Since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the notion that undocumented immigrants are a criminal threat has been an increasing and controversial part of political discourse about immigration in the United States. Media images of undocumented immigrants in handcuffs and chains—on the ground somewhere in the desert, detained in a workplace or home raid by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, or on the tarmac boarding a deportation flight—vividly communicate to the public that undocumented immigrants are viewed and treated as criminals, not hard workers wanting to improve their lives and those of their families.
While undocumented immigrants have been vilified and targeted with harsh enforcement actions and penalties in the past, many would be surprised to learn that the immigrant-as-criminal narrative so prevalent today has its policy roots in the 1929 Undesirable Aliens Act (S. 5094), a federal law that for the first time criminalized undocumented entry and reentry into the United States, punishable by prison or fine or both. In Handcuffs and Chain Link, Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien offers an insightful and accessible analysis of the historical criminalization of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. His analysis of congressional debates and public opinion survey data lucidly explains why the criminalization of Mexican immigrants has become so entrenched, why alternative elite discourses and policy treatments of undocumented immigrants have failed, how the criminality frame resonates with the public today, and how public perceptions of undocumented criminality shape different immigration policy preferences.
The book is clearly structured. The introduction discusses how rhetoric and legislation related to undocumented immigrants in the United States have long been viewed through a criminality lens, and it provides an overview of the book. The analysis of early congressional debate texts in Chapter 1 traces the roots of the convergence between immigration and criminal law to the 1920s, when Congress passed the restrictive immigration quotas as part of the Johnson-Reed Act and S. 5094. Chapter 2 offers an analysis of congressional debates in the 1980s and 1990s to show that while the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) sought to approach undocumented immigration more as a labor issue, the law’s shortcomings only further reinforced the earlier established fictitious association of undocumented immigrants with criminality, as evidenced by Congress’s adoption in 1996 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Chapter 3, drawing on nationally representative survey data, examines the beliefs in immigrant criminality among the public, highlighting differences in perceptions among Whites and Blacks. Chapter 4 draws on the same survey data to examine the effects of public perceptions of undocumented criminality on policy preferences, finding that criminal threat perceptions resonate differently among Whites and Blacks. The conclusion reviews key findings and discusses possible avenues for further research.
Besides adding to the immigration literature by exploring the themes of criminality, illegality, and federal policy, the book’s strength also lies in its contribution to public policy research. In public policy theory, path dependence assumes that early policy decisions create institutional paths that constrain future policy choices, so that later policies resemble earlier ones, until moments of punctuated equilibrium open windows of opportunity for notable policy change that deviate from the prior path. Path dependence theory, however, does not adequately account for policies that go in a different direction but whose failures then are critical in reinforcing prior paths, prior rhetorics, and prior policy solutions.
This book is a useful case study of these dynamics in the specific area of immigration policy. After the enactment of S. 5094 in 1929, members of Congress had approached undocumented immigration largely as a crime control issue with policy solutions that solely punished the undocumented for their immigration “crimes.” The enactment of IRCA in 1986 promised to be a moment of punctuated equilibrium and allowed the reframing of undocumented immigration as a labor issue, with solutions that included a large-scale legalization program and punishment of employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. But as Gonzalez O’Brien shows, IRCA turned out to be a “critical policy failure” that did not stem the tide of undocumented immigration, prompting members of Congress once again to embrace undocumented immigration as a crime control issue moving forward.
Another strength of the book is its use of both qualitative and quantitative data to provide a compelling account of the origins and consequences of negative stereotypes against undocumented immigrants (and especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico) in the United States. Chapters 1 and 2 draw on content analysis of congressional debates about key immigration laws in the 1920s, 1980s, and 1990s. Both chapters include many vivid and, to be sure, hair-raising quotes from U.S. representatives and senators that effectively illustrate how they similarly racialized and criminalized undocumented immigrants from Mexico then and now, often clearly contradicting data that showed that undocumented immigrants were less prone to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze two nationally representative surveys from 2011 to examine how the media influence public perceptions of immigrant criminality and what effect the belief in immigrant criminality has on the public’s preferences for different immigration policies, such as deportation, a guest worker program, a path to citizenship, and employer penalties. These two chapters include many helpful tables and figures (with full statistical models included in a separate appendix), making these data accessible to statistical experts and neophytes.
The book, however, could have been stronger in several areas. For example, to communicate even more effectively why the criminalization of undocumented immigration is so problematic, it would have been helpful had the book included a more detailed discussion of how the United States historically treated immigration violations as civil, rather than criminal, offenses, along with how such violations were treated before “crimmigration” became a thing. What did “illegality” mean before it was criminalized, how did the system deal with it, and what were the repercussions for immigrants caught crossing the border illegally or apprehended as unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. interior? I also would have welcomed a more in-depth discussion of the tenor of debate over undocumented immigration and why it changed in the mid-1980s leading up to the enactment of IRCA, as well as what lessons, if any, from that period we can carry forward in order to have more productive and balanced discussions about immigration reform today. Finally, early on in the book, the author mentions that there is a feedback loop, where Congress’s treatment of undocumented immigration as a crime control issue influences the media narrative, which influences public opinion, which in turn influences public policy that reinforces the immigrant-as-criminal narrative. With an eye toward thinking about ways to break this vicious cycle of criminalizing the undocumented, I would have welcomed more discussion of what causes what, according to Gonzalez O’Brien’s analysis of congressional debates and survey data: Does media reporting influence public opinion, which then influences congressional policy, or does congressional policy influence the media, which then influences public opinion, or does the causal arrow point in another direction?
Overall, Handcuffs and Chain Link is a very welcome addition to the migration and public policy literatures. It illustrates well why, regrettably, today’s debates about undocumented immigration have come to focus so much on immigrant criminality. The book’s accessible and engaging narrative and strong qualitative and quantitative data make it recommended reading for both students and academics, especially those interested in (Mexican) migration, race and ethnic politics, criminality and illegality, public policy, and American political development.
