When Race and Policy Collide: Contemporary Immigration Debates

Examining actual policy to identify the facts, this book exposes how racially charged political and legal debates over immigration reform in the United States continue to inform our immigration policy.

Immigration reform policies continue to influence domains like housing ordinances, official language laws, mass deportation, and bilingual education, amongst many other topics. In this work, authors Donathan Brown and Amardo Rodriguez demonstrate how immigration policies belie simplistic conversations pertaining to border control. Their focus is on actual policy as opposed to mere headlines and "talking points," as it is policy and the debates that it produces that inform the headlines and subsequently incite controversy and heated arguments. Each chapter of the book addresses both policies and the fallout they produce to clearly articulate how such policies usurp fact with fiction, producing residual messages that equate "diversity" with destroying our social and political order.

This accessible book provides high school, college, and graduate-level students insight into the laws and lawsuits stemming from current legislation, an understanding of the peculiar racial dimensions intertwined in these policies and debates, as well as comprehension of immigration reform against the grander backdrop of the growing Latino demographic in the United States. The authors argue that the varying degrees of immigration reform passed by state legislatures throughout the country are based on thinking that ignores the sociopolitical and cultural realities of modern-day America and continue to rely less on facts and more on fear, causing greater deep-seated paranoia, distrust, and resentment within our nation.

Donathan Brown, PhD, is assistant professor and editor of Journal of Race and Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Ithaca College.

Amardo Rodriguez, PhD, is professor and book review editor for Journal of Race and Policy in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University.