Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America

My friends at CHIRLA gave me this book and at 300 pages of small print it looked intimidating so I put off reading it for a few weeks. When I finally picked it up I found it to be well organized, informative and a compelling read. Tichenor tells the history of immigration politics in the America by showing the shifting alliances of groups and their interest in the level of immigration and the rights that should be given to immigrants. He uses a simple two by two grid throughout the book to illustrate this changing alliance. For instance the labor movement went from pro-immigrant around 1890 to anti-immigrant for most of the 20th century and became pro-immigrant again in the 1980's. Dividing Lines also shows difference in the politics of legislation versus enforcement and between what the public says they want and what the politicians actually enact. For instance the book shows why we have laws mandating employer sanctions and yet we have almost no enforcement of those laws by the executive branch. This book is an excellent read about the politics of immigration and should be considered by everyone who wants to understand the current state of immigration politics.

This book will be useful to students of immigration, history, and political science. Tichenor shows us the complex set of connections between political institutions, interest groups, and political actors that combined to produce policy outcomes. One of his most interesting findings regards the unusual fact that while most Americans favor tighter restrictions on immigration, politicians nowadays rarely enact such laws. Instead they usually increase immigration levels despite broad public opposition. Tichenor argues that this is because a "policy regime" has been structured over time, encompassing the immigration committees in both houses of Congress, and including the preferences of strong pro-immigration interest groups, that pushes for liberalization of immigration laws. Only rarely in American history do restrictionists succeed in limiting immigration, most notably from the 1920's until the landmark 1964 law that set off the wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia we still experience today. Tichenor's work is easily accessible, well-written, and thought provoking.