“Felons, Not Families”: U.S. Immigration Policies and the Construction of an American Underclass

Abstract:Amid the recent rescinding of DACA and DAPA, this article examines two competing discursive constructions of undocumented immigrants: as “families,” a move that coincides with efforts to offer more inclusive immigration reform; or as “felons,” a move that coincides with efforts to offer more exclusive immigration reforms. In examining these binary depictions of undocumented immigrant populations, this article argues that the deployment of the figure of the felon or criminal to describe immigrants casts immigration as a criminal anomaly and contributes to more punishing immigration policies, troubling kinship trends, and the criminalization of undocumented populations and Latinos more generally.