Читать книгу Latino Politics - Lisa García Bedolla - Страница 17

But how do racialization, gender identity, and sexuality relate to Latino politics? Racialization processes and other differences are important because they have shaped the way Latinos are seen by non-Latinos, the opportunities Latinos have been afforded, and the kinds of restrictions that have been placed on their incorporation into political life. Some Latinos living in the United States have been present in their communities since before they became part of the United States. We will see in the following chapters the significance of that long-term relationship. Yet a large proportion of Latinos in the country have arrived there since 1970. So, even though not all Latinos are immigrants – recent or otherwise – the community contains a sufficient number such that thinking about how immigrant politics varies from the politics of those who were born domestically is an important part of learning about the Latino political experience in the United States. Immigrant political incorporation is different from non-immigrant political incorporation because of two factors:

1 Immigrants choose to be part of the United States, and therefore must overcome important structural hurdles before they can even consider engaging politically.

2 Immigrant inclusion is about defining the boundaries of the US polity, and therefore speaks in important ways to issues of race, inequality, and power within American society, in ways that are somewhat different from (but related to) what is happening with US-born racialized groups.

Immigrants do not arrive in their new country as a clean slate. They bring a set of resources and a historical experience that shape their decision to migrate and their opportunity structure once they arrive. Thus, the study of Latino immigrant incorporation needs to begin with the international structural context which embeds the decision to migrate. Immigrants’ decisions to migrate are rooted in macro-geopolitical processes over which their subjects have little control, such as economic recession or dislocation, war, or natural disaster. Once immigrants arrive in the United States, they must deal with an immigration bureaucracy that, as we will see in the following chapters, does not treat them all the same. The country an immigrant comes from, and the relationship the US government has with that country at the time of migration, strongly affect how easy or difficult the legal aspects of the migration process are going to be. Hence, not only the immigrants’ legal and economic status upon their arrival, but even their tendency to come from particular countries and their choice to migrate to the United States, are intimately related with US foreign and economic policy.