Walls Within: Immigration Policy and the Politics of Belonging in America since 1965 traces how politicians, activists, interest groups, communities and the courts strove to define the rights of immigrants in the United States after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Hart-Celler ended the national quota system of the 1920s and initiated an eraof mass immigration that remade the demographic profile of the United States. The growing number of immigrants from Mexico and Central America changed the fabric of cities and suburbs and in turn triggered a powerful restrictionist movement that sought to contain and undercut the connections that immigrants forged with the American welfare state. This wave of immigration and the restrictionism that it engendered led to a bitter political struggle over immigrants’ rights and more broadly, over the notion of what it means to be American.
The movement to restrict immigrants’ rights created new cleavages and facilitated a redistribution of power centers in both political parties. The Democrats were divided by both a desire to accommodate anti-immigrant labor unions and members of an emerging centrist faction while still appealing to the party’s traditional support of an expansive welfare state and immigrants’ groups since the New Deal. Within the GOP, the restrictionists wrestled with the New Right, with its commitment to free enterprise and deregulation, for control of the party policy over immigration. Over time, calls for immigration restriction gained currency within both parties.
Pro and con Proposition 187 activists are separated by police Aug. 10, 1996 (AP Photo/Frank Wiese)
But while they grew in strength, restrictionist efforts were curtailed by strong countervailing forces. The legacies of the civil rights revolution, unusual political alliances, institutional structures, and the shifting politics within local communities provided significant barriers to efforts to restrict immigrants’ access to the state and society.
Walls Within exposes the ways in which immigrants’ rights were central to questions of controlling admissions and national identity in the second half of the twentieth century.It shows that the current wave of anti-immigrant sentiment seen in the electoral success of Donald Trump is not a recent phenomenon, but instead has deep roots dating back to the reshaping of the politics of immigration post-1965 and has been nurtured by the battles seen in this book.