Scholars frequently invoke the term “women of color” (WOC) in their research, and, increasingly, the media make reference to WOC in news stories. Despite this common usage, researchers have failed to investigate whether the phrase WOC is politically advantageous. That is, do all women, black, Latina, Asian, white, and mixed-race women, support WOC candidates? This omission is unfortunate considering the large body of literature about race and gender politics concerned with descriptive representation and the extent of coethnic voting and gender affinity effects. Using original public opinion data, we draw on theories of intersectionality and social identity to hypothesize about how different subgroups of women respond to the prospect of electing more WOC to Congress. Consistent with group differences in the historic processes of racialization, our findings reveal considerable complexity within the WOC umbrella. Even within this complexity, we found that black and white women are the most distinctive in their preference for electing WOC. We contribute to the gender and race fields by identifying WOC as a politicized identity, and thus complicate and expand the study of descriptive representation.

This conceptual article examines the intersection between immigration law enforcement and education. We explore the following questions: How have immigration and education policy intersected in the last decade, and particularly after the 2016 presidential election? To examine this question, we make use of the interdisciplinary nature of our own academic backgrounds as a political scientist and an education policy scholar to ground our article using sociologist Herbert Blumer’s sense of group position theory, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit). Guided by this theoretical frame, we discuss the notion of education being used as a bargaining tool and a weapon with implications for Latino communities given the current political and anti-immigrant context. We highlight examples that represent various levels of government and that on the surface have a target population of immigrant adults or young adults—however, we argue that regardless of the target population, if a policy has direct implications for adult immigrants and immigration, it will have direct implications for educational institutions and the children of immigrants.

No abstract

In this article, I examine the decisions of Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, Indiana, and most recently, Texas to pass restrictive immigration omnibus bills and analyze the factors associated with the decision of a state to pass its own immigration law, sometimes without explicit warrant. I focus on state omnibus legislation for two main reasons. First, this type of legislation has been the focus of much media attention. Second, omnibus legislation mimics comprehensive immigration legislation over which the federal government has sole authority. Additionally, I focus on the regional proliferation of restrictive immigration laws, and then bring my attention to the seven states that passed similar legislation. Individually, I examine the roll call votes by each state’s House of Representatives. By looking at immigration politics at a sub-national level, this article provides a more nuanced understanding of the political and ideological work of immigration policies. I argue that contemporary immigration politics at sub-national levels should not only be understood as a story about demographic changes and strictly partisan politics but also a story about the sociohistorical legacies of localities. The historical processes of race, and the differing ways in which places get racialized, influences, beyond partisanship, which representatives voted for and against restrictive immigration legislation. These differences, alongside state-level differences, I argue, continue to affect politics and policy today. Immigration policy has become a vessel through which to contest the politics of race, place, and power.

No abstract

Previous work has shown public opinion toward immigrants is malleable based on how immigrants are described in media and elite rhetoric. In a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of American adults, we extend this research to test for possible priming effects that occur based on how salient documentation status is when respondents proffer opinions on Latino immigrants. Our findings show that when subjects are first asked about “undocumented Latino immigrants,” their attitudes toward “Latino immigrants,” appear more negative, relative to when they are first asked about “Latino immigrants” without invoking the legal modifier. Respondents channel their negative associations with “illegal” or “undocumented” immigration into their opinions of Latino immigrants writ large. The results have implications for political communication, media reporting on immigration, and policy debates, which frequently discuss both “legal” and “undocumented” immigration in the same context.

“A Legacy of Exclusion” briefly traces the historical migration of Latinas/os to the US South, countering the myth that the migration of Latinas/os to the region is new. Additionally, the piece argues that the exclusion Latinas/os face in the region is a continuation of racist policies and unequal power dynamics in the South that link Latina/o presence to a longer historical past and legacy. Through an examination of Alabama’s anti-immigration legislation, HB 56, I make two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that although there is nothing new about Latina/o migration to the region, what is new is the geopolitics of immigration — specifically, the proliferation of immigration enforcement within the interior of the United States. Second, these kinds of racist exclusionary projects have historical precedent. The contemporary regulation of nonwhite bodies is part of a much longer legacy of social control in the United States. Moving forward, I urge scholars of Latina/o studies and related fields whose focus is on the US South to engage with the history of settler colonialism, the displacement of native peoples, and the African American history of this region as a way to make important historical connections among and across racialized and otherized groups.

No abstract