Reading Response - The Walls Within (Coleman, 2021)

Allison Brown HIST 5400: Migration, Mobility & Borders Dr. Hampton November 3, 2022 Reading Response - The Walls Within (Coleman, 2021) Coleman’sThe Walls Within(2021) analyzes how in recent years, federal policies towards immigration has become especially hostile and how this history of immigration explains how American nativism alongside the considerations of public safety and economics led to more strict immigration policy as well as immigrants in the US being viewed as a burden. In short, Coleman argues that “Racism and nativism had become less reputable in American society, while the United States had embraced and expanded a welfare state with a variety of new benefits. As a result of these changes, the new restrictionists rejected overtly racist arguments and instead charged that immigrants unduly burdened the state and its citizens. In this new rendering, immigrants took government benefits and jobs away from working and middle-class Americans in an era when the new service-oriented, low-wage economy left 1 many citizens economically insecure.” The 1965 Hart-Celler Act transformed the American immigration system by abolishing national quotas in favor of a seemingly more open approach to allow immigrants into the US. The Hart-Cellar Act “Hart-Celler Act in 1965 drastically remade the nation’s immigration patterns and its racial composition more broadly. Approved by Congress under an ethos of civil rights and fairness and as part of the Great Society, the Act set a uniform cap on all nations at 7% of the annual 2total.” But the subsequent demographic and discourse shifts in the US resulted in a backlash over the social contract and the rights of citizens versus noncitizens. In this book, Coleman analyzes how political discussion and different campaigns shifting from focusing not on attempts to stop immigration at the border, but rather to restrict the social and economic mobility of immigrants once they are in the US. 1 Sarah Coleman, The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2021). pg. 3 2 pg. 7 Drawing on new materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, and immigration and civil rights organizations, Coleman exposes how the politics of immigration control has undermined the idea of citizenship for all. Coleman shows that the politics of immigration and the borders of belonging could be better defined not by a strict border, in which immigrants were inevitably going to continue to come into the US, but in redefining the borders of belonging with the US, more domestic policies could occur and speak to public concerns about immigrants’ economic pressures. Through employer sanctions, different access to citizenship, access to schools, welfare, and the role of local authorities in implementing policies, the state could better control how immigrants were treated in the US and how those attitudes in turn impacted their belonging in the US. Impacts and the influence of inclusion for immigrants was shaped by different campaigns and differing public sentiments towards immigrants through the Carter and Reagan administrations notably at this time. With regards to President Carter, “rising domestic political pressures including the impending presidential election led the Carter administration to publicly address the issue of unauthorized students’ access to education in a way that differed significantly from its positions espoused in court. While White House staffers continued to seek out discrete policy solutions that would help to diffuse the issue, on the campaign trail, Carter and others embraced more neutral and vague positions, distancing themselves from 3 the positions they had taken in court.” These opinions though for President Carter would change when he was advised to distance himself from the government’s role in immigrant cases in order to take a neutral position which would appeal to both Latino and moderate Republican voters. The passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 shifted understandings of the role citizenship occupied for immigrants and how this in turn allowed for access to welfare and other economic necessities. This debate in Congress and nationally broke down political parties by their views on welfare support for immigrants as a deciding factor as to what the state valued most for inclusion of immigrants and the impact of welfare benefits and economics as a deciding factor for the inclusion of immigrants. 3 pg. 42 Discussion Questions What are the impacts of different "socialist" eras such as the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society? How do these different social and political discourses shape immigration policy in terms of fears surrounding socialism? Is welfare/economic benefits the primary driver of exclusion for immigrants? If not, what is? And do fears of public safety or nativism lead to the denial of welfare benefits for exclusionary purposes? Can the borders of belonging be better controlled and restricted through domestic immigration policies of exclusion rather than quotas/caps/stricter borders?