2/22 Talk - Ethnic Advocates and Immigration Law
Carolyn Wong
Political Science Department, Carleton College
3-4:30 PM (Scott Hall Commons) -- Talk: Ethnic Advocates and the Making of Immigration Law.
In every decade since passage of the Hart Cellar Act of 1965, Congress has faced conflicting pressures: to restrict legal immigration and to provide employers with unregulated access to migrant labor. In congressional debates immigrant rights groups advocated a surprisingly moderate course of action: expansionism was tempered by a politics of inclusion. Rights advocates supported generous family unification policies, for example, but they opposed proposals that would admit large numbers of guest workers without providing a clear path to citizenship. Latino and Asian American rights advocates led pro-immigrant coalitions of interest groups. The ethnic advocates were successful in casting rights demands in universalistic terms, while leveraging their standing as representatives of growing minority populations.
Carolyn Wong is on the political science faculty at Carleton College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, after earning a Masters Degree in Technology Policy at M.I.T. Prof. Wong's research and teaching focus primarily on the politics of race, ethnicity and immigration in the United States. Her book Lobbying for Inclusion: Rights Politics and the Making of Immigration Policy (2006) was published by Stanford University Press. She is currently comparing the paths to political integration of Hmong and Vietnamese refugee communities in the U.S., France, and Australia.