Dorothee Schneider is the author of Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century United States, new this Spring. In the book she juxtaposes the personal stories of immigrant experiences with the Federal and local immigration policy debates that swirl endlessly. Below, Schneider explains how a Supreme Court ruling last week reflects the historical push and pull between Federal immigration law and local enforcement.
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On May 26, the United States Supreme Court upheld a 2007 Arizona law that allows the state of Arizona to close down businesses found to knowingly ignore the Federal prohibition against hiring undocumented workers. A majority of justices found that states can enhance or even override Federal laws dealing with immigrants. This precedent will likely provide momentum to the growing movement to pass ever-tighter immigration restrictions on the state and local levels.
But some states and cities are also tugging at Federal immigration law from another direction. On May 6 Illinois Governor Pat Quinn officially withdrew from the Federal “Secure Communities” program, which requires local law enforcement officers to report any apprehension to a Federal databank linked to immigration enforcement. That same day the Illinois State Senate passed its own version of the DREAM Act, preparing to set up a scholarship fund for undocumented foreign students at Illinois public colleges. Other states and localities have made similar moves, opting out of strict Federal provisions or enhancing the possibilities for higher education access for undocumented students.
The tension between Federal immigration law and state and local politics has bedeviled immigration policy for over a century, and enforcement of immigration law has varied greatly in different parts of the country. Early in the twentieth century, a concern over the spread of prostitution through immigration led to numerous investigations in American cities. But only on the West Coast did Asian women face prosecution and deportation on charges of prostitution. Police in Eastern U.S. cities were reluctant to send suspected immigrant prostitutes back to Europe. Authorities in the Pacific Northwest proved eager to arrest and deport suspected anarchists early in the twentieth century—too eager for the Federal authorities. But when “Deportation Fever” gripped the nation as part of the Red Scare during and after World War I, the Immigration Service filled up a good part of its “Deportation Train” with suspected communists from the Pacific Northwest. In Chicago and other Midwestern cities, on the other hand, police refused to cooperate in the hunt for suspected revolutionaries. In 1928 when Texas authorities and the Federal Border patrol staged raids to deport undocumented workers in some borderland communities, the white citizens of Donna, Texas, protested, protecting “their” Mexicans, and writing to their congressmen in a successful effort to have the raids called off. From Spokane to New York to Donna, immigrants and the “immigration problem,” while subject to uniform Federal law, were also part of local communities and widely different social contexts.
The twenty-first century is no different. Federal immigration law is uniform, but on the ground immigration policy is shaped and enforced in diverse regional contexts. States and cities where immigrants quickly found a voice as voters and politically active citizens have always pushed against restrictionist measures by the Federal government, sometimes with the help of local legislators. Regions where immigrants were less politically empowered were more easily swayed to support restrictionist measures. But the twentieth century also shows that in the ever-changing landscape of American immigration, political allegiances can shift quite rapidly. In this context neither Federal nor state laws will provide the permanent bulwark against newcomers that restrictionist politicians seek.
