Brokered Boundaries

“In this fresh look at the dynamics of U.S. immigration, Massey and Sanchez document the effects on [immigrants’] identities of the current harsh anti-immigration environment they encounter in the United States. Hewing to the dominant view in the sociology of immigration, the authors model immigrant assimilation not as a straight-line process of gradual adoption of the dominant culture, but as a two-way process of group-boundary negotiation between newcomers and native-born citizens. . . . This sobering account of the experiences of immigrant reform is highly detrimental, not only for the immigrants themselves, but also for American society at large.”
—Population & Development Review 

“Based on statistical and ethnographic accounts, Douglas Massey and Magaly Sánchez have written a book that offers an insightful portrait of new Latin American immigrants and also challenges the prevailing anti-immigrant hysteria. The lives of the new immigrants, told in their own words, are full of hard work and dreams for a small piece of the American dream. Some make it, but most struggle at multiple jobs with no benefits and with little chance of upward mobility. The overwhelming evidence shows that almost all new immigrants are hopeful, law abiding, family and community orientated, and working hard to secure a better life for themselves and their children. The harshness of American policies has not reduced immigration, but has legitimized discrimination that has marginalized immigrants and weakened the fabric of American society.”
—Charles Hirschman, Boeing International Professor, University of Washington 

“Brokered Boundaries is a timely, unflinching, compelling, and rigorously reasoned analysis of the consequences of a hostile context of reception for immigrant destinies and identities. In an era of widening inequality, rising xenophobia, and unprecedented state persecution of millions of undocumented immigrants and their children, the authors trace the trajectories and stories of a sample of Latin Americans in the urban northeast. In the process they tackle empirical puzzles, challenge conventional wisdom, debunk the sunny ethnocentrism embedded in formulaic discourses of ‘assimilation’ in American life, and offer a sober reconsideration of policy courses for the American future.”
—Rubén G. Rumbaut, professor of sociology, University of California, Irvine

Anti-immigrant sentiment reached a fever pitch after 9/11, but its origins go back much further. Public rhetoric aimed at exposing a so-called invasion of Latino immigrants has been gaining ground for more than three decades—and fueling increasingly restrictive federal immigration policy. Accompanied by a flagging U.S. economy—record-level joblessness, bankruptcy, and income inequality—as well as waning consumer confidence, these conditions signaled one of the most hostile environments for immigrants in recent memory. In Brokered Boundaries, Douglas Massey and Magaly Sánchez untangle the complex political, social, and economic conditions underlying the rise of xenophobia in U.S. society. The book draws on in-depth interviews with Latin American immigrants in metropolitan New York and Philadelphia and—in their own words and images—reveals what life is like for immigrants attempting to integrate in anti-immigrant times.

What do the social categories “Latino” and “American” actually mean to today’s immigrants? Brokered Boundaries analyzes how first- and second-generation immigrants from Central and South America and the Caribbean navigate these categories and their associated meanings as they make their way through U.S. society. Massey and Sánchez argue that the mythos of immigration, in which newcomers gradually shed their respective languages, beliefs, and cultural practices in favor of a distinctly American way of life, is, in reality, a process of negotiation between new arrivals and native-born citizens. Natives control interactions with outsiders by creating institutional, social, psychological, and spatial mechanisms that delimit immigrants’ access to material resources and even social status. Immigrants construct identities based on how they perceive and respond to these social boundaries. The authors make clear that today’s Latino immigrants are brokering boundaries in the context of unprecedented economic uncertainty, repressive anti-immigrant legislation, and a heightening fear that upward mobility for immigrants translates into downward mobility for the native-born. Despite an absolute decline in Latino immigration, immigration-related statutes have tripled in recent years, including many that further shred the safety net for legal permanent residents as well as the undocumented.

Brokered Boundaries shows that, although Latin American immigrants come from many different countries, their common reception in a hostile social environment produces an emergent Latino identity soon after arrival. During anti-immigrant times, however, the longer immigrants stay in America, the more likely they are to experience discrimination and the less likely they are to identify as Americans.

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.

MAGALY SÁNCHEZ R. is senior researcher and visiting scholar at the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.