"I've lost my city": law, community, and immigration under colorblind neoliberalism
Date
2011
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This research is centered around Hazleton, Pennsylvania's Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA). Passed in 2006 and subsequently ruled unconstitutional (i.e., Lozano et al. v. Hazleton), the IIRA sought to punish landlords and sanction businesses who rented to or hired undocumented immigrants and to make English the official language of the city. Taking a constitutive approach to the study of law and society and using a variety of ethnographic and qualitative methods (e.g., archival analysis, in-depth interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and media analysis), this research explores how and to what effect white working class residents, politicians, and activists have made sense of social, demographic, and economic change in Hazleton. Set in the context of the neoliberal political economic climate and a post-Civil Rights era characterized by colorblind racial discourse, this dissertation argues that we can understand the IIRA as a reassertion of local collective identity made in the face of change and constructed along racial rather than class lines. I proceed in two parts. First, I explore how Hazleton residents came to misinterpret their city's economic struggles as an undocumented immigrant "invasion." In this regard I explore how local elites (e.g., developers, politicians) injected hegemonic "pro-growth" and "tough on crime" narratives with sentiments that appealed to residents' nostalgia and sense of community solidarity. Second, I explore the activism that followed the passage of the IIRA. Here I describe how a vision of rights emerged that coincided with community imaginings, leaving Hazleton's newcomers and their advocates in a tenuous position despite the legal victory in Lozano. Taken together, this dissertation illuminates how social upheaval mobilizes discourses of `community' and `rights.' Ultimately, however, neither community nor rights are realized on the ground. In contrast, local hierarchies are strengthened and attention is diverted away from core economic troubles to the detriment of white working class residents and Latino/a immigrants alike.