My thanks to Rafael Alarcón, Edwina Barvosa, and Louis DeSipio for their thoughtful responses to my essay, and to Perspectives on Politics for occasioning this discussion. The respondents each highlight crucial challenges for my argument—but their essays also suggest how I might address those challenges more adequately. I will review the contributions of each writer and sketch the lessons I draw from them in turn.

Extending the themes of my essay, Rafael Alarcón describes how “the identities of many rural communities in Mexico have been constituted more by U.S. immigration policy and the labor demands of U.S. employers than by similar policies and economic factors in Mexico”; but Alarcón is skeptical about whether most U.S. citizens and politicians will support immigration reform. Precisely because it is in the same spirit, Alarcón's extension may appear to reveal a weakness in my argument: he notes that rural localities throughout Mexico have responded to the “invitation” of the U.S. to undertake labor migration. It might be said since the U.S. simply “invited” Mexican laborers to work in America, it cannot be said to have “coercively constituted” their identities, creating obligations for itself, as I contend. That may be one valid reason why so many U.S. citizens and leaders feel they have no obligation to undertake any immigration reforms other than tighter restrictions.

Edwina Barvosa correctly contends that my argument about the U.S. government's role in constituting the identities of white Arizonans in racial supremacist terms points to obligations to facilitate the reconstruction of their identities that I do not discuss very fully. She also rightly notes that I shift to the federal government's duties to help address their economic concerns instead. And she plausibly connects the challenges of transforming white supremacist identities to the need to confront the contradictions embedded in economic accounts of American identity. Throughout U.S. history, Americans have endorsed “bootstrap” principles of self-help, even as they adopted practices of highly unequal public and private aid that privileged some at the expense of others—something many beneficiaries and providers of this aid refuse to recognize. Those refusals underline, again, how sturdy the barriers to inclusive immigration reforms are.

While affirming the need for such reforms, Louis DeSipio thinks my suggestion to raise the national cap for the number of legal immigrants from Mexico, at the possible expense of nations that send the U.S. few immigrants, will not work as politics or policy. He sees the domestic and international objections to privileging Mexico over other nations as being too great to overcome, and he doubts the Mexican government's actual commitment to the idea of dual citizenship. He favors instead “maintaining the present system” of giving immigration preferences to family members of residents and to those with needed economic skills, while supplementing that system with legalization provisions for undocumented immigrants, an approach he thinks expresses “more universalistic principles.”

These are compelling challenges. And the conclusion to which they all point—that, for many reasons, there are massive political obstacles to the direction I propose for U.S. immigration policy—is plainly right. Yet I see in all these concerns some basis for continuing down the path I began to take in my essay.

Alarcón's discussion of how the U.S. has long invited rural Mexicans to see their best opportunities as laborers in “El Norte” is not meant, I know, to suggest that coercive governmental policies played no role in shaping their beliefs that their best economic opportunities required them to cross the border. A major complication to which I allude, however, is that in the late nineteenth century, when many patterns of policy that shaped twentieth-century policymaking were established, it was Diaz's Mexican government, along with the U.S. government, that used its coercive power to foster the economic interdependencies that have resulted in continuous labor migration to the north. Nothing Mexico did, to be sure, was as significant as the U.S. conquest of half of Mexico's land in 1848. But in his later efforts to enrich Mexico and himself, Diaz made—for example—the key concession that empowered the originally Massachusetts-chartered, Boston-based Ferrocarril Central to connect Mexico City to El Paso.Footnote ¹ This was just one of many Mexican coercive policies, often interlocked with American policies, to break up traditional Mexican and Mexican-American small farming, as I noted. What does it mean for my argument that the Mexican government, along with the U.S. government, has coercively constituted the identities of rural Mexicans, shaping them into persons whose aspirations cannot be fulfilled within its bounds—especially in light of Louis DeSipio's concerns that Mexico today is less amenable to dual nationality than the recent constitutional and policy developments in that direction I cite might suggest?

My answer is that, because Mexico also professes to be a constitutional democracy committed to human dignity and rights, its complicity, past and present, in the coercive constitution of the identity of rural Mexicans and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. means that it has obligations to those communities that parallel the U.S.'s own obligations. Its complicity also shows why northward patterns of labor migration throughout the twentieth century cannot be seen as merely voluntary responses to American “invitations” to work. Thus, Mexico should also seek to facilitate, not resist, the forms of dual cultural, economic, and political nationality that many persons of Mexican descent desire. Both countries should work together to find ways to do so, precisely because both countries often worked together to foster the aspirations to those forms of nationality in the first place. The fact that neither government is eager to do so, even if Mexico is more willing than the U.S., simply underlines why it is necessary to make arguments that they should.

But normative arguments alone are never enough. Political coalitions must be built to bring about reform. Again, Edwina Barvosa is correct to suggest that this requires reconstructing forms of white identity that are presently “grounded through xenophobic ‘Othering.’” She is also right to indicate that other, healthier constructions of white identity are in fact possible. The European societies that imposed imperial rule over much of the rest of the world, justifying themselves by appealing to racial ideologies, also formulated ideologies of human rights and dignity that could be used, and have been used, by a wide variety of political actors to combat imperial exploitation and racial hierarchies. So it is possible for whites to recognize that their historically-crafted racial identities are bound up with xenophobia and injustice, but also bound up with humanitarianism and the quest for greater justice and equality. That is what I meant to suggest by noting the popularity of the “Promiseland” song, and what I tried to show by elaborating the national obligations implied by the philosophic beliefs already held by many white Americans. I agree with Barvosa that my arguments require us to work harder to identify ways the U.S. government can help strengthen commitments to these more morally-defensible dimensions of what it has historically meant to be white and to be part of predominantly white societies. I also agree that doing so requires us to reject one-sided “bootstrap” accounts of success in America, a point to which I will return.

First, let me observe that although these tasks may seem to underscore Louis DeSipio's concern that my proposals are not politically feasible, they also show why his own recommendations face, if anything, even greater political difficulties. DeSipio thinks it is unwise to call attention to the special issues of Mexican immigration, and he instead urges that the U.S. maintain its “more universalistic” status quo immigration policies. He hopes additionally for the legalization of the millions of undocumented aliens already in the U.S., a policy move with some precedent in U.S. immigration legal history.

But it is the status quo that produced our current gridlock on immigration, and that helps to fuel a mounting hostility specifically towards Mexican immigrants. And the fact that the last major grant of amnesty to undocumented immigrants in 1986 failed to stop such immigration means that further amnesties are something that today's immigration conservatives are unlikely to support. Furthermore, the status quo is not really much more “universalistic” than what I propose. Preferences for family members of U.S. residents and for those with skills useful to American employers are ways of putting America first, not of providing “equal opportunities” to all. And though I agree that raising Mexico's national immigration cap would not solve every problem, if the status quo were really sufficient to allow all the Mexicans who wish to move to the U.S. legally to do so, then they would not constitute the great majority of America's undocumented population as they do now. DeSipio seems to hope that if we do not give any special consideration to Mexican immigrants, opponents of immigration will change their minds and realize that they need the undocumented population after all. Here I am the less sanguine one, believing that new arguments and proposals are needed to move us past our policy impasses.

The DREAM Act, which would have extended opportunities for citizenship to undocumented young people who committed to military service or post-secondary education, was one such proposal. Though it did not pass, it did receive majority support in both the House and the Senate. That support can be legitimately seen as a sign that a successful coalition for change is possible, and the bill's failure not as decisive evidence that most U.S. citizens and politicians prefer to continue to oppose immigration reform, as Alarcón claims. Let me also note that as President Obama calls for new ideas to address the nation's economic and immigration difficulties, he has begun to make the sorts of arguments that I believe we need. In his recent speech on the budget, for example, Obama specifically challenged the adequacy of the “bootstrap” story Barvosa critiques:

Obama has long accompanied his insistence that American identity involves both self-help and helping each other with the recognition that mutual aid has been unequally and unfairly distributed in the past, and needs to be distributed more inclusively in the future. Like the “Promiseland” song, he often invokes dominant American religious traditions to make this case—saying at the most recent National Prayer Breakfast, for example, that many Americans feel divinely “called to work on behalf of … the most vulnerable,” and that “in a caring and in a just society, government must have a role to play” in this work—that it is not only the responsibility of nonprofits and faith-based organizations.Footnote ³

Obama concluded his recent El Paso speech on immigration with the story of José Hernández, born in California to migrant farm workers. Obama noted that “if it had been a different time of the year,” José, like two of his siblings, would have been born in Mexico, where the family returned each winter. José did not learn English until he was twelve, but he excelled in math. He had heard of an American astronaut with a Latino surname, and decided he could be one, too. He studied hard in school, eventually earning a graduate degree in engineering. “And a few years later,” said Obama, “he found himself more than 100 miles above the surface of the Earth, staring out of the window of the shuttle Discovery … remembering the boy in the California fields with that crazy dream that in America everything is possible.”Footnote ⁴ This is a story of exactly the sort of person my argument considers: a member of a family of rural migrant laborers who found that, partly as a result of coercive U.S. and Mexican policies, their best opportunities were to work in the North while maintaining their roots in Mexico. Hernández is also someone whose childhood experiences fostered in him the aspiration to realize his version of the “American dream.” Although Obama did not suggest, as I have done, that the U.S. has a special obligation to such people, his point clearly was that Americans should help people like José fulfill their dreams. That is the kind of argument that immigration reform needs. Obama's speech was short on policy particulars, and it is too soon to say whether such arguments will make inclusive immigration reforms possible. But it is not too soon to decide to try them.