Before the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), the relationship between undocumented immigrants and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was highly antagonistic. Undocumented immigrants were distrustful of the immigration service due to its deportation mission that implemented deceitful tactics, which included using immigrant children to lure their undocumented parents and sending letters to immigrants promising legalization only to deport them once they arrived to INS offices among many others. However, this changed for a brief period after the passage of IRCA when INS transformed its image in the eyes of immigrants and became their amigo – their friend. INS accomplished this by engaging in a furious public relations campaign and training their staff to be supportive of immigrants as they applied for legal status – unprecedented measures for an agency that was set on deporting immigrants. Immigrants began to trust INS and went to them for help to get legalization during IRCA, something that experts thought would be impossible. While the literature on IRCA has studied its legislative history, short-term effects and long-term impact, it has overlooked the central question this study analyzes: why did INS implement unprecedented measures to help undocumented immigrants attain legalization? Using congressional hearings on INS, interviews and public statements made by INS officials, institutional evaluations of IRCA’s implementation, news articles and secondary data, I show that INS was going through a legitimation crisis, meaning that Congress and other overseeing institutions questioned INS’ effectiveness and management leading to stagnation in INS’ growth, something INS wanted to change. Implementing the legalization component of IRCA successfully was one way in which INS could regain its standing in the eyes of Congress, which meant helping immigrants attain legal status. In other words, the interests of immigrants and INS converged during IRCA leading to a change in INS’ behavior. To understand this process, this study shows how INS went from being la migra (immigration services) to el amigo of undocumented immigrants during IRCA. / text

This thesis is an enquiry into the regulation of immigration through criminal law and its institutions. It looks at the range of immigration offences in British legislation, and whether and how they are being used in practice. The criminalisation of immigration status has historically served functions of exclusion and control against those who defy the state’s powers over its territory and population. In the last two decades, the prerogatives to exclude and punish have been enhanced by the expansion of the catalogue of immigration offences and the more systematic enforcement of these powers. The great reliance on the criminal law to regulate immigration is distinctive of a period in which crime and immigration have been increasingly politicised. As a consequence, more offences have been created and more individuals have been subject to the hybrid immigration and criminal justice system. While immigration offences largely remain under-enforced, some of them –particularly those penalising document fraud and identity stripping- are used against foreign nationals who cannot be removed from the country. In this thesis I explain what I consider to be the most pernicious consequences of this expansion of formal and substantive criminalisation of immigration breaches. The existence of a parallel system of sanctions allows enforcement agencies wide margins of discretion. Therefore, similar cases may be dealt with in very different ways. When the criminal route is chosen, the use of criminal law in the vast majority of cases reaching the criminal courts is unnecessary, disproportionate and extremely harmful. Both the decision to prosecute and the sanction eventually imposed are justified by preventive and regulatory purposes. The actual practice of criminalisation reveals that the criminal procedural safeguards are weakened and those accused of immigration crimes are likely to be convicted and imprisoned for these offences. I conclude that the formal and substantive criminalisation of immigration represents a departure from liberal criminal law principles and the purposes of criminal punishment. These conclusions cast doubts about the pragmatic, non-principled use of criminal law to regulate immigration flows, and call for the need to look at other, more humane alternatives in the treatment of ‘unwelcome’ migrants.

This paper explores the history of a group of immigrants that came to the United States from the small rural Austrian region of the Burgenland between World War One and World War Two. By examining several biographical life stories of contemporaries it wants explain why the emigrants decided to leave their country, how they managed their passage, how they assimilated to their adopted‐home, and how they integrated themselves into the new society.

This thesis is about immigration discourses among the political elite in Sweden. The focus of interest has been to establish if the racist and assimilationist discourses of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) has been influential on the political party elite, and more specifically on whom, and how. Parliamentary debates and opinion pieces written by party elites has been the basis of material for the enquiry, covering the time period 2006 – July 2016. As SD had their political breakthrough in 2010, it is assumed that, provided that they have been influential on the immigration discourses of the mainstream political elite, new elements in the elite discourse mirroring the discourses of SD should emerge after 2010. The results show that some of the assimilationist ideas and negative discourses on immigration pre-existed the breakthrough of SD. The elite of the political mainstream articulated a strong resistance towards SD’s discourses during their first election cycle. However, more negative discourses bordering those of SD emerged in tandem to the so called refugee crisis in late 2015. The crisis can thus be understood as a catalyst breaking some of the taboos regarding negative immigration discourses. At the same time, although assimilationist discourses emerged among other elites than SD, they where always presented in much milder forms than SD’s discourses, who remain radically different from the other parties. These assimilationist ideas and discourses where mainly adopted by the right wing parties the Moderates (Moderaterna, M) and the Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna, KD), as well as the Liberal party (Liberalerna, L). I conclude that the adjustments in discourse to that of SD is less than expected, perhaphs as a result of the cordon sanitaire.

Thesis advisor: James M. O'Toole / This dissertation argues that the movement to restrict European immigration to the United States in the early 1900s was critically supported by a set of ideas that the dissertation refers to as "classic racialism." Derived from several intellectual traditions - such as anthropology, biology, criminology, eugenics and zoology - classic racialism posited that differences in human population groups were biologically determined and hereditary, and because of this fact, American nativists held that the "new" immigration to the United States had to be curtailed in order to save the American Anglo-Saxon racial stock. The dissertation uses Italian immigration to the United States as a case study for understanding the fluidity of racial and biological thought. While classic racialism played a key role in supporting nativists' calls for immigration restriction, advances in methods of scientific research were revolutionizing the fields of biology, genetics and anthropology. Research in these fields cast doubts on the veracity of intellectual claims made by classic racialists, which were increasingly untenable in the light of advancing scientific knowledge. The tensions between these competing intellectual paradigms of classic racialism and modern experimentalism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries reveal the esoteric nature of scientific revolutions, in that the uncertainty and complexity of the developing biological and genetic sciences kept knowledge of scientific advances in these fields restricted to a narrow audience of professional scientists and academics. While modern experimental biology raised significant scientific doubts about the principles of classic racialism, it was the latter that influenced American immigration policy in the 1920s because of classic racialism's simplicity and the broad public recognition that "like produces like." / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Cette thèse porte sur les tentatives de constitution d'une organisation nationale et autonome de l'immigration et des quartiers populaires entre 1982 et 1992, et ce à travers l'histoire de Résistance des banlieues et de ses fondateurs. / This thesis concerns the attempts of constitution of a national and autonomous organization of the immigration and the popular districts between 1982 and 1992, and it through the history of the Résistance des banlieues and his founders.

"Family unity" is often upheld as the principle of U.S. immigration policy, central to the making and self-understanding of the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants." However, family-based immigration system was only born of struggles of immigrant families against the regime of restriction. As the era of open immigration ended in the U.S. in 1921, there emerged a fundamental tension between claims of immigrant families and the regime of immigration restriction. Much of what current immigration law recognizes as family, or how it matters, originated in the post-1921 era, born out of struggles by immigrant families. This dissertation examines the period between 1921 and 1978 from two perspectives. One is as an era of the three-tiered regulatory system created in the 1920s that lasted until the 1960s to the 1970s: 1) quotas restriction applied to European immigrants 2) exclusion of Asian immigrants, and 3) administrative regulation of immigration from Mexico without a firm ceiling. Another is as the formative years of contemporary immigration control that lasts today. The three-tiered system marked by explicit ethno-racial hierarchization closed first in 1965 by abolition of the quotas system in the Eastern Hemisphere, and finally in 1978 when Congress placed all countries including the Western Hemisphere under a worldwide ceiling. But the end of the quotas era was not a return to an era of open immigration, but an onset of alternative form of immigration restriction and regulation. With particular attention to linkage between ideas about family and ethno-racial composition of the U.S., the dissertation will discuss how claims of family, selective admission and restriction of family immigration, created, reinforced, and unmade the three-tiered immigration restriction regime. To date there has been no comprehensive historical study of the concept of the "family" in immigration law -- how it is defined, who is eligible as a family member and who is not, under what conditions families may be united or separated, and how family-based policies varied according to ethno-racial origin. This lack has resulted in a static and naturalized view of the family rather than a dynamic and contested concept in immigration law and policy. This dissertation explains the changes in definitions of family in immigration, deportation, and nationality law during the quotas era, shows how they are the product of challenges raised by immigrant families, and how they were inherited to the era of formally neutral and at the same time global immigration restriction.

This dissertation examines the shape, objectives, and fate of the anti-immigrationist movement from 1955 to 1981. During this period, groups and individuals operated within the confines of the British political system to advocate for the restriction of non-white immigration to the UK and also to minimize the perceived negative impact these immigrants were having upon the social and economic fabric of the UK. The study argues that by attaching their anti-immigrationist objections to existing political concerns, including anxieties about the welfare state, and by advocating for anti-immigrationist policies and legislation within the confines of established techniques of political activism and protest, anti-immigrationists were far more successful than they might otherwise have been, and indeed more successful than academic studies and popular opinion have portrayed them. However, their reliance upon a language of active citizenship and genuine democracy to justify their arguments to restrict immigration proved to be less popular with elite politicians and senior civil servants than a language of inclusivity and civil rights. As such, while much of the substantive legislation which anti-immigrationists advocated for was implemented at the highest level of government, the anti-immigrationist ethos, and the language in which they expressed their views, was not adopted by these powerful individuals, resulting in a foreclosure and minimization of the role of anti-immigrationists in agitating for the implementation of this legislation and body of policy. Furthermore, the decline of the anti-immigrationist movement was less the result of the success of the left in persuading the right to abandon its commitment to anti-immigrationism than of the success of the extreme right in claiming anti-immigrationism as its own, to the dismay of the more moderate right and centre-right.

Despite being the largest migratory movement between two states in modern history, the origins and operation of Mexican migration to the United States has not been a major research topic. We lack a comprehensive view of Mexican migration as it was established in early twentieth century and reproduced throughout the century as a system that reached from Texas borderlands to California and to western agricultural regions and beyond to Midwestern farming and industrial areas, a system that continued to be circular in nature even as permanent settlement increased, and which was in constant interaction with families, villages, and towns throughout Mexico. This interdisciplinary, bilingual, and transnational project is one of the first histories of the creation of migrant networks narrated from multiple geographic and institutional sites, analyzing the relationship between state agents, civic organizations, and migrants on both sides of the border. My project utilizes a statistical analysis of migration trends combined with qualitative research in order to show how migration arose as a mass phenomenon in Mexico and extended into the United States. This dissertation argues that large scale Mexican migration was created and operated through an interconnected transnational migrant economy made up of self-reinforcing local economic logics, information diffusion, and locally based social networks. I demonstrate that town-based interpersonal networks formed the engine that propelled and sustained large scale migration. Migrants needed transportation, capital, and information to travel north. Town-based networks provided all of these things. I follow the spread of migrant routes, explaining the creation of Mexican communities in the US Showing why communities were located where they are and their links to the larger economy of migrant labor before turning to Mexico and showing the effects of migration on sending communities. Migration evolved from a wave of mainly men into a broad based phenomenon, drawing in families and communities through remittances. I argue this is because a set of self-reinforcing economic logics were being created on both sides of the border. These logics are separate, but linked to the economic conditions that framed migration- the pull of the industrialization of the American West and the Mexican north with its relatively high wages- and the push of the chaos and violence of the Mexican revolution and Cristero Wars. Likewise, these logics could not have occurred without the demographic pressures of population growth in central Mexico, and the economic transformations of the Porfiriato. As more and more people participated in migration, they sent back information and remittances, which in turn made it easier for others to follow their path. Circular migration reinforced this dynamic as migrants returned home on a large scale, bringing back knowledge and experience. Together, these practices constituted the migrant economy and made central and central-north Mexico the engine of migration in the twentieth century. This new economy made it easier to move, but also tied many families and towns into continuous migrations in order to achieve economic stability. Ultimately this project shows the creation of the political economy of migrant labor between Mexico and the United States.

Cette thèse porte sur le processus et les modalités d’intégration des immigrés. Elle tente àmontrer la pluralité des manières de s’insérer et de participer des immigrés à leur sociétéd’accueil, en fonction des origines socio-économiques, géographiques, des relationshistoriques entre les pays d’origine et d’accueil et en fonction des projets migratoires desindividus. Les récits de vie des immigrés originaires de Maroc, de Portugal et de Turquienous ont révélés deux principaux modes d’action : individuel quand le capital humain estélevé et communautaire lorsque la manque de capital humain est compensé par le capitalsocial ethnique. Ce dernier cas de figure est très présent chez la population turquerencontrée. En s’appuyant sur cette vague migratoire, la thèse consiste à soutenir lapossibilité d’une intégration par voie collective dont le ciment est l’appartenance ethnique. Depart le mode d’intégration communautaire très présent, le cas des immigrés turcs del’agglomération bordelaise nous donne l’opportunité de discuter la pertinence, et l’exclusivitédu modèle d’intégration français ainsi que les attentes relatives à l’intégration de l’autre. Lemode d’intégration par les dynamiques communautaires que nous avons observé chez cettepopulation donne le ton d’un mode cosmopolite. L’intégration structurelle rendue possible parun fonctionnement communautaire rend possible un double processus d’insertion et departicipation qui s’effectue de manière transnationale. Cette situation alimente la création desponts économiques, sociaux, associatives et politiques entre les deux pays, désormaisd’appartenances. / This study concentrates on immigrants’ integration processes and methods through thesocio-spatial trajectories. It reveals the plurality of the manners of the migrants participationto the society within the context of their immigration projects, socio-economic andgeographical origins and the historical relations between their origin countries and France.The analysis of the residential courses of the immigrants from Morocco, Portugal and Turkeyand owners of their residents within the agglomeration in Bordeaux, indicates two principalintegration models: individual, when human capital is elevated and collective, when theinsufficient human capital is balancing through the social community capital. This lastsituation is common in Turkish population met during this study. Based on the case ofTurkish migration, this thesis supports the possibility of the collective integration of which thebinding factor is ethnic networks. The economic integration based on ethnical networks andsocial participation developed by the community dynamics, enable a two-way integration.This double local and transnational integration creates economic, social and even politicalconnections between two countries.