Content area
Full text
Abstract
In this article we explore the policy and legal build-up that led to the 2017 Executive Orders targeting Latino/a immigrant families and communities. We provide a historical backdrop for the merging of criminal and immigration laws that has contributed to the criminalization of the behaviors, bodies, and communities of Latino/a immigrants. We then look at the media narratives that burry immigrants' complex identities and reproduce daily the demonization of Latino/as as criminals. Together, these factors contribute to socially construct a "Brown Threat" which reproduces anxieties and fears about crime, terror, and threats to the nation, affecting the everyday lives of immigrants and non-immigrants alike, though in different ways. Based on an 18-month ethnography in a small Kansas town carried out before and after the signing of Executive Orders in 2017, we examine the spill-over effects of this environment on Guatemalan immigrant families as well as on non-immigrant Anglo-white residents in a rural community.
Keywords: immigration policy; Latino/a; Executive Orders; Kansas; Midwest; criminalization; rural communities; media; stereotypes.
Introduction
A few days after his inauguration, President Trump signed a series of Executive Orders (EOs) targeting immigration from Latin America and Muslim-majority nations. How could such racially-charged orders come about in the first place? We argue that this was not simply the result of the peculiarities of the most recent presidential election or the new administration's extraordinary measures. Rather, the EOs signed in early 2017 were facilitated by decades of laws passed and policies implemented, political discourse, and media narratives that have criminalized certain groups of immigrants, particularly Latino/as and Muslims, in sustained fashion for at least two decades (Menjívar 2014; Sinema, 2012). Such narratives and legislative advances have fallen on fertile soil at a precise historical moment, when U.S. publics are fearful about rapid cultural change in the face of profound demographic shifts that some fear will diminish the economic and political power of the white population. Therefore, we argue, far from being aberrant legislation, the EOs are the culmination of a long history of immigrant and immigration criminalization through law. In this article we ask, how does the long-trend of criminalizing certain immigrants through law affect the perceptions and experiences of residents (immigrants and nonimmigrants alike) in a rural community in the Midwest? How...