Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America

As Gonzales highlights in Harvest of Empire, immigration has a long history of controversy in the US. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, suspicion of immigrants largely targeted those coming from Europe or Asia and in some cases found legal expression—e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Since the late 20th century, however, debates around immigration have tended to center on Latin America and in particular on unauthorized immigration.

Legislative attempts to address the issue have sometimes taken a two-pronged approach, extending citizenship to at least some unauthorized immigrants currently in the US but also taking steps to reduce such immigration in the future—e.g., by penalizing businesses for employing unauthorized workers. This, for example, was the route taken by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. On the executive front, a significant development was President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) order, which aimed to address the plight of immigrants brought to the US as children and burdened by their unauthorized status.

Efforts to extend rights to immigrants have often met with public backlash, however. As Gonzales notes, events in the first decade of the 21st century—particularly the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2008 recession—led to a wave of xenophobia that scapegoated migrants as potential sources of violence and economic distress. In part due to this political climate, many efforts to ameliorate the status of Latin American immigrants have stagnated, including the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 and the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. Both laws would have combined amnesty for some immigrants with stricter enforcement measures, thus alleviating some suffering but failing to address what Gonzales argues are the root causes of the crisis. More recent political actions have been anti-immigrant in approach, such as President Trump’s 2017 execution action curtailing travel from seven countries, including Venezuela.