Vol. 10 No. 4 (April 2000) pp. 257-260.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN AMERICA: A REFERENCE HANDBOOK by David W. Haines and Karen E. Rosenblum (Editors). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. 584 pages.

Reviewed by John C. Blakeman, Department of Political Science, Baylor University.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN AMERICA: A REFERENCE HANDBOOK is a large collection of 21 essays, each focusing on one distinct aspect of illegal immigration. Indeed, the book offers a very thorough treatment of the topic. As a reference handbook, it provides wonderful guidance for research of the topic.

The guiding focus of the essays, as the editors put it, is that "illegal immigration as a social and political issue is as much about the way immigration is structured, conceived, and legislated as it is about the undocumented immigrants themselves" (p. xi). Thus, the book "aims to illuminate the subject of illegal migration in the United States as broadly as possible. It thus stresses the variety of migration experiences that are, in at least some ways, illegal and the varied public responses to the overall issue of illegality and to the specific groups who end up for one reason of another as illegal." For such an expansive range of inquiry, the book is appropriately cross-disciplinary, making use of methodologies from anthropology, sociology, political science, and history. Sociological research especially stands out, but the diversity of the essays in the book and the research questions posed are indeed a real strong point. Briefly, the book is organized into four sections. Section one concerns "concepts, policies, and numbers," and focuses on questions concerning how illegal immigrants are counted, and some of the legal and policy responses surrounding illegal immigration. Section two concentrates on a more sociological look at "the migrants and their work," and concerns detailed studies of illegal immigrants in specific industries, or migrants from specific regions and countries. Section three looks at legal and political responses to specific immigration issues. One chapter, for instances investigates California's failed attempt to regulate illegal immigration through Proposition 187. Section four, interestingly, pursues a comparative focus to illegal immigration, and various chapters address the topic for Canada, Europe, and Japan.

Reference handbooks, by their nature, can be difficult to evaluate, and space limits preclude an exhaustive review here. Considering that this assessment of the book is for the LAW AND POLITICS BOOK REVIEW, this reviewer has opted to devote more attention to legal and political issues and problems raised by the book. I do so only to denote the particular value the book has for scholars of the judicial process, law and society, and other sub-disciplines falling under the rubric 'law and politics.'

One understated theme running through many of the chapters concerns the relationship between immigration law and illegal immigration. None of the chapters specifically focus on the impact between law

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and immigration, yet many indirectly raise the issue. One plus to the book here is the appendix, which contains synopses of recent immigration legislation passed by Congress.

Jeffrey S. Passel's chapter entitled "Undocumented Immigration to the United States: Numbers, Trends, and Characteristics," critically analyzes illegal immigration trends established by government agencies, and finds that the methods used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and the Current Population Survey (CPS), generally undercount and underestimate the number of illegal immigrants in the United States. Although Passel's chapter takes a more critical look at the counting methods used by the INS, he makes an interesting argument concerning the impact of immigration legislation on controlling illegal immigration. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) was a major effort to control illegal immigration, in part by sanctioning employers who used illegal immigrants, and also by permitting illegal immigrants who had resided in the United States for some time to become legal. As Passel demonstrates, though, "the undocumented immigration population.is larger now (and in 1995) than when IRCA was enacted in 1986 to control illegal immigration. Further, the rate of growth has not been curtailed, and the numbers may be increasing faster than during the mid-1980s" (p. 102). Passel's focus in not on the impact of the IRCA per se. He is more concerned with providing an alternative measure of illegal immigration. Yet, his analysis raises real questions about the ability of the current statutory framework to control illegal immigration into the United States.

Katharine M. Donato and Rebecca S. Carter offer a follow-up, of sorts, to Passel's chapter. Donato and Carter focus on the provisions of the IRCA that define the provisions for granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. In "Mexico and U.S. Policy on Illegal Immigration: A Fifty-Year Retrospective," Donato and Carter point out that one affect of the IRCA amnesty provisions was to prompt a more in-depth dialogues between the United States and Mexico about illegal immigration. The authors also focus in detail on those who have received an amnesty under the IRCA, and they conclude that the statute has not necessarily had its intended affect of controlling illegal immigration. Many amnesty recipients have not had "a legitimate claim to amnesty" (p. 126), thus one unintended consequence, as Donato and Carter put it, is a large "illegal legal population" (p. 127).

Again, serious questions about the impact of immigration law are raised. Moving from the federal to the state level, Karen E. Rosenblum's chapter, "Rights at Risk: California's Proposition 187," concerns questions raised by the 'Save Our State' initiative (Prop 187), which was passed by California voters in 1994 to control the tide of illegal immigration. Prop 187 would, in theory, deter illegal immigration primarily by denying public services, from education to health care, to illegal immigrants. Federal courts struck most of the statute's provisions down, mainly under the law of federal preemption. Nonetheless, Rosenblum demonstrates a couple of interesting points. One, Texas and Arizona, two states also affected by illegal immigration, resoundingly reputed measures similar to Prop 187. As Rosenblum notes, "unlike California, Arizona and Texas have nurtured interdependent business relations in the cities that span the Mexican border and have economies that are heavily dependent on exports to Mexico" (p. 378).

Prop 187 also arose in southern California counties

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affected by the early 1990s recession, and Orange County, one of the homes of the proposition, was consistently faced with budget shortfalls. Thus, public sentiment in part supported the denial of public benefits to illegals as an austerity measure. One other consequence that Rosenblum notes is the link between Prop 187 and the political mobilization of the immigrant voices. "Politically, passage of Proposition 187 has been hailed as a watershed event for Latino/a political participation, at least in Los Angeles" (p. 378).

The final section to the book appropriately investigates comparative issues in illegal immigration. As such, it provides a window into a problem - illegal immigration - that is not unique to the United States. Norma Buchignani and Doreen Indra present a very detailed chapter on Canada's attempt to control illegal immigration. The authors note that public opinion in Canada, unlike in the United States, has generated low interest in the issue of illegal immigration. The Canadian government, for instance, has "increasingly avoided publicly identifying flows of migrants or individuals as illegal or having illegal dimensions to them"(p. 440). Moreover, the federal government has largely transformed illegal immigrants into "legal immigrants-in-waiting, especially into asylum seekers." With Canada's parliamentary form of government, immigration policy has primarily been established through executive rule-making, thus "new initiatives to head off or disguise illegal immigrant flows usually involve changes in regulations rather than in law, so that the issues do not have to be subject to parliamentary debate or aired by the media" (p. 440). Thus, Canada's experience poses a stark contrast to the United States. U. S. immigration policy is more of a product of the give-and-take between Congress, the states, and the executive, rather than an example primarily of executive policymaking, as in Canada.

Continuing the comparative focus, Deborah R. Altamirano's chapter focuses on illegal immigration in Europe. Altamirano looks at immigration and the European Union, and also provides short case studies of Greece and Italy, two countries that were "traditionally 'migrant-sending' countries with extensive diasporas" (p. 451). Yet, Italy and Greece have become "hosts to large foreign immigrant populations and are now trying to forge their own immigration policies within the framework of the European Union." As Altamirano notes, member-states of the EU face a conflict over illegal immigration. Not only are states "making efforts to restrict the flow of

immigrants by tightening the controls at external borders," the same member-states are also "implementing parallel policies to remove internal border controls" under EU laws and policies (p. 451). Focusing on Greece and Italy, Altamirano notes that "the extent to which [they] will be able to comply with the stipulations put forth in EU treaties is yet to be seen. However, given their respective socioeconomic structures and geographical locations, it appears that the balance between their respective national interests and the supranational objectives of the EU will be delicate indeed"(p. 466). Thus, Altamirano raises a real problem for EU states, which concerns the reconciliation between their politics on non-EU immigration and EU policy affecting immigration among EU states.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IN AMERICA offers a good overview of an important topic. The collection of essays is diverse, and the book's claim to be a reference handbook is accurate. The topics contained in the work, the questions

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addressed by the essays, and the diversity of methodological approaches make the book almost indispensable to scholars researching illegal immigration. Scholars of the judicial process, law and society, or even constitutional law, will find the book adding another dimension to questions concerning the impact of law on illegal immigration. From a policy-oriented standpoint, the detailed case studies on specific immigrant populations, both in the United States and abroad, allow a more detailed understanding of the pressures affecting how, why, and by whom immigration policy is made. The book is a valuable contribution to the study of illegal immigration, and to the making and enforcement of immigration law and policy.