Abstract
The Great Recession coincided with a period of heightened immigration enforcement at the Southern border and in the country’s interior. In this chapter we analyze the economic performance of Latino immigrants in general and of unauthorized immigrants in particular during the Great Recession through a lens that focuses on the confluence of stricter enforcement, the criminalization of immigrant workers and limited economic opportunity. Qualitative interviews with Latino immigrants in the Phoenix, Arizona, a state that has adopted a tapestry of punitive immigration laws, and nationally representative data from the American Community Survey and Current Population Survey suggest that increased enforcement drove undocumented immigrants further underground. An important finding is that the quality of these immigrants’ jobs declined, indicating increased undergroundness and vulnerability, a trend that started earlier in the 2000s but was exacerbated during the Great Recession.
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Notes
- 1.
Fussell (2011) identified a “deportation threat dynamic,” a social mechanism through which physical appearance, language use, and labor practices are associated with undocumented status and which in turn permits unscrupulous employers to use deportation as a threat.
- 2.
Importantly, whereas immigrants have moved to the so-called “new destinations,” they have continued to settle disproportionally in a few traditional “gateway” destinations, such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago (Singer 2004); indeed, many of these new destinations “have not experienced a significant foreign-born presence for at least a century, if ever” (Ellis et al. 2013: 3). What these new destinations have seen is a relative increase in the Latino population, sometimes multiplying its size, as the initial numbers were very low to begin with.
- 3.
This legislative activity may in some ways be related to the observation above. New destinations, with very small populations of Latino immigrants that then increased to several times their size (though remaining relatively small in comparison to the size of these populations in traditional gateway points) have tended to react more strongly to these demographic changes by proposing more anti-immigrant legislation.
- 4.
Class 4 felonies have a presumptive of 2 years and 6 months in prison and an aggravated term of 3 years and 9 months (Ariz. Rev. Stat. § 13–701). For example, theft of property worth between $3,000 and $4,000 is a “class 4 felony.” Source: http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/criminal-defense/felony-offense/arizona-felony-class.htm (Accessed March 4, 2014).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Evelyn Cruz for her help in deciphering the details of Arizona immigration laws. All errors remaining are, of course, ours.
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Menjívar, C., Enchautegui, M.E. (2015). Confluence of the Economic Recession and Immigration Laws in the Lives of Latino Immigrant Workers in the United States. In: Aysa-Lastra, M., Cachón, L. (eds) Immigrant Vulnerability and Resilience. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14797-0_6
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