I am queer and undocumented – “undocuqueer.” I began organizing five years ago with Orange County Dream Team, and I was captivated by that space, hungry to tell my undocumented story. Soon enough I was coming out as undocumented and sharing my story with friends and coworkers and in public spaces, but that process was heavy and painful, because I was leaving my queer story in the back seat. Every time I walked into a meeting, joined a rally or attended an event, I was making a painful negotiation: “Today I am only wearing my undocumented hat.” I couldn't do that to myself, my community or movement. I needed to come out again, but his time as both queer and undocumented. The pain I felt no longer held me back; alliances via my undocuqueer identity.
Jorge Gutierrez
I always feel that I am at the edge of two borders.…It feels like I am fighting two different struggles. Whenever I come across LGBT folk that don't support immigrant rights, I feel marginalized and oppressed by my own community. Equally, when I am around people belonging to the immigrant community, I am saddened that some don't support equal rights for LGBT people.
Jorge Gutierrez
The immigrant rights movement has been a little unwelcoming sometimes there is still some homophobia in the immigrant rights movement…I think we have to hold conversations about homophobia in the immigrant community, while at the same time have similar conversations with LGBT people about how they support undocumented immigrant people.
Reyna Wences
The largest immigration youth-led organization in the country, United We Dream (UWD), has embraced its LGBTQ members and formed an alliance. Jorge Gutierrez and Reyna Wences are representatives of undocumented LGBTQ immigrant students who are at the forefront of the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act Movement. The DREAM Act is legislation in the United States aimed at establishing a path to citizenship for the many high school graduates under 30 who came to the country as minors (Amaro 2010). In 2007, the DREAM Act failed to pass the Senate, and UWD began to build an immigrant youth movement that would shape and influence the broader immigrant rights movement. UWD's platform and twenty-point plan for immigration reform includes LGBTQ individuals in the leadership and recognizes their families and partners. In 2011, UWD established the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project (QUIP) to secure the place of the LGBTQ community in the struggle for immigration reform. The Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL) had already joined the LGBTQ Immigrant Rights Coalition in Chicago. UndocuQueer, QUIP and other campaigns bring together the identity of LGBTQ undocumented immigrants who previously felt isolated in groups identifying only as LGBTQ or only as undocumented immigrants, such as those mentioned by Jorge Gutierrez and Reyna Wences at the beginning of the chapter (Nicholls 2013). By merging these identities in their advocacy for a path to citizenship, they are creating a space that empowers people to be both undocumented and LGBTQ.
Like LGBTQ people claiming their sexual and gender identity, the IYJL organized the National Coming Out of the Shadows in 2010, which became a significant strategy to call attention to the impact that immigration policy has on limiting their opportunities. Publicly telling their stories became an act of empowerment and expressed their commitment to come out of the shadows and live their lives openly. Coming-out events were the first form of civil disobedience in the immigrant youth movement, which was also marked with the slogan, “undocumented, unafraid.” As undocumented LGBTQ immigrants, these activists come out twice to their family, friends and community. As immigrant youth activists planned their strategy for protests and rallies, they yielded to the famous quote from the late Harvey Milk (the first openly gay elected official in California, on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors): “Brothers and sisters, you must come out. Come out to your parents, Come out to your Friends, if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors. Come out to your fellow workers. Once and for all, let's break down the myths and destroy the lies of distortion” (Ramirez 2012). Milk recognized that winning public support to change discriminatory laws required putting a human face on the issue and allowing one's personal lives and pain to be visible.
One well-known person to use the tactic is Jose Antonio Vargas, a member of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting in 2008 for their coverage of the Virginia Tech Shooting. Vargas received the Sidney Award for his 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, “My life as an undocumented immigrant,” as “an outstanding piece of socially-conscious journalism.” He describes how stepping out of the shadows and becoming visible among the many undocumented was more “daunting than coming out” as gay in high school. His story begins in the Philippines, when his mother sent him to live with his grandparents in Mountain View, California, when he was 12. Vargas recounts trying to live his life as a US citizen but with the constant reality of living in the shadows as an undocumented immigrant:
And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am. It means keeping my family photos in a shoebox rather than displaying them on shelves in my home, so friends don't ask about them. It means reluctantly, even painfully, doing things I know are wrong and unlawful. And it has meant relying on a sort of 21st-century underground railroad of supporters, people who took an interest in my future and took risks for me.
His grandparents’ plan was for him to marry a woman who is a US citizen and obtain legal residence through marriage. At the time, this option was not available to a gay man; the federal government only recently (2015) recognized gay marriage.
Outreach projects working with both populations addressed the significance of the intersection between the LGBTQ and the undocumented communities. For instance, Julio Salgado, co-founder of the collaborative media project DreamersAdrift.com in 2010, explains the intersection as follows:
There's homophobia within our [immigrant] communities so what we need to do, the undocumented people who are also queer, [is] call out and say “hey if you're talking about social justice and you're trying to talk about treating everybody equally, we need to start with ourselves. How is our homophobia affecting certain things?” And likewise when you're in queer spaces, a lot of the times [what's said is] we should focus on gay marriage, we should focus on joining the military but we don't focus on immigration.
LGBTQ advocacy organizations are also recognizing the intersection of issues arising from shared identities and the impact that immigration legislation has on their broader community. As early as 2010, the Equality California Institute reached out to the immigrant community with the project “Equality Beyond Borders: LBGT Inclusive Immigration Reform,” which shares the stories of LGBTQ immigrants and struggles to increase awareness for “a humane and inclusive approach to immigrant rights legislation” (Equality California 2010).
Immigration and LGBTQ issues had been debated for decades but the political movements kept each as separate issues. However, in the last few years, numerous individuals involved in advocacy for immigration reform and LGBTQ rights focused on the intersection of these movements. The Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report, “LGBT adult immigrants in the United States,” which further connected the two political issues – immigration reform and DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act):
An estimated 267,000 adult undocumented immigrants are LGBT-identified or 2.7% of undocumented adults; 71% of these are Hispanic and 15% are Asian or Pacific Islander.
An estimated 637,000 adult documented immigrants are LGBT-identified or 2.4% of documented adults; of which 30% are Hispanic and 35% are Asian or Pacific Islander.
An estimated 113,300 foreign born individuals are part of a same-sex couple; 54,600 of these individuals are not US citizens; an estimated 24,700 same-sex couples are binational, along with 11,700 same-sex couples comprised of two non-citizens; and an estimated 7,000 same-sex couples that include two non-citizens are raising an estimated 12,400 children under age 18.
These statistics identify the intersection of changing immigration and marriage legislation to allow families and partners to be together. The US Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 that all state laws had to recognize same-sex marriages, and QUIP remains committed to empowering the undocumented LGBTQ community and recognizing same-sex marriages.
I begin this chapter on interlocking systems of oppression and privileges by introducing immigration issues and employing intersectional analysis of citizenship status, age and sexuality, or more specifically the intersection of LGBTQ undocumented youth. This perspective on citizenship challenges the dominant narrative of undocumented immigrants in the US as Mexican heterosexual adult males employed as farmworkers. That image is one that dates back to the Bracero Program, a guest program negotiated between the US and Mexico in 1942 to cover the labor shortage experienced after World War II. Although the war ended in 1945, the program continued until 1964. During the program and afterwards, adult Mexican males continued to migrate to the agriculture areas to work in the fields (Molina 2014). However, some family members were also migrating, and many established homes and raised families in the US. In the last two decades of immigration scholarship, research points to the increasing number of women migrating with and without family members to work and begin new lives in the US (e.g., Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Flores-Gonzalez et al. 2013). The Dreamer generation makes visible the number of young children who migrated to be with their parents (Pallares 2015). Shifting attention from low-wage Mexican workers in agriculture to college campuses, the identities of undocumented immigrants of color becomes more fluid. Undocumented immigrants are included in all age categories; some are middle-class, young, old, disabled, and LGBTQ. Latino immigrants are from numerous countries; some are white, others Indian or Black, and many have a mixed-race background; all the possibilities make “Latino/Hispanic” a pan-ethnic category that is meaningless as a racial or cultural category. However, the Latino/Hispanic designation does serve to divide Whites of European ancestry from all other Whites and non-Whites from south of the US–Mexico border, including several Caribbean islands. Recent statistics also include the presence of undocumented Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants (Batalova et al. 2014).
This chapter focuses on citizenship status as defined by immigration legislation in order to examine interlocking systems of oppression and privilege. To begin, I review the ways in which immigration laws incorporate systems of domination by privileging or subordinating certain social identities. Certain types of citizenship status are allowed; others are denied. A closer review of immigration legislation and law enforcement illustrates the significance of an intersectional approach to understanding the complexities of citizenship that are too often analyzed as a single dimension based on the binary notion of documented versus undocumented status. A brief overview of immigration law immediately highlights the historical contextualization of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ageism and disability. These laws established the legal structure for the social hierarchies surrounding citizenship privileges, opportunities and oppression that persons living in the US experience: “Immigration law has long been understood as an important site for regulation and production of class, ethnic, national, and race boundaries and hierarchies in the United States…but more recently scholars have examined how these dynamics intersected with the regulation and production of familial, gender, reproductive, and sexual boundaries and hierarchies” (Stein 2005: 507–8).
Examining immigration law enforcement and the policing of citizenship status further illustrates the significance of intersectionality in these processes of subordination and domination. Reframing the analysis of immigration to recognize the ways immigration law and enforcement construct citizenship, one can see how different social identities are at risk, while others are not suspect. I will conclude the chapter on interlocking systems of oppression and privilege by examining how immigrant movements have worked at the intersections of social identities to build important alliances.
To get to the heart of the significance of intersectionality in citizenship status and immigration law enforcement, it is essential to recognize that the legal classification of “alien” and “citizen” is socially constructed. Legal scholar Kevin Johnson (2004: 154) describes the social processes in constructing “alien” as:
Fabricated out of whole cloth, the “alien” represents a body of rules passed by Congress and reinforced by popular culture. It is society, with the assistance of the law, that defines who is an “alien,” an institutionalized “other,” and who is not. It is a society, through Congress and the courts, that determines which rights to afford “aliens.”…Like the social construction of race, which helps to legitimize racial subordination, the construction of the “alien” has helped justify the limitation on noncitizen rights imposed by our legal system.
Thinking about citizenship as a social construct is necessary to identify and comprehend the intersections of systems of domination, particularly white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.
Citizenship status includes numerous identities but the three major social structural positions used by the state to construct “alien” are race, gender and class. The Constitution recognized white men with property. Citizenship status constructed around racial and ethnic identities is apparent by examining the ethnic groups defined as “white” and “non-white,” as well as noting the changes in immigration law and legal cases that moved some groups from being legally defined as “non-white” to the legal designation of “white” (López 1996). Other social identities, such as religion, sexuality, colorism and age, have experienced citizenship privileges or subordination throughout US history. For instance, in 1776, not all the colonies recognized Catholic, Jew, and Quaker men with property as having voting rights (Chilton 1960). Systems of privilege and oppression determining citizenship rights are most evident when examining the intersection of citizenship and race.
Throughout US history, racialized immigration laws and citizenship have been a major theme, from the classification of slaves from Africa, to indigenous populations, to the treatment of immigrants from southern Europe, Asia and Latin and South America (López 2006). Citizenship status in the US has a long history of privileging certain social identities and oppressing others. Dating back to the Declaration of Independence, the phrase “all men are created equal” was not inclusive. The Articles of Confederation ratified in 1781 defined a slave as three-fifths of a person. This use of the word “men” did not mean all people, but rather meant that only white men with property had citizenship rights. Over time, a form of citizenship rights included women and Blacks. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in that year, allowed former slaves to be US citizens. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote by eliminating race, color and servitude restrictions. The Nineteenth Amendment gave all women the right to vote in 1919.
While Black men and women were citizens, their citizenship status was distinct from that of Whites. Even though they were citizens in 1868, the enforcement of state and local Jim Crow laws denied Black men and women freedom of movement and enforced segregation, and they were restricted to inferior schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains and restrooms. They sat in segregated spaces of buses and trains, and were not permitted into restaurants serving Whites. Unlike white men or women, Blacks faced voting restrictions imposed by poll taxes, property requirements, literacy tests and other mechanisms. Several important legal cases slowly eroded legalized racial segregation. For instance, in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1947), the Supreme Court decided against the segregated seating on interstate buses as a violation of the interstate commerce clause. In 1948, President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which eliminated segregation in the military. Desegregation under President Eisenhower's administration expanded to include military schools, hospitals and bases (Nichols 2007). The most widely cited desegregation case is Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared school segregation as unconstitutional. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was crucial in eliminating the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other mechanisms to deny Black women and men the right to vote. Even though the law prohibited segregation and discrimination, the lack of enforcement protected white privilege. Issues around equal treatment before the law, such as racial profiling, continue to be an obstacle, particularly for Blacks living in poor and working-class communities.
Native peoples’ unique legal status of “dependent sovereign nations” carried both privileges and liabilities. Recalling the treatment of Blacks who were first only counted as three-fifths of a person under slavery, the US did not recognize Native Americans as persons. However, the government did attempt to establish numerous treaties, which resulted in establishing Indian Territory on smaller areas of land. The 1879 Standing Bear trial (Standing Bear v. Crook) began with arguments over the status of Native Americans as either people or citizens, and what, if any, rights they had. Judge Dundy ruled that “an Indian is a person within the meaning of the law” and issued a “writ of habeas corpus,” which declared Standing Bear to have been held illegally. However, this decision did not establish clarity in the citizenship status or rights of Native people. The Snyder Act of 1924 granted Native Americans the right to vote, but not necessarily the right to vote in state and local elections. Many state laws disenfranchised Native Americans, and in other cases states used poll taxes, literacy tests and similar strategies used against Blacks to deny voting rights. Many American Indian groups fought to keep their independence as nations, since the US government's decision to grant citizenship to indigenous groups was an attempt to absorb and assimilate them. Prior to this, Indian men had access to citizenship by joining the military, as well as through special treaties and statutes, while Indian women were able to become citizens by marrying white men. Federal courts acknowledged the property rights of white husbands married to indigenous women, which included her tribal property, but state courts usually disputed that men, white or indigenous, had any legal obligation to their indigenous wives. Gender and race were frequently determining factors in legal rulings involving property. Eventually, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected Native Americans’ rights, and later legislation protected their rights as non-English-speakers. However, indigenous men and women have not always been able to claim the same rights or obligations as others in the US.
Turning specifically to immigration, the intersections of systems of domination – particularly white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism – embedded in legislation appear throughout history and were central to developing immigration restrictions and limiting paths to citizenship. While race appears the most salient identity throughout the history of US law, gender and class were important intersectional identities and were significant in lived experiences. To begin, let's turn to the writings of legal scholar Robert Chang (1999), who identifies the major obstacle to justice for immigrants of color as the exclusion of non-Whites in the Naturalization Act of 1790. This Act is one of many racialized immigration legislations over the next century and a half. Many laws enacted protected white citizens and immigrants. For instance, as the Chinese began migration to the US during the California Gold Rush of 1848–55, the Irish and German miners competed with the Chinese and Mexican miners in California. In response, the state enacted the Foreign Miners’ Tax in 1852 against the Chinese miners, and applied the law to Mexican miners as well. Chinese leaders complained about the anti-Chinese violence and the lack of justice. An example of the violation of Chinese rights is illustrated in People of the State of California v. George W. Hall (1854), in which the California Supreme Court overturned the guilty verdict against George Hall for the murder of Ling Sing, on the basis that testimony from Chinese persons was not permissible. The court based its decision on the state statute prohibiting Blacks, “mulattos” or Indians from testifying against a white man.
The Page Act of 1875 prohibited the entry of immigrants deemed as “undesirable”; this included any forced labor, prostitutes and convicts, which served to exclude men and women arriving from China, Japan or any Asian country with a fixed term of service or for lewd and immoral purposes. Chinese male laborers worked to pay brokers for their trip to California. However, white male workers perceived them as slave labor and felt threatened by their low wages (Chang 1999; Johnson 2004). Government officials scrutinized Chinese women on arrival to determine whether they were prostitutes. There were attempts to identify Chinese women from respectable families, or they needed to prove their husbands had the means to support them (i.e., merchants’ wives), or to have other visible evidence of wealth, such as their clothing. Marriage between Chinese women and white men was prohibited, and white men risked losing their citizenship if they violated the law. Essentially, the Page Act served to exclude Chinese women from the US (Luibhéid 2002). California passed laws prohibiting Chinese from entering the state in 1858. Eventually the federal government stepped in and established the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which was the first law to exclude entry by race. Only Chinese who were able to prove they were not laborers were eligible to enter the US. The Scott Act (1888) expanded the Chinese Exclusion Act to deny re-entry to Chinese who left the US. Congress passed additional legislation in the following years to renew the exclusion. The Immigration Act of 1924 then prohibited all classes of Chinese from entering the US. The US repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 when China became a US ally against Japan in World War II. However, even then, entry was limited to a quota determined by the Immigration Act of 1924, which was 2 percent of the total number of Chinese residing in the US. The quota for Chinese did not increase until the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965.
Unlike the Chinese, most Japanese migrated in family groups with the intent of settling in the US. They assimilated by wearing western clothing, and many converted to Christianity, and lived throughout cities rather than developing distinct areas like Chinatowns. Nevertheless, anti-Japanese sentiment began rising in 1905, and the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League campaigned for exclusion like that applied to the Chinese to be extended to Japanese and Koreans. The League pushed for closed borders, denying Japanese and Koreans employment, and the restriction of their children to segregated schools. After the 1905 San Francisco earthquake, fire destroyed many of the schools and the school board forced the Japanese students to attend the Chinese Primary School, which was renamed the Oriental Public School for Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. Japanese parents complained to government officials in Tokyo, who responded to the act of segregation as an “insult to their national pride and honor.” President Roosevelt convinced the San Francisco mayor and school board to drop the segregation plan in return for addressing the immigration issue. The informal agreement reached between Japan and the US, known as the Gentleman's Agreement of 1907, consisted of Japan agreeing not to approve passports for their citizens to migrate to the US unless they were joining family, which they had already begun to do in 1900. However, this essentially established the practice of “picture brides” who were Japanese women wanting to come to the US who arranged long-distance marriages using photographs. President Roosevelt further limited migration by signing Executive Order 589 (1907), which prohibited Japanese laborers from migrating from Hawaii, Mexico or Canada. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 limited further Japanese entry into the US (Chang 1999).
In his book White by Law, Ian Haney López (1996) chronicles the legal history of immigrant groups becoming defined as “white” and thus eligible to become naturalized citizens. The legal construction of white identity demonstrates that the social construction of race is fluid, constructed relationally, against other categories, rather than in isolation. This is quite evident in reviewing the range of rationales given from the 1878–1944 law cases determining what ethnic immigrant groups were sufficiently white to be eligible for naturalization, or the degree of citizenship rights immigrants were granted. The rationales included scientific evidence, common knowledge, Congressional intent, legal precedent and, in one case, “ocular inspection of skin.” López' review of prerequisite cases documents the changing constructions of various groups – once defined as white and later as non-white, as well as initially defined as non-white and later legally constructed as white. Some of these cases include legal decisions about persons of mixed ancestry.
The legal process of defining race is far from consistent but reflects difference in geography and history, and other factors such as colorism and religion. Here, we see the interaction of systems of domination is more evident. Regarding Syrians, in the case In re Najour (1909), the court granted Costa George Najour eligibility for citizenship based on “scientific evidence” that he was white. The court cited scientific evidence that “free white person” is a reference to race, not color, and in this case was based on Dr. Keane's claim in The World's People that Syrians are part of the Caucasian or white race. However, in both Ex Parte Shahid (1913) and Ex Parte Dow (1914), the court denied Syrian applicants were white, based on common knowledge. The judge argued that, while Caucasian and white are similar today, in 1790 the founding fathers meant “European” when referring to Whites. In Dow v. United States, the judge overturned the verdict and decided that George Dow was entitled to naturalize because he was Caucasian, and noted that Syria is geographically near the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity. Asian Indians were determined “probably not white” in In re Balsara, where the 1909 case was based on Congressional intent. In US v. Dolla (1910), they were determined to be white based on “ocular inspection of skin.” In United States v. Thind (1923), the Supreme Court used common knowledge and Congressional intent to determine that Bhagat Singh Thind was not white and, therefore, ineligible for citizenship. Socially constructing race does not always include the privilege and disadvantages individuals may experience from colorism, which may present further barriers to attaining white privilege and the ability to access all citizenship rights. For example, Mexicans were legally defined as white but experienced a history of segregated housing and schools, denial of entrance to restaurants and theatres (unless there was segregated seating), and other forms of discrimination that were sanctioned by local governments (López 1996).
Many court cases determining racial eligibility for citizenship point to the intersectionality of religion and colorism in white supremacy. Peoples from ancient biblical lands of Moses, Jesus and the Apostles, near the roots of Christianity and Judaism, posed contradictions for constructing the white race. These cases demonstrate that immigrants from northern Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East in general posed a dilemma for a legal system that constructed Christianity as a European religion. Persons with ancestry from these holy lands, but who were not Christian – be they Sikhs, Muslims or Hindus – challenged the construction of whiteness. Later, southern Europeans who were largely Catholic further reinforced notions of whiteness as linked with Protestantism. They also experienced discrimination based on their darker skin color. All the racial prerequisite cases classified persons of “mixed blood” as not white. Colorism, particularly when intersected with class and religion advantages, helped individuals engaged in passing: individuals who were light-skinned could pass as white, which involved living one's public and private life so as to conceal one's heritage. Therefore, persons with light-enough skin and European features might avoid revealing their indigenous, African or Asian ancestry by avoiding social interaction in these communities and cutting off their ethnic family and community.
In addition to race, religion and colorism, gender is significant in analyzing the lived experiences of men and women granted or denied citizenship rights (Harty 2012). Gender oppression and privilege limited and constrained women's ability to acquire and maintain citizenship, particularly if they were not white or middle class (Glenn 2004). The ways in which marriage shaped women's citizenship status and rights in US legal history demonstrate the continued race and class privilege, and the domination of patriarchy. As mentioned in relation to indigenous women earlier in this chapter, coverture doctrine, which placed women under the control of their husbands, shaped women's access to citizenship rights and to legal entry into the US, as well as their ability to become naturalized citizens. Laws determining citizenship also limited who was eligible for marriage. Immigrant women became US citizens if they married a US male citizen or when their immigrant husbands became naturalized citizens. However, as noted earlier, white men could not marry Chinese women and keep their citizenship. “Until 1931, a woman could not naturalize if she was married to a foreigner racially ineligible for citizenship, even if she otherwise qualified to naturalize in every respect” (López 1996: 15). A woman with US citizenship lost her citizenship when she married a man racially excluded. These restrictions did not end until 1952.
Linking immigrant women to their husbands has had serious consequences for women in abusive marriages and limited their abilities to leave their husbands without facing deportation. Other exclusions of women from similar rights occurred because of prostitution laws (i.e., The Alien Prostitution Importation Act of 1875), failure to recognize gender-based asylum (i.e., cases of rape and genital mutilation) and assumptions of women lacking moral values (i.e., sexually active women, lesbians), and by incorporating the male privilege of coverture (Luibhéid 2002; Ono & Sloop 2002; Johnson 2004). “When citizens or residents are abuse partners, they tend to take advantage of their power to sponsor or not sponsor the immigrant spouse's USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] application as a means of control” (Villalon 2015: 120). Eventually, domestic violence-based asylum became recognized (Cianciarulo 2009). The passage of the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) in 2000 provided some protection for women. Circumstances of trafficking are now considered, and women arrested for prostitution are not immediately prosecuted and deported (Cianciarulo 2009). However, some women may not fit the image of the “iconic victim” (i.e., children, young girls) of a trafficked person, and others, such as older women or adolescent males, have other intersecting social identities that prevent them from gaining protection under the law (Srikantiah 2007).
Our previous discussion has not so far highlighted the class bias in citizenship construction that intersects with race and gender. However, class is an important system of domination in obtaining status as a US citizen. Beginning with giving citizenship rights to white men who were property owners, class continues to determine a person's eligibility for citizenship. Many early immigration laws integrated a class bias, but a closer look at class and citizenship makes this more evident, particularly in light of the phrase inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor.” However, US immigration law has consistently practiced the opposite of open borders to the poor. More accurately, the US established statutes and laws barring the entry of “paupers” that date back to the beginning of the nation-state (Johnson 2004). The terminology most frequently used against the poor is the exclusion of persons who are likely to become public charges. “Public charges” replaced the classification of paupers as a basis to deny entry into the US or as grounds for deportation. Frequently, the basis for classifying a person as a public charge intersected with race and gender (Johnson 2004). For instance, arguments for excluding or limiting immigration of Chinese, Japanese, and southern and eastern Europeans have relied on categorizing these populations as public charges.
The intersection of race and class explains the different paths of entry between workers. Low-skilled workers of color are limited to temporary entry through guest programs (i.e., the Bracero Program) and the use of H-2 Visa programs (i.e., used to bring in workers for clean-up after Hurricane Katrina). Today, class continues to be a significant axis by privileging immigrants with wealth and professional job skills. US companies can sponsor 85,000 skilled immigrant workers with H-1B visas. The majority of these visas (65,000) are for immigrants with a bachelor's degree, and the remaining 20,000 are given to foreign nationals with advanced degrees from US universities (Jordan 2015). The wealthy have always had special provisions for immigration to the US. Currently, the EB-5 visa program allows wealthy foreigners access to green cards for themselves and family members if they invest $500,000 to $1 million in development projects (Oder 2015). Many wealthy foreigners are interested in relocating families to the US for their children to receive an education there. However, the disadvantages poor working immigrants face are particularly visible in legislative action taken to deny public assistance and healthcare, and attempts to exclude their children from an education. More contemporary examples include the provisions ensuring that individuals do not become public charges under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) (Chang 2000), and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Marchesvsky & Theoharis 2006).
Class also intersects with ageism and disability in defining populations classified as public charges. These populations are socially constructed as unable to work and “likely to become a public charge” (LPC) (Nielsen 2012). Early in the eugenics movement in the US, persons differently abled were perceived as inferior and it was feared they would pollute the “nation's gene pool” (Johnson 2004: 106). Disability was legally constructed to include persons perceived as “lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged, or infirm,” which was easily applied to persons with any physical or mental impairment, particularly working-class immigrants denigrated as inferior races. As disabled persons gained more acceptability for residing in society rather than being institutionalized, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed (1990). In 1994, Congress removed the naturalization requirements of English proficiency and knowledge of US history and civics for disabled immigrants. However, in 1996, disabled immigrants were no longer eligible for public benefits. Here, anti-immigrant sentiment was primarily targeted at older immigrants of color who were disabled (Weber 2004).
Sexuality is also an important identity in white supremacy and patriarchal systems of domination regulating immigration. Early cases of limiting immigration entry and naturalization based on sexuality (perceived or otherwise) involved Chinese women classified as prostitutes (Johnson 2004). Deportation of men engaging in homosexual acts was included under the regulation of denying entry to populations that may become public charges or legally defined as “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy or a mental defect” (Johnson 2004: 142). Later, Congress added “sexual deviation” to the previous phrase. The history of excluding gay and lesbian immigrants does not officially begin until the 1950s when McCarthyism added them to the population of “undesirables.” One of the major Supreme Court gay rights rulings on immigration rights involved the 1967 case of a Canadian immigrant, Clive Boutilier. He entered the US in 1955 with his family and became a permanent resident. In 1963, he applied for citizenship. In the application process, Boutilier mentioned his 1959 arrest for sodomy in the interview with the naturalization examiner in 1964. The government began deportation proceedings on the basis that he was gay. In 1967, the Supreme Court upheld his deportation to Canada on the basis that he should have been denied entry in 1955 because of the exclusion of gays under the psychopathic personality provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. However, the court made no inquiries nor offered evidence that Boutilier identified as gay or was gay when granted entry to the US (Stein 2010). Justice William Douglas argued in his dissent that the exclusion under “psychopathic personality” was vague and did not take into consideration the number of gays in the larger US society, as well as the distinguished gays serving in Congress and the Executive Branch (Stein 2005). Eventually, the Immigration Act of 1990 removed homosexuality as a basis for exclusion. Later, gays faced barriers under the HIV exclusion until 2009 (Robinson & Moodie-Mills 2012).
Sexual orientation eventually was recognized as an eligible classification of “protected group” seeking asylum. In 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno granted a gay Cuban man relief from deportation on the basis of sexuality, which established a precedent for homosexuals as a “particular social group eligible for asylum” (McClure & Nugent 2000). However, “applicants must mold aspects of their life and identity to fit US norms and expectations of what it means to be LGBT” (Morgan 2006: 136) and “immigration officials and judges make decisions based on racialized sexual stereotypes and culturally specific notions of homosexuality” (Morgan 2006: 137). In her interview with asylum applicants, Morgan describes a case of an Iranian gay male who had experienced abuse by a male guard in a volunteer military force in Iran; when he escaped, the guard filed criminal charges that he was a homosexual, which is a crime punishable by death. In response, his father beat him and disowned him. He initially failed to gain asylum because he did not meet the immigration officer's expectations that gays are feminine. He was also living with his Iranian American lover under the pretense they were room-mates. The officer concluded that if he was able to pass for straight in the US, he would be able to do the same in his homeland. After he was denied asylum, attorneys advocating for LGBTQ rights took his case and reopened it to provide additional background information. His attorney advised him to “provide proof comporting with judicial stereotypes of what it means to be gay, his membership in gay organizations, subscriptions to gay publications, and participation in gay pride parades” (Morgan 2006: 147). Without an intersectional approach to analyzing sexual orientation, gay essentialism is assumed, along with rigid boundaries of sexual identity (Katyal 2002).
In excluding specific racial, gender, class and sexual orientation categories of persons from citizenship or legal entry into the US, physical appearance frequently becomes a proxy for citizenship. Consequently, the uniformity of types of persons denied citizenship reinforces gendered-racialized and class-based images of what an “illegal alien” looks like. In his examination of legal history, Robert Chang (1999: 29) captures the link between the racial experiences of citizenship and immigration when he observes “the dynamics of racial formation as immigrants enter the political/cultural/legal space of the United States and ‘become’ differentially racialized as Asian American, black, Latina/Latino, and White.” Chang argues that persons racialized as non-white in the US carry a “figurative border” as they are stigmatized as “aliens.” Even though US legal history establishes the identification and treatment of persons classified as “alien,” the social construction of a specific racialized, gendered and class-based body as an “illegal alien” is reified in public discourse, media and the everyday practices of immigration policing and surveillance. Marc Stein (2010: 58) further observed: “U.S. immigration has helped form and regulate class, racial and religious hierarchies by favoring white Christians from northwestern Europe and Canada, and this has intersected with the formation and regulation of gender and sexual hierarchies through provisions and practices that favored heteronormative families.” As we will see in the next section, policing citizenship status and rights relies heavily on assumptions about social identities made based on physical appearance.
1 How does an intersectional analysis of immigration law identify the privileges that certain populations have had in migrating legally to the US?
2 What systems of domination shaped your family's citizenship history?
Between 2010 and 2012, the federal government deported over 200,000 parents with children who were born in the US. The government deported more people in 2010 than between 1981 and 1990. Under current immigration laws, persons deported without criminal records become criminalized in the process, which eliminates legal options to reunite with their family (Golash-Boza 2012). Under the Obama administration, a record number of families were torn apart by Congress's mandate that required the immigration agency to detain 34,000 immigrants daily. Consequently, an estimated 2 million individuals have been deported. Civil rights organizations argue that, in order to meet quotas, law enforcement has incorporated racial profiling practices. While 37% of undocumented immigrants are from Mexico and Central America, 29% are from Asia, 14% are from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the South West Pacific, 9% from Africa, 4% from the Caribbean, and 7% from South America (Rosenblum & Soto 2015). Yet Mexicans have become the political face of anti-immigrant sentiment and law enforcement. However, a closer look at reported policing practices points to the intersectionality of citizenship status with other identities – namely race, ethnicity, class, age and, frequently, gender.
Exclusion, detention and surveillance of non-citizens of color are central to counterterrorism legislation, which includes the USA PATRIOT Act, the Homeland Security Act (HSA) and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act (EBSVERA). The distinction between criminal aliens (deportable for their post-entry criminal conduct), illegal aliens (deportable for their surreptitious crossing of the US border) and terrorists (deportable for the grave risk they pose to national security) are blurred and all undocumented immigrants are treated as dangerous. Combining the traditional domains of immigration and criminal law enforcement under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security has further served to obscure differences between immigrants who are simply working illegally in the US and immigrants and non-immigrants engaged in murder, human smuggling, money laundering or child pornography. In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security released a ten-year detention and removal strategy. As a mission slogan, the Office of Detention and Removal (DRO) selected: “Promote the public safety and national security by ensuring the departure from the United States all removable aliens through the fair and effective enforcement of the nation's immigration laws.” In framing the mission solely on public safety and national security, the government defined all unauthorized immigrants as security threats. Traditionally, immigration raids occurred at work sites employing low-wage male workers. However, since the beginning of the immigration program Operation Return to Sender, in 2006, news accounts and civil rights litigation report an unusually high number of immigration raids targeting low-income families of color.
One story to catch the headlines was “Child's civil rights were violated during immigration raid” (Hendricks 2007). Kebin Reyes, the 6-year-old son of a Guatemalan-born father, was arrested along with his father when immigration agents raided their home early in the morning. His father explained that his son was born in California and showed his son's passport as evidence of citizenship. Agents refused his father's plea to call relatives to come to pick up his son. Instead, agents held Kebin in a locked room all day and only gave him bread and water. A family member arrived at the detention center and requested Kebin's release but he was not released until the evening. Before the arrest, his father described Kebin as very friendly and active. Afterwards, he “turned to be very reserved and quiet and not as open to speak to anyone” (McKinley 2007).
During Return to Sender and Operation Endgame, reports of immigration agents entering residences unannounced or without warrants, particularly in pre-dawn raids, increased (Romero 2011b). Concerns about the civil rights violation of family members, frequently children, have emerged, particularly given the unprecedented number of poor and working-class immigrant women and children of color held in detention centers. The largest family detention center in 2015 was Dilly in Texas, which held 1,735 individuals, including about 1,000 children. Without an intersectional framework, immigration enforcement may appear to be one-dimensional, but race and class systems of domination intersect with citizenship to place communities of color at risk. A closer look at the way law enforcement inspects citizenship status reveals race, class, gender and other systems of domination.
Scholarly attention to the everyday practices of citizenship highlights the significance of social identities intersecting and placing certain groups at a higher risk of police scrutiny (Lugo 2000; Heyman 2001; Inda 2006; Romero 2011b). Similar experiences have been found in the racial profiling of Latinos and African Americans in the War on Drugs (Russell 2009 [1998]; Milovanovic & Russell 2001; Lundman & Kaufman 2003), and are evident in targeted citizenship inspections that occur away from the border. Among the most common aspects of immigration law enforcement is the targeting of persons with particular physical characteristics that mark race and class, rather than behavior, to trigger “probable cause” and “reasonableness” for citizenship inspection (Lugo 2000; Heyman 2001). Specific immigration enforcement practices place low-wage, racialized Latinos in harm's way of the law. Consequently, the heavy police surveillance in Latino communities results in immigration stops for many Latinos who are born US citizens, naturalized citizens, permanent residents, and immigrants with and without documentation. White racialized spaces, such as middle-class neighborhoods and upscale shopping malls, provide a bubble for Whites, regardless of their citizenship status, to move around without the burden of police questioning their right to be in the US. Middle-class Latinos experience more freedom of movement without policing in these white racialized spaces (Romero 2006). Therefore, as a heterosexual Mexican American woman born in the US and employed as a college professor, I do not face the same risk of having my rights violated by immigration law enforcement as if I were a working-class Mexican American male college student driving home from campus to a predominantly low-income community of color. If working-class white students are undocumented, they are at far less risk of being stopped than a person physically characterized as Latino/a, Asian, American Indian or of Middle Eastern descent. However, border patrol officers at immigration checkpoints along the highway in the southern area of Arizona are more likely to stop and question me than they are to stop my white male or female, straight or LGBTQ colleague driving through the same checkpoint. While the use of racial profiling relies on physical appearance as evidence of citizenship status, it intersects with social class, gender, and location.
Immigrant advocate organizations voiced concern about the civil rights violations of citizens of color when Congress passed draconian immigration policies, as well as the bills passed at the state and local levels. Along with researchers, they understood that the public responds to anti-immigrant laws by discriminating against people of color, particularly Latinos, Asians and Arabs, as well as ethnically identified persons speaking with an accent or having the ability to speak more than one language, regardless of their actual citizenship status (Davis & Moore 2014). As perceived foreigners, they are more likely to be denied employment, housing and access to quality healthcare. Low-income adults of color are questioned more than Whites when they attempt to vote or apply for government benefits. The intersections of race, ethnicity, class and gender increase the likelihood that darker-skinned low-wage Latino male workers will be stopped by police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for proof of citizenship on worksites or driving to and from work. For instance, the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County in Arizona regularly raided workplaces, such as construction sites and factories, claiming a crime sweep of criminals on the basis of workplace fraud. However, white citizens also commit workplace fraud but are not targeted in these raids. Since 9/11, Arab Americans are more likely to be questioned when they are passengers waiting for a flight. Nafees Syed, a writer and attorney in New York, noted that “flying while Muslim” means extra screening, particularly when wearing a hijab or having an Arabic name. Understanding citizenship inspection and the privileges of citizenship requires an intersectional approach. Examining the context of immigration checkpoints, the degree of Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inspection, surveillance in low-income neighborhoods of color, employment sites hiring Latinos and Latinas, and the convenience of voting precincts highlights the interaction of race, gender and class systems of domination in restricting citizenship rights.
1 How do systems of domination interact to restrict citizenship rights of certain populations?
2 How does an intersectional analysis identify the social inequities in immigration policing and surveillance?
Now that we've reviewed immigration legislation and law enforcement, the intersectionality of various systems of domination constructing citizenship is apparent. I will return to the young LGBTQ UndocuQueer immigrants living at the intersection of sexuality, gender identity and citizenship status. Embracing intersectional alliances, they demonstrate significant ways the LGBTQ and immigration reform movements converge on common issues. In an interview, Julio Salgado, a gay artist and co-founder of DreamersAdrift, described the inspiration found in intersectional activism:
I've been queer since I was little, since I can remember. But one of the people that sort of created the spark in me about two years ago was Mo [Mohammad] Abdollahi. He was one of the people that did the sit-in in Tucson in 2010. He's from Iran. When I heard his story, I said – this dude is willing to say “I'm queer and undocumented.” I mean, he was risking deportation back to Iran, a place where homosexuality is punished with death.
So I was graduating from college at the time, and the first thing they would tell us was don't tell anyone you're undocumented. And here we have people revolutionizing that. It was Mo, and Yahaira Carillo, and Tania Unzueta from Chicago. So we have three queer folks who are huge parts of this movement. And I was like, “Oh my god I have to document this.”
LGBTQ immigrant youth of color called attention to their presence in the US – some of them fleeing prosecution in their own countries, others who are married to US citizens but as same-sex couples do not necessarily have access to the “cancelation of removal” that heterosexual married couples enjoy. Undocumented LGBTQ immigrants in detention face sexual assault, arbitrary solitary confinement (used as the only safety measure), denial of medical care, harassment and discrimination (National Immigrant Justice Center [NIJC] & Physicians for Human Rights [PHR] 2012). Recognizing the intersection of sexuality, gender identity and citizenship status, as well as race and class in the construction of immigration, the youth immigration movement works closely with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in planning activities for the “Not1MoreDeportation” campaign aimed at protesting against deportations. They successfully called a National Day of Action on April 5, 2014, with thousands of demonstrators in more than 50 cities. LGBTQ and other youth activists in the immigration movement were active in hunger strikes in 2014. They have been at the forefront of civil disobedience, blocking buses carrying undocumented immigrants by forming a human chain or creating human blockades at detention centers and court entrances. However, while the campaigns for marriage equality and immigration reform intersect, media coverage and political pundits treat the activism and struggles as separate and distinct from each other.
This chapter has examined the interlocking systems of oppression and privilege by focusing on immigration to illustrate the significance of intersectional analysis. On the surface, immigration appears to be one-dimensional, only having to do with a person's citizenship status in the country in which they reside. This overview, however, addresses the necessity of an intersectional framework for explaining intra-group differences in obtaining and retaining citizenship rights. Like all social identities, citizenship status is socially constructed. A review of immigration policy demonstrates the way an immigrant's social identity links race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age and abilities. Access to citizenship rights is contingent on the intersectionality of these systems of domination, which are contextually rooted in history and geography. While citizenship status is primarily one constructed by the law and criminal justice system, practices in the media and other institutions perpetuate specific images of “aliens” that are racialized, class-based, gendered, and often include age and sexual orientation – all of which have real consequences.