As Gonzales highlights in Harvest of Empire, immigration has a long history of controversy in the US. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, suspicion of immigrants largely targeted those coming from Europe or Asia and in some cases found legal expression—e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Since the late 20th century, however, debates around immigration have tended to center on Latin America and in particular on unauthorized immigration.

Legislative attempts to address the issue have sometimes taken a two-pronged approach, extending citizenship to at least some unauthorized immigrants currently in the US but also taking steps to reduce such immigration in the future—e.g., by penalizing businesses for employing unauthorized workers. This, for example, was the route taken by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. On the executive front, a significant development was President Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) order, which aimed to address the plight of immigrants brought to the US as children and burdened by their unauthorized status.

Efforts to extend rights to immigrants have often met with public backlash, however. As Gonzales notes, events in the first decade of the 21st century—particularly the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2008 recession—led to a wave of xenophobia that scapegoated migrants as potential sources of violence and economic distress.