Rallying for Immigrant Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America
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Rallying for Immigrant Rights: The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520948914 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 07/06/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Rallying for Immigrant Rights
The Fight for Inclusion in 21st Century America
By Kim Voss, Irene Bloemraad
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94891-4
CHAPTER 1
The Protests of 2006
What Were They, How Do We Understand Them, Where Do We Go?
Irene Bloemraad, Kim Voss, and Taeku Lee
In a short span of twelve weeks between mid-February and early May 2006, an estimated 3.7 to 5 million people took to the streets in over 160 cities across the United States to rally for immigrant rights. Marches and demonstrations were organized from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, and forty-two states in between. The marches brought together groups large and small, from the 24 people counted at a protest in Anchorage to as many as 700,000 people in the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles. Often wearing white T-shirts, waving American flags and, at times, flags from their homelands, the marchers included people of all ages, from babies in strollers and teenagers walking with their parents to gray-haired seniors in wheelchairs. The marchers spanned economic conditions and came from all walks of life, from day laborers and janitors to professionals and politicians, including the future U.S. president, Barack Obama. Together, they chanted slogans such as "Today we march, tomorrow we vote," and "!Si, se puede!" (Yes, we can!). The majority of those who took to the streets were Latino, but people of European, African, and Asian heritage marched too. The group of "Latinos" who participated was diverse, including immigrants from over a dozen Spanish-speaking countries, their U.S.-born children, and Chicano or Hispanic Americans whose families' U.S. roots stretch back a hundred years or more.
The sheer scope of the protests and the numbers involved are of historic proportions. During the heyday of the civil rights movements, in 1963, 250,000 people flocked to the Mall in Washington DC to hear Martin Luther King Jr. (JBHE Foundation 2003). In 1969, those who marched on Washington to protest American involvement in Vietnam numbered between 250,000 and 320,000 (Cicchetti et al. 1971). Looking back to the nineteenth century, some 300,000 to 500,000 people took to the streets to militate for labor rights, culminating in the famous Chicago Haymarket protest of 1886 (Avrich 1984; Foner 1986). Strikingly, none of these prior protests—historic moments in the annals of contentious politics in the United States—matched the largest May 1 rallies for immigrant rights in 2006.
Beyond the United States, the marches of 2006 were likely the largest protests over immigrant rights seen in the world, and they probably figure among the largest demonstrations held in Western nations in recent de cades. Especially noteworthy, the 2006 U.S. mobilizations were peaceful and without a major violent incident: there were no demonstrator/police melees, not a single person died, and not a single car was burned, unlike other twenty-first-century protests and riots over immigrant rights and race relations in cities such as Birmingham, Paris, and Sydney.
The scope, scale, and peaceful nature of the protests demand explanation; this is one of the goals of our volume. Activism outside "normal" electoral or institutional politics suggests that standard political science accounts of behavioral politics or Latino/minority politics must be expanded beyond voting or contacting elected officials to include contentious action. At the same time, the protests do not quite fit within existing social movements scholarship: the strategies used were tried and true tactics employed by past social movements, but the nature of the 2006 mobilizations was unusual. The protests rapidly ballooned to unimagined proportions, were sustained for about three months, but then collapsed as quickly as they started. Why, like a July 4 fireworks display, did the marches end as abruptly as they began? It is unclear whether the 2006 protests better represent "spontaneous" collective action, as articulated by an older generation of social scientists and recently retheorized (Killian 1984; Biggs 2003, 2005), or a "sustained" movement in line with most contemporary political process and new social movement models of contentious action.
Much of the research reported here suggests that the rapid, large-scale mobilization arose, in part, due to the loose network of local groups who received support from actors like the media or Catholic Church, organizations that could send widespread messages about the protests. We also suggest that the protests were animated by an almost paradoxical mix of threat—from legislative action against undocumented immigrants and anti-Latino or anti-immigrant sentiment more generally—and faith in the political system. Perhaps for this reason, there is evidence that some of the energies animating the 2006 street protests became channeled into 2008 electoral participation. These dynamics, if accurate, reinforce social movement scholars' argument about the importance of organizations for contentious politics. However, they challenge the idea that, for mobilization, social movements need openings in the political opportunities structure—2006 was more about threat than opportunity—and they challenge hard and fast distinctions between contentious and electoral political engagement.
The 2006 protests were remarkable in another way: they focused on, and were in substantial part animated by, people without citizenship in the political system they challenged. Most studies of formal politics take for granted the citizen-actor, an individual who holds political rights and who may act independently, as a voter, or in a collective, as part of a civic association, political party, or interest group. Those who are foreign-born, particularly those without citizenship and especially those without legal residence, are absent from standard, institutional accounts of political engagement.
Noncitizens also tend to be absent from studies of social movements. Social movement scholars devote their energies to studying the political actions of those who, in the classical language of social movements, are "challengers," forced to engage in contentious action because they see few opportunities in the formal political system (Tilly 1978). This characterization perfectly suits noncitizens' activities, yet the assumption undergirding most studies of social movements is one of the protesting citizen. Protesters might have second-class citizenship, as was the case for African Americans, but they are nationals of the countries where they advocate for change. They can be jailed, attacked, and obstructed in their protest activities, but they cannot generally be thrown out of the country altogether. This is the case for a noncitizen migrant.
In the United States, an estimated 11 to 12 million unauthorized migrants lived in the country in 2006, and another 14 million noncitizen legal residents—from international students to permanent residents who have made the United States home for decades—face an additional form of repression not seen in most social movements. They can be summarily removed from the society in which they are protesting and be deported, ripping families apart and tearing a person away from his or her livelihood and community. What would possess people who have everything to lose by coming out into the limelight to march, even though the cost could be permanent and definitive exclusion? Noncitizens are invisible from most political struggles in the United States, but the 2006 protests rendered them visible.
The language of visibility—what worked to frame these individuals' struggles, and what didn't—deserves careful attention. Our preliminary conclusion is that the most successful framing of the movement centered on American values of family and work: immigrants are members of families and hard workers who do not deserve to be seen or treated like deportable criminals. In contrast, frames that hinted at foreignness, such as appeals to home-country pride, America's immigration history, or even human rights, found limited traction in the court of public opinion and mainstream media coverage of the protests. The American public, it seems, need immigrants to make appeals to their Americanism. From the viewpoint of some contributors to this volume, the 2006 rallies also mark a crystallization of a new Latino identity that brings together multiple generations whose roots in the United States might date from a few years to more than a century.
In the remainder of this chapter, we provide some background to the events of 2006, and we make the case for why the immigrant rights rallies offer an important lens onto critical questions of citizenship, social movements, politics, and identity. We sketch out key ways to understand the protests and highlight the various institutions and processes involved in this moment of mass mobilization. We then take a step back and ask about the consequences of the protests, for American politics and for immigrants and Latinos in the United States, as well as for academic scholarship within sociology, political science, and related disciplines. In doing so, we highlight the contributions of the other chapters in this volume, which address the question of why and how the protests occurred as well as their consequences for the future. In a world where globalization has spurred dramatic increases in the number of international migrants, even as immigration policies grow more restrictive in many places, the practical and theoretical issues raised by the 2006 protests present pressing dilemmas for scholars and citizens around the world.
BACKGROUND: THE EVENTS OF 2006
The immediate catalyst of the 2006 spring protest wave was the passage of the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, also known as H.R. 4437, on December 16, 2005. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, first introduced the bill on December 6; ten days later it passed the House of Representatives with a vote of 239 to 182. The bill, which the Congressional Bud get Office estimated would cost almost $2 billion dollars between 2006 and 2010 alone, counted among its provisions a substantial investment in border security, including almost seven hundred miles of double-layer fencing, increasingly high-tech document control, more cooperation between the Department of Homeland security and local law enforcement, and stiffer penalties for employers hiring illegal migrants. Even in the context of greater congressional concern over security and border control in a post-September 11 environment, the bill was widely perceived as draconian, in no small part because it would make living in the United States without valid legal documentation a crime rather than the civil offence it currently is. The provision would have not only criminalized anyone who committed an immigration violation, even a technical one without intent to violate the immigration laws, but it also threatened to criminalize anyone who assisted illegal aliens, including those working for religious, humanitarian, or social justice organizations that might offer legal aid, social welfare, or sanctuary to people without proper documents.
Passage of H.R. 4437 sent ripples of anxiety through immigrant rights, union, and religious networks across the country. By February 11, 2006, roughly five hundred Latino leaders from labor unions, churches, community-based organizations, advocacy groups, and universities met in Riverside, California, to plan a nationwide series of protests (see Wang and Winn, this volume). These activists wanted to influence the expected spring debate over immigration legislation in the U.S. Senate.
The ripples rapidly grew in amplitude and began to be visible to the wider public. The first wave of protests reported in the media occurred between February 14 and 22 in Philadelphia, Georgetown, Delaware, and Fort Myers, Florida, drawing between 1,000 and 5,000 participants. On March 1, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles used his Ash Wednesday address—a choice that was a striking religious and symbolic message—to call on Catholics and other concerned citizens to defy H.R. 4437 should it become law. The wave of protests then grew at a furious pace, with 20,000 to 40,000 rallying in Washington DC on March 6, followed by a massive demonstration of 100,000 to 300,000 protesters in Chicago on March 10. The storm of immigrant rights rallies had begun.
Upwards of 260 separate demonstrations occurred in the subsequent two months, with most clustering around three distinct time periods: March 23–31, April 9 and 10, and May 1. Table 1.1 highlights the largest twenty demonstrations that occurred between March 23 and May 1, 2006. Eight of these rallies attracted at least 100,000 participants, with perhaps half to three-quarter million people marching in the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles on May 1. The symbolism of May 1 might have been lost on some American observers, but the date is highly significant: currently known as International Workers' Day, this day of labor protest and celebration of workers' rights originated in the United States with the Haymarket Riots of 1886 in Chicago. The theme of work, and the economic contributions made by immigrant workers regardless of legal status, was a prominent theme on placards held by demonstrators and in speeches addressed to the marchers. As one banner said, "We are workers, not criminals!" (Reid 2006).
The wave of protests also spread to new places not historically known for activism around immigrant rights or, for that matter, not known as places of migration at all. During the spring of 2006, demonstrations occurred in towns large and small across the South and Midwest. Tens of thousands took to the streets in Fort Meyers, Florida, and in Atlanta, while smaller rallies occurred across the Carolinas, in Tennessee, as well as in rural Nebraska and Kansas. For example, Schuyler, Nebraska, a small town of 5,300 souls, saw 3,000 people rally for immigrant rights (Wang and Winn, this volume). The broad geographic scope of the demonstrations, shown in figure 1.1, reflected the new and growing dispersion of immigrants, and especially Latino migrants, throughout the United States (Singer 2004a; Zuniga and Hernández-Léon 2005; Massey 2008).
As with many powerful storms, this one died quickly, at least from the public eye. Indeed, the demobilization of the marchers was as dramatic as their mobilization. Few rallies of substantial size occurred in the months and years following May 2006. The immediate goal of many marchers—to kill H.R. 4437—succeeded. The Senate refused to consider the legislation. But the marchers failed to spur more proactive legislation. On May 26, 2006, the Senate passed S. 2611, the Comprehensive Immigration and Reform Act, which would have created a path to legalization for undocumented migrants, but the bill died and alternative bills during the summers of 2006 and 2007 suffered a similar fate. At the time of this writing, in spring 2010, there still has been no comprehensive immigration reform. President Barack Obama has signaled an interest in pushing for such a bill, but responding to the severe economic recession, foreign policy, and health-care reform have taken center stage early in his administration.
PLACING SPRING 2006 IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Just as no one predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, no scholar or political commentator predicted the scale and scope of the spring 2006 protests. With the Just as no one predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, no scholar or political commentator predicted the scale and scope of the spring 2006 protests. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can identify a number of precedents, including Chicano, worker, sanctuary movement, and immigrant rights activism, which laid the groundwork for 2006.
Legacies of Activism
"Latinos"—ranging from Spanish speakers of Spanish heritage to those of mixed or largely indigenous background born in the Spanish-speaking Americas—have lived in what is the United States since before the country's independence. Substantial incorporation of Latinos only occurred, however, with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. The treaty ceded significant proportions of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming, as well as all of California, Nevada, and Utah, to the United States, and it forced Mexico to recognize the Rio Grande as the border between Texas and Mexico. In 1850, an estimated 80,000 Mexican Americans lived in the U.S. Southwest, accounting for about 20 percent of the region's population (Nostrand 1975). Although the border was relatively open and unpoliced in this period, migration of Mexicans to the United States was modest. According to official records, 728,000 Mexican moved to the United States between 1901 and 1930 (Bean and Stevens 2003, 49). These migrants, combined with people born in the United States of Mexican heritage, accounted for the 1,423,000 Mexican-origin individuals living in the United States in 1930 (Bean and Stevens 2003, 53). This number would decrease over the subsequent two de cades as older generations passed away, new migration was reduced by economic depression and war, and the United States forcibly returned hundreds of thousands of people to Mexico.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Acknowledgments
What Happened? The Historically Unprecedented Mobilizations of Spring 2006
1. The Protests of 2006: What Were They, How Do We Understand Them, Where Do We Go?
Irene Bloemraad, Kim Voss, and Taeku Lee
2. Groundswell Meets Groundwork: Building on the Mobilizations to Empower Immigrant Communities
Ted Wang and Robert C. Winn
Mobilization Dynamics: Why and How the Protests Happened
3. Mobilization en Español: Spanish-Language Radio and the Activation of Political Identities
Ricardo Ramírez
4. Building the Labor-Clergy-Immigrant Alliance
Randy Shaw
5. From Prayer to Protest: The Immigrant Rights Movement and the Catholic Church
Luisa Heredia
6. Mobilizing Marchers in the Mile-High City: The Role of Community-Based Organizations
Lisa M. Martinez
7. Migrant Civic Engagement
Jonathan Fox and Xóchitl Bada
8. Regarding Family: New Actors in the Chicago Protests
Amalia Pallares and Nilda Flores-González
9. It’s a Family Affair: Intergenerational Mobilization in the Spring 2006 Protests
Irene Bloemraad and Christine Trost
Looking Forward: Whither American Politics and Immigrant Rights Mobilization?
10. LA’s Past, America’s Future? The 2006 Immigrant Rights Protests and Their Antecedents
Ruth Milkman
11. Drawing New Lines in the Sand: Evaluating the Failure of Immigration Reforms from 2006 to the Beginning of the Obama Administration
Louis DeSipio
12. The Efficacy and Alienation of Juan Q. Public: The Immigration Marches and Latino Orientations toward American Political Institutions
Francisco I. Pedraza, Gary M. Segura, and Shaun Bowler
13. Out of the Shadows, into the Light: Questions Raised by the Spring of 2006
Roberto Suro
References
Contributors
Index
What People are Saying About This
"This important book makes a significant contribution to the growing fields of immigration, ethnic relations, and policy studies."—Choice
"The 'fight for inclusion in . . . could not have been waged so effectively without prior grassroots work by . . . unions, the religious community, and immigrant rights organizations."—Monthly Review