The New Latino Underclass: Immigration Enforcement as a Race- Making Institution

Abstract

Mexicans are the second largest minority in the United States after African Americans. Although they have been in the country in sig nificant numbers since 1848, the Mexican population has grown rapidly in recent decades and together with other Latin Americans Hispanics now constitute the nation’s largest minority population and is rapidly pulling away from African Americans in size. Since 1965 Latinos in general and Mexicans in particular have been subjected to a variety of processes of racialization in public rhetoric and the media, and these have been associated with radical shifts in immigration and border policy, such that the U.S. immigration control system has become a major race-making institution for Hispanics. This paper documents the rise of a war on immigrants that parallels the earlier wars on crime and drugs such that immigration enforcement has come to affect Latinos in the same way that the criminal justice system affects blacks, further exacerbating intergroup inequalities in the United States.

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