Lobbying for Inclusion Rights Politics and the Making of Immigration Policy [Hardcover]

In every decade since passage of the Hart Cellar Act of 1965, Congress has faced conflicting pressures: to restrict legal immigration and to provide employers with unregulated access to migrant labor.Lobbying for Inclusionshows that in these debates immigrant rights groups advocated a surprisingly moderate course of action: expansionism was tempered by a politics of inclusion. Rights advocates supported generous family unification policies, for example, but they opposed proposals that would admit large numbers of guest workers without providing a clear path to citizenship.

As leaders of pro-immigrant coalitions, Latino and Asian American rights advocates were highly effective in influencing immigration lawmakers even before their constituencies gained political clout in the voting booth. Success depended on casting rights demands in universalistic terms, while leveraging their standing as representatives of growing minority populations.

Wong offers a fascinating analysis of American immigration policy over the last quarter century. Where other social scientists have been divided into two rather hermetically sealed camps, Wong bridges issues of class and identity in innovative ways. The result is a subtle and original account of the vicissitudes of American immigration policy that will be of great interest to scholars working on both sides of the class-identity divide. Political scientists, sociologists, and historians will find much that is new here; we will all have to rethink some of our most basic assumptions concerning the forces shaping immigration policy in the United States. Lobbying for Inclusionshows that Latin American and Asian immigrant advocacy groups created in the wake of the 1965 immigration reforms were remarkably effective in influencing the formation of federal immigration law and policy. Lobbying for Inclusionaddresses an important area of policy-making. It will be of great interest to students and scholars ofl#É