U.S. Immigration Policy: Sustaining Racialized Inequalities Through “Illegality” and Education
Description
Through an interdisciplinary American Studies approach, this thesis examines access to education and immigrant “illegality” as tools of racial domination by investigating colonial legacies and structural inequalities linked with immigration policy. Providing a background on the political formation of immigrant “illegality”, this research focuses on how race relations have influenced immigration policies, as well as political efforts to exclude racialized and minoritized groups from lawful immigration, naturalization, and national belonging. These historic texts shed light on overarching connections between the racialized policy construction of immigrant “illegality” and the role of education in nation building and class conservation. Comprising three analytic chapters; the first historicizes how education was used as a tool of the nation-state in the early formation of U.S. territories, the second chapter applies discourse analysis to link contemporary political rhetoric with color-blind ideologies. The third analytic chapter is a critical review of existing quantitative findings on the effects of legal status on educational attainment for Mexican and Central American immigrants and their descendants living in the United States. Challenging the dominant narrative around immigrant “illegality”, this work highlights the racist formation and continued application of unequal access (to both education and citizenship), further demonstrating how structural inequalities remain racialized.
Date Created
The date the item was original created (prior to any relationship with the ASU Digital Repositories.)
2021
Agent
- Author (aut): Olsen-Medina, Kira
- Thesis advisor (ths): Yellow Horse, Aggie
- Committee member: Vega, Sujey
- Committee member: Diaz McConnell, Eileen
- Publisher (pbl): Arizona State University