Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy 

About: Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Population & Immigration. It has an ISSN identifier of 1074-1917. Over the lifetime, 65 publications have been published receiving 362 citations.

Shades of Belonging: Latinos and Racial Identity

Abstract: 1. Introduction In a now familiar decennial ritual, Americans completed their census questionnaires in the spring of 2000. Most identified their race by selecting one or more of the five standard race categories--White, Black, American Indian, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. But for millions of Americans the standard race categories did not fit (Figure 1). By the millions, these Americans ticked the last available box, identifying themselves as "some other race" (SOR). Numbered at 15 million, these "some other race" Americans constituted a group larger than Asians and American Indians combined. And size was not the only distinguishing characteristic of the SOR population. The vast majority is also of Hispanic origin. (1) Their Hispanic ethnic origin was clear because the census makes a distinction between the concepts of race and ethnicity and therefore tabulates Hispanic origin separate from race (Figure 1). (2) Among the 246 million non-Hispanic Americans, the SOR category was far less attractive. Fewer than half a million non-Hispanics ticked off "some other race" (Table 1). And these half-million respondents amounted to less than 1 percent of all non-Hispanics. In contrast, the SOR category drew in 42 percent of the Hispanic population. In fact, among Hispanics only White Hispanics comprised a larger share of the Hispanic population (48 percent). Even with 31 different standard single and multiple race combinations to choose from, the vast majority of Hispanics in the United States fell into just these two categories. Nearly half identified themselves as White, a racial identity that they shared with the majority (69 percent) of non-Hispanics. And most of the remaining Hispanics selected SOR, a category only sparsely populated by non-Hispanics. This pattern of Hispanic race responses was not the result of an organized political campaign. In fact, estimates of the size and potential political clout of the Hispanic population are tied to the Hispanic origin question, not to the race question. So why do some Hispanics choose White while others choose SOR? Are these two groups of Hispanics one and the same in other respects? Evidence from several sources suggests that SOR Hispanics are different than White Hispanics, and the differences fall into a consistent pattern. This report details those differences using data from the 2000 Census, showing that SOR Hispanics are less educated, less likely to be citizens, poorer, less likely to speak English exclusively and less often intermarried with non-Hispanic Whites. Focus group responses and attitudinal survey data support these findings. The socioeconomic profiles, the attitudes, the language usage and even the reported political behavior of SOR Hispanics consistently place them at a distance from non-Hispanic Whites. In comparison, White Hispanics consistently occupy the intermediate ground between SOR Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites. Even after removing immigrants from the analyses, compared to White U.S.-born Hispanics, SOR Hispanics occupy a more marginalized socioeconomic position, more often report having experienced discrimination and less often report behaviors consistent with strong civic bonds. These results are significant because they show that for Hispanics racial identity is not immutable. Rather, it is at least partially a function of education, citizenship, civic participation and economic status. However, these results do not necessarily mean that the color lines in American society are fading. With the growth of the Hispanic population, the boundaries are shifting, at least for Latinos, to encompass factors other than skin color. The Latino experience suggests that Whiteness remains an important measure of belonging, stature and acceptance. And a large segment of the Hispanic population, SOR Hispanics, may be feeling left out. Much of the following data is derived from the 2000 Census, 5 percent sample. …

Tolerance in Schools for Latino Students: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract: INTRODUCTION Schools have imposed harsher sanctions on students for minor disruptive behavior, causing a systematic pushing out of students from schools and into the juvenile justice and criminal justice system. (1) This trajectory is often referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline. The pipeline is facilitated by several trends in education that negatively impact students of color, particularly African American and Latino students. Some of these trends include growing poverty rates and declining school funding, high-stakes testing, and overrepresentation in special education tracks. (2) The focus of this article is on school administrators' reliance on zero-tolerance and exclusionary policies, which play an integral role in feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Zero-tolerance policies are the most severe forms of school discipline today. These policies strip school administrators of discretion and impose predetermined penalties for a given infraction, without consideration of mitigating circumstances or unique situations that may have led to the incident. (3) The dramatic increase of the use of these extremely severe disciplinary practices has resulted in too many arrests and referrals of students to the juvenile and criminal justice system each year. (4) School districts nationwide have adopted these policies because of a perceived rise in crime and violence in primary and secondary schools. (5) Through the application of zero-tolerance policies, schools indirectly drive children into the juvenile justice system by criminalizing a wide variety of student behavior, including behavior as minor as tardiness, absences, noncompliance, and disrespect. (6) HISTORY OF ZERO-TOLERANCE AND HARSH DISCIPLINARY POLICIES Over the past twenty years, the rate of violence among K-12 youth in the United States has steadily declined. (7) Schools also remain one of the safest places for the nation's children. (8) Between 1992 and 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that annual rates of serious violent crimes were lower at school than away from school. (9) Despite schools remaining one of the safest places for children, schools have adopted many of the punitive policies of the criminal and juvenile justice systems as a means of disciplining students. The ideological origins of punitive policies such as zero tolerance can be traced to the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s when youth of color were viewed as violent predators, which became a widely accepted stereotype. (10) During this time, the media focused on youth gangs and the rise of the teen "superpredators" that would come of age by 2010. Many of these teen superpredators were urban African Americans and Latinos, who were described as "relentlessly violent." Media coverage exaggerated the extent of gang membership and gang violence among youth. According to "Framing Children in the News: The Face and Color of Youth Crime in America," two-thirds of violent crimes covered focused on youth under the age of twenty-five. (11) The rhetoric of the rise of the teen superpredator set the stage for substantive policy changes in the area of student discipline. (12) In 1994, U.S. Congress passed the Federal Gun-Free Schools Act (GFSA) in response to school shootings and an alleged surge in adolescent violence. (13) The act mandated that every state enact a law requiring districts to expel students for at least one year for bringing a firearm to school. The GFSA paved the way for more punitive disciplinary policies. The National Center for Education Statistics found that during the 1996-1997 school year, 91 percent of public schools imposed zero-tolerance policies for weapons other than firearms; 87 percent of schools used zero-tolerance policies for alcohol offenses and 88 percent had such policies for drugs; 79 percent of schools had zero-tolerance policies for violence; and 79 percent also employed harsh policies for tobacco violations. …

Local Immigration Regulation: A Problematic Trend in Public Policy

Abstract: Introduction A looming issue for Latinos across the country is the proliferation of new local ordinances targeting undocumented immigrants. Such ordinances usually seek to impose harsh sanctions on landlords who rent to undocumented immigrants and/or employers who hire them. In many of the debates around such ordinances there is a fusion of undocumented immigrants and Latinos. This blurring of distinct (but overlapping) populations is dangerous, as such debates have heightened anti-Latino sentiment and such ordinances are likely to cause discrimination against Latinos through landlord and employer efforts to avoid possible violations. These ordinances are, therefore, of particular concern for those interested in public policy that affects Latinos. Between May 2006 and September 2007, 131 cities and counties in thirty states considered ordinances targeting undocumented immigrants. (1) These ordinances contain five major aspects: rental provisions, employer sanctions, English as the official language, day labor prohibitions, and police enforcement of immigration law. The first three often come as a package and are sometimes called the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, or IIRA. Other locales have considered a wide variety of other measures. For instance, Prince William County, VA, adopted an ordinance (07-894) denying undocumented immigrants county services such as elder care, drug abuse prevention, and aid to the disabled. (2) According to the 9 July 2006 San Francisco Chronicle, the town of Milford, MA, amended their city regulations to prohibit any check cashing businesses, which often cater to immigrants. (3) Forty-four percent of localities have passed at least one prohibition. While this article focuses exclusively on the local level, it should be noted that there are also an unprecedented number of bills being considered and passed at the state level (NCSL 2007). This article seeks to lay out the contours of the local ordinance phenomenon and also the principal arguments against such regulation. The article is based on over sixty interviews with members of communities where such ordinances have been considered. The members of the community are mainly representatives of non-governmental organizations, landlords, business owners, public officials, and police officers. Half of the interviews were conducted in a case study of Escondido, CA, and the others via telephone in fifteen cities in fourteen states. We also reviewed news articles from across the country, legal documents, proposed and passed ordinances, and videos of city council debates. Finally, we analyzed census data for the 131 localities. It is clear from the data collected that there has been a general lack of accurate information in the consideration of these ordinances. We will conclude by reviewing some of the common faulty assumptions on which the ordinance movement relies and the demographic shifts that have driven the perceived crisis. Background of Ordinances There is no doubt that undocumented immigration has increased significantly in recent years. The leading demographer in the field, Jeffrey Passel, estimates that the unauthorized population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2004. Perhaps more significant to the proliferation of ordinances is the dispersal of undocumented immigrants to states that had previously seen any unauthorized and in many cases any immigrants and Latinos in general. In 1990, six states accounted for 80 percent of the undocumented population. By 2004, these six states were home to only 59 percent of undocumented immigrants (Fortuny, Capps, and Passel 2007, 45). While still housing the majority of undocumented immigrants, the six states account for fewer than 20 percent of the ordinances. Although the diffusion certainly contributed to rising concern across much of the country, we have not found a direct correlation between the number of proposed ordinances and the rise in the undocumented population in a particular state. …

Advancing School Readiness for Young Hispanic Children Through Universal Prekindergarten

Abstract: Hispanics account for over one-fifth of newborns in the United States. Hispanic children, on average, achieve at lower levels from kindergarten forward than the non-Hispanic White majority and Asian Americans. Increasing the percentage of Hispanic children who enter kindergarten “ready” for school constitutes one of the nation’s most important current agenda items in education. Given that it is believed that the early childhood years provide the best window for improving academic trajectories for Hispanic children, this article describes current findings and offers recommendations to expand high-quality universal prekindergarten (UPK) programs for Hispanics in the United States.

Unaccompanied Child Migrants in "Crisis": New Surge or Case of Arrested Development?

Abstract: Crisis and Surge In spring and summer of 2014, news accounts broke about a growing "crisis" and "surge" of unaccompanied Central American minors front El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras entering the United States. The news was sudden and swift, accompanied by photos of children lying about on floors, crowded behind prison bars, or overflowing into hallways of detention facilities. By the end of that summer, the US government would report 66,000 apprehensions of unaccompanied children, with more than 50,000 of them front El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (1) as well as thousands of others apprehended and detained with family members while pursuing asylum claims or fighting deportation. The Obama administration responded to the increased flow of Central Americans with its own enforcement "surge," ultimately requesting $3.7 billion to manage the humanitarian emergency. (2) Alejandro Mayorkas, deputy secretary at the Department of Home land Security (DHS), stated, "We are surging resources to increase our capacity to detain individuals and adults with children, and to handle immigration court hearings." (3) The administration opened emergency detention centers at military bases in Texas and California, expanded the use of ankle bracelets to monitor freed migrants, provided emergency legal counsel to children, and accelerated the processing and deportation of migrants by strategically deploying immigration judges to high docket courtrooms along the southern border. It also provided Central American countries with $255 million for repatriation and reintegration programs and attempted to quell rumors of easy admission to the United States, sending Vice President Joe Biden to Latin America to meet with the presidents of El Salvador and Guatemala as well as senior officials front Honduras. (4) The "crisis" and "surge" served all sides of the debate, demonstrating an unenforced and out-of-control border for anti-immigrant forces, a cruel and rushed detention apparatus for migrant advocates, and the urgent need for comprehensive immigration reform (GIR) for the Obama administration. It caused the administration to delay promised executive actions (5) on deportation policies in the absence of CIR and to more permanently expand detention capacity for children and families beyond merely emergency incarceration. As apprehensions led to deportation and asylum cases, government lawyers maintained the "crisis" discourse, utilizing procedures not used against migrants since the period immediately following the September 11 attacks. DHS attorneys argued, for example. that Central American refugees represented, collectively, a "national security threat" that would "encourage human trafficking" and that they should be categorically denied bond and release from the newly created restrictive detention facilities; in other words, the minors and their parents represented a "mass migration" and should be treated en masse instead of as individuals. (6) These prosecutorial decisions led to accelerated court processes not meant to deliver justice sooner, but rather to deter future migrations by deporting today's migrants more quickly. Circumventing careful individual deliberations of an asylum seeker's case, immigration court proceedings entailed the prosecutorial management of "surge dockets," or "rocket dockets," which gathered dozens of children together for their collective day in court in a rushed process. (7) The increased movement of asylum seekers, emergency response by government. and the vexed debate locally and nationally all pointed to a migration crisis. But was this truly a crisis and sudden surge in migration? Prior to the story breaking in the spring of 2014, immigration lawyers in South Texas had reported since 2008 seeing increases in the number of migrants--primarily women and children, the majority from Central American countries, and some of them unaccompanied--entering detention centers. …