In his essay “Living in a Promiseland? Mexican Immigration and American Obligation,” Rogers Smith delivers a philosophically astute, politically relevant, and extremely timely meditation on the underlying principles that can and should shape contemporary U.S. immigration reform. Once again in America today the wind of economic misfortune has stoked a blaze from the smoldering embers of anti-immigrant—especially anti-Mexican immigrant—sentiment. In this newest wave of immigrant bashing, Arizona has become ground zero for hostile, xenophobic policymaking directed at Mexican-origin peoples, a population that has been present in the American Southwest since long before it was “American” at all.

It is in this context of renewed open hostility toward Mexican immigrants that Smith makes his important contribution. He argues that when governments engage in coercive acts that shape the identities, practices, and aspirations of a people, those coercive acts oblige that government to help those affected realize the identities and aspirations that have been foisted upon them. Smith argues persuasively that this relationship of obligation exists between the U.S. government, on the one hand, and Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants—documented and undocumented—on the other. Smith's careful historicization of this theoretical claim is one of the most important contributions of his piece. He traces the U.S. government's machinations from the nineteenth century to the present as it constructs and positions Mexican origin peoples as subordinate labor. His narrative is compact but comprehensive and nuanced. It also addresses key intersections of that narrative with others—including the story of how the desire to maintain slavery helped to drive the armed land grab in 1848 that annexed northern Mexico into the United States. Smith shows how Mexican-origin peoples remaining in those territories were dispossessed and marginalized, rendered economically indispensable and yet perversely unwanted as perpetual “visitors,” their diverse ethnic commitments at once a public source of stigma and a private saving grace. His narrative arc culminates at the most recent stages of the denigration of Mexican-Americans, including the Arizona legislature's SB 1070 and that state's elimination of ethnic studies—specifically, Chicana/o Studies—from its public school curriculum.

If Smith offered only this important historical narrative as the basis for his argument for political obligation, we would owe him many thanks for his concise accounting of a long, ugly history, and the obligations that history imposes on the nation whose people and government were responsible for it. Yet his essay offers several other contributions of significant philosophical and public policy value that should be hailed as well. First, while Smith does not argue for reparations for past losses, his essay nevertheless demonstrates the influence of historical events on contemporary Mexican immigration and indeed the diverse composition of the American polity as a whole. Smith rightly urges us to look below the surface of current political discourses to the meanings and historically-derived hierarchies beneath them—elements they conceal and dismiss, not because they are irrelevant to the measure of contemporary justice, but precisely because they belong at the heart of such a project.

Second, Smith highlights two other significant dimensions of political life that are often overlooked as key contributors to the persistent and cyclical qualities of anti-immigrant—and specifically anti-Mexican immigrant—hostility. These two dimensions are identity formation and the intersection of broad social conflicts. Smith rightly contends that U.S. government policies have imposed limited choices on Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants that lead to dual cultural commitments that do not fit neatly together, thus coercively burdening them with the task of negotiating multiple conflicting identities. On Smith's view, the U.S. is now obliged to “facilitat[e] quests for forms of dual nationality or dual economic and cultural citizenship” that make it possible for Mexican-origin peoples, U.S.-born and immigrants, to effectively negotiate their multiple ethnic and linguistic identifications—and, in the case of transnationals, to juggle their multiple national commitments as well.

Yet, as Arizona's current social and political climate indicates, shouldering this burden is not merely a matter of public policy. For Mexican-origin peoples, it involves facing the resistance of many Americans who subscribe to assimilationist notions that immigrants must give up immigrant languages and histories to claim American identity. At the same time, because Mexican-origin peoples are visible as racialized minorities, even when they do assimilate, they are still likely to be excluded from claims to American identity because of phenotype-based presumptions of foreignness. Thus, the everyday subordination that bicultural Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans experience comes not only from government policy, but also from their “fellow” Americans—policemen, journalists, shopkeepers, teachers, neighbors, employers, realtors—both interpersonally and in official contexts. For many mainstream Americans, the belief that immigrants and their descendants must become like them—white, monolingual English speakers, identified only with mainstream American ethnic culture—is a component of their identity as Americans.

And herein lies a problem with Smith's otherwise fine argument—although I will suggest that it is a useful problem, one that he and all of us who study these issues should explore much more fully. Smith argues that coercive government efforts at identity formation create a source of political responsibility. Yet, as he notes, when western states such as Arizona were admitted into the Union, whites were goaded into adopting positions of white supremacy and into denigrating long-present—indeed, first-present—Mexican and native peoples as a condition of their admission to the United States. Logically, then, the U.S. government's obligation to help officially-coerced people achieve their prescribed identity aspirations should extend to those whites who aspired to xenophobic exclusion and white racial privilege as a result of their exposure to projects of American nation building, and presumably also to their descendants and the communities they built. Thus the U.S. government is potentially just as obliged to foster a xenophobic brand of white American identity as it is to foster the identity needs of bicultural Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans—two sets of obligations that are clearly are not mutually compatible.

Smith acknowledges this contradiction, but he underplays its implications for policy. With regard to Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants, Smith enumerates numerous important policy interventions intended to discharge the governmental obligations that he envisions. Yet his reference to the needs of white Arizonans sidesteps the issue of identity formation. He refers instead to the fiscal burdens of these Arizonans—burdens Smith argues should be shouldered federally. Here Smith subtly shifts from the concept of identity formation to the concept of intersectionality, specifically to the intersection of economic crisis with anti-immigrant ethnic conflict. Whether he means to or not, this shift suggests that something besides xenophobic identity formation may lurk in white Arizonans' hostility toward Mexican-origin peoples, and perhaps in virtually all anti-Mexican immigrant episodes in American history. For virtually every economic downturn in U.S. history has been seasoned with anti-Mexican immigrant sentiment, and frequently open hostility—from street fighting and public insults to discriminatory public policy and forced deportations.Footnote ¹

Smith mentions the forced deportation of roughly half a million Mexican-origin people, many of whom were U.S.-born citizens who had never been to Mexico, during the Great Depression. Yet there are many other examples of open anti-Mexican hostility accompanying economic downturns, including the pivotal federal immigration policy shifts of the mid-1990s, and California's Proposition 187, which sought to deny undocumented immigrants access to social services. These episodes are often downplayed as political haymaking or pocketbook politics. But they form a pattern, and I would suggest that Smith's emphasis on identity formation should prompt us to analyze this pattern for intersections among key identity formations that may be shaping reactions to Mexican immigrant labor. Moreover, based on my own research, I would suggest that we look for contradictions within identity formations and consider whether economic downturns may excite those identity contradictions in ways that (re)ignite anti-Mexican hostilities.

One possibility is that among the various discourses of nineteenth-century nation building, the story of the American Dream, the ideology of the free market, and immigrant arrival discourses become entangled. Smith gestures toward this entanglement when he quotes the Willie Nelson song “Promiseland,” from which he drew the title of his essay. The story emerging from the combined narrative is roughly: When anyone comes to America and works hard, their hopes and dreams will be realized. Our rise or fall as individuals thus depends on our own merit and the sweat of our brow. America therefore needs no social safety net, for our hard work and bootstrap ingenuity are our security. This story, of course, is patently false. Volatile market cycles, greed, corruption, and unchecked capital accumulation have always assured that meritorious, hard-working Americans can become destitute at a moment's notice. This brutal economic truth also intersects with race and immigration, in that the volatile American economy has always depended for its growth on cheap labor. First came the enslavement of Blacks, and then the yoking of cheap immigrant labor—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and others, but particularly Mexican laborers. Nearer to the U.S. than any other labor pool, for over a century and a half Mexicans have been heavily recruited when needed, only to be thrown out when their presence is no longer profitable or convenient. Those who remain are resented for their supposed hubris, and for the inconvenient reminder they present that many different peoples have long populated and built this land. Like other immigrant laborers, they have found that ingenuity and hard work are no guarantees of security.

If this reading is plausible, then perhaps every American's identity has been coercively formed around the grand but unfounded bootstrap narrative of the Promiseland, and it is only during economic downturns that the contradictions of this narrative are revealed—when we can see that, while we rely on our hard work for security, in truth our hard work is never really enough. Everyone in America who has lost a home or a job in our current recession, or is close to someone who has, is painfully privy to this contradiction. The victims of these losses ask themselves, “Are my losses my fault? Did I not work hard enough? Are my ingenuity and my gumption insufficient? Am I really a bad person?” In Arizona, such questioning might be particularly acute, for Arizona's economy is among the worst in the country, its foreclosure rate higher and its loss of wealth more severe than in many other places in the U.S. And it is worth considering what such self-questioning might lead to. Would it be a fight-or-flight response, or could it be, in Arizona as elsewhere, that it is virtually unbearable to find that the American dream always been a seductive and subduing deception, that a person's place in American society (even a white person of relative privilege) does not really depend on merit and effort, but on the whimsical greed, unethical recklessness, and political cowardice of people we shall never meet, and among whom we have no voice? Is facing this contradiction in American identity too great a task—would it be too crushing a disappointment to bear? Who would we need to become in order to face it?

Arguably, American national identity formation has been coercively constructed since the earliest days of the republic to contain (but only barely) this deep contradiction. And just as different identities become salient in different contexts, the contradictions in American identity may become salient during every economic downturn. If so, then this internal contradiction could intersect with anti-Mexican discourses during those times of crises, igniting xenophobic impulses that serve to distract from the pain of this contradiction. Anti-immigrant attitudes and behavior can divert attention away from the disaster at hand and the reality of one's own vulnerability. Thus anti-Mexican sentiment could serve today, as it always has, as a safety valve: an opportunity for mainstream Americans to blame a subordinated people for their own suffering, and out of fear of or anger at their own pain to compound that suffering, without ever acknowledging that they share it—it is the common if variably manifest cruelty of a national, and today global, economic system that commodifies the many for the benefit of a dwindling few.

Thus Smith is right that identity formation and intersecting social conflicts are the key to understanding and resolving the anti-Mexican immigrant sentiment that persistently punctuates American political life. I also agree with him that the obligations he considers the U.S. government to have assumed because of the history of coercive identity formation he describes are real, and even easier to establish than he sometimes seems to think. His claim is both historically well-founded and morally intuitive: If a government forces you to do something, it is reasonable to expect it to help you do it. Yet, more must be done, I think, to assess the governmental obligation to xenophobic, ethno-chauvinist, white identity formations that contribute today to persistent social cleavages. Not all constructions of white identity must grounded through xenophobic “othering.” There are alternatives, and it is worth considering how they can be fostered, because we cannot logically support both xenophobic white identities and the needs of Mexican-origin peoples, and of others who aim to live the meaningfully multiethnic lives they have come to value with or without government coercion. Nor would supporting them both serve the collective interest of building a more cohesive multiethnic and democratic society. Considering how to distinguish and prioritize these diametrically-opposed obligations is the next topic in a discussion about immigration, identity, and obligation that Rogers Smith has advanced with enormous success.