Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper take a preliminary look at the influence of public opinion on immigration on how members of the 109th Congress voted on the 2005 Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (HR 4437) and the 2006 Secure Fence Act (HR 6061). Using district-level public opinion data from the 2004 National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) and district-level demographic data from the 2005 American Community Survey, I find that while public opinion on immigration aligned closely with how members of Congress voted on these bills, the noncitizen immigrant population in a district had no significant effect on legislators' votes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper analyzes newspaper coverage of immigration reform in mainstream English-language newspapers prior to, and following passage of immigration reform legislation by the US House of Representatives in December, 2005. The purpose of this project is twofold: 1) To illuminate the media’s participation in the social construction of the policy “problem” and acceptable “solutions” to it; 2) To illuminate how the social construction of the policy problem and solution contributes to the social construction of a particular group of people in America, namely Latino immigrants. The analysis presented here is based upon a qualitative analysis of a large random sample of newspaper articles published in the northeast and southwest United States during August 2005, April 2006, and October 2006. The analysis reveals both consistency and significant changes in the news coverage of immigration reform between April 2005 and October 2006. I discuss two key findings at length. First, changes in coverage between August 2005 and October 2006 portray an expansion in the terms of the debate about immigration reform that has proven significant in the course of the policy’s development. Second, while many articles fail to explain the need for immigration reform, the coverage generally portrays the problem as “illegal immigrants” from south of the US-Mexican border. This portrayal contributes to the social construction of Latinos as the Other. This project therefore enhances our understanding of the social construction of immigration policy and its subjects, and the print media’s contribution to this process.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Data from the French Ministry of Justice, the German Statistical Office, and the British Home Office are used to investigate the impact of the securitization of immigration policy on criminal justice net-widening in Germany, France and Britain. These three societies demonstrate the primary variations in welfare management and union strength that Sutton (2004) found to be important in explaining national incarceration rates. The paper clarifies the interrelations among immigration policy change, the national immigrant integration model and criminal justice net-widening. It explains the influence of executive, court and NGO-sponsored initiatives on criminal justice scrutiny of foreign workers and minority group members. The findings reflect the influence of policy shifts at both the national and European levels on the criminal justice supervision of the “outsiders” constituting each nation’s post-World War II foreign work force. The results also suggest that the impact on incarceration rates of corporatist and neoliberal economic and political regimes is not the same for “insiders” and “outsiders”.

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Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There is no doubt that examinations of state security have been around for decades, even centuries. However, these security studies have often been narrow in focus, exploring various military strategies and foreign policies that best protect a state (or states?i.e. collective security) and its people/interests. These types of security studies have been dominant in the field of international politics, and though important and useful, only offer us a few lenses to view state security and security issues. Moreover, these ?traditional? security studies often do not critically examine the ways in which and for what purposes certain concerns are articulated as security issues. But, in the past ten years or so, there have been calls by many scholars (particularly those who situate themselves in the English School, the Copenhagen School, and/or loosely in the postmodern tradition) to expand the methods by which we study security as well as its subjects/issues. This has been undertaken primarily by scholars residing in Europe (Buzan and Waever) who often use the European Union as empirical and discursive examples for alternative approaches to security studies in order to question and problematize historical and current ?security? ?threats?. In light of the current state of security studies and the ?interventions? of alternative perspectives on security and foreign policy, new spaces are opening for interpreting ?security? issues. This piece (which is part of a bigger project on the securitization of immigration in the United States), enters these new spaces by examining the rules that govern the ways in which immigration becomes part of the U.S. national discourse on security. That is, I seek to locate the concepts, figures, narratives and codes within the U.S. national/security discourse that limit (and potentially open up) the ways in which political actors talk about immigration since September 11th, 2001. I argue that immigration (broadly defined) has been limited to a security issue?immigration articulated as a military, economic and/or societal security ?threat??in the national discourse because the immigration-security nexus resonates with the American people and the current national vision of the state post 9-11. Identifying these codes and limits enables us to better understand how and why policymakers are constrained in what they can/cannot say regarding immigration. Given this examination, I suggest that these discursive limits enter the realm of national security/foreign policy as they place well-structured constraints on the immigration policies in the United States. In other words, I argue these discursive limits aid in constructing interests and are then transformed into ?immigration as security? policies. In short, it is through these analyses that I offer an account of some current immigration policies (and how they have come to be) and propose a range of possible immigration-as-security policies that may emerge in the United States in coming years.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper studies how the skill level of immigrants affects the formation of public attitudes toward immigration. Many studies on the public opinion on an immigration issue have been focused on the increase or decrease of total immigrants. Different from these studies, this paper will see how the change in the quality, in terms of skill level, affects the public attitudes toward immigration. There are two hypotheses here. Fist, if total numbers of immigrants are controlled, the skill level of immigrants will be positively correlated with public attitudes. In other words, the hostility will be high when or where there are lots of unskilled immigrants. Second, when the skill level of immigrants drops, the income and education of individuals will have larger negative effects on the public attitudes toward immigrants. That is because unskilled immigrants decrease the wage rates of native unskilled workers. When or where there are lots of unskilled immigrants, these native people with low skill and income level will more tend to dislike immigration.