Skip Nav Destination
Close Modal
Update search
NARROW
Format
Journal
Date
Availability
1-1 of 1
Cecilia Menjívar
Close
Follow your search
Access your saved searches in your account
Would you like to receive an alert when new items match your search?
Sort by
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Daedalus (2021) 150 (2): 91–105.
Published: 04 January 2021
Abstract
View article
PDF
This essay examines the intertwined nature of seemingly neutral immigration laws that illegalize certain immigrant groups and the socially constructed attitudes and stereotypes that associate the same legally targeted groups with “illegality,” to produce the racialization of illegality. These complementary factors are further sustained by other social forces, including media discourses that reify those associations. The racialization of illegality is a fundamentally situational, relational, dynamic, and historically and context-specific process. Today, Latino groups are the preeminent target group of both the social and the legal production of illegality. Thus, this essay examines Latinos' racialized illegality across geographical contexts, within their group, and in relation to other contemporary immigrants. Although expressions of racialized illegality and specific targeted groups will vary across time and space, the contours of the phenomenon will be present across contexts and times (and produce specific outcomes) because they are shaped by existing racial hierarchies.