Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and the Process of Settlement among Mexican Immigrants to the United States: Reflections on the Current Wave of Mexican Immigrant Bashing

Tamar Diana Wilson
Additional contact information
Tamar Diana Wilson: Condominiums Aloha 301-E, Paseo San Jose s/n, San Jose de los Cabos, BCS, 23448 Mexico

Review of Radical Political Economics, 1999, vol. 31, issue 2, 1-26

Abstract: After reviewing literature which correlates economic crises with immigrant scapegoating and shows the former functionality of Mexican undocumented immigrants for U.S. capitalism, I argue that the anti-immigrant sentiments arising globally today have a new dimension that is closely related to the restructuring of the world system as well as to the qualitatively different character of immigration. Immigrant bashing is partially a reaction to the "deterritorialization" and increasing delegitimization of the nation-state as a viable "encapsulating" entity. Such deterritorialization represents a qualitative change in immigration patterns: immigrants from underdeveloped to core capitalist countries have progressively formed "daughter communities" and become settlers instead of temporary, circular migrants, thus becoming economically less functional for U.S. capital. At the same time, their cause has been taken up by Mexican-American political groups, making them increasingly dysfunctional in political tens.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://rrp.sagepub.com/content/31/2/1.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:31:y:1999:i:2:p:1-26

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Radical Political Economics from Union for Radical Political Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().