This is an important moment in the long-running debate over both the future of immigration policy and the even more vexing question of the status of the millions of noncitizens who currently reside within the boundaries of the United States. With Congress seemingly unable to agree on an approach to these complex questions (beyond an apparent consensus of intensifying a militarized border-enforcement regime), the debate over the status of the noncitizen population continues to careen between outright expulsion and providing resident aliens with some “path to citizenship.”

I'd like to suggest, however, that couching the current debate in such polarized terms helps obscure what has been a complex historical problem that has its roots not so much in the vagaries and oscillations of immigration politics but, more importantly, in the trajectory of capitalist economic development in the past century. More specifically, I would like to contest constructively Gary Gerstle's claim in this volume that the current presence of an estimated eleven to twelve million undocumented persons somehow represents an anomaly in the historical trajectory of immigration and in the different processes of immigrant incorporation that have unfolded over the course of the nation's history.

Of course, in terms of the sheer magnitude of the issue, it is difficult to quarrel with much of Gerstle's argument. As we all know, the presence of such huge numbers of officially unauthorized persons within the political jurisdiction of the United States has been the third rail in domestic politics for years now. And, as has been suggested here, it continues to color discussion of a broad array of issues, ranging from the purpose and function of the 2010 Census to the deeply divisive debate over healthcare and, by extension, other tax-supported services. Finally, it also engages the question of who actually should enforce the slippery notion of “national sovereignty”—federal authorities or agents of state and local government. And ultimately, as all the essays in this forum amply underscore, the presence of this number of undocumented persons raises profound questions about the very nature, function, and meaning of the institution of national citizenship as an organizing force of modern or postmodern politics.

Be that as it may, I'd like to suggest, first, that there is nothing particularly historically anomalous about this state of affairs; and, second, that the current situation may well represent the “new normal” in the American political economy. Gerstle (in this volume) is correct in noting how much the trajectory of the American immigration saga changed after the 1924 Johnson-Reed overhaul of the immigration system. After passage of that landmark legislation, immigration from Europe dropped off dramatically, and the movement of people from Asia fell even more precipitously. Additionally, an explosion in the ethnic Mexican population in the first third of the century, largely in response to the relative decline in Asian labor migration, stopped and declined sharply with the great repatriation campaigns of the 1930s.

But I think it high time that we dispel the persistent myth that the flows into the United States of massive numbers of unskilled laborers somehow stopped with the Great Depression. Indeed, we need to remember that as soon as the economy began its rapid recovery and explosive expansion after Pearl Harbor, the same patterns of foreign labor recruitment that had existed before the Depression were immediately reinstitutionalized with the creation of the Bracero Program in 1942. Although the recruitment of Mexican workers was now augmented by labor recruitment from the Caribbean and other places in Latin America, the Bracero Program in some ways marked an extension and expansion of similar labor recruitment experiments first tried during the First World War.Footnote ¹

At the time of the program's implementation in the 1940s, most employer lobbyists and their allies in Congress depicted the development of the Bracero Program as some kind of anomaly and insisted that the program would not affect the permanent population of the nation because these workers were temporary contract workers.Footnote ² But this argument, which had been used by employer lobbies to great effect since the turn of the century, conveniently obscured the fact that the implementation of this type of “guest worker” program inevitably stimulated increased migratory influxes of unauthorized workers. Indeed, virtually all reputable historians who have subsequently explored the Bracero Program more closely note that over the duration of various versions of the program between 1942 and 1964, the ratio of unauthorized workers to legally contracted ones often ran at least two to one, and at times may have approached three to one or more.Footnote ³

The government essentially “cooked the books” when it came to actual immigration and population numbers from the 1940s into the 1960s. While official immigration and census statistics in this period indicate modest rates of authorized migration and a steady decline in the officially acknowledged population of foreign-born persons, conditions on the ground actually reveal that the mass circulation of both authorized and unauthorized foreign workers had become a permanent feature in certain key sectors of the US economy. In addition, this growing dependence on foreign labor tended to hide from view the existence and deepening of two interrelated factors: the transnational social networks between sending regions and the US labor market, which helped to sustain this perpetual circulation of workers; and the growing dependence on highly mobile workers—with little regard for their nominal nationalities—in many other growing economies of the postwar world.Footnote ⁴

The population and labor trends that unfolded after 1970, therefore, represent not so much changes in kind but rather in degree and magnitude. To reiterate, the larger point—as Gerstle notes—is that for virtually all of the twentieth century (with the exception of the Depression era), especially after the Second World War, the institution of formal membership in society (commonly called citizenship) has always been in constant tension with a permanent, increasingly diverse population of persons who, for whatever reason, do not possess citizenship in the nation in which they are working. In other words, this kind of dynamic stasis characterized by the presence of a large and growing permanent population of denizens of various kinds of legal status has been a common feature of life not only in the United States but also in other industrialized and now postindustrial societies.

I agree with Mae Ngai and others (in this volume) that we have to recognize that much of the growth in recent historical immigration rates and the concomitant expansion of the foreign-born population are direct outgrowths and derived artifacts of the extant principles of so-called family-reunification policies, the other preferences of US immigration law, and, to a lesser extent, the exigencies of intermittent refugee and asylum crises. At the same time—and this is really my central point—a huge proportion of immigrant flows and concomitant demographic shifts (especially in the so-called unauthorized or undocumented population) are largely attributable to business as usual in the US economy or, put another way, the insatiability of the demand side of the capital/labor equation.

And in an increasingly globalized and complexly integrated economy, can it really be any other way? I would submit that although we continue to fetishize the institution of national citizenship, the driving dynamic in today's political economy is the constant pressure on American employers to find sources of labor from which they can wring profits at a rate comparable to foreign employers. The question of whether those workers are eventually “incorporated” as citizens is really beside the point: In this world a worker is a worker however you dress her up.

When we think of what the “new normal” has become over the past forty years or more—and what may remain normative as far as we can see—we have to acknowledge the organic relationship between such large economic trends as the routine and ongoing downsizing of US-based firms; the continuation of offshore outsourcing of production processes; the increasing utilization by US-based firms of labor sources abroad; and the simultaneous explosive growth (or “in-sourcing”) of foreign labor supplies, which exists both at the high end in science, technology, and engineering and at the low end in the agricultural, construction, maintenance, manufacturing, and service sectors of a radically restructured economy.

Much of the problem is that you seldom hear this kind of stark analysis as part of serious policy discussions in Washington. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most important is that if we did hear such analysis, we would have to acknowledge that the issue is not so much officially unauthorized migration or even “illegal” immigration, but rather the ongoing destructive trend of the hyperexploitation of all workers in an increasingly integrated global economy, regardless of the citizenship of specific workers—and therefore, also, the erosion of the institution of citizenship as a source of political power and guarantor of rights. In other words, it has been and is currently much easier to scapegoat immigrant workers and hype the fetishes of American citizenship and the sanctity of “national sovereignty” than it is to discuss the parallel precipitous decline in US standards of living and increasing powerlessness of working people (and, not incidentally, so-called middle-class people as well), which have accompanied the latest form of capitalist economic restructuring.

If the undeniable acceleration of patterns of socioeconomic polarization we have seen over the past four decades has become the new norm, at the very least, one has to raise the question, “incorporation into what and for whom?” As many of the essays that are a part of this forum note, the processes of meaningful political incorporation and political participation—whether defined, as Gerstle aptly has, either as “acquiescent” or “transformational”—have always been strongly influenced, if not completely determined and predicated by class standing and the possibility for upward socioeconomic mobility.

Scholars of immigration are correct in noting how the convergence of the golden age of broad-based growth and prosperity and the civil rights revolution of the period roughly between the end of the Second World War and the end of the 1960s opened up unprecedented avenues for meaningful upward mobility and political incorporation for populations that had historically been excluded from both. But the convergence of social and economic trends indicates not only that something very different has happened since the beginning of ongoing economic restructuring in the early 1970s, but that the concentration of power and resources at the top and erosion of power and access to mobility at the bottom may well define the new normal for the current century.

Thus, it seems to me that if we are serious about facilitating the incorporation of the currently unincorporated and in “fixing” what is broken about our intertwined systems of immigration and citizenship, we first need to grapple honestly with how those systems mesh or do not mesh with our systems of economic production and consumption. At the very least, considering alternative mechanisms of incorporation and membership would involve acknowledging and trying to rein in the current system of flexible accumulation based on flexible exploitation that strips power from working people regardless of whatever nominal citizenship they happen or happen not to hold. We have already seen glimmers of this new kind of mentality in certain sectors of an admittedly shrinking labor movement. And for a very brief moment, I think we also saw something like this expressed by the mass movement of noncitizens a few years ago. Obviously, turning back the powerful economic trends that have undercut workers' relative position in society and the value of citizenship will not be easy, but it is an absolutely essential first step if we are truly serious about facilitating incorporation and renewing some semblance of national and regional democracy in the current moment.