About This Unit

This unit treats the U.S. border, the immigration statute, and the deportation apparatus not as procedural arrangements through which the state administers a pre-existing population but as the institutions through which racial categories are made, ranked, and inscribed in law. Module 1's argument that race is produced rather than discovered moves here from the laboratory and the clinic into the customs hall, the consulate, the asylum office, and the detention center. The historical arc the unit traces — from the 1790 Naturalization Act's limitation of citizenship to "free white persons," through the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone, the 1924 National Origins Act, the Bracero Program, "Operation Wetback," the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the post-1996 expansion of removal, and the contemporary asylum and detention infrastructures — shows immigration law as the primary statutory archive through which the United States has built and rebuilt its racial order.

The unit also takes up a question that the standard immigration frame tends to obscure: who counts as a "migrant" to begin with? Immigration as a category presupposes a settled national territory whose boundaries appear natural, yet those boundaries were imposed across Indigenous lands and across nations whose sovereignty long predates the United States. Attending to settler colonialism alongside immigration history is therefore not a separate topic but a condition for reading the racial scripts that govern who belongs, who is admitted, who is expelled, and on whose land any of this occurs.

Three analytical concepts anchor the readings. Racial scripts — Natalia Molina's term for the way racial logics get inherited, adapted, and rewritten across groups and historical moments — names the mechanism by which exclusions developed against one population get reactivated against later ones. Crimmigration names the fusion of immigration enforcement with criminal law that has produced "illegal alienage" as a racialized legal status disproportionately attached to Mexican and other Latin American migrants. The deportation-industrial complex names the network of federal, state, private, and carceral institutions through which removal is now organized at scale. Together these frameworks let learners read present-day debates over asylum, sanctuary, enforcement, and the border not as departures from American ideals but as continuations of the long racial work that immigration law has always performed.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Trace the institutional history of U.S. immigration restriction from the 1790 Naturalization Act through the contemporary asylum and detention regime, identifying how successive statutes produced and revised racial categories.
• Distinguish racial scripts, crimmigration, and the deportation-industrial complex as analytical frameworks, and apply them to a specific historical or contemporary case.
• Articulate how attention to settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty reframes the standard immigration narrative — particularly its treatment of national territory and the immigrant/citizen binary.
• Analyze contemporary debates over deportation, asylum, sanctuary, and bordering as continuations of, and departures from, the long history of U.S. racial exclusion law, drawing on both scholarly and lived-experience sources.

Keywords

• Crimmigration
• Deportation-industrial complex
• Racialized illegality
• Racial scripts
• Settler colonialism and bordering
• Xenophobia

Open Educational Resources

• Coutin, Susan Bibler. On the Record: An Ethnography of an Immigration Court. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025. Access the book.

Book · Open access (UC Press Luminos).

Coutin's On the Record is an ethnographic study of an immigration court — its rhythms, its actors, and the everyday production of legal decisions about admission, asylum, and removal. Drawing on extended fieldwork in proceedings before immigration judges, asylum officers, and attorneys, Coutin examines how cases are documented, narrated, contested, and resolved, and how the courtroom record produces "facts" about migrants that travel into appeals, into databases, and into future enforcement decisions. The book argues that immigration adjudication is not the neutral application of statute to fact but a constitutive site at which legal categories — refugee, asylum-seeker, removable alien, lawful permanent resident — are made and remade in the encounter between state authority and the person seeking protection. Learners will encounter immigration enforcement at the granular scale of testimony, evidence, and legal reasoning, and will gain a methodological grounding in how ethnographic attention to bureaucratic practice reveals what statute and case law obscure.

• Andrews, Abigail Leslie. Banished Men: How Deportation Changes Who We Are. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023. Access the book.

Book · Open access (UC Press Luminos).

Andrews's Banished Men draws on years of fieldwork with Mexican men deported from the United States to argue that deportation reshapes not only the lives of those expelled but the social categories of masculinity, family, and belonging through which deported men make sense of their post-removal existence. Following her interlocutors across two countries, Andrews traces what happens after the legal moment of removal — the loss of work and family contact, the renegotiation of identity in cities of origin where they no longer fit, the strategies of return, refusal, and remaking. The book argues that deportation must be understood as a long process rather than a discrete event, and as a gendered process whose costs and reorganizations operate through specifically masculine framings of provision, protection, and worth. Provides learners with a sustained ethnographic account of the human aftermath of the deportation apparatus that the unit's other readings address from legal, historical, and political angles.

• Locke, Joseph L., and Ben Wright, eds. The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Continuously updated. Access the textbook.

Open textbook · CC BY-SA 4.0.

The American Yawp is a free, collaboratively authored U.S. history textbook published by Stanford University Press and maintained as an open educational resource under a CC BY-SA license. Composed of thirty-one thematic and chronological chapters with linked primary sources, the textbook covers Indigenous North America before contact, settler colonization, slavery and emancipation, industrialization, immigration, twentieth-century reform and reaction, and the present. Several chapters are particularly relevant to this unit — including those on Indigenous America, the conquest of the West, the Gilded Age, immigration restriction, and twentieth-century globalization — and learners are encouraged to consult chapters according to their own interests and prior background. The textbook is designed for substitution into university courses, with primary-source readers attached to each chapter. Provides historical grounding for the unit's analytical readings and a free, openly licensed reference work that learners can return to throughout the course.

Key Scholarship

• Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America: A Portrait. 5th ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Portes and Rumbaut's Immigrant America, now in its fifth decennial edition (2024), synthesizes more than four decades of sociological research on immigration to the United States. The book examines the demographic composition of contemporary immigration, the economic and labor-market trajectories of first- and second-generation immigrants, the political incorporation of immigrant communities, the religious and linguistic dimensions of immigrant life, and the policy regimes — past and present — that shape who arrives and on what terms. Drawing on Census data, ethnographic field studies, and the authors' long-running Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, the fifth edition adds material on the post-2016 turn in immigration policy, on the adult outcomes of the second generation, and on the conceptual reframings that recent scholarship has brought to questions of assimilation and segmented incorporation. Provides learners with the unit's most comprehensive empirical baseline for understanding contemporary immigration as a social phenomenon.

• Arriaga, Felicia. Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Arriaga's Behind Crimmigration examines the entanglement of federal immigration enforcement with state and local law-enforcement agencies in the United States, tracing how programs such as Secure Communities and the 287(g) agreements have fused criminal law with immigration removal. Drawing on field research in North Carolina sheriff's offices and on case studies of community resistance, Arriaga argues that crimmigration is not an unintended convergence of two separate legal regimes but a deliberate political project that recruits local law enforcement into the work of racialized removal. The book documents how this fusion operates in everyday traffic stops, in jail bookings, and in jurisdictional politics, and it examines the organizing strategies through which immigrant communities, faith institutions, and sanctuary movements have contested those practices. Learners will encounter crimmigration both as an analytical concept and as a concrete set of institutional arrangements visible at the level of the county and the parish.

• Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. American Crossroads. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Molina's How Race Is Made in America argues that the racial categorization of immigrant groups in the United States proceeds not as a series of independent racial projects but through what she calls racial scripts — recurring logics, vocabularies, and policy templates that are inherited from prior exclusions and adapted to new populations. Drawing on archival research in California and the Southwest from the 1920s through the 1960s, Molina traces how categorizations developed against Asian and African American populations were reworked and redeployed against Mexican Americans, and how the racial knowledge produced by one exclusionary regime became material for the next. The book argues that race is made historically and relationally, across groups rather than in parallel silos, and that learning to read racial scripts allows learners to see continuities in immigration politics — between Chinese exclusion, Mexican repatriation, and contemporary deportation discourse — that the individual-group framing obscures. The unit's analytical use of "scripts" derives from this account.

• Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Updated ed. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Originally published 2004. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Ngai's Impossible Subjects argues that the legal category of the "illegal alien" was not a description of pre-existing transgressors but a statutory invention of the early twentieth century — specifically of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and the bureaucratic infrastructure it produced — that has subsequently structured the racial politics of American citizenship. Drawing on records from the Bureau of Immigration, congressional hearings, court cases, and ethnographic accounts of communities subjected to deportation and Border Patrol policing, Ngai traces how the racial quotas of 1924, the Bracero Program, the policing of the U.S.–Mexico border, and the postwar deportation regime together produced "illegal alienage" as a racialized legal status disproportionately attached to Mexican and other Latin American migrants. The book argues that the impossibility of regularization for the undocumented — their structural exclusion from the polity despite their economic incorporation — is constitutive of modern American citizenship rather than a flaw in it. The updated 2014 edition adds material on the post-1996 enforcement regime and contemporary debates over immigration reform.

• Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus is an ethnographic and political study of Kahnawà:ke, a Mohawk community whose territory is bisected by the U.S.–Canada border and whose nationhood predates both states. Drawing on extended fieldwork with Mohawk people who navigate, refuse, or selectively accept settler citizenship, Simpson develops the concept of refusal — a stance distinct from resistance, in which Indigenous people decline the terms on which settler states would recognize them as subjects. The book argues that the settler-state immigration and citizenship apparatus, which presents itself as a neutral administration of who may belong, is itself a colonial structure that depends on the prior erasure of Indigenous sovereignty; the immigrant/citizen binary is therefore unintelligible without attention to the settler frame within which it operates. Learners will encounter a sustained alternative to the assimilation-and-incorporation paradigm that organizes most U.S. immigration scholarship, and a methodological model for ethnographic work that takes Indigenous political theory as its analytical starting point.

Case Studies

• Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children

Silvia Rodríguez Vega · NYU Press, 2023 · Book paired with a structured gallery-walk activity.

A case study built around Silvia Rodríguez Vega's Drawing Deportation (NYU Press, 2023) — an ethnographic study of how mixed-status families and the children of deported parents represent their experiences through drawing, performance, and play. Vega argues that children's artistic production is not merely expressive but evidentiary: drawings encode what survey instruments and interview protocols cannot, and they document the racial, political, and emotional geography of deportation in ways that reorganize what counts as data in immigration scholarship. The case study pairs the book with a publicly available book talk on YouTube and a structured gallery-walk activity in which learners engage selected images as ethnographic objects rather than illustrations.

Suggested gallery-walk sequence:

1. Read Vega's introduction and one selected chapter (instructor's choice), and watch the linked book talk (approximately sixty minutes).
2. Select four to six images from the book or talk for use as gallery-walk "stations." Display each image with the child's age, year of production, and any contextual notes Vega provides.
3. Engage each station individually and record brief notes, working from the following framing prompts: What objects, persons, scenes, or absences does the image include — what is foregrounded, and what is left out? How is the state represented — its agents, its violence, its presence in the family or the home? What does the image claim to know that an interview or written narrative might not? Whose perspective is centered, and what political or emotional knowledge does that perspective assert?
4. Discuss collectively across the stations: what does the body of work argue about family separation, the deportation regime, and the racialization of mixed-status families? What does the artistic record show that statutory and statistical sources cannot?

The activity is designed for either a classroom or an online setting and can be adapted to a single class session or extended across two.

• The Long Arc of U.S. Immigration Law

Multi-source case study · Three institutional timelines and historical narratives.

A three-source case study that asks learners to compare how three institutional venues — a scholarly society, a research center, and a national library — narrate the history of U.S. immigration law. The case study uses the Immigration History Timeline maintained by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Pew Research Center's 2015 short read on how U.S. immigration laws and rules have changed through history, and the Library of Congress's Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History classroom materials. Learners are asked to read across the three sources and examine which statutes, eras, and populations each foregrounds, where the periodizations diverge, and how the institutional perspective of each source shapes what its narrative includes and omits. The case study positions the historical record itself as an object of analysis, not as a neutral background to the unit's contemporary scholarship.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Andrews and Coutin: Both Andrews and Coutin examine immigration enforcement at the level of lived experience and procedural detail — Andrews following Mexican men after deportation, Coutin observing the production of legal categories in immigration court. Drawing on one specific scene, encounter, or testimony from each work, articulate what ethnographic attention reveals about deportation and adjudication that statute and statistics obscure. What is gained, and what is risked, when scholarship anchors itself in granular ethnographic material?
2. On Portes and Rumbaut and the American Yawp: Portes and Rumbaut argue that contemporary U.S. immigration is shaped by both long-running structural factors — labor demand, demographic change, U.S. foreign policy — and shifting policy regimes that determine who arrives and on what status. Choose one chapter of the American Yawp that covers immigration history (for example, on the Gilded Age, the early twentieth century, or post-1965 globalization) and identify one historical pattern that informs the contemporary picture Portes and Rumbaut describe. What is the relationship between the historical formation of the immigration system and its present-day operation?
3. On Arriaga and Ngai: Arriaga uses the term crimmigration to name the fusion of immigration enforcement with local criminal law that has accelerated since the 1990s; Ngai shows that "illegal alienage" was a racialized legal category produced by the 1924 immigration regime and its bureaucratic infrastructure. Reading the two together, identify one continuity and one important difference between the historical production of illegality (Ngai) and the contemporary crimmigration apparatus (Arriaga). Where does the analytic of crimmigration extend Ngai's account, and where might it require revision?
4. On Molina and the immigration history case study: Molina argues that racial scripts — recurring policy templates and vocabularies — are transferred across immigrant groups and reactivated against new populations over time. Drawing on Molina alongside the three institutional timelines in the case study, identify one racial script that recurs across two or more eras of U.S. immigration history. What is reorganized when the script is redeployed, and what stays the same?
5. On Simpson and the Vega case study: Simpson argues that the settler-state immigration and citizenship apparatus depends on the prior erasure of Indigenous sovereignty, and that refusal — declining the terms of settler recognition — is a distinct political stance. Reading Simpson alongside Vega's Drawing Deportation, examine how children of mixed-status families articulate belonging, refusal, and territory in their drawings. What does Simpson's framework add to or complicate in Vega's account of these representations?
6. Synthesis across the unit: The unit's readings advance the argument that immigration law is a primary statutory archive through which the U.S. racial order has been built and rebuilt — and that attention to settler colonialism is a condition for reading immigration history clearly. Drawing on two of Ngai, Molina, Arriaga, and Simpson together with one of the unit's case studies, articulate the relationship between immigration law, racial formation, and settler colonialism as you now understand it. Which scholar's analytical vocabulary do you find most useful for thinking about a specific case — historical or contemporary — that you know, and why?

Further Readings and Resources

• Dreby, Joanna. Surviving the ICE Age: Immigrant Families in an Era of Mass Deportation. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2025. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Dreby examines how the post-2016 expansion of immigration enforcement reshapes family life among immigrant households in the United States — particularly mixed-status families with U.S.-citizen children. The book draws on longitudinal interviews to trace how the threat of deportation alters routines, parenting, schooling, and emotional life, and how families develop strategies of concealment, mobility, and mutual support. Provides a recent counterpart to the unit's ethnographic readings, focused on the household rather than the courtroom or the deportation aftermath.

• Park, Lisa Sun-Hee, Erin Hoekstra, and David Naguib Pellow. The Third Net: How U.S. Immigration Enforcement Steals Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Park, Hoekstra, and Pellow argue that the U.S. immigration enforcement system constitutes a "third net" — distinct from but interlocked with the criminal justice system and the welfare state — that captures and disposes of immigrant lives through detention, deportation, and surveillance. The book traces the political economy and operational geography of this third net and considers the abolitionist arguments that have emerged in response. Extends the unit's crimmigration readings by foregrounding the analytical and political work being done by immigrant-justice movements.

• National Immigration Law Center. "Know Your Rights Under the U.S. Constitution." Los Angeles: NILC, 2024. Access the resource.

Public-facing legal resource.

A rights-literacy guide produced by the National Immigration Law Center that summarizes constitutional protections — Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, the right to remain silent, the right to refuse warrantless entry — as they apply to immigrants regardless of status. Maintained as a public resource for both immigrant communities and allies, the document is widely circulated by immigrant-rights organizations during periods of intensified enforcement. Provides learners with a working knowledge of the rights at stake in everyday encounters with immigration enforcement.

• Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America's Long History of Expelling Immigrants. Politics and Society in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Goodman argues that the United States has been deporting immigrants — through formal removal, voluntary departure, and self-deportation produced by enforcement pressure — at scale for far longer than the post-1996 expansion would suggest. Drawing on archival research and government records, the book traces the development of the deportation apparatus from the late nineteenth century through the present, foregrounding the routinized administrative practices that have made mass expulsion an enduring feature of U.S. immigration policy.

• Karuka, Manu. Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. American Crossroads. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Karuka argues that the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century was a joint operation of Indigenous dispossession and racialized Chinese labor exploitation, and that the resulting infrastructure shaped both the racial geography of the United States and its imperial relations with the Pacific. The book situates Asian American history and Indigenous studies within a single analytical frame and offers learners a worked example of how settler colonialism and immigration history can be read together rather than as parallel topics.

• Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation. Passenger Search (Arrival Records Collection). New York: Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation. Access the archive.

Digital archive.

A searchable digital archive of passenger arrival records from the Port of New York between 1820 and 1957, maintained by the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation. Learners can search by name, ship, year, or country of origin and view ship manifests and other primary documents. Useful as a primary-source resource for tracing specific arrivals and for assignments that ask learners to engage immigration history at the level of the named individual passenger record.

• Pew Research Center. "Immigration & Migration." Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Access the topic page.

Research portal.

The Pew Research Center's topic page aggregating its ongoing research on immigration and migration in the United States and globally — public-opinion surveys, demographic analyses, policy briefings, and comparative international research. Serves as a current-data resource that learners can consult for up-to-date figures on immigrant populations, attitudes toward immigration policy, and comparative migration patterns.

• American Immigration Council. "Research and Analysis." Washington, DC: American Immigration Council. Access the portal.

Policy research portal.

A policy-research portal maintained by the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit organization that publishes data analyses, legal explainers, and policy briefs on U.S. immigration. The resource includes fact sheets on detention and deportation statistics, the economic impact of immigration, naturalization patterns, and current legislative and administrative developments. Useful for accessing accessible policy briefings on issues the unit's scholarly readings treat at greater length.

• National Museum of the American Indian. Native Knowledge 360°. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. Access the resources portal.

Educational resources portal.

A Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian initiative offering educational resources on Indigenous history, sovereignty, treaty rights, and self-determination, designed for classroom use and openly accessible. Learners can engage modules on treaties, removal, Indigenous nationhood, and contemporary sovereignty struggles. Provides a counterpart to the unit's Simpson reading and a resource for thinking about migration, borders, and citizenship from within Indigenous frameworks rather than alongside them.