Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

5-9-2016

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; Law & Society eJournals; Law & Society: Public Law eJournals; LSN Subject Matter eJournals; AARN Subject Matter eJournals; Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence & Legal Philosophy eJournals; Political Science Network; Anthropology & Archaeology Research Network

Abstract

When hundreds of thousands of Latino workers many of them undocumented began arriving in the South in the mid1990s looking for work the region greeted them with open arms or if not that at least neutrally This was no surprise as they represented a source of muchneeded labor in farming food processing construction and the hospitality industry The initial reception quickly turned sour however as each of the southern states enacted antiimmigrant statutes punishing practically everything that an undocumented person might want to do rent an apartment enroll a child in school seek medical services at a public hospital or even get a ride from a friend The laws were so farreaching and draconian that a conservative Supreme Court struck most of them down yet the antiimmigrant attitudes that produced them remained and make life difficult for Latinos in the South even today Professor Jean Stefancic and I show how these antiLatino attitudes originated in an early period in Southern history just before the Civil War when the region sought to create new states out of Mexico Nicaragua and many other Caribbean and Latin American countries by the simple expedient of invading them with volunteer armies led by Southern adventurers and mercenaries The resulting states would naturally be Southern in outlook and proslavery thus extending the life of that institution a little longer We show how the cultural memory of this expeditionary filibuster period lingered in the South and found outlet in the intense nativism that the abovementioned arrival of newcomers prompted We also show how First Amendment formalism obscured how this happened and made it easier for nativists in the region to mask their motives and the consequences of their behavior

Download

Share

COinS