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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Is Immigration Policy Labor Policy? Immigration Enforcement, Undocumented Workers, And The State, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz, Laura Nussbaum-Barberena
Is Immigration Policy Labor Policy? Immigration Enforcement, Undocumented Workers, And The State, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz, Laura Nussbaum-Barberena
Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Enforcement-oriented immigration programs have spread rapidly from the United States-Mexico border throughout the United States interior in recent years, intensifying the vulnerabilities of undocumented workers. In this article, we draw on our ethnographic research with undocumented workers and activists in the Chicago area to examine the expanded use of instruments such as E-Verify, No-Match letters, and federal-local enforcement collaborations. We consider how accelerated enforcement-oriented immigration policies affect the labor relations of undocumented workers in the Chicago area, and we also explore how immigrant labor leaders help workers ward off the short-term effects of punitive immigration policies as they organize for …
Inequality In A "Postracial" Era: Race, Immigration, And Criminalization Of Low Wage Labor, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Inequality In A "Postracial" Era: Race, Immigration, And Criminalization Of Low Wage Labor, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Over the past four decades, increasingly punitive and enforcement-oriented U.S. immigration policies have been legitimized by a rhetoric of criminality that stigmatizes Latino immigrant workers and intensifies their exploitation. Simultaneously, there has been a sevenfold increase in the prison population in the United States, in which African Americans are eight times more likely to be jailed than Whites (Western 2006, p. 3). In this paper, I draw on scholarship in history and sociology, as well as my own anthropological research, to develop the argument that criminal justice policies and immigration policies together disempower low-wage U.S. labor and maintain categorical racial …
Willing To Work: Agency And Vulnerability In An Undocumented Immigrant Network, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Willing To Work: Agency And Vulnerability In An Undocumented Immigrant Network, Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Ruth Gomberg-Munoz
Restriction-oriented immigration policies and polarizing political debates have intensified the vulnera- bility of undocumented people in the United States, promoting their “willingness” to do low-wage, low-status work. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research with undocumented immigrants in Chicago to examine the everyday strategies that undocumented workers develop to mediate constraints and enhance their well-being. In particular, I explore how a cohort of undocumented Mexican immigrants cultivates a social identity as “hard workers” to promote their labor and bolster dignity and self-esteem. Much of the existing literature on unauthorized labor migration has focused on the structural conditions that encumber …