Abstract

In President Bill Clinton's 1995 State of the Union address; we got our first glimpse of immigration being framed as a national crisis (Bill Clinton, 2019). He asserted that "illegal aliens" posed a threat to our country, to law-abiding taxpayers and that more needed to be done to protect our nation's borders (Bill Clinton, 2019). This rhetoric would be utilized by future Presidents like Bush and Trump. When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he did so with the assertion that he was going to be tough on immigration, and he made the unfounded claim, like Clinton, that immigrants are dangerous and a threat to the safety of Americans (Moreno & Price, 2016). By having immigration continuously framed as a threat to national security, especially in a post 9/11 America, people have become more amenable to treating immigrants as criminals, detaining them in less than satisfactory conditions, and isolating them from the rest of society. Support for privatization of public services has roots in neoliberal ideology which asserts that the best thing the government can do for the nation's economy is to utilize and expand upon private-public partnerships. These partnerships have resulted in market-like mechanisms being embedded into the public domain; immigration policy is not an exception (Moreno & Price, 2016).

Document Type

Paper

Student Type

Undergraduate

Department, Program, or Center

Department of Criminal Justice (CLA)

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Publication Date

4-11-2023

Comments

2023 recipient of the Henry and Mary Kearse Writing Award

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