A deportation raid is where the government comes to your house or place of work to arrest you, jail you and possibly deport you, sending you out of the country. In the US they are carried out by agents of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of Homeland Security.
In a typical raid, there is a knock at the door at four or five in the morning. They say it is the “police”. You open the door and then comes what some describe as:
“the most horrifying moment of their life. Nowhere to run to, no one to scream to for help.”
The ICE agents come into your home. Your children are crying and screaming. ICE is asking you questions, often in bad Spanish. They arrest whoever they feel like – citizen or not (they will sort it out later). They put you in handcuffs in front of your children
How Race Is Made in America examines Mexican Americans—from 1924, when American law drastically reduced immigration into the United States, to 1965, when many quotas were abolished—to understand how broad themes of race and citizenship are constructed. These years shaped the emergence of what Natalia Molina describes as an immigration regime, which defined the racial categories that continue to influence perceptions in the United States about Mexican Americans, race, and ethnicity.
Molina demonstrates that despite the multiplicity of influences that help shape our concept of race, common themes prevail. Examining legal, political, social, and cultural sources related to immigration, she advances the theory that our understanding of race is socially constructed in relational ways—that is, in correspondence to other groups. Molina introduces and explains her central theory, racial scripts, which highlights the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another. How Race Is Made in America also shows that these racial scripts are easily adopted and adapted to apply to different racial groups.
The number of unaccompanied minors detained at the U.S. border with Mexico continues to rise, with more than 6,700 taken into custody in December alone, according to the latest figures released this week.
The number is a jump from roughly 5,600 detained in November and 4,973 in October, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Compared to same three-month period in 2014, the number of apprehensions in 2015 represents a 117% jump.
This post was written by Chanchala Gunewardena, (Clark University 2011), Summer 2010 intern in WITNESS’ Communications department.
Last Thursday, WITNESS was invited to The Paley Center for Media for a screening of a special segment of NBC’s Dateline, titled America Now: Children of the Harvest. This piece, a follow up to a 1998 Emmy Award winning report on migrant farm workers and their families, attempts to see, what has developed and changed in the lives of a particulargroup of people twelve years on. More specifically however, it is focused on the issue of child labor, as migrant families who work in the agricultural sector tend to be assisted in their work by their whole family, including children under the legal working age (for this specific sector) of twelve.
Graphic based on Pew Research article “The Next America”
The country is slowly becoming more like a “rainbow,” according to a new book by Paul Taylor and Pew Research called “The Next America”.
Defining Mixed
These groups have many people of mixed heritage:
Latino, Black, Asian, Native American, and White
Latino
(Hispanic) people are mixed by definition. Hispanic has not been defined as a race, but this seems to be changing. Latin American countries have not had anti-miscegenation laws like the U.S. Most Latinos are part Amerindian mixed with some part(s) Spanish, Portuguese or Black.
people have been mixing with others in the U.S. since anti-miscegenation laws have been abolished, and also before anti-miscegenation laws were in place. After WWII there were more interracial Asian children in the U.S. due to both “war brides”, and a fear that being Asian and looking Asian can lead to discrimination and even internment.
“Native American people is the only race in America that has to prove that they’re Indian.” – Dwanna L. Robertson
White
White people are often mixed with ‘5 shades of White’, or they are White Latino, or they are ‘One drop’ of color / ‘passing as White’, aka 1/16th or 1/32th of color. White is not counted as White when mixed with people of color, which accounts for the decline in White numbers over time. The other reason the numbers for White drop is because Europeans no longer immigrate to the U.S. at any where near the same rate of other groups. European countries tend to provide good universal health care and tend to have lower gun violence. Police do not routinely carry guns on their person in Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand and India. In Norway officers carry arms in their cars but not on their person.
Other
Other people includes Native American (1%) and self identified Mixed people (5%).
Marrying Out
Intermarriage among people of different races is increasingly common. In 1980, just 7% of all marriages in the U.S. were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity.In 2010, that share has doubled to 15% of all new marriages in the U.S. Hispanics (26%) and Asians (28%) were most likely to “marry out,” compared with 9% of whites and 17% of blacks. – Pew Research
If two people of mixed heritage marry, does Pew Research count that as marrying out / intermarriage?
(im)migration Policy
There is no Mixed American Life without pluralism. There is no pluralism without (im)migration.
The 1964 Civil Rights act, pushed by the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, influenced a change to U.S. immigration policy so that quotas are no longer based on race. This explains why the graph above shows population diversity quickly expand after 1964.
Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin.
The Nation Origins Formula restricted immigration on the basis of existing proportions of U.S. population, severely restricting immigration of people who were not already represented in the current U.S. ethnic groups of the time.
Current U.S. immigration law favors the highly educated. U.S. immigration laws are now based on class instead of race. A problem with this is that class is often linked with race, and even more so now because U.S. immigration laws favor certain class groups, then those class groups become associated with certain professions, whether it be highly educated doctors and IT workers, or less educated agricultural workers and service industry workers.
The Immigration Act of 1924 included an Asian Exclusion Act and Nation Origins Act which outright banned the immigration of Arabs and Asians.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed in 1943. Years later, U.S. culture finally considers Chinese food to be American food. You can tell because most every significant city in the U.S. has a Chinese restaurant. Chinese food is so popular with Americans as to now be considered American food, the way that Mexican and Italian food is also American food because you see these restaurants in so many cities.
Amerindians used to make up 100% of the Americas. Native Americans make up only about 2 percent of the U.S. population in 2014 and are projected to make up only 2.4 percent of of total U.S. population in 2060. –census.gov
Black percentage of U.S. population is expected to grow by only 1% in 50 years according to Pew Research graphic above. And shrink by half a percent according to demographer Dr. Priyank Shah. Mass-incarceration and the war on drugs (war on people) is removing Black people during the prime of their life, the time when most people are starting families. And U.S. police are killing Black people at the rate of 1 every 26 hours in 2015, and U.S. police and vigilantes killed a Black person at the rate of 1 every 28 hours in 2012. Not to mention historic lynchings.
Asians were murdered by White people during the gold rush and also excluded from entering the U.S. between 1882 and 1965.
“…we have over a million ancestors counting back just 20 generations.” – G. Reginald Daniel
“And since we are migratory by nature, we mix as we migrate. Some migrations are by choice and some are by force. The force can be the slave trade, war, climate or economic – hence the terms war refugee, climate refugee and economic refugee. Economic policies also constantly change and affect trade agreements, tariffs and embargoes – creating push and pull effects on migration patterns.” -Glenn Robinson
“Instead of a narrative on immigration, what we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, an overall anti immigrant climate that is morally reprehensible.”
Mixed American Life 
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