The Latino Threat Narrative
The Latino Threat Narrative
Ronald Reagan advocated for ceasing to view Canada and Mexico as foreign entities.
Renato Rosaldo noted a stigma against Latinos linking them to undocumented workers and questioning their legality in the U.S.
The public debate on immigration became more alarmist from 1979-1999, continuing to the present.
After 9/11, focus increased on national security threats, with diminished constitutional rights for foreigners and immigrants.
Mexican and Latin American immigration, along with the growing Mexican-American population, are perceived as national security threats.
This perception remained consistent over the past 40 years, independently of international terrorism fears but heightened after 9/11.
Constructing and Challenging Myths
Samuel P. Huntington argued in 2004 that Latinos, particularly Mexicans, have not assimilated like previous European immigrants.
He claimed they form political and linguistic enclaves and reject Anglo-Protestant values.
Huntington asserted the "reconquista" of the Southwest United States by Mexican immigrants is underway, posing a challenge to America's traditional identity due to their high fertility rates.
In 2000, Huntington described the "invasion" of over 1 million Mexican civilians as a threat to American societal security, on par with 1 million Mexican soldiers, urging Americans to react with comparable vigor.
Mexican immigration is considered a unique and disturbing challenge to cultural integrity, national identity, and the country's future.
These ideas are rooted in a history of ideas, laws, narratives, myths, and knowledge production in social and natural sciences, media, and the arts.
This forms a "discourse," a cluster of ideas, images, and practices constructing knowledge and conduct related to a particular topic.
Stuart Hall noted that discursive formations define what is appropriate in our understanding and practices related to a subject.
They determine what knowledge is considered useful and what types of people embody its characteristics.
Mexican Immigrants are the main focus of the Latino Threat Narrative
The threat is generalized to Latin American Immigrants
Specific themes surrounding the Latino Threat Narrative:
Construction of “illegal aliens” as criminals
The Quebec Model
The Mexican invasion and reconquista of the United States
Unwillingness to learn English and integrate into U.S. society
Out-of-control fertility
Threats to national security
Constructing the “Illegal Alien”
Discussions on immigration and citizenship are directly correlated to a population's perceived identity, and who is allowed to be a part of the nation
Restrictions on immigration and citizenship have always been about imagining who we are as a people and who we wish to include as part of the nation
Mae Ngai's history, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, talks about Immigration reforms of the 1920s
Immigration reforms of the 1920s created major restrictions in the flow of immigrants leading to hierarchies of people and nationalities
Western and northern Europeans were the desired immigrants, and their movement hither was the goal of the national origins quotas.
Southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, Mexicans, and other Latin Americans were less desirable
The 1920s placed new importance on national borders, surveillance, Border Patrol, and immigrant health examinations.
The Immigration Reforms established “illegal aliens” who bypassed border controls to enter the country
The large-scale restrictions of the 1924 immigration law “generated illegal immigration and introduced that problem into the internal spaces of the nation.”
Ngai argues that immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject
Their inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility—a subject barred from citizenship and without rights
Mexican immigrants were closely associated with the term "illegal alien".
The enforcement aspects of immigration policy created many thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants.
Mexicans were not subject to numerical quotas and were defined as “white,” unlike Asians, and thus were not excluded as racially ineligible for citizenship.
This whiteness was a by-product of Mexico’s signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War.
Mexicans living in what was now U.S. territory were allowed to become U.S. citizens, a privilege reserved for “white” immigrants at the time
Mexicans were still considered “not-white” in the public imagination.
Italian immigrants had a similar problem with ambiguous racial designation
Asians and Mexicans became legally racialized ethnic groups.
Racialized Ethnic Groups aren't based on genetics, but are created socially and culturally based on perceived biological differences
Asian immigrants were denied citizenship, and Mexicans were associated with illegal alien status and Jim Crow segregation.
Mexican and Asian immigrants were cast as permanently foreign with obstacles to their integration into the nation
In 1925, David Starr Jordan, commented that “the Mexican peon, who for the most part can never be fit for citizenship . . . is giving our stock a far worse dilution than ever came from Europe.”
Racial Formations led to Alien Citizens:
“Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United States with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the nation.”
These complicated debates over legalization programs for undocumented immigrants.
Uneven application of Early legalization programs reflected hierarchies of nationality and race
Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, primarily from Europe, were allowed to adjust their status to that of legal immigrants and eventually citizens.
Deportation was justifiable for criminals, but not for otherwise law-abiding immigrants who had established roots in the country - However, this didn't apply to Mexicans.
Mexicans were subject to a different logic that began with the premise of criminality because of their illegal entry into the nation.
Walking across the border was viewed as the quintessential act of illegal immigration
Current opposition to pathway to citizenship beings with the same association of illegal entry with criminality
Mexicans are still the prototypical “illegal aliens.”
The belief that providing immigrants with rights diminished the value of citizenship was Prevalent in the early twentieth century.
Undocumented immigrants accessing driver’s licenses and publicly funded resources continue the same sentiment
Public opinion favors punishing “illegals” as opposed to universal rights and access
The historical lesson is that “illegality” is socially, culturally, and politically constructed.
Status is determined by policies, not inherent traits of the migrant.
Policy makers, using Foucauldian techniques of governmentality, construct classifications to further bureaucratic control of populations
Being an unauthorized migrant, an “illegal,” is a status conferred by the state
Illegality is both produced and experienced.
The state's unwillingness to recognize the demand for labor is what marks the illegal
A legal fiction emerges, the “illegal” entrant is constructed.
Invasion, Reconquest, and the Quebec Model
Mexican undocumented immigrants are viewed as criminals (since 1920's)
Mexican immigration viewed as invasion since 1970's
The invasion theme evolved into reconquest of the U.S. Southwest and the Quebec model.
In the Quebec model, the Quebecois independence movement among French-speaking Canadians serves as an example of the threat posed by Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants
Mexican immigrants supposedly live separate lives form the U.S. society
These themes are repeated until they become taken-for-granted assumptions
Huntington’s observations are building on a history of such assertions about Mexicans
As legal immigration increased after 1965 public anxiety over undocumented immigration also increased
INS commissioner publicly stated that 10-15 million illegal aliens were flooding the country at the time
The display of such large numbers carries meanings apart from their mathematical references
Due to the difficulty in assessing these numbers, the numbers themselves become the Images
These numbers invoke simplified responses
The authority of the INS meant that these numbers entered public discourse even though they may have been exaggerated
December 1974 cover of the American Legion Magazine showed the U.S. overrun by illegal aliens
Mexicans storming across the U.S. border, breaking down signs
Other immigrants landing by boats or parachuting across the border
They are converging upon the nation’s institutions, most notably welfare, education, housing, jobs, and medical care.
Resulted in the increased alarmist discourse on Mexican Immigration
The Quebec model first surfaced on the cover of the December 13, 1976, issue of U.S. News and World Report
U.S. News and World Report featured the headline “Crisis across the Borders: Meaning to U.S.”
The crises in Mexico and Canada were labeled with arrows on a North American Map
The crisis in Mexico was the potential for increased migration to the United States
The problem in Canada was Quebec, where many French-speaking residents were pushing for greater sovereignty and even separation from the English-speaking provinces
As we will see, the Quebec independence movement came to serve as a metaphor, or civics lesson, for the threat of national division inherent in the “Mexican problem."
The April 25, 1977, issue of U.S. News and World Report asks if Illegal Aliens are out of Control
The Out of Control behavior referred to Mexicans using welfare and medical services displacing citizens from jobs and turning to crime
Asserted that the “U.S. has lost control of its borders”
The same magazine published yet anohter cover on the invasion in January 29, 1979
Up to 12 million undocumented immigrants might have been in the United States at the time and that by the year 2025 they could account for 10 percent of the population
Included displacing U.S. citizens from jobs, use of welfare, and crime.
Emphasized was the internal threat posed by the children of immigrants, an idea that is central to the reconquest theme and the Quebec model
Traditions of Mexican Americans remain undiluted, refreshed daily by an influx of illegal immigrants from the mother country
Mexican Americans did not assimilate into American society and culture. They remained separate and apart
Characterizing Mexican Americans as foreigners who remain foreign (undiluted) gave added urgency to the invasion metaphor of the article and the cover.
Continued repetition of the invasion theme and the Quebec model in the 1980's
United States was the focal point of the map, and the stars and stripes of the U.S. flag covered it
To the north was Canada, with the image of a Mountie holding the Canadian flag and a French Canadian holding the Quebec flag in one hand raising his other hand in a defiant, closed-fisted gesture toward the Mountie
To the south was Mexico, where a line of men emerged from the mountains and walked single file toward California; the man in front had his left foot ready to step on the red and white of California, at about San Diego
The headline read “Our Troubled Neighbors—Dangers for U.S.”
The magazine made it clear that the Quebec problem was a model for Mexico to have the the Mexican “problem,” a reconquest of the United States.
Time magazine warned Los Angeles (new Ellis Island) was being invaded in 1983
“the statistical evidence of the immigrant tide is stark” (p. 19); and that there was a “staggering influx of foreign settlers” (p. 20)
They single out Mexicans Because the Southwest was once part of Mexico, Mexicans arrived “feeling as much like a migrant as an immigrant, not an illegal alien but a reconquistador,” or reconqueror (p. 24).
The fully elaborated triple threat of invasion, reconquest, and a Quebec-like separatist movement soon took on even greater currency in public discourse.
U.S. News and World Report (1983) announced: “Invasion from Mexico: It Just Keeps Growing”
The New Republic (1985) worried about “a Balkanization of American society into little subcultures” (p. 25)
Ex-governor of Colorado Richard Lamm feared immigration would result in “a vast cultural separatism” and that the children of Latino immigrants would not grow up as loyal Americans but might instead lead “secessionist” riots in the Southwest to “express their outrage at this country”
The Disappearing Border: Will the Mexican Migration Create a New Nation? U.S. News and World Report (1985)
Implies that it was not just recent Mexican immigrants who posed a threat but even those Americans who were descended from the first Spanish-speaking explorers of the Southwest
The conspiracy for the reconquest of the Southwest had been in operation for generations and spanned centuries.
It was as if Mexican Americans and other Latinos existed in an ahistorical space apart from the life that took place all around them and characterized them as alien citizens
The Mexican invasion and reconquest were at the heart of a veritable publishing industry that emerged during the 1990's, playing on the public’s fears of immigration
Schlesinger, Brimelow, Geyer, Buchanan, Hanson, Huntington, Tancredo, Gilchrist and Corsi
The works often explicitly refer to the Mexican invasion, the Quebec model, and the Mexican reconquest of the U.S. Southwest.
Schlesinger's Disuniting of America brought alarm from the Havard liberal about social separatism by bilingual education and not assimilating from immigrants
Buchanan (1994) reasoned that sometime in the near future the majority of Americans would trace their roots not to Europe but to Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Pacific islands
He predicted the demands for Quebec-like status for Southern California
Brimelow argued that Hispanics were symptomatic of the American Anti-Idea
Asserted that “Spanish-speakers are still being encouraged to assimilate. But not to America
Geyer argued that excessive immigration, especially unauthorized immigration, and the rights accorded immigrants were diluting the meaning of U.S. citizenship
Worried that