Model Immigrants and Undesirable Aliens: The Cost of Immigration Reform in the 1990s

Christina Gerken examines the changing debates around immigration that surrounded the passage of landmark legislation by Congress in the mid-1990s, arguing that it represented a new, neoliberal way of thinking and talking about immigration. She concludes that the passage of pathbreaking legislation was characterized by a useful tension between neoliberal assumptions and hidden anxieties about race, class, gender, and sexuality.