Making Immigrants Illegal in Small‐Town USA

Abstract

Using two discourse‐analytical lenses, one genealogical and the other textual, this article traces the interdiscursive history through which the social categories “Mexican immigrant” and “illegal alien” have become conflated in the United States, effectively criminalizing Mexican immigrants as dangerous Others. Today, this conflation is a prime source for the racialization of not only Mexican immigrants, but other Latin American immigrants as well, where racialization is understood as a form of social differentiation that marks people as inherently threatening and foreign. This article focuses on the ways this conflation has been established and circulated in U.S. immigration policy. After offering a genealogy of the relevant federal policy, I provide a textual analysis of an anti‐immigrant ordinance penned in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I trace the interdiscursive strategies used by municipal officials in constructing the ordinance, showing that they extend the “legal racialization” in federal code by expanding the categories of behavior associated with immigrant illegality. [Legal discourse; racialization; interdiscursivity; performative nomination; Latin American immigration; Hazleton]

“She does have an accent but…”: Race and language ideology in students' evaluations of mathematics instructors on RateMyProfessors.com

“…In other words, although many Latino/as are in fact NESs (or bilingual English speakers), dominant discourses in the US often position them as NNESs or non-English speakers on the basis of race and (often inaccurately assumed) nationality (Dick 2011;Subtirelu 2013). Gonzalez) due to the ideology of nativeness's problematic positioning of that population.…”

On the margins: Undocumented students’ narrated experiences of (il)legality

“…Here race is explicitly invoked as an explanatory construct; however, ethnicity (and nationality) are also mentioned. While social scientists generally differentiate 'race' and 'ethnicity', with ethnicity referring to "types of social difference constructed to appear relatively more flexible, less hierarchical, and anchored in inherited cultural beliefs and practices" (Dick, 2011, p. E40)-in everyday interactions, including this account, the contrast is very often blurred or non-existent.…”

“….into fixed species of otherness" (Silverstein, 2005, p. 364). The ways in which U.S. federal policy (e.g., Coutin, 2005;De Genova, 2005;Ngai, 2004) and state and local government mandates (e.g., Dick, 2011;Schiffman & Weiner, 2012) have criminalized and racialized Mexicans and other Latin American adult immigrants has been well documented. De Genova (2005), for instance, examined how 'illegality' has been discursively and ideologically constructed as both a category and a crime, and linked with the Chicago Mexican communities.…”

Evidence of Nonconscious Stereotyping of Hispanic Patients by Nursing and Medical Students

“…In the present study, nursing and medical students were subliminally exposed to Hispanic and non-Hispanic White faces before identifying words related to noncompliance, health risk, negative stereotypes about Hispanics that are unrelated to health (e.g., uneducated; Dick, 2011; Dixon & Rosenbaum, 2004), and equally negative control words unrelated to stereotypes about Hispanics. It was hypothesized that participants would be faster to recognize noncompliance, health risk, and general stereotype words following exposure to Hispanic faces, compared with non-Hispanic Whitefaces.…”