A virtuous nation and its deserving immigrants. How the immigrant rights movement embraced nationalism

Abstract

Immigrants, and particularly undocumented immigrants, are oftentimes seen as disrupting the nation state and destabilizing its boundaries. This paper develops the argument that immigrants can, under certain conditions, actively employ nationalist frames and language to support their rights claims. It presents a two-prong argument to explain for this outcome. First, immigrant rights advocates needed to select a 'master frame' that would will resonate with audiences in different regions of the country and counter the anti-immigrant discourses of their adversaries. These constraints favored the selection of a frame that was nationalist enough to make sense to middle-of-theroad Americans and liberal enough to provide 'deserving immigrants' a pathway to citizenship. Second, advocates needed to ensure that their frames were delivered with a degree of consistency in different localities across the country. This favored a robust and centralized discursive infrastructure that could exercise dominance over the production and diffusion of core messages. The paper uses a range of sourcesincluding interviews with leaders of immigrant rights associations, organization documents, training materialssupport the argument.

Immigrant Child Legal Identity Registration as A Tool to Promote Sustainable Development Goals 16.9

“…By that, immigrants are oftentimes identified as distribution for the states and weaken their boundaries and sovereignty. (Nicholls & Uitermark, 2021) Moreover, we believe that both education and healthcare are the most essentials rights that we have to obtain. As a child, education is the most essential thing in order to prepare and meet requirements for future processes, which is also connected to employment in terms of economic status.…”

Mixed signals: Understanding the democratic work of narratives in pro-immigrant protests across local policy environments

“…Extant literature tends to focus attention on how a hostile national environment pressures activists to legitimize protest through earned deservingness narratives that emphasize how (some) immigrants conform to existing mores, specifically at the national (rather than universal) scale (e.g., Nicholls and Uitermark, 2019). Conforming to these norms is easier for some immigrants than for others, reinforcing a “moral economy of deservingness” (Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, 2012: 242; Lauby, 2016) that marks immigrants as deserving of national membership based on the extent to which they demonstrate cultural assimilation and economic contribution (Motomura, 2012; Yukich, 2013).…”

“…This discussion foregrounds the environmentally contingent nature of activist narratives. Political narratives respond to the openings and limitations presented by existing conditions, even as they seek to alter those conditions (Nicholls and Uitermark, 2019). But the tendency in the social movements literature to focus primarily on national (and sometimes discrete urban, e.g., Leitner and Strunk (2014)) environments potentially makes it more difficult to see patterned effects of environmental variations that can significantly affect the political work of protest and narrative production.…”

“…Scholars of immigrant rights movements argue that although activists pursue more just arrangements despite these barriers, activists’ efforts are shaped by the hostile environment in which they work. We focus in particular on the work of Walter Nicholls, who has done extensive work on the impact of national hostility on the narratives and frames produced by activists (e.g., Nicholls, 2014; Nicholls and Uitermark, 2019). Nicholls (2013) argues that hostile environments constrain the narratives circulated; the more hostile the environment, the more likely activists are to develop nationalistic narrative claims for deservingness in which immigrants are portrayed as conforming to national norms.…”