The dark side of immigrant integration policies: Day laborers in the United States

Abstract

This article uses the case of immigrant day laborers to examine how municipalities develop policies to integrate immigrants. In the 1990s and 2000s, local elected officials adopted integration policies to address the issues raised by the presence of day laborers in their jurisdictions. While first drawing on cases from around the country, the study then homes in on the case of Pasadena, California, to examine the implementation of integration in a moderately liberal city. The results reveal that many officials embraced both disciplinary and punitive tactics, making use of worker centers, aggressive ticketing, and solicitation bans for the purposes of controlling and governing an illegalized population. Some policies institutionalized the subordination of the population and heightened its deportability. The paper complicates the presumed binary between restrictive and integrative policies.