Disaffected black and white youth: The role of unemployment duration and perceived job discrimination*

While unauthorized immigration has existed in the USA since the inception of immigration laws in the early twentieth century, ‘illegality’ did not become a central concern in mainstream debate until the late 1970s. Existing scholarship has developed two lines of argument to explain the salience of illegality: a state-centred approach that sees bureaucrats pushing forth the category, and a ‘bottom-up’ approach that emphasizes the grass-roots activism of restrictionist organizations effectively disguising their nativism by appealing to law and order. The data collected here builds on but complicates the state-centred explanation, and points away from the ‘bottom-up’ approach. I locate a critical juncture in the immigration debate during the early 1970s and argue that the shift towards the focus on illegality as a point of concern was due to an alignment of interests that brought an array of civil society organizations commonly understood as progressive to coincide with sectors of the bureaucracy.