Text-Based Assignment #1

Anti-immigrant movements are not new in the United States. Campaigns against new immigrants have generally coincided with the business cycle, rising in intensity with economic slowdowns, declining in times of prosperity. The U.S. public generally views immigrants with more or less hostility according to the color of their skin and their English-speaking abilities. In times of war, immigrants from nations in conflict with the United States are especially suspect. Such grassroots campaigns that blame immigrants for job losses and declining wage levels, as well as charges that fault the immigrant population for crime and public health crises, have coursed through U.S. history, ebbing and surging in response to economic and political circumstances. The deepening sense of vulnerability experienced by many U.S. citizens today in the face of downsizing, outsourcing, stagnant wages, labor union decline, and the steady loss of medical and retirement benefits explains the path of the anti-immigration movement.


Immigration restriction is increasingly framed as key to homeland and cultural protection. Most of the allied anti-immigrant forces argue that the War on Terror cannot be successfully fought without gaining total control of U.S. borders, downsizing the resident immigrant population, and severely restricting new immigration. These events have affected the progress or path of the anti-immigration movement.

Brief chronology of Anti-immigration
-1882 Chinese Exclusion Act: Barred the entry of any Chinese for 10 years, made permanent in 1904 until it was rescinded in 1943.
-1921 Quota Act: Established first immigration quotas
-1954 Project of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about four million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States, with a focus on Mexican nationals.
-1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act: Provided amnesty and temporary status to all illegal aliens who had lived in the United States continuously since before Jan. 1, 1982; extended a separate, more lenient amnesty to farm workers; imposed sanctions on employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens; increased inspection and enforcement at U.S. borders.
-1990 Immigration Act: Established limits on immigration but also increased available visas; continued reunification of families as a goal of immigration policy; increased the number of immigrants admitted for employment; gave higher preference to professionals and highly skilled immigrants; provided for admission to U.S. of immigrants from “underrepresented” countries.
-1994 California Proposition 187 was a ballot initiative designed to deny illegal immigrants social services, health care, and public education.
-1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act: Mainly an enforcement measure. Doubled the size of the Border Patrol to 10,000 agents over five years; required construction of 14 miles of fencing at key points on the U.S.-Mexico border; toughened penalties for smuggling and document fraud; tightened sanctions on employers of illegal immigrants; denied government benefits to non-citizens; toughened refugee and asylum provisions; gave immigration officials authority for expedited removal to immediately deport a foreigner at a port of entry; denied public benefits to non-citizens.
-2006 Secure Fence Act - Requires construction of at least 700 miles of fencing along U.S. Mexico border

Mass society theory argues that people protested because they were swept up in irrational crowds, or because they had personality flaws for which they were trying to compensate (G&J, 11). This was considered to be stable and normal and healthy organizations, unlike social movements. Today, having shown that protestors are usually well integrated into their communities and social networks. Scholars reject this theory.

Resource mobilization consist of certain level of resources, especially money in order to sustain it. Researchers argued that there were always enough discontented people in society to fill a protest movement, but what varied over time was the resources available to nourish it (G&J, 11).

Political process theory perceives social movements as primarily political, making demands of the state and asking for changes in laws and policies. When a crisis in the government occurs, such as a result of losing a foreign war, the social movement may rise and its relative success may increase.

Cultural and emotional approaches are seen as efforts to control the direction of social change by controlling a society’s symbols and self-understandings. This involves shaping their own collective identities as social movements. One such example is the animal protection movement, they wanted to give the perception of how nonhuman species were suffering.

I believe the political process theory best describes the anti-immigration movement because they want political leaders to reform the current immigration law by reducing annual legal immigration to numbers which can be readily assimilated. They also want an increase on penalties for those who knowingly transport, recruit, solicit, or hire illegal aliens. They encourage deporting those illegal aliens already in the U.S. and opposing all amnesties & guest worker legislation.