View article

For the first hundred years of US history, states and municipalities formulated their own immigration policy. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the federal government took control of this policy realm, a control it continues to exercise to the present (Zolberg 2006). By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, an increasing number of governments at the state, county, and municipal levels were proposing, approving, and enforcing policies directed toward immigrants. During the spring of 2007, for instance, the city of New Haven, Connecticut, began offering identification cards to all residents, regardless of documentation status, in order to facilitate immigrants’ access to public services. While New Haven’s move exemplifies subnational policies that accommodate immigrants, restrictive subnational laws are also common. In November 2006, the city of Farmers Branch, Texas, passed Ordinance 2892 requiring landlords to verify the citizenship or immigration status of tenants. Shortly afterward, the Illegal Immigration Relief Act was passed in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, to discourage hiring or renting to undocumented immigrants. Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 of April 2010 directed state and local police to detain anyone suspected of being in the country without papers.

Efforts by subnational governmental authorities to craft and implement immigration policies have also emerged in Oklahoma and California, the two most important destination states for Tlacuitapense immigrants. In this chapter, we explore how Tlacuitapense migrants living in the United States experience the application of state policies of immigration in their daily …