patler, 2018; Lauby, 2016; Unzueta Carrasco and Seif, 2014). Scholars attending to post-political conditions note the potential for rupture when migrants appear in public to declare, “We are here, therefore we are from here” (Swyngedouw, 2021: 493). As Swyngedouw argues, this act of presence simultaneously demonstrates the exclusionary nature of hegemonic frameworks for democratic inclusion. In taking up this work, and in a multitude of other ways, immigrants actively shape the conditions of their lives and the contours of publicly circulated narratives.

Given the difficulties and limits described above, however, questions remain about how to construct counternarratives that effectively challenge existing orders. Radical democratic theorists, wary of depoliticizing techniques that stifle contestation, prescribe various mechanisms for surfacing conflict and challenging hegemonic arrangements. Rancière, for example, argues that democracy requires disruption of the established order which distributes names and places to people and things. The rupture of this ostensibly “natural” order, the “partition of the sensible,” is accomplished through disidentification as those who have no part give voice to their equality and refuse to observe the existing order (Rancière, 2001: 6, 8).

Such arguments are perhaps insufficiently sensitive to the needs of emplaced movements. For instance, Nicholls (2013) asserts that while Rancière’s arguments are compelling, his assumptions about the power of disidentification are faulty because “[i]ncreasingly xenophobic environments limit the range of discursive options available to rights claimants” (84). He draws on Dikeç’s work to argue that if those constructing immigrant rights narratives “are to gain recognition as legitimate ‘voices’ and avoid being dismissed as impossible ‘noises,’ they must construct representations of immigrants and their cause in ways that cohere with the core normative and moral values of the nation” (Nicholls, 2013: 84). We similarly embrace a broader account of what actual political work in particular places may look like.

Extant literature tends to focus attention on how a hostile national environment pressures activists to legitimize protest through earned deservingness narratives that emphasize how (some) immigrants conform to existing mores, specifically at the national (rather than universal) scale (e.g., Nicholls and Uitermark, 2019). Conforming to these norms is easier for some immigrants than for others, reinforcing a “moral economy of deservingness” (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012: 242; Lauby, 2016) that marks immigrants as deserving of national membership based on the extent to which they demonstrate cultural assimilation and economic contribution (Motomura, 2012; Yukich, 2013). Even though this strategy produces and widens fissures within the immigrant rights movement, it can seem necessary given the hostile national environment in which activists work. Identification with the (national) in-group allows those who already belong according to official orderings to see “outcasts” as more like themselves, and thus human. This recognition of humanity is necessary for the recognition of human rights violations. In this way, the private concerns of immigrants are translated into public, political problems and public debate on immigrant rights becomes legitimate.

Participation in this moral economy of deservingness is primarily a product of the organizing strategies of professional immigrant rights associations. Among others, Nicholls (2013) describes how asymmetries in social and political capital allow these organizations to “assume control over how representations of immigrants are constructed and articulated” (85–86). Immigrant rights organizations expend considerable energy controlling narratives circulated by activists—expressing the organization’s prognostic and motivational frames—because political success is assumed to depend upon delivering convincing and consistent messages (Benford and Snow, 2000).

This discussion foregrounds the environmentally contingent nature of activist narratives. Political narratives respond to the openings and limitations presented by existing conditions, even as they seek to alter those conditions (Nicholls and Uitermark, 2019). But the tendency in the social movements literature to focus primarily on national (and sometimes discrete urban, e.g., Leitner and Strunk (2014)) environments potentially makes it more difficult to see patterned effects of environmental variations that can significantly affect the political work of protest and narrative production. An important exception is Burciaga and Martinez (2017), though their comparison still focuses on just three major metropolitan areas.

In this article, we broaden the discussion in two ways. First, expanding Burciaga and Martinez’s (2017) “localized political contexts,” rather than relying on an analysis of national or singular urban environments, we attend to differences in subnational political environments precipitated by profound variations in local immigration policy across the United States, specifically at the county level. The devolution of immigration enforcement is richly explored in geography and urban studies (e.g., Coleman, 2012a, 2012b; Nguyen and Gill, 2016; Varsanyi, 2008b). Largely at the municipal and county levels, officials have been enacting regulations and policies aimed at shaping immigrants’ presence and participation in economic, social, and political life. Sometimes these explicitly target migrants, usually undocumented migrants; other times, regulations are formulated with neutral language but disparate effects (Varsanyi, 2008a). In some places, policies are explicitly protective and civically inclusive, no matter citizenship or visa status; in other cases, they aim to limit immigrants’ presence and participation in local life (Walker and Leitner, 2011). With this devolution, subnational policies produce ageography of hostility that, while always influenced by the national context, is nevertheless quite uneven.

Many of these policies dictate how (particularly) county law enforcement and governments collaborate with ICE, or, alternatively, how they actively resist such collaboration (Avila et al., 2018). Though the threat from collaboration with ICE is clearest and most direct for undocumented migrants, ICE has detained legal immigrants and even U.S. citizens (e.g., ACLU Florida, 2019); their operations involve officials with the authority to use lethal violence in ways that are oppressive and disruptive to individuals (ACLU Florida, 2019) and also to entire communities (e.g., Nguyen and Gill, 2016). Additionally, county policies impact those who may not see themselves as directly affected by immigration enforcement because such policies are integral to the ordering work of determining who belongs and who does not, who deserves protections under the law and who does not, who has the right to make rights claims and who does not. As such, these county policies are a potentially important (though never singular) factor in the production of more or less hostile local environments in which protesters construct legitimizing narratives. County policies and practices are also potential targets of protesters’ attention, related to, but distinct from, national policy targets.

In a second departure from existing analyses, we move away from examining narratives and framing developed (and disciplined) primarily by established organizations. We value the deep engagement of scholars studying the work of immigrant rights organizations and the implications it has for movement building (e.g., Burciaga and Martinez, 2017; Lauby, 2016); however, our study provides a different lens through which to view democratic possibility. By analyzing how a broader set of actors explain their participation in disruptive events across uneven geographies of hostility to immigrants, we gain insight into the diversity of narrative signals that are voiced publicly and the emplaced nature of political work.

We are convinced of the importance of narrative in challenging conventional political agendas (Lejano et al., 2013: 59) such as local policies on cooperation with ICE. While this study cannot observe the “telling and retelling” of full network narratives (Lejano et al., 2013: 73), we examine a substantial number of what we call “narrative signals” produced by participants in anti-ICE protests as they describe their grievances and articulate why protest is justified. In taking this approach, we forgo analysis of frames that may emerge from narratives while remaining unstated (Lejano et al., 2013: 57), and instead follow Lejano et al. in embracing the importance of what is actually spoken out loud (2013: 54). Extending Leitner and Strunk (2014), this approach allows us to account for the narrative signals produced by many types of voices across many locations in moments of protest who are “engaging different publics (religious communities, unions, the larger public sphere, etc.) and the state (in its different institutions) in complex ways” (960).

Networked movement building (Lejano et al., 2013) and disciplined motivational framing (Benford and Snow, 2000) are not, of course, a guaranteed result of the sometimes-conflicting narrative signals we observe. But even when social movements do not emerge, we suggest that narratives can help people to make sense of their disparate environments and the openings for political intervention within them. By communicating why protest is warranted and how they envision alternatives, protesters’ narrative signals may call others into publics that, as John Dewey (1927) argues, come into existence as people recognize (and see themselves implicated in addressing) public problems. Empirical analysis of the extent to which different, and potentially conflicting, signals coexist is useful because it points to both the impediments protesters face and the ways they might attempt to overcome them. In pursuing this line of inquiry, we emphasize the need for political and geographic theory that is grounded in the emplaced experiences of people engaged in political work, even (and perhaps especially) when their understandings do not map easily onto narrow conceptions of radicality (Barnett and Bridge, 2013).

Data and methods

The data used in this study come from two sources: local policy environment data come from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) website and publications (Avila et al., 2018; ILRC, 2019) and narrative signals data come from news coverage of protests collected and indexed by the Count Love website (2019). These two sources allow us to analyze narrative signals across differentially hostile environments across the United States.

Hostile environments: County policies on cooperation with ICE

Among other research and advocacy programs, the ILRC tracks formal county involvement with ICE. Their index includes multiple policies restricting county resources from use in facilitating deportation processes (for details see Avila et al., 2018: 3–4, 27–28). The composite index ranges from 0, indicating the lowest barriers to local involvement with ICE (e.g., 287g program participation (Coleman, 2012a)), to 7, indicating the strongest prohibitions on cooperating with ICE. Aligning this with the language of Nicholls (2013), 0 indicates the most hostile environments, and 7 indicates the most hospitable ones.

These data have strengths and weaknesses for the current study. The data are internally consistent and quite comprehensive, covering 3015 of the 3140 counties and county equivalents (Avila et al., 2018: 9). Missing are sub-county municipal policies on cooperation with ICE and independent cities not part of any county (common in Virginia). Also hidden are overlapping jurisdictional conflicts. For example, a county where the sheriff’s office collaborates with ICE containing a city with more protective ordinances. The ILRC data certainly obscure some contextual nuance here, but we argue that county functions still often occur within city limits (e.g., operation of holding centers) and city ordinances are not so protective as to make the county context irrelevant. The ILRC also emphasizes that the index captures official policies, not necessarily actual practices (Avila et al., 2018: 5), which may stray from policy and vary across individual officials. Finally, these ICE-related policies exclude a broader set of local policies that can facilitate or limit immigrant participation in local economic, social, and political life (e.g., Walker and Leitner, 2011). Nevertheless, these data provide consistent information on a coherent set of policies that link well to threats migrants face daily and a common focus of immigration-related protests: ICE itself. These policies also clearly order official stories of who belongs and who does not, which involves everyone in how hostile or hospitable the local environment is.

Index values were shared by the ILRC and match the data underlying their online interactive map, current as of 22nd May 2019 (ILRC, 2019). In our analysis, we compare the two extremes of the ILRC scale: contrasting hospitable places (levels 5–7) and hostile ones (levels 0–2). While this approach hides some heterogeneity, it usefully allows broader patterns to emerge at the extremes of the local policy environment.

Relatively few counties strongly dissociate themselves from ICE: 124 counties have ILRC’s highest level (7) of immigrant protections, expanding to 199 counties when we include the top levels (5–7), or 7% of all counties. There are also few counties that go very far out of their way to cooperate actively with ICE: only 25 counties receive the lowest score on disentanglement (0). This picture changes dramatically when we expand to examine the top range of hostility (0–2): 2348 counties (78% of the total) provide substantial cooperation with federal deportation mechanisms. As Figure 1 shows, many more counties than not are doing ICE’s work for it (Avila et al., 2018: 14).

Figure 1.

Distribution of pro-immigrant protests, by local level of hostility. Source: Authors’ calculations and thematic coding using data from Count Love (2019) and ILRC (2019).

Narrative signals: Digital news coverage of protests

The website Count Love collects data on protests in the United States, aiming to provide a “factual record of ongoing demonstrations” since 20th January 2017 (Count Love, 2019: faq page). The data are constructed by crawling thousands of local newspaper, television, and radio websites daily for coverage of protests, then manually checking recording of the date, location, (conservatively recorded) attendance, and topical themes of each protest (for details, see Fisher et al., 2019). The website disseminates this information and includes links to the original news sources, mostly local newspapers and TV news stations for the protests analyzed here. This study uses data through 20th May 2019.

Count Love collects data on protests spurred by many issues, but we examined ones with the category tag “immigration” and the option of “curated protest data for a more compassionate country” (Count Love, 2019: search page). This results in a set of 2705 pro-immigrant protests between 25th January 2017 and 18th May 2019, roughly the first two and a half years of the Trump presidency. We further focus on a subset with the detailed subject tag of “Against ICE,” which yields 91 protests between 6th March 2017 and 18th May 2019.

To align with the ILRC index, we corrected recorded locations when necessary and matched the given locations (mostly cities and towns) to their home counties. Via the links on Count Love, we retrieved the coverage for all anti-ICE protests for which we could access the original reporting (n = 85).

The main coding focused on the justifications for protest, the “narrative signals” offered by protesters. We collected speech directly attributed to people associated with the protest; essentially this comprised every quoted protester voice (n = 132 individuals), in hospitable (26 of 43 protests) and hostile (16 of 24 protests) counties. Many of the quoted protesters were associated with organizations. The range was broad, including immigrant rights groups (local affiliates of broader national organizations, as well as independent groups), worker centers, student groups, anti-poverty groups, and religious leaders. However, many quotes were from unaffiliated individuals, including people directly affected by catalyzing events (e.g., family or neighbors of detained migrants), but also first-time protesters and many outraged by what they were seeing and who felt they just had to do something to express their dismay. This diverse set of voices defies characterization as a disciplined social movement organization, such as those often studied. This is broader and messier and can potentially provide new insights into democratic possibilities.

Though the coverage is necessarily mediated by news agencies, isolating protesters’ speech and combining all statements associated with each event allowed us to more closely examine how protesters spoke about their own work and to piece together narrative signals that emerged across multiple articles. Using a general inductive method (Thomas, 2006) we identified inherent categories found in the data themselves (Emerson et al., 2011), paying particular attention to the scalar and place-based aspects of how protesters revealed what had motivated them to protest and how they justified their protests. From initial codes that emerged from the protesters’ words, several rounds of subsequent analysis resulted in a set of ten main protest justifications: community concerns, earned protection, sanctity of family, human value, equality, justice, social aspirations, religious obligation, profit from ICE, and movement building (see Table 1 for more detail). This coding allowed us to produce summary counts of each justification in different policy environments, before analyzing the quotes more deeply.

Table 1.

Narrative justifications in anti-ICE protests, by local level of hostility.

	More hostile (levels 0–2)	Less hostile (levels 5–7)	Elaboration of themes
Percent of codable protests reporting each theme:
Community concerns	63%	23%	Who belongs, what should happen there, sense of place
Earned protection	50%	12%	People are deserving of protection due to their positive attributes
Sanctity of family	38%	35%	Unity and well-being of families is sacrosanct
Human value	38%	38%	Defense of dignity and rights that stem from shared humanity
Equality	13%	19%	Calls for equal treatment, often tied to racial justice
Profit from ICE	13%	15%	Dismay about making money from deportation processes
Justice	6%	31%	Protested actions/policies are unjust, broadly conceived
Social aspirations	6%	27%	“This is not who we are” or “who we should be” in the nation/society
Religious obligation	0%	8%	Protested actions/policies offend religion-based moral codes
Movement building	0%	12%	Articulations of motivational framing processes
Number of anti-ICE protests with thematic coding possible in news coverage	16 (of 24 total protests)	26 (of 43 total protests)

Source: Authors’ calculations and thematic coding using data from Count Love (2019) and ILRC (2019).

As with the policy data, these protest data have strengths and weaknesses. Among the weaknesses, Count Love’s automated web-crawling misses some portion of protests (Fisher et al., 2019: 8). Additionally, a particular protest must be big enough or otherwise “newsworthy” enough to gain coverage and consequently be recorded, a common issue for such “event catalogues” (Fisher et al., 2019: 2). This is surely compounded by the consolidation of news source ownership, shuttering of local news outlets, and dramatic decline in the number of newspaper journalists (Abernathy, 2018). One further challenge is that in working with the quotations in the original news sources, we surely lack a full picture of how every protester understands their protest efforts. However, there are also important strengths to note. First, the data are internally consistent and, while they do not observe the universe of protests, they do provide a substantial number of observations to engage. Second, even if this set of “newsworthy” protests is incomplete, it does represent the picture that is circulating publicly. Similarly, while the voices accessible through the often quite limited quotes are undoubtedly a small subset, they are the narrative signals publicly circulating at and about these protests. For these reasons, we find these data to be a valuable source for this study.

Results

The 2705 pro-immigrant protests in our data have taken place in all fifty states, as well as Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, and in 640 (about 20%) of counties. In varying forms and sizes, and with different foci, pro-immigrant protests have been meaningfully widespread across the country. Among the anti-ICE protests, almost three-quarters occurred in the most- and least-hostile counties. Figure 1 shows that compared to the overall distribution of counties, anti-ICE protests are overrepresented in hospitable places (47% of protests compared to 7% of counties) and underrepresented in hostile places (26% of protests, 78% of counties).

Table 1 provides a summary of the narrative signals offered in anti-ICE protests. Some justifications are represented relatively equally across the two policy environments. These include the sanctity of family and human value. Notably, neither justification rests on national identification. However, there were also themes more prominent in one environment or the other. For example, in hospitable counties, narratives mobilizing the moral imperative to seek justice (31%), social aspirations (27%), religious obligations (8%), and movement building (12%) were more common (versus 0–6% in hostile places). In hostile counties, community concerns (63%) and immigrants’ earned protection (50%) were raised more frequently than in hospitable places (23% and 12%, respectively).

Compared to literature linking hostility with a singular rhetorical focus on conformity with national norms, these results suggest a more complicated relationship between immigrant rights narratives and the environments in which they are produced. As anticipated by the literature studying environmental influences on narrative production and framing, we see markedly different justifications for protest in the most- and least-hostile environments. However, we see both different and more varied justifications than the existing literature might lead us to expect. In hostile counties, we see competing signals, many of which show identification with norms not specifically tied to the nation state.

Drilling down, we now focus on the most prevalent narrative signals produced in hostile counties (ILRC 0–2).

Sanctity of family and human value

As is clear from Table 1, the sanctity of family and references to human value were widely used to justify protest in hostile counties. In sanctity of family narratives, the value of the intact family is presented as a natural fact, beyond the scope of national regulation. The well-being of families therefore takes precedence over political and/or juridical designations that might separate parents from their children. This is apparent in the comments of a protest organizer in Waterville, ME (2)¹:

There are a lot of avenues [to address immigrants’ rights issues], but the avenue we’re taking this weekend is in a peaceful way, on a day we celebrate mothers and children, to raise our voices against an inhumane policy where (the United States) takes children away from their families and puts them places. So (this rally) is looking at it more as a humanitarian problem, not a political problem. (Robbins, 2019)

Even broader than family-centered justifications, protesters also framed their work as a defense of dignity and rights that stem from shared humanity, rather than the state. Some protest narratives expressed the concern for human value by explicitly marking the need for social equality and particularly racial equality. Others emphasized placing the needs of people over profits, particularly profits generated through collaboration with ICE. As with family narratives, human value narratives justified protest by insisting that there is a “higher law” that should be adhered to in the face of local or national violations of human rights. In Grand Rapids, MI (2), for instance, protesters rejected local law enforcement’s collaboration with ICE on the grounds that ICE regularly engaged in human rights violations.

Where is (the sheriff’s office’s) original mission statement that we will collaborate with an organization that’s kidnapping children? That’s going against human rights, that’s going against the Geneva Convention. (Kransz, 2018)

Such universal narratives build upon, but also extend, the concerns articulated in sanctity of family narratives by explicitly recognizing the value of all human life and the importance of defending associated rights.

Earned protection and community concerns

A second type of narrative signal that emerged strongly in hostile counties focused attention on the positive attributes of immigrants themselves. These narratives essentially argue that the migrants targeted by ICE deserve protection because of their particular personal qualities, community contributions, or life experiences. Some narratives emphasized contributions to society and respectability as when a protester in Las Vegas, NV (2) argued against the practice of detaining immigrants: “[These immigrants] are not criminals. They are family members, they are fathers, they have a job” (Sadler, 2019).

Other narratives highlighted the hardships that immigrants have endured as grounds for compassionate inclusion into U.S. society, and for protesting policies that instill fear in people who have already suffered so much. Speaking of her parents who brought her to the United States when she was three, one protester in Pittsburgh, PA (2) justified her work this way: “They sacrificed so much and like I said, they got through constant [expletive] every day, and I can’t just sit around and not do anything” (Grant, 2018).

Deservingness narratives position immigrants as placed in situations beyond their immediate control and/or as rational and ethical decision-makers doing the best they can under difficult circumstances. In this narrative, a protester in Flagstaff, AZ (1) spoke of her brother who committed suicide while in ICE custody, and her mother who first migrated to the United States:

How would you like to be told that your brother’s suicide was justifiable because he was brought here when he was 2 years old? And it was against the law because his mom was looking for a better life, to give him a better life? (Buffon, 2018)

In the most hostile counties, this type of non-universal rights justification was often coupled with narrative signals that foreground the relationship of immigrants and immigrant enforcement to community life. Protesters described the ways in which the presence of ICE violated protesters’ sense of place and undercut collective safety.

In Las Vegas, NV (2), protesters described their city as unrecognizable without immigrants: “Las Vegas would not be what it is without our immigrants – documented and undocumented” (Sadler, 2019). Anything that jeopardized the well-being of immigrants was therefore suspect, including collaboration between local law enforcement and ICE. Rejecting the possibility of more collaboration and drawing on a sense of citizenship rooted in community participation, one protester explained, “We don’t want that to happen because that’s how we put fear in our citizens” (Sadler, 2019).

In these narratives, immigrants are positioned as valued community members. Threats of arrest and deportation are tactics that shake the foundations of community and must be rejected on these grounds. For example, the arrest of four men on their way to work in Racine, WI (2) sparked protests that identified the men as part of the community—as neighbors and church members. One protester spoke directly to ICE agents: “Get out of our community and stop picking up our people. They’re not criminals” (Taylor, 2018).

Another dimension of these community-based narratives that emerged in hostile counties was the rejection of tactics that shut community members out of decision-making processes and silenced community voices. Here, the justification springs from notions of community control. For example, protesters in Conroe, TX (0) described their objections to a new privately-run 1000-bed ICE detention facility by drawing attention to the lack of community involvement in deciding how and where ICE should operate within their town:

We’re very upset the county commissioners never asked the public whether we agree with the prison or want it in our town. They just did this under the table and gave the OK. (Jordan, 2017)

This type of justification rests on an understanding that local cooperation with ICE has violated protesters’ sense of place. Such narrative signals call attention to a perceived conflict between what is happening and what should be happening in protesters’ communities.

Discussion

As Leitner and Strunk (2014: 947) point out, “contrasting imaginaries [of community and place] and associated policy landscapes create very different challenges and conditions of possibility for immigrant advocacy.” This insight complements the work of Nicholls (2013), and others, particularly Burciaga and Martinez (2017), who emphasize the environmental contingencies of political practice. Our findings corroborate, nuance, and extend this understanding.

The narrative signals we find in hospitable counties are consistent with Nicholls’s (2013: 85) claim that this type of environment allows for a different (if not more varied, as he argues) set of rights claims than more hostile environments. We find that in both more and less hostile environments, protesters emphasized human rights that transcend national borders. In hospitable environments, however, this kind of claim was often coupled with justifications facilitating ongoing collective action and dismantling hierarchical and exclusive social arrangements. This combination focuses on building political capacity around rights claims not permissioned by the state, illuminating discrepancies between the values enacted by policy and those associated with a respect for human equality. In other words, justifications utilized in hospitable counties nurture the possibility of what Nicholls describes as “thriving, tangled mobilization networks” with the capacity to turn moments of rupture “into a disturbance that brings to light the wrongs of exclusionary policies,” and potentially alter existing governmental power circuits (2015: 516, 518).

It is in the hostile counties where our data paints a more unexpected picture of the relationship between narrative and environment. First, following Nicholls (2013) we might expect to see a narrower range of protest justifications, but in hostile counties, we continue to see a variety of narrative signals. This variety may be a result of a campaign (anti-ICE) that is not as fully developed as others in the broader movement, and hence not yet as cohesive or disciplined as the ones Nicholls (2013) studies. It may be that immigrant rights organizations, while powerful disciplinary forces in some places, are less dominant in others. It may reflect bias in what media outlets chose to circulate. But it may also be reflective of the “plurivocity” Lejano and his colleagues observe. They write, “…the power of narrative [is] that it allows for different actors to tell the story in differing ways and still be inclusive of them. It is not necessary for there to be one story in common…” (Lejano et al., 2013: 21). This plurivocity is consistent with the idea that narratives are generative; when shared, narratives are actively received and interpreted (58) and therefore allow people to experiment with alternative ways of knowing, even in hostile environments.

Second, whereas the justifications used in hostile environments might be expected to hinge on immigrants’ identification with national norms, instead we observe human rights claims similar (and similarly prevalent) to those found in more hospitable counties. In the hostile environments, however, articulations of human value more frequently coexist with justifications resting on community-centric norms and concerns. This may be a response to devolution patterns, which have shaped uneven geographies, but also present more potential targets for protesters’ ire. Multiple jurisdictions shaping and enacting policy may also multiply protest responses. But importantly, we see claims grounded in understandings that (particular) migrants are conforming and contributing to local community life and therefore are deserving of social and political inclusion; and we see narratives that rest on the idea that local cooperation with ICE violates protesters’ sense of place and what can or should happen in their communities. Protesters’ sense of place is clearly shaping their work.

As many scholars have argued, both of these community-based narratives contain elements that may severely curtail the democratic work they can accomplish. The emphasis in hostile environments on immigrants’ attributes as a justification for inclusion and protection is problematic because it implies that those who cannot conform to particular ideals are less deserving of rights. Such narratives undermine solidarity by encouraging the movement to build empathy for those who can more easily conform at the expense of others who cannot (Lauby, 2016; Schwiertz, 2016; Sharpless, 2015; Yukich, 2013). Grounding immigrant contributions in a local community rather than a national one does not alleviate these concerns. Furthermore, focusing on the norms and needs of particular communities often ignores larger systems that produce widespread, yet uneven, harm. These narratives may exert a powerful influence on local officials and draw sympathy from individuals in that particular community (e.g., Leitner and Strunk, 2014: 958). However, this strategy still inscribes limits on who can potentially belong in the community and risks localizing broader interconnected dynamics.

A similar critique can be leveled at a focus on how immigration enforcement violates ideals of community control. When, for instance, the protester in Conroe, TX says, “We’re very upset the county commissioners never asked the public whether we agree with the prison or want it in our town,” (Jordan, 2017), this glosses over the ethical ramifications of an immigration policy that relies on prisons. Instead, the new prison is treated as any other undesirable form of development. Such a narrative forecloses contestation on other grounds and makes it difficult to link struggles in places like Conroe to broader immigrant rights movements; NIMBY politics do not build encompassing solidarities. Moreover, by directing attention to the procedural, such narratives shift political work (even the highly contentious political work of protest) towards the realm of civic engagement, short-circuiting political contestation that might actually produce substantive change.

We embrace visions of a more “radical egalitarian citizenship” (Schwiertz, 2016) and share concerns about justifications reliant on distinguishing between deserving and undeserving migrants, as well as those that obscure connections between the widespread local harms associated with punitive immigration enforcement and the systems producing oppression and exploitation and harm. With other scholars of immigrant rights movements, however, we insist that evaluations of immigration-related protest narratives must consider the context (and particularly the enforcement policy context) within which narrative-producers operate and the multiple purposes those narratives serve (e.g., Nicholls, 2013; Leitner and Strunk, 2014). From this perspective, we discuss possible functions of the combination of narrative signals we see most often in hostile counties: those based on community concerns, positive immigrant attributes, and the value of all human life. We argue that in hostile environments, this combination of narrative signals provides important pathways for politicizing violent immigration enforcement, even if these pathways are themselves fraught with risks.

Lejano et al. (2013: 6) argue: “networks emerge when people are struggling to fit into a world for which they have a conflicting or non-workable narrative, and in the process create new ways of understanding, or new stories about their relationships to the world.” If these stories resonate, they can help a movement to recruit new participants and to “withstand threats and to grow” (56). But people must first create the conditions for engaging in such narration and collective struggle. The narrative signals we observe in hostile counties indicate neither complete disidentification with prevailing orders, nor a kind of disciplined attempt to align with organized efforts identifying with national norms. The narrative signals we observe in these counties do, however, create opportunities for public formation. Publics come into being when people recognize a particular situation as problematic and when they see themselves as affected by it (Dewey, 1927). Publics include people who need not agree on the cause of a problem, or on the remedies; they are not formed specifically to advocate for a particular position. Such organizing might grow out of publics, but in order for people to participate in them, they must first name something as a problem and frame the problem in a way that allows them to see themselves in it.²

Particularly in hostile environments, narratives emphasizing community concerns can engage people who might otherwise consider themselves unaffected by immigrant rights struggles. These narratives encourage people to draw connections between immigrant rights issues and deeply held values not necessarily tied to national norms. When protest is justified by demonstrating how policy violates local norms, the narrative invites anyone connected with a particular place to engage. For example, in places like Conroe, TX, narrative signals emphasizing the need for local control over decision-making processes expand the universe of people who might feel compelled to engage in anti-ICE protests by tapping deep-seated distrust of federal “intrusion” into local affairs. Narratives emphasizing immigrants’ integral role in communities also play on listeners’ sense of place in order to draw them in. When listeners hear others express outrage at ICE for forcibly taking people in the community away from their homes (“Get out of our community and stop picking up our people” (Taylor, 2018)), those who already feel affected by violent immigration enforcement may be encouraged to join others who are fighting against it. Those who have not seen themselves as affected may change their minds as they wrestle with immigration policy’s compatibility with their vision of community, that is, as a safe place, or as a place where hard work is rewarded, or a place where neighbors look out for each other. If migrants are already “in” the local community, illuminating how the official orderings officially place them “out” of the community may persuade a local audience to see such arrangements differently. In sum, narratives that center community concerns can be seen as attempts by protesters to articulate and communicate their own sense of identity as well as their relationships with places and with the other people living in them (Casey, 1993; Lejano et al., 2013: 58).

In hostile counties, community-based justifications were often used in concert with narratives alluding to immigrants’ contributions to communities and the hardships they have faced. While we have recounted the significant downsides to such narratives, they may play a role in creating new opportunities for the amplification of immigrants’ voices in the public sphere. Widely circulated narratives (from Trump administration rhetoric down to justification of county-level cooperation with ICE) frequently suggest that hardships associated with immigration enforcement are at best, private problems and at worst, necessary for eradicating a threat to the nation. Under these conditions, narratives describing immigrants as people with jobs and families and fears, as people doing their best under duress, force listeners to engage with immigrants’ humanity, even as they draw distinctions between deserving and undeserving immigrants. While this recognition is not enough to support radical change, it seems a first step for recognizing immigrants as legitimate participants in public life. This recognition is important because it opens space for immigrants themselves, and not just advocates, to publicly articulate grievances and imagine alternatives in ways that can be heard as “voices not noises” (Dikeç, cited in Nicholls, 2013: 84), perhaps eventually leading towards transformation (Swyngedouw, 2021).

The coexistence in hostile environments of human rights narratives with more divisive justifications offers political opportunities that would otherwise not be available. Even in environments where protesters clearly feel compelled to justify their work in ways that will draw in antagonistic or indifferent others, narratives that signal recognition of all human life locate local concerns within broader patterns, link local responses to broader organizing networks, and deemphasize the divisions produced by narratives of earned protection. To the extent that it highlights conflicts between held values and existing arrangements, the dissonance produced by the coexistence of protest justifications rooted in notions of human value with those that hinge on community concerns and the ways that (some) immigrants have earned protection can be productive. As Nicholls (2015: 516) argues, while “[s]mall and defensive resistances” aimed at protecting “our people” in “our community” may never grow into networked movements, they can “serve as important networking opportunities. They encourage diverse people to come out of their private worlds, engage directly with the effects of restrictive government policies, and learn how to pool their different resources (i.e., money, bodies, knowledge, information, connections, etc.) for a collective enterprise.”

Implicit in these examples is the proposition that in hostile environments, more participation in struggles for immigrant rights is beneficial, even when this includes people unsupportive of radical change. In these environments, any pro-immigrant rights organizing may be preferable to none, in part because once people can see themselves as part of a public, internal narrative crosscurrents provide opportunities for illuminating existing orders and for reevaluating them in light of others’ experiences and ideas. People who have recognized a situation as problematic often still find themselves in conflict as to how to think and talk and act on the problem. In environments where the boundaries produced by local collaboration with ICE represent official orderings, these conflicts momentarily disrupt the “normal” operations of exclusion; they bring to the surface questions that otherwise might not be askable. In doing so, they hold open the possibility for more and different organizing (e.g., Schwiertz, 2016). As they are “actively received and interpreted” and reshaped, dissonant narrative signals allow for dynamic openings through which multiple voices and perspectives can be heard within a movement (Lejano et al., 2013: 58–59). Over time, they may develop into narratives robust enough to “create the glue that binds people together in networks, providing them with a sense of history, common ground, and future, thus enabling them to persist even in the context of resistance” (Lejano et al., 2013: 2). But this cannot happen without public activation.

There are risks associated with emphasizing the benefits of public formation. Focusing on how people who are antagonistic or indifferent to immigrant rights might receive protest narratives in places where negative attitudes are endorsed by policy might suggest that there is a society or public to which immigrants must appeal in order to gain entry; that migrants are not, in fact, already and always part of such bodies, reinforcing exclusionary orderings. Even when the goal is to engender public deliberation that is inclusive of all affected by a particular problematic situation, a focus of public formation can discount the extent to which differently positioned people and groups can make their voices heard. Finally, a focus on public formation decentralizes both enactments of radical equality, disidentification, and rupture that Rancière prescribes, as well as the work of movement building that underpins Nicholls’s interest in the conditions under which narratives can be formed and received.

These critiques speak to the dangers and limitations of relying too heavily on public formation for radical change. There are certainly important practices that we do not observe here and we do not wish to idealize the political strategies we observe in the most hostile environments. However, the benefit to broadening conceptions of democratic practice to include public formation is that such a focus allows for a better understanding of how people engaged in political struggles comprehend the possibilities and pitfalls that exist within their disparate environments, and for the recognition that these ideas can shift. When people who have not thought of themselves in connection to a particular situation come to see it as a public problem that they themselves are affected by, opportunities for movement building grow. So too do possibilities for altering the direction of political organizing as internal and external conflict push people to change their understandings and commitments (Huff, 2020).

Conclusion

Unlike moments of rupture in which democracy is practiced through the enactment of equality, through disidentification with existing orders, the protest narrative signals we examined were shaped by the very environments they sought to alter. Narratives cannot effect change unless they are taken up by actual people in actual places. Precisely because narratives aim to be heard and acted upon in environments where immigrant rights claims have been delegitimized, we can discern elements in the narrative signals that undermine radical democratic change. This is not ideal.

The overtly hostile national context during the study period also manifests at more local scales and we see evidence of its influence in the narrative signals we observe. Our research demonstrates that even in hostile local environments, protesters still send out a variety of narratives to get people to see official orderings in a new light and to imagine something different. This broad range of justifications allows protesters to try to engage a similarly broad range of people, including those who may feel disconnected from immigrant rights struggles. The specific justifications most frequently observed in hostile counties—including community concerns and earned protection—particularly reflect the potential for bolstering local participation in public action around immigrant rights because they expand who might be affected by immigration enforcement to include all community members; they humanize immigrants in ways that can amplify immigrant voices in the public sphere, and they coexist with rights frames that transcend national and local boundaries. This lays the groundwork for more robust publics in places where low resonance (Bloemraad et al., 2016) may make public formation around immigrant rights difficult. While not always ideal for immediate radical change, the variety of narratives being forwarded in such publics may challenge members to reevaluate previously held positions. In this way, the direction of organizing can change, and perhaps even include more disruptive articulations of disidentification.

Of course, there is no guarantee that transformative movements will grow out of these efforts (Swyngedouw, 2021). But as Avery Gordon reminds us, work that troubles naturalized orders “must take place while you’re still enslaved, imprisoned, indebted, occupied, walled in, commodified, etc” (2011: 16).

Consider the justification for protest articulated by a protester in Yakima, WA (7):

Our communities deserve dignity and respect…We’re going to continue carrying this energy. Not only here in Yakima, but across all Washington state. From Spokane to Vancouver to Skagit County to Pullman to Walla Walla to Tri-Cities to Wenatchee to Seattle to Wapato to Mattawa. All Washington State will know what we’re here to do, which is fight for our families, to share the dreams of our families, because we deserve dignity. And to any local county or local city government that continues to choose to collude with immigration, we say, ‘Enough. We see you, and we’re coming after you.’ (Muir, 2019)

Here there are references to familial innocence and earned protection, as well as allusions to community-centered concerns. But there are also signals that articulate migrant power, dignity, and voice, demands for change, and an explicit commitment to movement building. While we have found many of these signals are more prevalent in hospitable counties, like Yakima (ILRC 7), neither policy environments nor protest narratives are static. Until 2017, Yakima was in the most hostile ILRC category (0; Avila et al., 2018: p. 16). The increase in immigrant protections there was in part the result of people coming together and making claims in ways that convinced others to join in the struggle in a very hostile environment. It demonstrates not only that change is possible, but that it is made possible through imperfect collective action in imperfect conditions. Attending to the relationship between local policy environment and narrative signals produced in protests large and small, networked and otherwise, allows us to explore emerging democratic possibilities that are obscured in analyses of political wins, or even networks struggling to achieve such victories.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Joe Cremaldi’s help in data processing; Krsna Avila at ILRC for sharing ICE-entanglement data; Tommy Leung and Nathan Perkins for providing clarifications on the Count Love data; and early feedback at the City Futures Dublin and RSA Montreal meetings in 2019, particularly from Anne Taufen; and thoughtful reviews from two anonymous referees.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Abigail Cooke

Notes

Alice Huff has a doctorate in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the democratic possibilities of community-led activism.

Abigail Cooke is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo. Her research in economic geography has focused largely on the spillovers from immigrant diversity.

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