L e a h P e rry

OVERLOOKING/LOOKING OVER
NEOLIBERAL IMMIGRATION: AMNESTY
POLICY IN THE ‘NATION OF IMMIGRANTS

In the self-proclaimed ‘nation o f immigrants’, a strugglefo r power plays out in US

immigration law. This article examines such a struggle in the context o f rising
neoliberalism. As president Ronald Reagan set out to revolutionize America with
the deregulation o f the economy, privatization, and the globalization o f capitalist
democracy, pundits claimed that the country was experiencing a Mexican illegal
immigration crisis that pivoted on Mexican women’s fecundity and abuse o f social
services. Yet along with punitive provisions, the first US law to directly address
undocumented migration, the Immigration R form and Control Act o f 1986
(IRCA) included an amnesty programme widely praised as a democratic watershed
fo r the undocumented. Consequently, ‘multicultural’ immigrant men and women
seemed to he embraced, while in the same breath disciplined through discourses o f
respectability and criminality that secured both a pool o f cheap immigrant
labourers and minoritized citizens. More specfically, two strains i f 'nation o f
immigrants’ discourse that circulated around amnesty during the law-making
process effectively (and effectively) fram ed America as the globally exceptional
guarantor o f democratic rights, inclusivity, and equal access to economic
opportunity fo r citizens. On one hand, discourse that welcomed and celebrated
an abstracted immigrant subject who wasfree to succeed on the basis o f individual
hard work was coded as the epitome o f Americanism. On the other hand, discourse
that welcomed explicitly racialized and gendered immigrants who were free to
succeed on the basis o f their hard work was coded as emblematically American. In
this case respectable tokens o f multiculturalism (i.e. immigrants o f colour and
especially immigrant women f colour who upheld traditional fa m ily values)
evidenced American inclusivity. This article argues that both strains o f ‘nation o f
immigrants’ discourse naturalized a relationship between citizenship, freedom, and
free markets and thus powefully masked the exploitative social relations key to
neoliberal economic arrangements.

Keywords immigration; gender; race; neoliberalism; multicultural­

ism; Ronald Reagan

The amnesty programme of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
(IRCA) was widely praised as a watershed in American immigration policy that
emblematized America’s exceptional commitment to democracy, freedom, and
C u ltu ra l Studies, 2014

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 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OVER N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 845

equality. The etymology of amnesty points to the freedom it grants by altering

seeing, looking, and remembering; the noun refers to a:

‘pardon of past offenses,’ 1570s, from Fr. amnestie ‘intentional over­

looking,’ from L. amnestia, from Gk. amnestia forgetfulness (of wrong); an
amnesty, from a-, privative prefix, not + mnestis ‘remembrance,’ related
to mnaomai ‘I remember’ (see mind (n.)). As a verb, from 1809. (Harper
2001 - 2010 )

In common Engbsh usage, amnesty describes legislative or executive acts that

restore innocence to persons who have committed an offense: amnesty
overlooks an offense, obliterating all legal remembrance of it and thereby
extending freedom to the offender. IRCA immigrant amnesty poignantly
connoted liberty, for recipients were freed from the dangers, vulnerabilities,
and stigma of illegality as amnesty overlooked the transgression of undocu­
mented entry and residency. In keeping with the American tradition of turning
to the law to resolve social issues, amnesty was thus a promise of the freedom
and civil rights that the self-proclaimed ‘nation of immigrants’— that is, the
nation intentionally and proudly comprised of people from various nations,
cultures, religions, races, and creeds— conferred to all citizens, and in the
1980s that promise of freedom for a diverse populace was especially
compelling.
Amidst increasing immigration from Latin America, Asia, and the
Caribbean in the 1980s, when the circle of who was considered American
seemed to have broadened considerably, reflecting democratic gains made by
racial minorities and women, and when that broadening was increasingly visible
in the daily lives of Americans via various media, the language and common
imagery of immigration debates were, as the amnesty watershed suggests,
reshaped and redefined, making immigration a key aspect of the rising
neoliberal project. The three core dimensions of neoliberalism are modes of
government-rooted in entrepreneurial values; policies that result in deregula­
tion of the economy, liberalization of trade, and privatization of state services;
and widespread acceptance of the theory that consumerist free trade will bring
unprecedented prosperity to both the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world
(Steger and Roy 2010, pp. 11—14, 55). The neoliberal nation-state roots and
limits government in free market entrepreneurial values and transactional logic
that extends to the social sphere with the notion that ‘the social good will be
maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions’
throughout the globe (Harvey 2005, p. 3); globalization is imbued with the
‘common sense’ logic that integrating markets universally increase individual
freedom and progress (Ong 2006). Neoliberalism is crucial to immigration
history because the ideology reshaped the causes and effects of immigration;
that is, how and why people migrated, and how they were received. Likewise,
846 CULTURAL STUDIES

in keeping with American historical patterns of using immigration as a source of

inexpensive labour (especially after the abolition of slavery and end of
colonialism), immigrant labour is a vital component of neoliberal projects.
The gender and racial hierarchies that cohered and were contested through
1980s immigration discourses inaugurated the paradigm of neoliberal immig­
ration. Although salutary discourses about IRCA amnesty framed it as an
actualization of the universal beneficence of the ‘nation of immigrants’ and its
free market system, the implementation and consequences of the law strongly
suggest that exploitation rather than democracy underscores the neoliberal
project.
More specifically, as president Ronald Reagan set out to revolutionize
America with deregulation of the economy, privatization, and the globalization
of capitalist democracy, lawmakers attempted to remedy an illegal immigration
crisis with the first comprehensive immigration reform since 1965. IRCA,
sponsored by a conservative, flagrantly nativist Wyoming senator Alan
Simpson, ushered in new sanctions for employers of undocumented workers,
welfare cuts, and increased border security, yet also included the amnesty
programme. After five years of heated bi-partisan debates amongst pundits and
numerous joint congressional hearings— highly unusual in immigration debates—
the US Congress passed IRCA. Thus ‘multicultural’ immigrant men and women
seemed to be embraced, but were in the same breath disciplined.
In this period, as Asia, Latin America, and especially Mexico came to
dominate U.S. immigrant sending countries, a new national narrative was
popularized that affectively (and effectively) framed America as the globally
exceptional guarantor of democratic rights, inclusivity, and equal access to
economic mobility for all of its citizens. The quintessential American story
became that of the white ethnic (Irish and eastern and southern European)
immigrants who created a better life with nothing but hard work and plucky
determination. According to the new ‘nation of immigrants’ narrative, any and
all immigrants earned access to American equal opportunity through hard work
and adherence to respectable heterosexual ‘family values’. This trope was key
to the neolibcral negotiation between welcoming and gatekeeping. Within
neoliberalism’s allegedly universally beneficial free market system, ‘ascriptions
of value and valuelessness are unevenly detached from overt reference to race,
yet their deployment provides for extreme racialized violence’ (Hong and
Ferguson 2011, p. 17). While policy and capital appear to be neutral,
neoliberalism accomplishes the extraction of surplus value from racialized and
gendered bodies through universalized discourses of value that are detached
from race and gender (equal opportunity for abstracted subjects) and through
the mobilization of multicultural and often feminist rhetoric ‘as the key to a
post-racist world of freedom and opportunity’ (Melamed 2011, p. 78). On one
hand, discourse that welcomed and celebrated an abstracted immigrant subject
who was free to succeed (compete) on the basis of individual hard work was
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OVER N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 847

coded as the epitome of Americanism. In this strain, race and gender were
‘overlooked’ or erased much like amnesty overlooked the offense of illegality,
and this overlooking was considered anti-racist and anti-sexist.
On the other hand, ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse that welcomed and
celebrated explicitly racialized and gendered immigrants who were free to
succeed on the basis of their hard work was also posited as emblematically
American. Tokens of diversity or multdculturalism (i.e. immigrants of colour
and especially immigrant women of colour) were appointed to stand as evidence
of American inclusivity. Race and gender were thus looked over and overly
looked at as indicators of America’s unparalleled commitment to equality, a
commitment that was best realized through all citizens’ access to the free
market.
Additionally, in both cases, ‘nation of immigrants’ discourse that framed
amnesty as the path to citizenship (and thus freedom and rights) concealed and
consequently reproduced racialized and gendered vulnerability in the service of
neoliberalizing America. Monisha Das Gupta (2008) has observed, ‘full
citizenship, which is the goal of civil rights-oriented visions of justice,
naturalizes and reinscribes the policing functions of borders that territorialize
racialized, ethnicized, and gendered notions of belonging. The civil rights model
formulates the lack of or the routine violation of rights of subjects inhabiting a
national space as second-class citizenship, a condition that needs to be corrected
through struggles for full national belonging’ (p. 403). Immigrants whose
realities were necessarily transnational and border-crossing given that neoliberal
structural adjustment policies in the global south create poverty that often
necessitates labor migration were erased: ‘immigrant rights when framed as
civil rights get interpellated by discourses of citizenship’ (p. 404). Whether
overlooking or overly looking at race and gender, ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes
obscured the transnational realties of immigrants’ lives.
To tease out the ways that amnesty naturalized a causal relationship
between citizenship, freedom, and free markets and thereby obscured the
inequalities underscoring the American neolibcral project, this article traces the
‘nation of immigrants’ tropes circulating in and around amnesty in the law­
making process and in public discourses about that process. As I will explain,
the material consequences of the law— namely the bureaucratic red tape that
kept disproportionally Mexican male amnesty applicants legally liminal and
highly dependant upon their employers during a five-year waiting period,
women’s exclusion from amnesty, and the bald neocolonial extraction of
temporary labour from Mexican men— were masked by the rhetoric of inclusion
in the ‘nation of immigrants’. The trope was powerful in the context of an
ostensibly widening circle of Americanness, but the material consequences of
amnesty indicated that this new immigration legislation was not a facilitator of
democracy. Much like Marx’s (1867/1990) notion of the commodity as a
hieroglyph that concealed the alienation— from one’s own labour, everyone
848 CUL TURAL STUDI ES

else’s labour, and the social relations that occur among people when they are not
alienated— characteristic of capitalism, ‘nation of immigrants’ rhetoric func­
tioned as a fetish that mystified— one might say overlooked— exploitative social
relations.
The process of demystifying ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes in 1980s
immigration law also contributes to a broad conversation about cultural studies
of law. In her magisterial article, ‘Is There a Cultural Studies of Law?’,
Rosemary Coombe asserts that the law may be ‘understood in Foucauldian
terms as both a discourse (a coercive web of interconnecting disciplines of
knowledge governed by a particular conception of rationality) and a set of
institutions and institutional practices through which that discourse is made
manifest’ (Coombe 2001, p. 39). Thus the law creates and diffuses certain
forms of power that ‘constrain and enable agency in social life’ (Coombe 2001,
p. 39). A cultural studies of law carefully considers local complexities in
relations between power and meaning in daily life. This centrality of law to the
cultural conditions of producing everyday life (Coombe, 2001, p. 55—56) is
undeniable when considering immigration rights, given that all aspects of
immigrants’ lives are carefully controlled and constructed by law and its varied
institutional and social manifestations. This is, for instance, plainly indicated in
the categories such as ‘immigrant’, ‘alien’, ‘refugee’, and ‘seasonal temporary
worker’ that IRCA amnesty delineated and enforced, and, as such, differentially
ascribed rights to. To demonstrate that immigration is a crucial area of inquiry
for cultural studies of the law, and to demonstrate the efficacy of cultural
studies methods in critical analyses of the law, this article looks over ‘nation of
immigrants’ discourses surrounding IRCA amnesty as an important facet of the
American neoliberal project.

Inaugurating th e am nesty fetish

Ultimately, the consensus needed to pass IRCA was hard-won due to conflicting
economic and social interests that crossed party lines, making for strangc-
bedfellow alliances that have become characteristically neoliberal. The early
1980s inaugurated the paradigm for American neoliberal ‘common sense’, and
Rcaganite ‘common sense’ included what might be called neoconservative and
neoliberal elements. It combined the notion that free markets generate human
freedom with social conservatism and patriotism. Thus neoconservatism joined
the liberal theory of free markets and limited government as determinant of
individual liberty with the exercise of state power to support a highly patriotic,
traditionally moral national imaginary. This post-Vietnam W ar anti-commun­
ism was characterized by unilateral use of military power to further national
economic and political interests. Reagan, for instance, dramatically increased
defense expenditures to protect America from the Soviet Union and
international terrorism. And in reaction to the ostensible liberal excesses of
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OV ER N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 849

the 1960s, intrusive foreign policy had domestic parallel in support of

government regulation of the citizenry in the name of public security and
traditional morality’ that superseded concern for individual rights (Steger and
Roy 2010, pp. 22—23). Early neoconservatives also rendered a harsh critique of
the New Deal and civil rights efforts, holding that ‘liberalism was never
intended to promise equality; that, at best, society and government can offer
only opportunity and incentive’, and according to this logic, ‘big government’
and especially social services, public programmes, and affirmative action bred
‘dependence and poverty’ (Eisenstein 1994, p. 5).
Although neoliberals and neoconservatives shared a commitment to free
markets, and while some neoliberals embraced aspects of neoconservatism like
traditional family values and a strong military, for the former, freedom and a
‘hands-ofF attitude was defined by globalism, less intrusion in the lives of the
citizenry, and was often at least superficially committed to socially progressive
values. In the midst of Reagan’s conservative commitments to hyperpatriotism,
hypermilitarism, and family values, his administration’s efforts to guarantee
individual freedoms via privatization, free markets, and consumerism, and to
frame and enforce the liberalization of global trade as a democratizing force
provided an enduring— and often bipartisan— model for American neoliberal
projects. This model was evident in immigration debates and eventually policy.
Thus amidst an illegal immigration crisis largely attributed to migrants of
Mexican origin, free market Republicans supported amnesty not for human­
itarian reasons like many Democrats and activists, but because cheap Mexican
immigrant labour was profitable. Reagan (1982) articulated this in a pro­
amnesty policy statement in 1981, the starting point of the five-year IRCA
debates. He stated:

W e must also recognize that both the US and Mexico have historically
benefited from Mexicans obtaining employment in the U.S. A number of
our States have special labor needs, and we should take these into account.
Illegal immigrants in considerable numbers have become productive
members of society, and are a basic part of our workforce.

The pro-immigrant labour stance was controversial in the context of

recession and the highest unemployment rates since the 1930s, as it suggested
lack of concern for native laborers. Organized labor thus opposed amnesty on
the basis of labor competition (Daniels, p. 220).
But the most urgent fears of an ‘immigration emergency’ and the
consequent cry for restriction pivoted on gender and racial politics. Nativist
groups like the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) and lawmakers like
Simpson argued that family reunification provisions should be cut to curtail
waves of ‘Hispanic’ immigrants, as their family configurations were at odds
with American family values (U.S. Congress Select Commission on
850 CUL TURAL STUDI ES

Immigration and Refugee Policy, 1981). The New Right commitment to family
values that solidified in the 1970s as a response to second-wave feminism and
the civil rights movements cohered in a narrative that conflated the patriarchal
bread-winning nuclear family not only with ‘good’ mothering but also ‘good’
American citizenship. Working women and single mothers— many of whom
were of colour— and extended kinship arrangements common among
immigrants became ‘bad’ and un-American. Family values discourse rationa­
lized economic and social policies that appeared race-neutral but impoverished
people of colour and immigrants primarily from Latin America, Asia, and the
Caribbean. As numerous feminist scholars have shown, appeals to protect the
national economy and American morality by policing mothering rationalized
allegedly race-neutral policies such as welfare cuts that in actuality penalized
and impoverished people of colour (Eisenstein 1994, Mink 1998, Collins 2005).
The language of gendered respectability for the sake of family values thereby
cloaked overt racism and sutured it to nationalism.
Immigrants’ worth was also measured by gendered and racialized
criminality. Lisa Cacho (2008, p. 192) argued that ‘discourses of criminality,
illegality, and respectability frame and limit how black and Latina/o relations
can be spoken about and represented in relation to civil rights, immigration
rights, and citizenship rights’. Criminality/illegality could be seamlessly applied
to undocumented immigrants given that illegality made them always-already
criminals and what Mae Ngai (2004, p. 8) called ‘alien citizens’, Asians and
Latina/os who as a consequence of a desire for an economical and dispensable
labour force have been cast as permanently foreign and ‘alien’ even when bom
in the USA and possessing formal citizenship. For example, in 1942 the Bracero
programme, the modern prototype for Mexican labour importation, provided a
paradigm for the construction of criminalized illegal aliens. Although Mexican
labour was wanted and needed during W orld W ar II, organized labour was an
important contingent in Roosevelt’s New Deal. To appease long-standing
opposition to foreign labour, the government established contracts for
temporary male Mexican labourers. Migrants entered the nation only to
work and then presumably returned to Mexico without the possibility of
bringing over or beginning families in the USA (King 2000, p. 233), a standard
pattern since the early twentieth century. Although official xenophobia marked
immigration law at the time, many, like president Calvin Coolidge, believed
that Mexican men were ideal labourers because permanent settlement and
family formation was rare. Therefore, the naturalization and the granting of
rights to this low-wage labour force was not a concern (Divine 1957, pp. 52—
66). The Bracero programme codified in law this labour practice, initially
bringing over a small amount of agricultural workers in California, and then up
until 1964 increasing the numbers and dispersing them throughout the USA.
Over the course of the largest US labour contract programme to date, 4.6
million contracts were signed, and many workers returned multiple times on
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OV E R N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 851

different contracts. The programme promised Braceros the prevailing wage of

native workers, work for three-fourths of the contract period, free housing,
work insurance at the employer’s expense, and free transportation back to
Mexico at the contract end (Roy Rozenzweig Center for History and New
Media 1996—2014). But employers ignored many of these rules, and also
resorted to illegal means to secure the cheapest labour without the red tape of
the new programme. Thus the desire for cheap labour plus the Bracero
programme produced the ‘wetback’, or Mexican undocumented worker who
was by definition criminal. The criminalization of wetbacks reconciled their
depressed wages and lack of rights even though antiracism, antifascism, and
decolonization were America’s wartime order of the day (Omi and Winant
1994). That ascription of criminality cast suspicion upon all persons of Mexican
descent regardless of their citizenship status, thereby creating alien citizens
(Ngai 2004, pp. 127—166).
Concerns that unrestricted family reunification would disrupt the nation
were directly related to changes in global capital. Historically, solicitation of
migratory male workers and prevention of marriage lessened social and
biological costs of immigration. In the 1980s, however, increasing numbers of
immigrants were women from Mexico, Latin America, and Asia, and they
comprised the new migrant workforce in domestic and service industries.
Structural adjustment policies and the extraction of resources in the global
south created unemployment and poverty that provoked migration, making
people a resource that was also extracted. For example, austerity programmes
imposed on Mexico created debt bondage. Migration was thus coerced to the
extent that employment outside of a nation in financial crisis was necessary for
survival, and migrant remittances could mitigate the financial crisis at a moment
when cheap immigrant women’s labour was desired in the service and domestic
sectors (Chang 2000, pp. 3—4). New cost-cutting methods focused on
reproduction and child-rearing; immigrants were accused of disproportionately
high birthrates that drained public resources, thereby threatening the economy
and family values (Tichenor 2002), and thus Americanism itself. Hence the
immigration crisis was a gendered affair, making family reunification and
welfare cuts, border security, and other punitive measures seem ‘common
sense’ rather than undemocratic, sexist, and racist; these were therefore issues
that conservatives and liberals like president Bill Clinton could support (See
Eisenstein 1994, p. 45).
Amnesty was thus polemical in terms of gender and race politics, a point
made clear in the law-making process. In 17 October 1986 Senate session that
culminated with the passing of IRCA, Illinois Democrat Paul Simon, a reliable
advocate for organized labor, and Texas Democrat Lloyd Bentsen argued that
with their excessive birth rates, heterosexual Mexican women were causing the
illegal immigration crisis. Invoking a common concern of contemporary pro-
eugenics groups like FAIR and Zero Population Growth, Simon pointed out
852 CULTURAL STUDIES

that Mexico’s population was excessive and stated that ‘if, by the end of this
century, Mexico reaches a status where one female produces one female— I am
not trying to be sexist, but that is the way demographers talk about zero
population growth— Mexico will taper off with a population of 175 million
people’. The large population and high birth rate in Mexico similarly disturbed
Bensten; he feared that economic instability in Mexico would draw ‘20 million
over the border in a hurry’ to burden the already beleaguered welfare state
(U.S. Senate 1986).
While proposed cuts of family reunification failed, welfare restrictions
included in IRCA directly tackled the fears provoked by wom en’s immigration,
and combined with increased border militarization and employer restrictions
effectively made Mexican female immigrants unrespectable and thus undeserv­
ing of rights. Liberal and conservative interests could be and were satisfied with
IRCA’s blending of amnesty as progressive, with border militarization,
employer restrictions, and welfare cuts as necessary conservative elements given
economic concerns, the need to preserve family values, and the need to fight
crime; the ‘nation of immigrants’ was framed as endangered by an ‘immigration
emergency’ and the entwinement of these two imaginings of immigration
emblematized the fusion of progressive and conservative ideologies that made
oppressive neoliberal cultural politics seem like common sense. This was how
IRCA delineated neoliberal immigration and why amnesty was so important to
that process— as I will show, amnesty was framed as heroically anti-racist
because whether looking over or overlooking race and gender, it appeared to be
inclusive and in keeping with ‘nation of immigrants’ rhetoric. Meanwhile,
Simpson was not racist but rather concerned with ‘Hispanics’ disrupting family
values and thus the very fabric of Americanism. Add in the projected cost of
supporting the allegedly excessive babies of Latina immigrant mothers that
Simon and Bensten— who were ‘not trying to be sexist’— articulated, and
moves to privatize and restrict seemed like common sense to many,1 though
opposing voices were present. Addressing Robert Weisberg’s assertion that ‘a
nation emerges into political rationality through narrative’, Coombe notes that,
‘the law engages the aesthetic strategies of a nation, and to that extent,
enshrines ethical and political values’ (Coombe 2001, p. 47). The purpose of
narrative is to persuade and convince; the two strains of the ‘nation of
immigrants’ trope laboured assiduously for American neoliberalism.

‘W e are all im m igrants’

Various ‘nation of immigrants’ narratives have functioned as shibboleths for

various iterations of American capitalism. America has reveled in its immigrant
past as evidence of its democratic exceptionality: romantic tales of the penniless
white ethnic migrant who arrived at Ellis Island and worked hard to pull
themselves up by their bootstraps to create a better life for subsequent
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OV E R N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 853

generations has become the quintessential American story of equal opportunity,

but this naturalized imagining of America has a history inseparable from the
racism and sexism underscoring American capitalist advancement. John F.
Kennedy’s (1964) civil rights era book Nation of Immigrants popularized a
multicultural ideology of Americanism that was rearticulated in the 1980s in a
way that obscured the violence of neoliberalism. Kennedy’s celebration of his
Irish immigrant ancestry and his election into office as an Irish American
Catholic indicated a move from the previous melting pot paradigm of
Americanism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the notion of America as
a crucible that melted down difference to include all races and creeds2 was
ubiquitous in the midst of overtly racist views of immigrants and overtly racist
immigration laws. For instance, Irish immigrants were the object of public
disdain and ridicule (Ignatiev 1996), Chinese Exclusion in 1882 barred all
Chinese from citizenship (Lee 2003), and the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 placed
national quotas on immigrants in order to minimize the then undesirable
immigration and procreation from white ethnic immigrants (Jacobson, M.
1998, Moloney 2006). Each law passed as the labour of all of these racialized
groups was economically advantageous for the industrializing nation. Then
during Kennedy’s presidency, preceded by the economic and social ascendance
of white ethnics with the help of New Deal housing loans and the G.I. Bill
(Roediger 2005), and which coincided with civil rights struggles, the USA was
redefined as a multicultural ‘nation of immigrants’. The hyphen (i.e. ‘Irish-
American’, ‘Italian-American’, etc.) became a source of national pride rather
than something that had to be subsumed in the crucible. And with texts such as
Kennedy’s, despite the systemic advantages offered to white ethnics with
federal programmes, the hardworking, self-sufficient white ethnic immigrant
became the quintessential American (Jacobson, M. 2005, Roediger 2005)
Hyphenated Americanism did not by any means indicate the end of racism
in matters of immigration. Melamed (2011) proposes that successive formations
of multiculturalism ascribed value and valuelessness after WWII when white
supremacy entered a stage of crisis given Allies’ commitment to antiracism,
antifascism, and decolonization. The civil rights and black power movements
exacerbated the crisis of white supremacy. Rather than ending racialization as a
system of privilege and stigmatization, different formations of multiculturalism
rearticulated it. Melamed defines ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ as procedures
and discourses that portray multiculturalism as the ‘spirit of neoliberalism and
posits neoliberal restructuring across the globe to be the key to a postracist
world of freedom and opportunity’ (p. 78). While in her important research
Melamed distinguishes between liberal multiculturalism of the 1980s and 1990s
and the neoliberal multiculturalism that followed, neoliberal multiculturalism
was ascendant in 1980s immigration discourses. Liberal multiculturalism was
characterized by the depoliticization of economic arrangements through the
integration of individualism, property rights, and market economies as signifiers
854 CUL TURAL STUDI ES

of equality (i.e. abstract equality before the law and equal opportunity). This
included a framework for equality through cultural integration and inclusion of
multicultural identities. By privileging individual rights this system erased the
race politics underscoring privatization and the growing gap that deregulation
produced. Melamed separates neoliberal multiculturalism from this phase
because rather than framing capitalist development as beneficial for people, the
equality of the free market abstracted multiculturalism, coding the free market
as the ultimate expression of equality, and categories of racial privilege and
stigma were rearticulated beyond colour lines in that ‘neoliberalism’s winners’
were multicultural global citizens (pp. 82—87). But while the reframing of
neoliberalism’s winners had not fully coalesced in the 1980s, it was in process;
along with the features of liberal multiculturalism, in the 1980s integration and
celebration of hyphenated multicultural identities and abstract coding was
inaugurated via ‘nation of immigrants’ rhetoric.
On the one hand, ‘nation of immigrants’ rhetoric that abstracted or
overlooked race and gender was evoked to show that the American free market
was inclusive. In the final IRCA Senate session, a Democratic Delaware Senator
Joe Biden asserted that ‘immigration has always been in the national interest and
the amnesty program in this bill represents the best of that tradition’ because it
would ‘move a growing underclass living in the shadows into the daylight of
citizenship and opportunity’ (U.S. Senate 1986). Biden lobbied for universalized
inclusion— abstract coding— as part of an American tradition of providing
citizenship as the pathway to opportunity.
Similarly, in popular and media culture of the 1980s, inclusion was framed
as multicultural and sometimes feminist, giving rise to a spate of popular new
TV shows and films that featured lovable immigrant characters and spectacles
like the celebration of America as the ‘mother of exiles’ at the Statue of Liberty
centennial. Lady Liberty’s extension of ‘world-wide welcome’ to abstracted
tired, poor, ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ (Lazarus 2002) reminded
the world of what American citizenship offered to abstracted immigrants. Neil
Diamond’s enduring contribution to the affective imagining of America as a
nation with a wide-open golden door was inaugurated at the celebration with
his performance of his 1981 hit pop song ‘Coming to America’ (1980). The
famous song ebulliently glorified the USA as a safe haven and land of freedom
and opportunity that enticed immigrants from ‘everywhere around the
world’. . . ‘every time the flag unfurls’. The circle of inclusion seemed to
continue to broaden. But despite the hype of universalized welcome, Lady
Liberty’s mothering has always been racially selective, and the IRCA debates
right up until the final IRCA Senate session in 1986 updated her exclusivity for a
neoliberalizing nation; as the remarks of Simpson, Bentsen, and Simon
indicated, some lawmakers aggressively maligned Latina immigrant mothers
as fecund economic burdens to the state, and IRCA welfare restrictions were
designed to appease those lawmakers (U.S. Senate 1986).
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Furthermore, while in keeping with the post-civil rights era practice of

conflating colour-blindness or racial neutrality with antiracism, IRCA language
was race neutral while its implementation was anything but. The specifics of the
programme were as follows: the general programme was available to all
persons who could prove consistent US residence since 1 January 1982. Those
who qualified received Temporary Worker Cards and were eligible to apply for
permanent status after one year of consistent employment, and they were
prohibited from all public cash assistance programmes for five years after
legalization. The Seasonal Agricultural Worker (SAW) programme did not
offer the possibility of legalization for like the bracero programme, SAW was
‘essentially a temporary worker program whose explicit purposes are to
facilitate the widespread entry of Mexicans into the United States for seasonal
farm labor and to encourage return migration rather than permanent
settlement’ (Massey et al. 1990, p. 184).
The text of the law and the possibility for enfranchisement that it offered
was race and gender neutral but amnesty was administered in racist and sexist
ways that facilitated the exploitation of immigrant labour and impoverishment
of immigrant women. The two-tiered amnesty programme distinguished
between immigrants who would qualify for amnesty as prospective citizens,
and those condemned to non-citizen subject status via either denial of amnesty,
as in the case of women, and in SAW classification. In all cases different
immigrant statuses— and thus different sets of rights— were determined by
legal categorization shaped by race and gender. Nearly 70% of those accepted
into the general amnesty programme were Mexican; more than 20% were from
Central America and the Caribbean. Over two-thirds were male (Daniels 2004,
p. 229). Two million workers applied for SAW. Approximately 83% came
from Mexico and most were male (Martin and Taylor 1988). Moreover,
alongside the flagrant labour impetus underscoring SAW, general amnesty was
contingent upon proving consistent employment for one year while applicants
held Temporary Worker Cards. This made applicants’ freedom contingent
upon consistent work and thus dependent upon employers who had the
opportunity to easily exploit them, and rights had to literally be earned through
hard work.
David Theo Goldberg (2009) has argued that since the civil rights
movement, antiracialism (characterization of race neutrality as antiracist)
supplanted the previous racist order of overt violence and dispossession with
race-neutral legal formalism. Antiracialism ‘“saved” racism... by abandoning (or
at least threatening to abandon) race’ (p. 23) because an ‘ism’ that cannot be
named cannot be seen, has no roots, and thus cannot be challenged. Efforts to
remove the structure of racism were reduced to the formalism of law while the
material conditions of people of colour became invisible. Racism was therefore
quite free to proceed, for ‘if you are not memorable... then you are deemed to
have no claim not simply on national remembrance but on the nation-state
856 CULTURAL STUDIES

itself, because you are seen to have no place in it’ (p. 24). If the demographic
data about amnesty programme can be taken as an indication, overlooking race
via ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes did not at all mitigate racial and gender
stratification; regardless of the affective discourse of freedom and democratic
inclusivity, a cheap racialized and gendered labor pool, a new generation of
alien citizens, and the common sense notion that immigrants of colour needed
to earn rights was produced through amnesty implementation. Legal action did
not resolve inequality but rather reinvented it for a new era and a new
‘multicultural’ America.
Others looked over or overly looked at race and gender in the name of
American inclusivity and this way of looking also made neoliberal restructuring
appear to be humanitarian. Like Biden, in the final Senate session on IRCA,
Colorado Democratic Senator Gary Hart made impassioned pleas for amnesty
as an enfranchising measure that provided equal access to the American Dream,
and he did so with direct recourse to race and gender. Hart pointed out that the
nation’s treatment of undocumented immigration involved balancing national
sovereignty with ‘the role that America has played as a haven for the oppressed.
It is an issue that forces us to reconcile law enforcement needs with our
commitment to civil liberties and civil rights’. Hart opposed earlier versions of
IRCA because he feared that employer sanctions would produce racially
discriminatory hiring practices. Employer sanctions, he claimed, were a civil
rights issue because businesses would surely try to play it safe by avoiding the
hire of blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. He stressed repeatedly that civil rights
battles were not an issue of the past but continued to be a pressing concern.
Throughout the IRCA debates, this fear was also voiced by several other
senators such as Democratic New York Senator Shirley Chisholm, the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Latina/o lobbying groups such
as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), La
Raza, and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) (U.S.
Senate 1986).
Additionally, in the Senate record from September 28, 1982, under a
subsection entitled ‘Nation of Immigrants’, J.F.K .’s nephew, Democratic
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, a life-long immigration proponent and a
co-author of an IRCA special visa programme that was specifically designed to
help Irish aliens legalize (Gozdziak 1999, Zolberg 2006), worked the trope to
challenge rcstrictionist lobbies. He began by pointing out that ‘except for native
Indian citizens, we are all immigrants or refugees or the descendants of
immigrants and refugees’, and lamented that this had been overshadowed by a
‘focus on the problems of immigration, rather than on the benefits migrants
have brought to our country’ (p. 2S355). He referred to a New York Times (NYT)
series of articles on ‘The New Melting Pot’, initiated that week, as evidence to
support immigrants’ significant contributions to America. Kennedy averred that
Dena Kleman’s article, ‘Influx of Immigrants Spices Life of New York’, printed
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in full in the record, was filled with ‘overwhelming confidence in America and
the opportunities it offers’ for industrious immigrants. Although on different
sides of the partisan split, Democratic lawmakers such as Kennedy, Biden, and
Hart and Republican President Reagan all made cases for the national value of
hard-working immigrants, the type of immigrants who earned rights that were
supposedly inalienable. Regardless of intentions, the multicultural ‘nation of
immigrants’ trope worked hard for neoliberalism as evidence of the inclusivity
of the American free market system.
In the above article, deployment of the ‘nation of immigrants’ trope held up
multicultural citizens as, to borrow Melamed’s phrase, the ‘just desserts’ of the
global free market system: race and gender were overly looked at in support of
‘nation of immigrants’ Americanism. To prove her point that the racially diverse
influx of immigrants enhanced America, NYT reporter Kleman presented a case
study of Elmhurst, Queens, ‘the city’s most ethnically diverse neighborhood
where 20,000 immigrants from more than 110 countries’ live (p. 2S3S5). She
pointed out that in Elmhurst one found that a Korean grocer, Argentine butcher,
and Colombian baker coexisted and laboured harmoniously; sari shops, stores
selling mandarin collars, and Pakistani pickles and a variety of ethnic delicacies
were far more available for purchase than that American dietary staple, the
hamburger. And while Kleman acknowledged that some immigrants struggled
to make ends meet even though they worked very hard, rather than dwell on
that and its possible implications about the inequalities endemic to a free market
system, she focused more intently on the victors, on those ‘just desserts’, on
‘neoliberalism’s winners’. For instance, Kleman pointed out that Sarita Ocampo
came from Colombia and worked as a maid, the only job she could find in the
USA because she could not speak English. She eventually married another Latin
American immigrant, both went into real estate, and at the time of press had
just bought a home on Long Island...and were looking for their own maid.
Through her hard work and with adherence to respectability via a heterosexual
marriage, Ocampa achieved the American Dream, most poignantly symbolized
in her move from maid to, with her husband, the hiring of a maid.
As noted, as neoliberal theory abstracted multiculturalism by coding the
free market as the ultimate expression of equality, categories of racial privilege
and stigma were rearticulated beyond colour lines so that the subject of value
under neoliberalism— the ‘winner’— became the multicultural global citizen.
Ocampa exemplified this ascendant narrative, which was made all the more
poignant and affective given that this ‘winner’ was female. The American
Dream was available to all races and creeds... who were willing to adhere to a
politics of respectability that was measured by hard work and patriarchal and
heterosexual norms (Cacho 2008, 2011). In other words, American ‘winners’
worked hard and adhered to family values.
A linking of women’s freedom and free markets via ‘nation of immigrants’
tropes also surfaced in popular media. In Time’s 1985 Immigration Issue: The
858 CULTURAL STUDIES

Changing Face of America, the article ‘Adapting to a Different Role’ praised

immigrant women from various nations in the global south— India, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico— as brave heroines who
worked assiduously to succeed in America, the nation that, with equal access to
opportunity, had freed them from oppressive patriarchal cultures. W riter Jane
O ’Reilly stated that:

for most of these women, no matter how hard life is here, it is better than
it was there. The possibilities for single women are as dramatic as releasing
a bird from its cage. Even for married women, immigration to the U.S. is a
transforming process. The experience of earning money is central to their
delighted discovery of their own worth. (1985)

Thus the article praised hardworking Latin American and Asian women’s efforts
to become ‘part of the national frame of reference’ through the freedom that
the free market offered them. In this narrative (and quite a few others), the free
market added up to the realization of feminist futures for immigrant women of
colour. As such, the rhetoric did double-duty for American neoliberalism by
framing Asian and Latin American cultures (and since 9/11 especially Muslim
cultures) as fundamentally oppressive to women (Volpp 2011, pp. 91—92) in
stark contrast to America and its free market values as the evolved liberator of
women.
Along similar lines, outside of Congressional debate amnesty was directly
praised for the rights it would grant Hispanic immigrants and immigrant
women. In 1984 the NYT article ‘The Death of a Humane Idea’ asserted that
had an early iteration of IRCA passed, its inauguration could have been called
‘Freedom Day’ because ‘hundreds and thousands of aliens, most of them
Hispanic, would have lined up in church basements and country courthouses
from Amarillo to Brooklyn, eager to come in from the cold of illegality and
accept America’s humane offer of amnesty’. The article emphasized that the
Toss [of the bill] for Hispanic Americans is monumental’. The gender card was
also played, for the article pointed out that the law would have offered justice
to women who had been raped but fearing deportation did not report the crime
(NYT, 1984).
But the amnesty programme did not provide justice for women and in fact
IRCA included provisions that set the stage for draconian laws that flagrantly
attacked and disenfranchised immigrant mothers of colour. First, the sexism of
amnesty was (unsuccessfully) challenged head on by the 1988 Zambrano vs. INS
case. A group of Latina immigrant women with dependents argued that INS’s
implementation of IRCA’s amnesty and welfare restrictions adversely affected
undocumented mothers, for women who legally used social services for their
American-born children were denied amnesty. This policy was not explicitly
included in the bill, but was one of its bureaucratic effects. The case also
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OV E R N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 859

charged that INS disci-iminated on the basis of sex by making legalization more
available to men than women.
In its execution of IRCA, INS perpetuated what Grace Chang (2000,
p. 55), in her path-breaking research on immigrant women and welfare, called
the ‘feminization of poverty’. She argued that welfare implementation
‘continued to fill the historical role of the state in using immigration and
welfare policies to maintain women of color as a super-exploitable, low-wage
labor force’ by coercing Asian and Latin American immigrant women—
Mexican women in particular— into the secondary labour force, private
household work, and institutional service work (p. 59). Prior to IRCA, legal
and undocumented Mexican and Latin American immigrant women were
disproportionately employed in the service sector and in operative and labor
jobs: 26.9% Mexican women and 20.2% Latin American women in service, and
18.5% and 35.8%, respectively, in operative/labour. Only 7.6% Mexican
immigrant women and 11.5% Latin American immigrant women were
employed in the professional sector (Borjas and Tienda 1985, Table 8.5). By
excluding women from amnesty on the basis of legal welfare receipt, IRCA
implementation continued to channel undocumented women trying to legalize
into secondary sector employment, and made them vulnerable to exploitative
working conditions; undocumented women in the secondary labour force often
earned wages below the poverty level but rarely utilized public assistance due to
fears that it would jeopardize applications to legalize (Borjas and Tienda 1985,
pp. 55—61).
Second, not only undocumented women but also women waiting to legalize
experienced numerous forms of exploitation, such as not being paid, being paid
lower wages than documented workers, and sexual harassment. As observed by
Chang (2000, p. 67), a 1991 US Labor Department investigation of the
garment industry showed that labor exploitation and sexual harassment was
commonplace among Latina immigrant workers because women in the process
of applying for legalization were especially vulnerable: fearing deportation,
women workers tended to accept unfair treatment and abuses.
Additionally, despite the pro-immigrant, ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes
linked to amnesty, a national ‘turn against immigration’ occurred in the 1990s
(Reimers 1998) that suggested that neoliberal Americanism did not smoothly
translate into multicultural inclusion and enfranchisement. Growing nativism
was evidenced in amplified punitive measures in immigration policy such as
increased border militarization and welfare restriction, more overt expressions
of alarm over the volume of Mexican immigration in relation to welfare, crime,
and culture from Republican lawmakers such as Simpson and Newt Gingrich
(Kurian 1997), and in opposition from the general public: in 1986, 40% of
polled citizens wanted immigration decreased. In 1993 and 1995, 65% favoured
a decrease (Jones 2001).
860 CULTURAL STUDIES

Furthermore, as Leo Chavez has observed, when the 1980s gave way to the
1990s, Latina immigrant reproduction became ‘ground zero in a war not just of
words but also public policies and laws’ (2008, p. 71). Concerns about the costs of
improper family values among people of colour and immigrants coalesced with
Proposition 187 and the The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity
Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), both passed during the Clinton
administration. Picking up where IRCA welfare restrictions and sexist amnesty
implementation left off, these laws blatantly attempted to reform and control Latin
American immigrant family formation with severe welfare restrictions that evoked
eugenicist race betterment rather than an inclusive ‘nation of immigrants’ stance.
Prop 187, passed in California in 1994 but quickly placed under injunction
because of unconstitutionality, made undocumented immigrants ineligible for
all public social services, all public health care services other than emergency
services, and public school. State and local agencies were also required to
report suspected illegal immigrants to the California Attorney General and to
INS. California had been in recession for four years and nativists argued that
educating, incarcerating, and providing social services for the state’s substantial
illegal immigrant population were the cause. Governor Pete Wilson, facing a
difficult re-election campaign, framed illegal immigration as an urgent financial
threat to the state with his proposed budget for 1995, which requested a
reimbursement of $2.3 billion from the federal government in order to cover
California’s expenses for illegal immigration. His request was reduced to $760
million the following year, but he also filed three lawsuits against the federal
government in ongoing efforts to receive funds (Jacobson, R.D. 2008, pp. xvi—
xvii). Wilson and other proponents claimed that social services rather than jobs
drew immigrants and used this as a rationale for the restriction of aid (Johnson
1995, pp. 1509—1575). Therefore an economic crisis provided the official
impetus for Prop 187, yet proponents had no qualms about overtly racializing
and gendering the issue in ways that resonated with eugenicist thinking: Bette
Hammond articulated the ‘anchor baby’ thesis. She asserted that Latina
immigrants ‘come here, they have their babies and after that they become
citizens and all those children use social services’ (quoted in Chavez 2008,
p. 72). FAIR claimed that allowing the reproduction of Third World immigrant
women was ‘race suicide’ (McDonnell and Jacobs, Los Angeles Times, 24
November 1993). Following his reelection, Wilson’s first act was to order all
state and local agencies to discontinue immunizations and prenatal care for
pregnant women because, he claimed, California’s citizens were suffering
economic hardships as the direct result of undocumented Mexican m others’
abuse of social services. Chang (2000) astutely notes that although Wilson’s
staff reported that Latinas used Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC) at a rate 23% higher than all other women, studies indicate that
immigrant women use social services at very low rates even when legally
entitled. For instance, an analysis of 1990 Census data by W endy
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Walker-Moffat indicates that the fertility rates among Mexican women who had
immigrated between 1987 and 1990 was lower than U.S. citizens as a whole
and U.S. bom Latinas, and their use of AFDC and California’s state aid
program was very low (Chang 2000, p. 4, 27). Yet Wilson’s actions justified
gendered racism by framing it as an economic issue and institutionalized that
gendered racism (Johnson 1995, Cacho 2000, Jacobson, R.D. 2008).3 Both
Eithne Luibheid (2002) and Dorothy Roberts (1997) have characterized Prop
187 as a modern-day eugenidst measure. For instance, Roberts has stated that
‘modem-day advocates of these anti-immigrant policies may not espouse
eugenidst theory, but, like the former eugenidsts, they harm not only the
immigrants themselves, but also their descendants’ (p. 212).
W hat is perhaps most disturbing is that attempts to control poverty by
managing racialized immigrant women’s reproduction soon hadfederal backing in
the ‘nation of immigrants’. Signed by Bill Clinton in 1996, PRWORA severely
limited documented immigrants, unwed teenage mothers, and children bom to
mothers on welfare from receiving public benefits, and dismantled 61 years of
government cash assistance to poor families with children by ending AFDC.
Replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANFs), the new system
gave states control of welfare determination and administration, limited lifetime
receipt of welfare to five years, and required most adult recipients to work after
two years. Sterilization incentives for the poor were also included.
Additionally, PRWORA banned state and local governments from
providing all services except for emergency care to undocumented immigrants,
including prenatal care. Half of the $54 billion savings PRWORA engendered
came from the continued restriction of aid to undocumented i m m ig r a n ts and
the restriction of food stamps and supplemental security income (SSI) for
documented immigrants. W omen of colour were the targets of these changes
(Lowe 1996, Chang 2000, Luibheid 2002, Smith 2007) and, imagined as costly
burdens and violators of family values, their impoverishment and disenfranch­
isement seemed like common sense.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsiblity Act of 1996
(IIRIRA), also passed during the Clinton administration, added to this draconian
environment by increasing militarization and punishment of i m m ig r a tio n related
offenses. In fact, under IIRIRA, Zambrano vs. INS, a significant act of resistance
against the state-sanctioned gendered and racialized devaluation of immigrants^
was dismissed in 1998 because provisions of IIRIRA limited the ability of courts
to review issues of legalization. IIRIRA balanced out the border permeability for
both goods and labour created by 1994’s North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), a trade bloc between Canada, the USA, and Mexico,
by exacerbating the gendered criminalization of Mexican and Latin American
migrants with ever more punitive measures.
Picking up where IRCA welfare restrictions and sexist amnesty imple­
mentation left off, Prop 187, PRWORA, and IIRIRA pointed to the
862 CULTURAL STUDIES

‘necropolitical implications of the racialized and gendered processes of

valuation’ (Hong and Ferguson 2011, p. 14)— in other words political
ideologies and actions that can have deadly consequences— underscoring
neoliberal immigration, processes that were inaugurated with IRC A and
concealed by the ‘nation of immigrants’ fetish that surrounded amnesty. The
first two laws blatantly attempted to reform and control Latin American
immigrant family formation with severe welfare restrictions that were
reminiscent of eugenicist race betterment. And IlRIRA’s punitive provisions
created a carceral state for immigrants.
In short, the ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes that circulated in and around
amnesty laboured for neoliberalism in variously gendered and racialized ways.
Immigration law legally constituted who was and was not valued, who did and
did not deserve rights, protections, and privileges; immigration law constituted
the citizen, the subject of value in the nation-state. Overlooking race and
gender and overly looking at race and gender (i.e. either the abstracting or
highlighting of difference as evidence of inclusion and equal opportunity)
proliferated side-by-side in the law-making process to constitute the ideal
neoliberal(izing) citizen as— whether abstracted or overtly marked by race or
gender— hard-working and respectable. Both strains gelled with neoliberal
discourse about the universal benefits of free markets and Americanism as
exceptionally inclusive, for both ways of looking made it easy to overlook the
material conditions of Mexican immigrants during the law-making process,
when amnesty was implemented, and in its aftermath. What amnesty actually
did was keep mostly male, mostly Mexican amnesty applicants, highly
dependant upon and thus highly vulnerable to employer abuses during the
five-year waiting period, excluded women and thereby made undocumented
women and those few waiting to legalize hyper-vulnerable to sexual abuse and
violence as they worked hard, and the SAW programme directly extracted
temporary labour from Mexican men. Prop 187, PRWORA, and IIRIRA, each
of which built upon the precedent IRCA set, indicated that the consequences of
the law were far-reaching.

C onclusion

Despite the visceral pull of Reagan era ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes, the
material consequences of amnesty indicated that the social life of the law’s
textuahty was a far cry from universally beneficial, inclusive, or democratic.
The immigrant beneficiaries of rising neoliberalism via amnesty— whether
abstracted subjects or visibly gendered multicultural subjects— were cast by
‘nation of immigrants’ discourse as valuable and deserving because they were
hard workers and with family values. Meanwhile, the immigrants who were
devalued ostensibly earned their marginalization and disenfranchisement by
failing to work hard and adhere to family values.
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OV ER N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 863

Furthermore, in addition to erasing the inherently transnational histories of

colonialism and forced migration that quite literally made America, ‘nation of
immigrants’ rhetoric and the rights-based paradigm it was mobilized to support
offered what can only be considered limited enfranchisement given the
inherently transnational nature of immigrants’ lives. Neoliberalism created ‘a
new global economy in which employers and factories are free to relocate but
workers are often constrained by national immigration policy’ (Buff 2008,
p. 2). Free trade agreements ensured the mobility of capital— thus labour
would also need to be mobile— yet immigration law constrained the mobility of
people across borders and within the nation-state. As noted above, the
neohberal state relied on the social and economic marginalization of people and
especially women of colour to reproduce itself; gendered and racialized
immigrant labor was, in a word, cheap. The neoliberalizing state quite literally
invested in keeping that labour cheap by denying immigrant populations rights
that reflected the material conditions of their lives. Although citizenship has
often been conceived of as the goal of rights struggles for immigrants,
citizenship was not an automatic indicator of rights and can often be a loss of
rights for persons who lead transnational lives (Buff 2008, Das Gupta 2008).
W hether overlooking or looking over gender and race, the work that ‘nation of
immigrants’ tropes did in relation to /fo r amnesty erased this by naturalizing a
relationship between citizenship, freedom, and free markets so that American
neoliberalism appeared to align with and even facilitate a more democratic
society.
W ith this reflection on the relationships between immigration law, the
state, and culture, I hope to have demonstrated that immigration law is a crucial
object for cultural studies scholars given the field’s impetus to not only critically
analyze but also to intervene in the processes by which structures of power are
produced and reproduced; I hope to have demonstrated that cultural studies
methodology of looking at the law in localized contexts to reveal the workings
of power is imperative. Although theories of globalization downplayed the
importance of the nation-state, ‘nation of immigrants’ tropes mobilized in and
around IRC A amnesty indicated that in the exceptional ‘nation of immigrants’,
ostensibly progressive immigration reform was not an effective route to equal
rights, freedom, and democracy. Amnesty legislation exacerbated social issues
by enabling the neoliberalizing nation-state to function as a potent force for
racialized and gendered geo-political and geo-economic control. Thus, this
looking over of amnesty policy suggests that immigration law must be a
significant m atter of concern for cultural studies.

N otes

1 This ‘immigration emergency’ trope, the other side of the ‘nation of

immigrants’ trope, was echoed in the popular culture of the period. The
864 CUL TURAL STUDI ES

circle of inclusion seemed to continue to broaden only to until immigrants

deviated from the dominant value system— like ostensibly fecund, welfare-
abusing undocumented Mexican mothers or, in the wake of the Mariel boatlift,
criminally-inclined Cuban refugees— and when they did they were justifiably
penalized and excluded. Amidst ubiquitous media representations of Latino
drug dealers and welfare-draining Latina mothers, these recurring stories about
immigration indicated that punitive legal action (i.e. family reunification cuts,
border militarization, welfare restriction, and deportation) was not racist or
sexist, but exacted only when necessary to preserve the fiscal and moral health
of the nation-state.
2 Israel Zangwill’s (1908) play, The Melting Pot, provided an emblematic
example of this. The protagonist, Russian Jewish immigrant David Quixano,
contended that America was ‘God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all
the races of Europe are melting and re-forming’. The true American, he
mused, ‘has not yet arrived’, because he was ‘only in the Crucible... he will
be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman’ (pp. 33—34). In the
play, to become American was to ‘melt’ European ethnic difference and
consequently have access to new opportunity and freedom.
3 Fact-free or at best spurious apocrypha frequently surfaced in support of other
neolibcral moves, notably Reagan’s frequent reference to a grossly exaggerated
‘welfare queen’ to justify welfare cuts.

N ote on C ontributor

Leah Perry is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at SUNY-Empire State

College. She received her doctorate from George Mason University’s Cultural
Studies program, and holds a Master of Arts from New York University in
Humanities and Social Thought, and a Master of Arts and Religion from Yale
Divinity School. Her teaching and research interests encompass gender and
sexuality, American Studies, immigration, race and ethnicity, and popular
culture. She is completing a book manuscript about the role of U.S.
immigration discourses, gender politics, and media in the rise of neoliberalism,
entitled Neoliberal Crossings: U.S. Immigration, Gender, and Media, 1981—2001.

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New York University Press, pp. 1—22.
 O V E R L O O K I N G / L O O K I N G OV E R N E O L I B E R A L I M M I G R A T I O N 865

Cacho, L. (2000) ‘“The people of California are suffering”: the ideology of white
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