Recent geographic research on U.S. immigration policy highlights the devolution of policy formula... more Recent geographic research on U.S. immigration policy highlights the devolution of policy formulation and implementation to local state actors. This study extends this research by analyzing how labor unions shape the implementation of state immigration policy and innovate institutional practices that affect regulatory spaces for immigrants at the local level. Using a case study of the hotel union in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article examines the origin, content, and implementation of immigration provisions recently negotiated in the union’s contracts. These contract provisions mediate the implementation of state immigration policies by specifying rules that govern employer actions in response to immigration enforcement activities by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, including admittance to the workplace, inspection of I-9 forms, and Social Security no-match letters. The contracts also establish nondiscrimination protections for immigrant workers, such as guaranteed leave to attend immigration proceedings. The legal codification of these protections and the robust practices of union enforcement yield “enclaves of rights” at the local level, further contributing to the highly uneven space of security for immigrant residents in the United States The article concludes by examining the possibility that unions—given their influence in local labor markets, their federated (or national) structures, and their role in the broader moral economy—could extend these rights beyond the confines of the enclave. Key Words: immigrant labor, immigrant rights, immigration policy, unions, worker rights.
Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and imm... more Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.
Abstract: Immigrants concentrate in particular lines of work. Most investigations of such employm... more Abstract: Immigrants concentrate in particular lines of work. Most investigations of such employment niching have accented either the demand for labor in a limited set of mostly low-wage industries or the efficiency of immigrant networks in supplying that labor; space has taken a backseat or has been ignored. In contrast, this article's account of immigrant employment niching modulates insights built on social network theories with understandings derived from relative location. We do so by altering the thinking about employment niches ...
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2004
Abstract When scholars map the urban geography of racial and ethnic segregation, they privilege t... more Abstract When scholars map the urban geography of racial and ethnic segregation, they privilege the time when people are at home. When workers commute, however, the tract of residence of one group often becomes the tract of employment of others. It follows that an exclusive focus on the residential geographies of racial groups erases the presence of others who work in those neighborhoods. Not only does this analytical orientation create a false impression of a city's racialized spaces as fixed, but it also misleadingly ...
A tactic recently deployed by economic-justice community campaigns has been the negotiation of Co... more A tactic recently deployed by economic-justice community campaigns has been the negotiation of Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs). CBAs are legally binding agreements between a private developer and a coalition of community-based organizations in which community members pledge support for a development in return for benefits such as living wage jobs, local hiring, and affordable housing. We elucidate key employment-related features
... led initiatives, and within a social context marked by corporate globalization and durable pu... more ... led initiatives, and within a social context marked by corporate globalization and durable public austerities, has led certain observers (eg, Amin, 2005) to ... or Mobilization for Youth activism in the 1960s) often emerged, if indirectly, out of social planning-type work (Selmi, 1998). ...
Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment ... more Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment niching. They also may cluster geographically; these districts can be neighbourhoods where workers reside or places of work (industrial quarters where labour is performed). The intrametropolitan spatial division of labour is perhaps best conceived as the relationships among employment concentrations in industrial niches and places of work shaped in large measure by the geographies of residence. The analysis of six immigrant ...
Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants disperse from ethnic neighborhoods as they tr... more Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants disperse from ethnic neighborhoods as they translate socioeconomic gains into more housing space and better residential environs. Models of this process typically relate the characteristics of individual immigrants to a locational outcome. The research described in this paper also considers immigrants in neighborhood context, but asks to what extent partnership and household composition shapes neighborhood location. This move" scales down" spatial assimilation research ...
Recent geographic research on U.S. immigration policy highlights the devolution of policy formula... more Recent geographic research on U.S. immigration policy highlights the devolution of policy formulation and implementation to local state actors. This study extends this research by analyzing how labor unions shape the implementation of state immigration policy and innovate institutional practices that affect regulatory spaces for immigrants at the local level. Using a case study of the hotel union in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article examines the origin, content, and implementation of immigration provisions recently negotiated in the union’s contracts. These contract provisions mediate the implementation of state immigration policies by specifying rules that govern employer actions in response to immigration enforcement activities by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, including admittance to the workplace, inspection of I-9 forms, and Social Security no-match letters. The contracts also establish nondiscrimination protections for immigrant workers, such as guaranteed leave to attend immigration proceedings. The legal codification of these protections and the robust practices of union enforcement yield “enclaves of rights” at the local level, further contributing to the highly uneven space of security for immigrant residents in the United States The article concludes by examining the possibility that unions—given their influence in local labor markets, their federated (or national) structures, and their role in the broader moral economy—could extend these rights beyond the confines of the enclave. Key Words: immigrant labor, immigrant rights, immigration policy, unions, worker rights.
Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and imm... more Popular discourse and academic scholarship both accent divisions between African American and immigrant workers. These debates most often focus on the question of job competition, positioning African Americans and immigrant workers as a priori adversaries in the labor market. We take a different tack. Drawing upon a case study of hotel workers in Chicago, we identify ways in which workers themselves challenge and bridge these divisions. Specifically, we reveal how union organizing activities, such as diverse committee representation and inclusion of diversity language in contracts, counter notions of intergroup competition in an effort to build common cause that affirms rather than denies differences. We argue that these activities represent political efforts on the part of workers to contest and even reshape the racial and ethnic division of labor, thereby revealing competition as a socially contingent and politically mediated process.
Abstract: Immigrants concentrate in particular lines of work. Most investigations of such employm... more Abstract: Immigrants concentrate in particular lines of work. Most investigations of such employment niching have accented either the demand for labor in a limited set of mostly low-wage industries or the efficiency of immigrant networks in supplying that labor; space has taken a backseat or has been ignored. In contrast, this article's account of immigrant employment niching modulates insights built on social network theories with understandings derived from relative location. We do so by altering the thinking about employment niches ...
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2004
Abstract When scholars map the urban geography of racial and ethnic segregation, they privilege t... more Abstract When scholars map the urban geography of racial and ethnic segregation, they privilege the time when people are at home. When workers commute, however, the tract of residence of one group often becomes the tract of employment of others. It follows that an exclusive focus on the residential geographies of racial groups erases the presence of others who work in those neighborhoods. Not only does this analytical orientation create a false impression of a city's racialized spaces as fixed, but it also misleadingly ...
A tactic recently deployed by economic-justice community campaigns has been the negotiation of Co... more A tactic recently deployed by economic-justice community campaigns has been the negotiation of Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs). CBAs are legally binding agreements between a private developer and a coalition of community-based organizations in which community members pledge support for a development in return for benefits such as living wage jobs, local hiring, and affordable housing. We elucidate key employment-related features
... led initiatives, and within a social context marked by corporate globalization and durable pu... more ... led initiatives, and within a social context marked by corporate globalization and durable public austerities, has led certain observers (eg, Amin, 2005) to ... or Mobilization for Youth activism in the 1960s) often emerged, if indirectly, out of social planning-type work (Selmi, 1998). ...
Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment ... more Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment niching. They also may cluster geographically; these districts can be neighbourhoods where workers reside or places of work (industrial quarters where labour is performed). The intrametropolitan spatial division of labour is perhaps best conceived as the relationships among employment concentrations in industrial niches and places of work shaped in large measure by the geographies of residence. The analysis of six immigrant ...
Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants disperse from ethnic neighborhoods as they tr... more Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants disperse from ethnic neighborhoods as they translate socioeconomic gains into more housing space and better residential environs. Models of this process typically relate the characteristics of individual immigrants to a locational outcome. The research described in this paper also considers immigrants in neighborhood context, but asks to what extent partnership and household composition shapes neighborhood location. This move" scales down" spatial assimilation research ...
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implementation to local state actors. This study extends this research by analyzing how labor unions shape the
implementation of state immigration policy and innovate institutional practices that affect regulatory spaces for
immigrants at the local level. Using a case study of the hotel union in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article
examines the origin, content, and implementation of immigration provisions recently negotiated in the union’s
contracts. These contract provisions mediate the implementation of state immigration policies by specifying rules
that govern employer actions in response to immigration enforcement activities by the Department of Homeland
Security and other federal agencies, including admittance to the workplace, inspection of I-9 forms, and Social
Security no-match letters. The contracts also establish nondiscrimination protections for immigrant workers,
such as guaranteed leave to attend immigration proceedings. The legal codification of these protections and the
robust practices of union enforcement yield “enclaves of rights” at the local level, further contributing to the
highly uneven space of security for immigrant residents in the United States The article concludes by examining
the possibility that unions—given their influence in local labor markets, their federated (or national) structures,
and their role in the broader moral economy—could extend these rights beyond the confines of the enclave.
Key Words: immigrant labor, immigrant rights, immigration policy, unions, worker rights.
implementation to local state actors. This study extends this research by analyzing how labor unions shape the
implementation of state immigration policy and innovate institutional practices that affect regulatory spaces for
immigrants at the local level. Using a case study of the hotel union in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article
examines the origin, content, and implementation of immigration provisions recently negotiated in the union’s
contracts. These contract provisions mediate the implementation of state immigration policies by specifying rules
that govern employer actions in response to immigration enforcement activities by the Department of Homeland
Security and other federal agencies, including admittance to the workplace, inspection of I-9 forms, and Social
Security no-match letters. The contracts also establish nondiscrimination protections for immigrant workers,
such as guaranteed leave to attend immigration proceedings. The legal codification of these protections and the
robust practices of union enforcement yield “enclaves of rights” at the local level, further contributing to the
highly uneven space of security for immigrant residents in the United States The article concludes by examining
the possibility that unions—given their influence in local labor markets, their federated (or national) structures,
and their role in the broader moral economy—could extend these rights beyond the confines of the enclave.
Key Words: immigrant labor, immigrant rights, immigration policy, unions, worker rights.