Chang

Question 1

Issue in the beginning of Chang article?

Answer 1

Anti-immigrant sentiment

T shirts worn in support

In response to California’s Proposition 187 (wanted to bar undocumented ppl from public schools, health care, and vaccines)

Question 2

Why was California’s Proposition 187 created?

Answer 2

to criminalize immigrants for presumably entering the country “illegally”
and stealing resources from “true” United States citizens

Also spread myth: “all immigrants are “illegal,” at worst, and, at best, the cause of
our society’s and economy’s ills”

Question 3

What do alien movies have to do with immigration?

Answer 3

American centrism

• America has the most coveted resources and is the best
• Obviously immigrants and aliens from alien movies would want to come here
  -feeds into immigration insecurity

Question 4

According to Saskia Sassen what is migration rooted in?

Answer 4

creation of linkages between sending and receiving countries through foreign investment and military interventions by
First World countries in the Third World

Ex. the establishment of an off-shore plant from the United States in a “developing”
country brings not only goods and information about life in the United
States but often creates social networks making migration more feasible.

Question 5

What is Changs argument for the paper?

Answer 5

First World countries routinely make deliberate economic interventions to facilitate their continued extraction of third World resources, including and especially people

Question 6

Is it on purpose? Who is responsible?

Answer 6

carefully orchestrated—that is, desired, planned, compelled, managed,
accelerated, slowed, and periodically stopped—by the direct actions of
US interests

Who? government as state and as employer, private employers, and corporations.

Question 7

How are women involved?

Answer 7

austerity programs imposed
on Mexico and other nations effectively create situations of debt bondage such that these indebted nations must surrender their citizens, especially women, as migrant laborers to First World nations in the desperate effort to keep up with debt payments and to sustain their remaining citizens through these overseas workers’ remittances

Question 8

What did many Americans believe about Immigrants and welfare?

Answer 8

47 percent of Americans believed that “most immigrants wind up on welfare.”

Question 9

What was the implicit shift in the main target of anti-immigrant
attacks?

Answer 9

Used to be immigrant men = job stealers

Now Immigrant women = portrayed
as idle, welfare-dependent mothers and inordinate breeders of dependents

(populating at high rate and threat to public resources)

Question 10

Are women coming more?

Answer 10

Yes, along with children, and entire families

Why?

Labor where women are preferred labor source: child care, cleaning, and laundry
work

Question 11

Why has US xenophobia come to focus on women?

Answer 11

perceived as the leaders of this threatening demographic trend

Cuz women may now represent the majority of “settled” undocumented Mexican immigrants
-They also tend to advocated and mobilize to get their families in the US too.

Question 12

What are immigrant women blamed for?

Answer 12

high rates of birth and consumption
of public resources (not gender natural)

reflect public perception and promote even stricter policies

Question 13

What happened to Proposition 187 in November 1994?

Answer 13

immigrant rights groups questioned the measure’s constitutionality

Court Judge Pfaelzer finally ruled in 1998 that much of the proposition
was unconstitutional

Ended up passing through a few other hands, but basically same conclusions

Question 14

What is the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation
Act, and its consequences? (Also personal responsibility act - PRA)

Answer 14

ending the federal government’s 61-year commitment to providing cash assistance to poor families with children.

- fulfill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it.”

Basically: removed safety net for poor families
Clearly targeted at immigrants

Question 15

How is the PRA targeted at women?

Answer 15

one provision of the PRA denies
aid to children unless paternity is established, even when the mother
complies with the District Attorney’s invasive and degrading inquiries.
As welfare scholar Gwendolyn Mink says, the PRA is “the most aggressive invasion of women’s rights in this century.”

Also targeted at poor women more specifically

Question 16

How were the acts passed worse on poor immigrant women?

Answer 16

poor immigrant women, the picture is even more grim as an act
also reduced judicial discretion in immigration matters, resulting in the
automatic deportation of immigrants convicted of even minor crimes.

Question 17

Why are children as future workers undesirable to the US?

Answer 17

Costs around 45k to raise a kid to 18.

if just take 18 year olds, u save the money

why immigrant’s children are undesirable, but they are

Question 18

What were “solutions” to WOC having children? (Also on family / setteling)

Answer 18

1. migration and settlement of women
   have been directly prohibited in order to prevent the reproduction and
   formation of immigrant families
2. subjected to enforced sterilization and contraceptive testing to effectively limit their reproduction
3. Let male workers come in (can’t stay any longer then work contract. And restricting the intermarriage of nonwhites with white citizens
4. Americanizing workers (getting them ready for low paid positions)
5. migrants have been refused the rights and benefits accorded to citizen workers and thus coerced into low-wage work

Question 19

Goals of these policies? (On immigrants and families / settling)

Answer 19

extract the benefits of immigrants’ labor while minimizing or eliminating any obligations or costs,

Question 20

Summary of the agenda on women Immigrants?

Answer 20

First, they force many undocumented,
as well as “legal,” immigrant women to take and remain in low-wage jobs for lack of critically needed government assistance.

Second, they allow the state to minimize its costs for providing basic needs and rights
to these immigrant women workers.

Ultimately, both private employers
and the state capture a pool of cheap labor—cheap because women are
cheated of fair wages, because they are denied the rights and benefits of
citizen workers, and because they have already been raised and trained
in their home countries.

Question 21

What does Chang look at in her book?

Answer 21

Immigrant women in the media

Acts with contradictory goals

Latina immigrant women as
welfare abusers and as inordinate breeders of dependents are deliberately
propagated by the state

Us captures and keeps labour through temporary workers

Abusive workplaces (ex. English-only rules)

global capitalism

denial of all forms of aid to immigrants in “host” countries such
as the United States seals the fate of these women (more likely to work and be stuck in low paying jobs)

collaborations between the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and other government agencies

threats to immigrants in several
domains Ex. border militarization and the growth of citizen vigilante groups