Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz

Transnational, sort of, story about how urban policy in the US abandoned cities to white flight and disinvestment, but Latino (Sandoval-Strausz’s preferred term) immigrants often brought vibrancy and recovery nonetheless, even though elite opinion preferred to praise the largely white creative classes’ return to the cities and even though they were regularly denied mainstream credit. Immigrants worked, built businesses, and bought houses when they could, despite generally lower wage rates; the communities they revitalized sustained property values where others collapsed, and they also had much lower crime rates. This all happened despite the 1965 introduction of severe limits, for the first time, on lawful immigration from this hemisphere, which created a crisis of legality and was part of depressing wages. Initially, many Latino immigrants tried to claim whiteness the way several other immigrant groups had done; the Texas-based League of United Latin American Citizens officially denounced King’s 1963 March on Washington.

In 1986, many immigrants got the opportunity to obtain legal status; the tradeoff increased criminalization of unlawful immigration ended up keeping more undocumented migrants in the US, since border crossings became more dangerous, and many even brought their families here for the first time for the same reason; this dynamic also increased the percentage of female immigrants. Newly legalized immigrants could demand higher wages and better working conditions, but wages and conditions also deteriorated for the still-undocumented, and employers shifted to subcontracting for better deniability about their hiring. The law also shifted immigrants to the cities, because agricultural work was seasonal and now it was dangerous to go back and forth so people needed year-round work.

Unsurprisingly, the book ends by discussing the 2016 election and Trump’s racism, noting that Trump won where there were fewest immigrants. Those voters, among other things, “were least in a position to see that Trump’s linkage of immigration and crime was simply not true. After all, they had heard stories of big-city danger during the decades of the urban crisis. How were they to know that crime had plunged, since they’d long ago forsaken the cities?” But Latino immigrants are also coming to rural areas, where they are often the only hope for revival: from 2000-2010, “Latinas and Latinos comprised 58 percent of all population growth in counties outside metropolitan areas.”… (más)