UC Berkeley

Despite its unprecedented militarization, the U.S.-Mexico border continues to be the world’s most crossed border, with Arizona serving as a key site for unauthorized entry. Moreover, although immigration policy remains a federal prerogative, day-to-day immigration enforcement has increasingly required the involvement of local actors. That there is a large undocumented population despite border buildup, and devolved enforcement despite federal preemption, has sparked political struggles at the local level. This dissertation examines these struggles. Drawing on 16 months of ethnography (2010-2012) with two pro-immigrant and three immigration restrictionist organizations in Arizona, as well as 70 interviews with activists, I show how contrasting assessments of the state’s strength shape each movement’s worldview, goals, and strategies.

To explain this variation, I propose the concepts of ‘strong-state effect’ and ‘weak-state effect.’ A group experiencing the strong-state effect sees the state as a powerful, predatory, and well-coordinated structure, while the weak-state effect produces the perception of the state as feeble, inept, and internally incoherent. In this study, the pro-immigrant movement subscribed to the idea of a strong state, while the restrictionist countermovement experienced the weak-state effect.

Pro-immigrant activists contended that the problem of undocumented immigration was the result of the state’s unrestrained coercive power. These activists used the metaphor of ‘Nazification’ to articulate the fear that the state was growing stronger and more exclusionary. In response to this strong-state effect, pro-immigrant activists in this study strategized how to weaken the state while also building up society’s capacity to resist the state’s power. By contrast, restrictionist activists attributed the problem of undocumented immigration to the state’s weakness as a policing body. The specter of ‘Mexicanization’ was the particular way in which restrictionists conveyed their anxieties about a state that had lost physical control over its territory and its resources. In response to this weak-state effect, restrictionist tactics tried to extend the state’s reach while also building up the ability to aid the state. In sum, grassroots immigration politics unfolded in a highly patterned way, as a struggle to change the scope and power of the state.

This study addresses two limitations in previous research. First, sociological studies often intuit that there is a relationship between the two competing sides of immigration politics, but few works have empirically examined both sides together and their relationships to each other. Second, previous research has struggled with theoretically bridging on-the-ground micro processes of mobilization with macro-level structures. In addressing these limitations with a relational political ethnography of the field, this dissertation makes three theoretical contributions.

First, this dissertation empirically illustrates that the state, as an effect of ideology, is not always successful. In fact, the very place that scholars have predicted the state effect to be the strongest—a nation’s border—is exactly where this effect is only sometimes experienced. Second, to theorize this variation in perceptions of state power, I rely on the concepts of the strong-state effect and the weak-state effect. In doing so, I show how disparate perceptions of the state’s power can be basis of contentious politics. Third, the emphasis on activists’ assessments of the state contributes to our understanding of social movements’ tactical repertoires. This study illustrates how a movement’s beliefs about the state inform its strategies. Finally, the state-effect lens is a tool that helps us see how tactics are oppositional and referential across political lines. With this lens, I argue, we can see the ‘field’ of social relations that constitute immigration politics.