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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 …