California as a “Blue-Print’ For Progressive Immigration Reform?: Uncovering Racial Liberalism to Expose Reconfigured Anti-Migrant Hegemony

• Main Author: Ortega, Edith Jaicel
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholarship @ Claremont 2018
• Subjects: Proposition 187; California Dream Act; Trust Act; Senate Bill 54; Political Whiteness; Anti-Migrant Hegemony; Colorblindness; American Politics; Civic and Community Engagement; Criminal Law; Education Law; Immigration Law; Inequality and Stratification; Legislation; Political Theory; Politics and Social Change; Race and Ethnicity
• Online Access: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/1092; http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2182&context=scripps_theses

Using the frames of analysis and language of political whiteness and anti-migrant hegemony, this paper examines the narrative of liberal immigration reformers transforming California’s political landscape within the period of 1994 to 2017. Taken as case studies the following articles of legislation are analyzed: Proposition 187 in 1994, the California Dream Act in 2010, the Trust Act in 2014, up to the present Senate Bill 54 in 2017. The paper finds that while California has experienced a recognizable shift in racial liberalism in rhetoric and legislation, its overall policy continues to work within the framework of anti-migrant hegemony that functions through criminalization and detention. The paper ends with the conclusion, informed by Gonzales’ writing in Reform without Justice, that the shift California has experienced is indicative of anti-migrant hegemony reconfiguring itself in changing social and political norms.