Introduction Excerpt for The Latino Threat

INTRODUCTION

ON MARCH 24, 2009, Pat Buchanan stated on MSNBC: “Mexico is the greatest foreign policy crisis I think America faces in the next 20, 30 years. Who is going to care, 30 years from now whether a Sunni or a Shia is in Baghdad or who’s ruling in Kabul? We’re going to have 135 million Hispanics in the United States by 2050, heavily concentrated in the southwest. The question is whether we’re going to survive as a country.”¹ Buchanan’s apocalyptic pronouncement went beyond immigrants from Latin America to warn about the threat posed by their children and subsequent generations.

A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center in August 2009 warned of the rapid growth in militia groups across the United States.² There were various reasons for this rise, with the stress of the recession and a liberal administration led by a Black president being the most important. But the center also cited “conspiracy theories about a secret Mexican plan to reclaim the Southwest” that are part of the public debate about immigration.

On April 23, 2010, Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, signed the United States’ toughest immigration law. What soon followed were similar laws in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah, as various states seemed to compete to pass the most draconian anti-immigration legislation. Although in June 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down most of Arizona’s immigration law, it did allow police to continue asking anyone suspected of being in the country illegally for their immigration papers.³ In Arizona, passage of the immigration law was followed by attacks on teaching Chicano studies in high school. Arizona’s banning of Chicano studies and textbooks was based on the argument that such classes fomented anti-Anglo (non-Latino White) hatred and promoted the idea of a Latino takeover of the U.S. Southwest.⁴

Figure I.1. Sharron Angle political ad, using a photograph of Mexicans taken in Mexico.

SOURCE: Andrew Price for www.good.org.

In the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Nevada, Republican Sharron Angle ran against Democrat Harry Reid. Angle’s campaign aired an advertisement that featured three Latino-looking male youth (Figure I.1). Each was standing looking directly at the camera, wearing casual clothing, sweatshirts, and jackets. One wore a baseball hat backwards. Across the image were the words, in bold, “illegal aliens.” One would think that these three Latino males were the hardest-working models in political ads that year, as they turned up in other advertisements as well. What’s important here is that the ad did not provide identifying information on the young men, such as where they were born or even if they really were “illegal aliens.” For all we knew, they could have been well-paid actors, college students, or immigrant workers. The reality is that these three Mexican men were photographed in Mexico. There is no evidence they were ever in the United States as undocumented immigrants.⁵ However, being “Mexican-looking” was enough to create the message that Latino immigrants represented a problem and that a vote for the political candidate would help fix the problem.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was in Tennessee on October 15, 2011, where he responded to a question about his views on erecting a fence between the United States and Mexico. Cain replied that if elected president, he would build a border fence: “It’s going to be 20 feet high. It’s going to have barbed wire on the top. It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you—Warning.’”⁶ Cain said later that he was joking but then quickly added, “but not really.” How could a presidential candidate joke about electrifying human beings?

Cain’s border fantasy became real when, in 2023, Gregg Abbott, the governor of Texas, placed huge floats in the middle of the Rio Grande and razorsharp concertina wire to discourage migrants, many of them asylum seekers, from crossing into the United States. The Texas National Guard was instructed to push migrants, including women and children, back into the river. While perhaps not electrified, many women and children were terrified as they became entangled in the barbed wire.⁷

This book grew out of my attempt to unpack the meanings of these views about Latinos. Rather than considering them in isolation, I began to see them as connected, as part of a larger set of concerns over immigration, particularly from Mexico and other parts of Latin America; the meaning of citizenship; and the power of media spectacles in contemporary life. The Latino Threat Narrative provides the raw material that weaves these concerns together.

The Latino Threat Narrative posits that Latinos are not like previous immigrant groups, who ultimately became part of the nation. According to the assumptions and taken-for-granted “truths” inherent in this narrative, Latinos are unwilling or incapable of integrating, of becoming part of the national community. Rather, they are part of an invading force from south of the border that is bent on reconquering land that was formerly theirs (the U.S. Southwest) and destroying the American way of life. Although Mexicans are often the focus of the Latino Threat Narrative, public discourse, as I elaborate in Chapter One, often includes immigration from Latin America in general, as well as U.S.-born Americans of Latin American descent. Thus the broader and more inclusive term Latino is used throughout this book, while recognizing that Latinos actually vary greatly in terms of their historical backgrounds and success in integrating into U.S. social and economic life.⁸

The contemporary Latino Threat Narrative has its antecedents in U.S. history: the German language threat, the Catholic threat, the Chinese and Japanese immigration threats, and the southern and eastern European threat. In their day, each discourse of threat targeted particular immigrant groups and their children. Each was pervasive and defined “truths” about the threats posed by immigrants that, in hindsight, were unjustified or never materialized in the long run of history. And each of these discourses generated actions, such as alarmist newspaper stories (the media of the day), anti-immigrant riots, restrictive immigration laws, forced internments, and acrimonious public debates over government policies. In this sense, the Latino Threat Narrative is part of a grand tradition of alarmist discourse about immigrants and their perceived negative impacts on society.⁹

However, the Latino Threat Narrative recognizes that Latinos are different from past immigrants and other ethnic groups in America today. Latinos have been in what is now the United States since the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, actually predating the English colonies. Since the Mexican-American War, immigration from Mexico and other Latin countries has waxed and waned, building in the early twentieth century, diminishing in the 1930s, and building again the post-1965 years. These migrations paralleled those of other immigrant groups. But Mexicans in particular have been represented as the quintessential “illegal aliens,” which distinguishes them from other immigrant groups. Their social identity has been plagued by the mark of illegality, which in much public discourse means that they are criminals and thus illegitimate members of society, undeserving of social benefits, including citizenship. Latinos are an alleged threat because of this history and social identity, which supposedly make their integration difficult and imbue them, particularly Mexicans, with a desire to remain socially apart as they prepare for a reconquest of the U.S. Southwest.

The Latino Threat Narrative is pervasive even when not explicitly mentioned. It is the cultural dark matter filling space with taken-for-granted “truths” in debates over immigration on radio and TV talk shows, in newspaper editorials, and on internet blogs. Unquestioned motives and behavior attributed to Latino immigrants and their children permeate discussions over amnesty for undocumented immigrants, employer sanctions, driver’s licenses, prenatal care, education for the children of immigrants, citizenship for “anchor babies” (U.S.-born children with undocumented-immigrant parents), White replacement, and even organ transplants for immigrants. Although some aspect of the Latino Threat Narrative can be found in almost any discussion of immigration in contemporary public discourse, what I attempt here is a more systematic elaboration of this narrative. I will also contest the basic tenets of this narrative, an ambitious aspiration for a cultural critic that is admittedly not unlike Don Quixote’s attacking windmills.¹⁰

In addition, I want to connect the Latino Threat Narrative to what I see as the contemporary crisis in the meaning of citizenship. Militias have become ubiquitous along the U.S.-Mexico border, part of what I call an ongoing “border as theater” (Chapter Six) that is about more than drawing attention to the perils of an uncontrolled border and unauthorized immigration. Militias, politicians, and pundits are also decrying what they perceive as the dilution of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship because of massive immigration. The Latino Threat Narrative is profoundly implicated in the contested terrain of citizenship in a world where national borders are increasingly permeable. What citizenship means in this changing landscape is not clear. But what is certain is that a legalistic definition of citizenship is not enough. Other meanings of citizenship—economic, social, cultural, and even emotional—are being presented in debates, marches, and public discourse focused on immigrants, their children, and the nation.

“Citizen” and “noncitizen” are concepts used to imagine and define community membership. According to Benedict Anderson, members of modern nations cannot possibly know all their fellow members, and yet “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. . . . It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”¹¹ Anderson eloquently argues for the importance of print media in the construction of “imagined communities” and subjectivities that lay the foundation for nationalism and modernity.¹² In a similar vein, Jürgen Habermas has argued that the public sphere relies on the circulation of print commodities.¹³ I extend this thinking to the image-producing industries in order to explore how the media help construct the imagined community through representations of both inclusion and exclusion.¹⁴

Both the Latino Threat Narrative and struggles over the meaning of citizenship pervade media-infused spectacles where immigration or immigrants are the topic. Broadly speaking, events or public performances that receive an inordinate volume of media attention and public opinion become media spectacles.¹⁵ It is difficult to escape media coverage and the incessant “talk” about immigration. Border surveillance, reproduction, fertility levels, fears of immigrant invasions and reconquests, amnesty programs, economic impacts, organ transplants, and the alleged inability to assimilate Latino immigrants and their offspring are all fodder for media attention.

Immigration-related media spectacles force us to reconsider what we mean by the word spectacle. Spectacle comes to us from Middle English and is an Anglo-French term with roots in the Latin spectaculum, derived from spectare, to watch, and specere, to look at. In other words, a spectacle is something watched or looked at. It is the object of the viewer’s gaze. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary includes this sense of the word in its definition but adds more connotations: a spectacle is “something exhibited to view as unusual, notable, or entertaining; especially an eye-catching or dramatic public display” or “an object of curiosity or contempt.”¹⁶ These definitions of spectacle may capture, to a certain extent, what occurred in the immigration marches and other immigration-related events considered here. However, these events push us to think about the meaning of spectacles in society and how they help construct subjective understandings of “citizens” and “noncitizens.”

When immigration-related events or issues receive extensive media focus and become media shows, there is more going on than merely relating the news. As Guy Debord has observed, in modern technological societies, life has become “an immense accumulation of spectacles” and “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”¹⁷ The images we constantly consume not only inform us of life around us but also help construct our understanding of events, people, and places in our world. In short, media spectacles are productive acts that construct knowledge about subjects in our world. This is particularly the case for how we internalize who we are as a people. How we, as a nation of diverse people, derive our understanding of whom to include in our imagined community of fellow citizens is a product of many things, not least of which is what we glean from the media.¹⁸ Debates over immigration, citizenship, and national belonging are informed by the events we witness through the media’s representation of immigrant spectacles, whether they are promoting concern for the plight of immigrants or anti-immigration events.

How newcomers imagine themselves and are imagined by the larger society in relation to the nation is mediated through the representations of immigrants’ lives in media coverage. Media spectacles transform immigrants’ lives into virtual lives, which are typically devoid of the nuances and subtleties of real lived lives.¹⁹ It is in this sense that the media spectacle transforms a “worldview”—that is, a taken-for-granted understanding of the world—into an objective force, one that is taken as “truth.”²⁰ In their coverage of immigration events, the media give voice to commentators, pundits, informed sources, and man-on-the-street observers who often invoke one or more of the myriad truths in the Latino Threat Narrative to support arguments and justify actions. In this way, media spectacles objectify Latinos. Through objectification (the process of turning a person into a thing) people are dehumanized, and once that is accomplished, it is easier to lack empathy for those objects and to pass policies and laws to govern their behavior, limit their social integration, and obstruct their economic mobility. Portraying Latinos as objects or things makes it easier to see immigrants marching against harsh immigration policies as a chaotic mass rather than as people struggling to be recognized as contributing members of U.S. society, or Latinas represented in advertisements as beer bottles—literally things—rather than human beings.

Through its coverage of events, the media produce knowledge about, and help construct, those considered legitimate members of society as well as those viewed as less legitimate, marginalized, and stigmatized Others. Thus media spectacles—such as those that occurred around organ transplants for noncitizens, migrants crossing (“invading”?) the U.S.-Mexico border, and political campaigns that use the immigrant threat narrative—help define what it means to be a “citizen,” a task that can be undertaken only by also defining its contrasting concepts: “alien,” “illegal alien,” “foreigner,” and “immigrant.” Where do Latinos stand in relation to these concepts? Are Latino immigrants worthy of the rights and benefits of citizenship if they are supposedly unwilling to integrate into U.S. society? Are Latinos who were born in the United States suspect as citizens because of the disloyalty to the nation implied by the “anchor babies” rhetoric? The very act of asking such a question casts U.S.-born Latinos as “alien-citizens,” perpetual foreigners despite their birthright.²¹

Media coverage of immigration and Latinos often goes hand in hand with political rhetoric. Politicians may use inflammatory rhetoric to incite their followers, using immigrants and Latinos as scapegoats for demographic change, environmental crises, contagious illnesses, crime, and economic problems. But what does it mean to be the target of negative political rhetoric? This is a particularly apt question given the high-decibel political rhetoric employed by Donald Trump and his political allies that characterizes immigrants and Latinos as a threat to the nation and to “real Americans.” While vitriolic political rhetoric is often readily apparent, less considered is the toll such negative political rhetoric takes on those it targets.²² As we shall observe, anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric has consequences for its targets’ sense of well-being, stress levels, and even perceived physical health.

Before proceeding, we need to clarify the context within which the Latino Threat Narrative gains tremendous currency and which has provoked a crisis over the meaning of citizenship. Adding to this necessary contextualization is a brief overview of recent legislation to control immigration. Debates over immigration reform provide ample opportunities for the Latino Threat Narrative to be invoked. In addition, immigration reform legislation is an exercise in inclusion and exclusion when it comes to defining who is legitimately able to join the community of citizens.

After passage of the monumental 1965 immigration law, President Jimmy Carter, in the 1970s, floated the possibility of an amnesty for undocumented immigrants and sanctions for employers who hired undocumented workers, neither of which gained much political ground at the time.²⁶ Almost a decade later, Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed into law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). The major provisions were sanctions for employers who hired undocumented immigrants and an amnesty program for over a million undocumented immigrants. Although touted as legislation to end undocumented immigration, IRCA was relatively ineffective.

The Immigration Act of 1990 made some adjustments to immigration law, such as increasing from 500,000 to 700,000 the number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States each year. It also created a lottery program for visas to help lure immigrants from countries that had not been part of recent immigration flows, especially countries in Europe. But major immigration reform came six years later.

Figure I.2. Immigration to the United States by Decade, 1820–2022.

SOURCE: Migration Policy Institute (MPI). https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-popu….

In 1996 the U.S. Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. This law toughened the requirements for undocumented immigrants to adjust their status to that of a legal immigrant and streamlined the judicial process by turning deportation decisions over to an immigration court, thus reducing the levels of judicial review open to immigrants. It also streamlined the deportation of criminals and widened the range of deportable offenses. Among the changes to the nation’s immigration law included in this act was a provision making immigrants’ sponsors responsible for public benefits used by immigrants. This provision, according to Sarita Mohanty et al., “created confusion about eligibility and appeared to lead even eligible immigrants to believe that they should avoid public programs.”²⁷

It should be noted that Congress also passed welfare reform in 1996 that targeted immigrants. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 ended the federal government’s sixty-one-year commitment to provide cash assistance to every eligible poor family with children.²⁸ This law was expected to save the government $54 billion over the following six years, with nearly half of those savings, or $24 billion, to come from restricting legal immigrants’ use of food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, and aid for low-income elderly, the blind, and the disabled. Legal immigrants were barred from using Medicaid for five years after their entry.²⁹ Undocumented immigrants, who already were denied virtually all federal assistance, continued to be barred from assistance except for short-term disaster relief and emergency medical care. Benefits, however, were soon restored to some at-risk populations, especially the elderly.³⁰

On December 15, 2005, the House of Representatives passed HR 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act.³¹ The bill represented yet another expression of the “get-tough” attitude toward undocumented immigration.³² Among its many provisions were more border fences and surveillance technology, increased detention provisions, employer verification of employees’ work eligibility, and increases in the penalties for knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants. Moreover, it would have made living in the country as an undocumented immigrant a felony, thus removing any hope of becoming a legal immigrant. The bill also broadened the nation’s immigrant-smuggling law so that people who assisted or shielded illegal immigrants living in the country would be subject to prosecution. Offenders, who might include priests, nurses, social workers, or doctors, could face up to five years in prison, and authorities would be allowed to seize some of their assets. The House’s bill was clearly an exercise of exclusion, whereas the immigrant marches it generated were public displays of a desire for inclusion.

The U.S. Senate, in May 2006, passed its own version of immigration reform that included a guest worker program for immigrants and a legalization program, a “path to citizenship,” for some undocumented immigrants. Importantly, many of the draconian measures in the House bill did not become part of a final version of immigration reform promulgated under the George W. Bush administration, but the willingness of the House of Representatives to pass such measures sent a clear message to undocumented immigrants about their stigmatized status in the United States.

Through the media, politicians desiring to restrict immigration have been able to represent undocumented immigrants as undeserving criminals and possible terrorists. Sometimes it seems that the spectacle surrounding immigration reform is more important than enacting new laws. For example, rather than arriving at a compromise bill on immigration, the House of Representatives sponsored more than twenty public meetings throughout the nation to discuss immigration reform, in what one newspaper editorial called the “endless summer” of 2006.³³ After that round of immigration reform failed to result in a new law, Congress, with President Bush’s support, again took up immigration in May 2007, when it met a similar fate.³⁴ To date, Congress has not succeeded in passing comprehensive immigration reform.

Immigration reform laws and the politics surrounding reform proposals frame the public discourse over immigration. If the decibel levels in the debate are sometimes high, it is because the stakes are too. Who we let into the nation as immigrants and allow to become citizens defines who we are as a people. Conversely, looking at who we ban from entry, or for whom we create obstacles to integration into society and to membership in the community of citizens, also reveals how we imagine ourselves as a nation—that is, as a group of people with intertwined destinies despite our differences.

The intertwined logics of race and national hierarchies based on theories of social evolution framed struggles over definitions of citizenship and immigrant desirability during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴⁰ Although race continues in importance, the crisis over citizenship in today’s world has moved to a different register, one complicated by globalization—a term that refers to how the world and its people are increasingly becoming integrated into one giant capitalist system. The spread of world capitalism also carries with it a spread of Western—often American—culture. Anyone who travels notices how common American fast-food restaurants have become in the world, a process sometimes referred to as the McDonaldization of society.⁴¹ But globalization is more than the movement of capital and the search for cheap labor. It is also about the movement of people, ideas, material culture, and commodities (e.g., movies, music, “traditional” Chinese medicine), as well as a whole host of flows unmoored from fixed nation-states.⁴²

Globalization has led to questions about the rights and privileges of citizenship and whether citizenship extends beyond the limits of the nation-state.⁴³ Indeed, the proliferation of types of citizenships now under consideration is an indication of the current crisis surrounding the meaning of citizenship. Some argue that there are “economic citizens,” who through their labor contribute to the well-being of society.⁴⁴ Others argue for transnational citizenship, post-national citizenship, transmigrant citizenship, transborder citizenship, or flexible citizenship, each of which recognizes that migrants often maintain lives that extend across the borders of nation-states.⁴⁵ Then there are “denizens,” legal residents of a country who are not naturalized citizens but enjoy some economic and political rights.⁴⁶ Victoria Bernal observed that an “emotional citizenship” emerges through the use of the internet by the widely dispersed Eritrean refugees.⁴⁷ Others point to social inequalities that create a segmented citizenship, as some members of society are more valued than others, who often become stigmatized.⁴⁸ Some also argue that immigrants and minorities are engaged in a struggle for cultural citizenship, reflecting their claims for inclusion in society.⁴⁹

What, then, do we mean by citizenship? As a key concept in American culture, citizenship can, and does, have many meanings.⁵⁰ It can range from the notion of being a “good citizen,” implying responsible membership in a social group, to strict legal definitions of rights and privileges. Incorporating immigrants into society entails a transformation from “other” to “us.” However, becoming part of the “us,” or to be included as part of the “we,” as in “we the people,” is a contested process partly because it is not clear what this process entails.⁵¹ Meanings of such seemingly concrete and objective terms as citizen and citizenship fluctuate over time and place. And immigration always complicates the notion of citizenship.⁵² Should immigrants and their children be included as citizens? Under what conditions should they be included in the national body? How we answer these questions depends on the way we perceive immigrants, which in turn is often based on what we know of them through their “virtual” lives, which are constructed through media representations.⁵³ The problem is that real lives of immigrants and their children may not correspond to their media-constructed virtual lives.

In a thorough review of the literature, Linda Bosniak found that there are four distinct understandings of citizenship: as legal status, as rights, as political activity, and as a form of collective identity and sentiment.⁵⁴ It is from the last of these definitions of citizenship that issues of cultural citizenship emerge. These four elements of citizenship find their analogues in the public debates and events focused on immigration, whether the actors are immigrants themselves or those posturing for restrictive immigration policies and greater surveillance of borders. Through the interplay of these four elements in daily discourse, the media, and government policies, we construct and define “citizens” in contrast to “noncitizen” subjects, as well as put pressure on society to broaden the definition of citizenship (the immigrants and their supporters’ agenda).

Notes

1. For the full quotation, see http://www.dailykostv.com/w/001046/.

2. Sullivan, “Officials See Rise in Militia Groups across US.”

3. Barnes, “Supreme Court Rejects Much of Arizona Immigration Law.”

4. Arizona’s HB 2281 is available at www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf.

5. Washington Independent, October 18, 2010, http://washingtonindependent.com/100958/angle-defends-her-anti-illegal-…; Price, “Republican Senate Nominee Uses Picture of Mexicans—in Mexico—to Scare Us about Illegal Immigrants.”

6. Wyatt, “Cain Proposes Electrified Border Fence.”

7. Reyes, “” Abbott’s Buoy Barrier, Razor Wire Border Wall Doesn’t Just Risk Lives.”

8. I use “Latino” and “Latina” here in keeping with the original title and usage in the first edition of The Latino Threat to refer to people of Latin American origin. I agree, however, that the more recent “Latinx” is often preferable as a gender-neutral or nonbinary alternative to “Latino” and “Latina.”

9. Chavez, “Immigration Reform and Nativism”; Gerstle, “The immigrant as Threat”; Faegin, “Old Poison in New Bottles”; Higham, Strangers in the Land; Perea, Immigrants Out!

10. I consider this book, as well as most of my publications and public speeches, as the work of an anthropological cultural critic. Handler defines such critics as anthropologists “who expend at least some of their professional effort in dissecting the commonsense presuppositions of their own world and in disseminating the results of that work to as wide an audience of other citizens as they can reach.” Handler, Critics against Culture, 4.

11. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15–16.

12. Ibid

13. Habermas, Structural Transformation.

14. For a discussion of immigrants represented as outside the imagined community of the nation, see Chavez, “Outside the Imagined Community.”

15. Kellner, Media Spectacle.

16. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.m-w.com, s.v. “spectacle.”

17. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 14.

18. As Ella Shohat has observed, “In a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and sounds, goods and peoples, media spectatorship impacts complexly on national identity, communal belonging, and political affiliations.” Shohat, “Post-Third-Worldist Culture.”

19. For a discussion of the theory of virtualism, see Carrier and Miller, Virtualism.

20. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 13.

21. Ngai, Impossible Subjects.

22. Perez, “” Xenophobic Rhetoric and Its Political Effects.”

23. See table 1 of the Pew Hispanic Center report Foreign Born at Mid-Decade, http://pewhispanic.org/files/other/foreignborn/Table-1.pdf.

24. Migration Policy Institute Data Hub, accessed August, 14, 2023.

25. Hing, Deporting Our Souls.

26. Chavez, Covering Immigration, 95.

27. S. A. Mohanty et al., “Health Expenditures of Immigrants,” 1436.

28. Shogren, “Clinton’s Signature.”

29. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Public Law 104–193, U.S. Statutes at Large 110 (1996), is available at http://wdr.doleta.gov/readroom/legislation/pdf/104-193.pdf.

30. McDonnell, “Mexico Latest to Grant Rights.”

31. HR 4437, the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act, is available at http://thomas.loc.gov.

32. Curtius, “House Moving to Tighten Immigration.”

33. Los Angeles Times, “Immigration’s Endless Summer.”

34. Gerstenzang, “Bush Strongly Defends Deal on Immigration.”

35. The concept of citizenship is in a state of crisis, not just in the United States but worldwide. See Reed-Danahay and Brettell, Citizenship, Political Engagement; Sadiq, Paper Citizens; Tsuda, Local Citizenship.

36. As Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez has argued, in the United States “citizenship, nationality, and ethnic identity reflect the dominant ethnic group of Anglo-Saxon Americans.” Vélez-Ibáñez, “Se me acabó la canción.”

37. Karst, Belonging to America.

38. Ngai, Impossible Subjects.

39. Luibheid, Entry Denied.

40. Gerstle, American Crucible; Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?; Stern, Eugenic Nation.

41. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society.

42. Inda and Rosaldo, “Introduction.”

43. Gordon and Stack, “Citizenship beyond the State.”

44. C. Gordon, “Governmental Rationality”; Rocco, “Transforming Citizenship.”

45. Basch, Schiller, and Blanc, Nations Unbound; Bosniak, “Citizenship Denationalized”; Brettell, “Political Belonging and Cultural Belonging”; Fitzgerald, Negotiating Extra-Territorial Citizenship; Inda, “Flexible World”; Ong, Flexible Citizenship; Schiller, “Transborder Citizenship.”

46. Hammer, Democracy and the Nation State; Varsanyi, “Interrogating ‘Urban Citizenship.’”

47. Bernal, “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination,” 164.

48. Ong, Buddha Is Hiding.

49. Flores and Benmayor, Latino Cultural Citizenship; Ong, “Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making”; Rosaldo, “Cultural Citizenship, Inequality, and Multiculturalism”; Stephen, “Cultural Citizenship and Labor Rights”; Stevenson, Cultural Citizenship.

50. Ortner, “On Key Symbols.”

51. Aleinikoff, “Tightening Circle of Membership”; Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle?”

52. Yuval-Davis, “‘Multi-Layered Citizen.’”

53. For a discussion of the theory of virtualism, see Carrier and Miller, Virtualism.

54. Bosniak, “Citizenship Denationalized,” 455.