Whom Should We Serve? A Discourse Analysis of Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants

Abstract

We present a discourse analysis of social work practitioners’
commentaries on undocumented immigrants that were collected
from a survey of practicing social workers’ attitudes toward immigration
and immigrants. Analyzing 198 open-ended comments,
we explore the discursive mechanisms practitioners employ to construct
undocumented immigrants, and their professional responsibilities
toward them. These views are illustrative of the ways in
which the profession determines inclusion and exclusion, writ
large in national immigration policies and laws and played out
in the arenas of social work and social services. Disparate views of
practitioners highlight tensions in the profession’s relationships to
law and social policies as well as to its own ethics and identity.

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Whom Should We Serve? A Discourse
Analysis of Social Workers’ Commentary
on Undocumented Immigrants
Yoosun Park a & Rupaleem Bhuyan b
a School for Social Work, Smith College, Northhampton,
Massachusetts, USA
b Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Available online: 09 Dec 2011
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Journal of Progressive Human Services, 23:18–40, 2012
Copyright ©Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1042-8232 print/1540-7616 online
DOI: 10.1080/10428232.2011.605745
Whom Should We Serve? A Discourse
Analysis of Social Workers’ Commentary
on Undocumented Immigrants
YOOSUN PARK
School for Social Work, Smith College, Northhampton, Massachusetts, USA
RUPALEEM BHUYAN
Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
We present a discourse analysis of social work practitioners’
commentaries on undocumented immigrants that were collected
from a survey of practicing social workers’ attitudes toward immi-
gration and immigrants. Analyzing 198 open-ended comments,
we explore the discursive mechanisms practitioners employ to con-
struct undocumented immigrants, and their professional respon-
sibilities toward them. These views are illustrative of the ways in
which the profession determines inclusion and exclusion, writ
large in national immigration policies and laws and played out
in the arenas of social work and social services. Disparate views of
practitioners highlight tensions in the profession’s relationships to
law and social policies as well as to its own ethics and identity.
KEYWORDS immigration, undocumented immigrants, social
work ethics, qualitative methods, discourse analysis, law and social
work
Xenophobia and cycles of nativism have always been a part of American
political and popular discourses concerning immigration (Higham, 1988).
Alarmist discourses framing immigrants as national security threats (terror-
ists of today, anarchists and communists of the past); as public burdens
(health care burdens of today, paupers and dependents of the past); as pub-
lic health dangers (HIV/AIDS of today, tuberculosis and cholera in the past);
and as unfair labor competition (the Latino day-worker of today, the Asian
Address correspondence to Yoosun Park, School for Social Work, Smith College, Lilly
Hall, Northhampton, MA 01063, USA. E-mail: ypark2@smith.edu
18
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 19
coolies of the past) are recurring themes in the history of U.S. immigra-
tion (Park & Kemp, 2006). Legal status has never been a protection against
anti-immigrant sentiment or punitive policies, but undocumented immigrants
have stood out throughout the history of U.S. immigration as a particularly
vulnerable population. The establishment of border control reaches back
to the restrictionist era of the 1920s when the racist ideology of Nordic
superiority shaped immigration law (Abbott, 1922). The ignoble 11-year his-
tory of Operation Wetback, the draconian police actions to round up and
deport massive numbers of Mexican temporary workers and immigrants in
the 1950s (Astor, 2009; Buff, 2008; Ngai, 2004), reverberate today in the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on workplaces and towns
populated by undocumented workers of Latin American origin.
Undocumented immigration is also a problematic issue of long standing
for social workers. As early as 1913, the call “for closer patrol of the Mexican
border” was coupled with concerns about the “dependency and delinquency
cases among the Mexicans in the southern part of California” (Blanpied,
1913, p. 43). In 1979, Raymond Salcido commented in Social Work that “the
influx of ‘illegal aliens’ from Mexico to the United States” (p. 306) was an
issue confronting both the nation and social work. Moreover, as Gelfand and
Bialik-Gilad (1989) noted a decade later,
... as is often the case, social workers experience firsthand the effects
of social policy decisions on their clients. Unless the majority of undoc-
umented aliens returns to their native country, social workers will find
themselves attempting to remedy the effects of an immigration policy
that prevents the undocumented alien from attaining satisfactory living
conditions. (p. 23)
In today’s practice field, immigration is no longer a specialized practice
area. Because of shifts in labor markets, immigrants are settling in increasing
numbers in suburban and rural communities that have not been key des-
tinations in the past (Passel & Cohn, 2009). All social workers who work
with individuals and families, whether in schools, hospitals, mental health
agencies, or social income/assistance offices, are increasingly likely, at one
time or another, to encounter clients affected by the issue of immigration
status.
The growing localization of immigration legislation and enforcement
(Kretsedemas, 2008; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2006, 2007),
with drastic anti-immigrant legislation passed in Arizona, Alabama, and
Georgia, among other states, poses difficulties for even the most consci-
entious practitioner to keep abreast of policy shifts that shape their work
with immigrant populations. Today’s practitioners are also more likely than
ever to encounter immigrant families whose members have vastly different
experiences of migration and settlement from each other, including unequal
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20 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
social and political rights related to differing immigration statuses. In 2008,
the estimated 11.9 million undocumented immigrants in the United States
composed 4% of the nation’s population and 5.4% of its workforce. Of the
11.9 million, 1.5 million (12.6%) were children under age 18; 3.8 million
(37%) were parents of the approximately 4 million U.S.-born children who
live in mixed-status households, families in which at least one parent is an
undocumented immigrant (Passel & Cohn, 2009).
Recently, a number of social work scholars and professionals have
begun to argue for the profession’s need to pay attention to the ways in
which immigration policy and patterns of migration into the United States
affect social work practice (Engstrom & Okamura, 2008; Furman, Negi, &
Cisneros-Howard, 2008; Organista, 2008; Padilla, Shapiro, Fernáez-Castro, &
Faulkner, 2008). Through the Migration and Child Welfare National Network,
social workers in the child welfare field have sought to develop and dissem-
inate information for practitioners and those in the policy and advocacy
arenas. Similarly, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) pub-
lished the Immigration Policy Toolkit (2008b) to provide “policy information
and tools to promote the competency of social workers in the immigra-
tion field, to fight discrimination against immigrants, and to take social and
political action in support of the rights of immigrants” (p. 2).
That the field has begun to produce guidelines for practitioners and
studies of the topic is welcome news. But a fundamental gap remains in the
professional discourse. Even as the field begins to take steps to formulate its
response to immediate practice problems, the questions and concerns that
undergird social work’s relationship to the issue of undocumented immigra-
tion remain unexamined: what is the profession’s relationship to the law?
To social policies? How does and should the profession make sense of its
own ethics, politics, and identity in relationship to those laws and policies?
Through the analysis of the ways in which current professionals position
themselves on the issue of undocumented immigration and understand their
professional ethics and obligations to those immigrants, this study explores
these foundational questions.
METHODOLOGY
We present a discourse analysis of social workers’ views on undocumented
immigrants and the role of social work collected from an online sur-
vey exploring practitioners’ attitudes toward immigration and immigrants.
A convenience sample of 1124 post-BSW and/or post-MSW practicing social
workers in 47 states participated in this exploratory survey. The 82-item
survey included one open-ended question: “Do you have any final com-
ments?” The query elicited 198 comments, ranging in length from a single
sentence to paragraphs of up to 450 words. More than half of the comments
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 21
referred specifically to undocumented immigrants; the majority exhibited a
troubled, if not conflicted, stance on the topic of undocumented immigra-
tion. We examined the 198 comments to explore the particular discursive
mechanisms social workers employ to construct undocumented immigrants
and their professional responsibilities toward them. This survey used a non-
random sample of social workers, so these data cannot be used to make a
generalization about the views of all social workers on the issue of undoc-
umented people. We have used the views expressed in these qualitative
texts, instead, as exemplars of the kinds of challenges social work practi-
tioners encounter in their daily practice. Thus, we have not enumerated the
frequencies of the various views respondents exhibited but, following estab-
lished conventions in qualitative research, we have reported the general
trends in our data by using terms such as some,many,orfew.
Our reading of the textual data is a work of discourse analysis, pred-
icated on the poststructuralist conception of discourse that “refers both
to the way language systematically organizes concepts, knowledge, and
experience and to the ways in which it excludes alternative forms of orga-
nization. Thus, the boundaries between language, social action, knowledge
and power are blurred” (Finlayson, 1999, p. 62). From this perspective, no
usage of language can ever be considered neutral, impartial, or apolitical.
The respondents’ uses of particular discursive strategies (e.g., the specific use
of terminology) are understood, therefore, not as unbiased acts of descrip-
tion but as constitutive modes of power that identify; they demarcate the
center from the periphery, the inside from the outside, the normal from the
deviant, the self from the Other. Working from the position that identities are
produced through discursive strategies of differentiation, categorization, and
nomination (Mountz, 2004), we analyzed the construction of undocumented
immigrants as particular kinds of identities, or “subjects,” in the language
of post-structuralist discourse theory. In applying this concept of discourse,
we attempted to shift the mode of inquiry from the usual “What is this?” to
“What does it do?” (Halperin, 1995). We examined the texts to investigate
the particular ways in which our respondents represent, constitute, and thus
make sense of undocumented immigrants and immigration and to explore
the meanings and significance such representations and constituted identities
might have for social work.
Our analysis was further guided by Foucauldian conceptualizations of
bio-power. The regulation of citizen and non-citizen subjects is “one of the
essential characteristics of modern biopolitics” illustrative of “its constant
need to redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is
inside from what is outside” (Agamben, 1998, p. 131). It takes place through
overt acts of sovereignty (e.g., border control and workplace raids) and
through the indirect production of knowledge (e.g., social work writings
about immigrants) that differentiate between legitimate and non-legitimate
subjects (Nadesan, 2008).
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22 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
Working from this theoretical position, we considered all terms used
to designate foreign-born persons who reside and work without govern-
mental authorization within the United States to have political implications.
Our decision to use the term undocumented immigrant (at times short-
ened to the undocumented for brevity) to refer to this population, rather
than the official term, unauthorized resident (Hoefer, Rytina, & Baker, 2008,
p. 1) employed by the U. S. Department of Homeland Security (USDHS),
or the popular terms illegal alien or illegal immigrant, is thus a marker
of our stance on the topic. Through the usage of the term undocumented
immigrant, we aim to underscore our understanding that significant con-
sequences are attached to undocumented status and to assert our position
that legality is a contested sociopolitical construction rather than a neutral
descriptor of personal identity. Conversely, our disinclination to use the term
unauthorized signals our analytical position that the concept of authority
is itself central to the debate on immigration. We oppose the terms ille-
gal alien and illegal immigrant as being conflations of the legitimacy of
persons with legal designations of immigration status that symbolize intoler-
ance for and discrimination against immigrants who lack the legal rights of
residence.
Drawing on our empirical data, we examined the social work profession
and its professionals’ relationship to law, social policies, and its own profes-
sional ethics and identity. We present our analysis to further the discussion of
the uncertain professional terrain, fraught with an array of ethical, moral, and
legal dilemmas, in which social work practice involving immigrants occurs
today. Social workers’ views of undocumented immigrants are illustrative
of the ways in which the profession determines the deserving—inclusion
versus exclusion—writ large in immigration policies and laws and played
out in the smaller but parallel arenas of social work and social services.
Who deserves help? Who is included and who excluded? The questions are
posed daily in the practice arena but the profession has done little to unearth
and examine the complex dynamics involved.
ANALYSIS
Whom Should We Serve?
Our respondents offered a range of views on the topic of undocumented
immigrants. A handful of respondents clearly espoused the view that social
workers have a definite ethical obligation to serve undocumented immi-
grants, despite their lack of legal status: “I believe that it is social workers’
responsibility to serve all people in need of their services.” Others, equally
clearly, articulated the position that social work is categorically not obligated
to serve the undocumented: “I am 100% opposed to illegal immigrants being
eligible for ANY public benefits.”
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 23
The majority of respondents, however, expressed more conflicted views
of undocumented immigrants. As one respondent explained, “I want to give
my time to anyone in need. When people are undocumented it is hurtful
to see needs not met. On an individual basis, I want everyone to receive
treatment and have access to resources. There are times, however, when
I am frustrated and I feel emotionally conflicted about the overall issue
regarding undocumented immigrants.” Another respondent explained that
there are contradictory demands at work in the field:
It clearly is a struggle in Child Protective Services when children who
are undocumented have to be removed from the home and there is NO
funding available for them... . Great demands are imposed on Child
Welfare to meet the needs of undocumented families seeking assistance.
There is nothing more difficult than to have to turn a family in need
away solely because of their residency, or lack there of, status.
Still another respondent pithily encapsulated the situation: “Illegal immigra-
tion puts every social worker into an ethical dilemma.”
These are, at first glance, familiar sentiments, unobjectionable in their
seemingly accurate description of the field as it stands. But they are views
that merit further examination. The demographic data on undocumented
immigrants clearly indicate that high rates of poverty in conjunction with
the lack of social safety nets and protective legal structures render them
a population that defines marginalization. Despite high rates of workforce
participation (Passel, Capps, & Fix, 2004), undocumented immigrants remain
disproportionately poor, at “nearly double the poverty rate for children of
U.S.-born parents (18%) or for U.S.-born adults (10%)” (Passel & Cohn,
2009, p. iv). Undocumented immigrants are concentrated in the low-wage
labor market (Passel & Cohn, 2009) and are, subsequently, less likely to
have private health insurance (Merrell, 2007) and other forms of work-
related benefits. With the exception of emergency health care and public
education for children, undocumented immigrants have consistently been
ineligible for all federal public assistance programs, including food stamps,
Social Security, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, and Medicare (Fix, Zimmerman, &
Passel, 2001; U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2008).
Given the professional mission “to enhance human well-being and help
meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the
needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and liv-
ing in poverty” (National Association of Social Workers, 2008a, p. 1), why
is the provision of services to undocumented immigrants experienced as a
source of ethical conflict in social work? Wherein lies the rub? The core
of the ethical conflict was usually represented by respondents as the ten-
sion that underlies the need to reconcile two contradictory ideals: (1) the
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24 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
professional and personal ideals of plurality and inclusion and (2) conceptu-
alizations of immigrants and immigration that promote and justify exclusion
and selectivity.
The conflict at the center of the national debate on immigration is the
contradiction between the ideals of inclusivity at the center of liberalism and
a nation’s right to determine the composition of its membership, a core tenet
of the system of modern statehood (Ngai, 2004). The practitioners’ com-
ments examined in the following sections indicate that a parallel dilemma
is at play in the profession. At debate in the textual responses are con-
flicts about whether social work’s avowed values of diversity, equity, and
social justice should and do extend to the undocumented, a population that
is placed outside of its polity by the legal code of the nation. Particularly,
given the ever-present scarcity of resources in social services, a point on
which all respondents agreed, how should the profession make sense of
the undocumented immigrants’ need for services? Whom do we serve? Or
perhaps more to the point, whom are we obligated to serve?
Transgressive Bodies
The undocumented were viewed by many respondents as transgressive bod-
ies lodged without authorization in our midst. Statements such as “Illegal
citizens SHOULD migrate through the LEGAL system in order to become
USA citizen. NO BENEFITS TO ILLEGALS!!!!!!!” demonstrate that just as “ ‘ille-
gal’ and ‘irregular’ migrants are positioned outside the conventional bounds
of the state” (Willen, 2007a, p. 2), they were also viewed as a population
positioned outside the bounds of social work.
This body of responses, invoking often the discourses of legality, is
typified by the statement “Illegal means not legal. I am strongly in favor
of legal immigrants, but cannot condone people coming into the country
illegally and using resources that are scarce enough for the people who are
here legally.” The reliance on the rule of law to invoke the illegitimacy of
the undocumented is, at first glance, a reasonable stance: “I believe strongly
in the rule of law. Provide a path to legal status or deport but don’t sit on the
fence.” Such statements insist that existing immigration laws, part of the legal
code of the nation, should be followed and respected. There are, however,
at least two arguments to be levied against this stance.
First, the sentiment that “I FEEL THAT IMMIGRANTS CAN COME TO
THIS COUNTRY I WILL NEVER DISPUTE THAT. I WANT THEM FROM
WHERE EVER THEY COME FROM TO DO IT THE RIGHT WAY!!!!” occludes
the reality that existing legal mechanisms are insufficient to meet the demand
for entry. The choice for most of those who enter (or remain) without
authorization is not between doing so with or without authorization but
between doing so without or not at all. The immigration scholar Claudia
Sadowski-Smith (2008) notes, “while current U.S. immigration legislation no
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 25
longer allows exclusion on racial or national grounds or specifically targets
unskilled workers, it has retained its class-based bias, containing few legal
options for those willing to work in the unskilled occupations that domi-
nate today’s postindustrial U.S. economy” (p. 782). Second, as Nicholas De
Genova (2004) explains about the undocumented: “theirs is an ‘illegality’ that
does not involve a crime against anyone; rather, migrant ‘illegality’ stands
only for a transgression against the sovereign authority of the nation-state”
(p. 175).
To accept the illegality of the undocumented at face value is also to
accept without critique the indisputable justice of immigration law and the
structures of society that enable and uphold existing policies. This appar-
ent faith in the rightness of law is problematic for a few reasons. The
history of U.S. immigration laws and their application have long been crit-
icized by scholars across the disciplines as a history replete with bigotry
(Fairchild, 2004; Glenn, 2002; Higham, 1988; Jacobson, 1998; Luibheld, 2002;
Ngai, 1999). The legitimacy of nation-states, and “analyses that take national
boundaries as fixed, implicitly timeless, or even always meaningful” (Briggs,
McCormick, & Way, 2008, p. 627), have also been deeply contested. The
institution of national citizenship itself has been critiqued as an exclusionary
mechanism maintained through the production of noncitizens’ “illegality”
(Gutiéez & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2008, p. 506).
The responses invoking the discourse of legality represented illegality as
an individual transgression. Their comments did not acknowledge the “con-
ditions of structural inequality and structural violence that shape migrants’
position and status” (Willen, 2007b, p. 13). For them, as De Genova (2004)
argues, migrant illegality is understood as a “natural” fact: “Indeed, ‘illegal-
ity’ looks most like a positive transgression—and can thereby be equated
with the behavior of Mexican migrants rather than the instrumental action
of immigration law” (p. 177). The actions of individuals appear to be easier
to problematize than the functions of the law, a complex abstraction that is
much more elusive in character. One respondent explained:
People are sympathetic to the plight that illegal immigrants may face in
their countries of origin, but it comes down to the fact that by being in
this country illegally, without documentation, they are breaking the law.
Personally I have no problem with immigrants of any race that come to
the county legally but I do not believe that those that are here illegally
should be given all the privileges of US citizens. There is a process in
place for them to come to the country legally, they need to follow it. If
they don’t, they should be deported.
International practices concerning the adjudication of refugee status
offer an analytical analogue. To be a refugee in the United States, one must
be extra-territorial. Crossing a national border, usually without invitation
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26 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
or explicit permission, is what differentiates an internally displaced person
(IDP) from a refugee (United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees, 2001).
The act of border crossing is not, therefore, in itself an act that necessarily
renders a person illegal. What differentiates the undocumented immigrant
from a refugee is not the fact of border crossing but the reason for doing so.
Refugees cross for a set of sanctioned reasons (e.g., religious or political per-
secution); undocumented immigrants cross for a set of unsanctioned reasons
(e.g., poverty). The illegality clearly resides, then, not in the act of border
crossing itself but in the international and national policies that define one
set of insupportable conditions as valid while disqualifying others. Illegality,
in other words, is a socio-legal construction rather than a condition of being.
The respondents’ assessment of the illegality of the undocumented as
a personal characteristic rather than a societal condition, the idea that their
“illegality is less an action than a facet of illegal aliens’ very being” (Coutin,
2005b, p. 7) was also constructed by some, moreover, as an issue of morality.
Statements such as “I believe social worker assistance to the undocumented
violates the social work code of ethics as it pertains to participating in fraud”
question the undocumented immigrants’ “very existence as moral beings”
(Chavez, 2007, p. 194). Another respondent opined:
Illegal immigration is not good for any society, because it opens the door
to the violation of legal statutes that will turn into crimes and will make
[a] less safe society. Illegal immigrants come to the USA for a better life,
however any relationship that starts by violating the most basic laws of
the land will lead to a path of corruption and many crimes.
Even if amorality is not inherent, illegality predicts immorality and “corrup-
tion” to come; undocumented status acts as a kind of gateway to a life of
criminality:
It is very sad and frustrating to have youth & families who desperately
want a path to documentation but have no options. I work with teens
who have been here since childhood but have no way to become legal
citizens and disparity breeds illegal activity to support themselves and
their families.
As Susan Coutin (2005a) argues about the undocumented, “as they cross
borders without authorization, it is as though a border forms around
them, alienating them from their social surroundings and making their very
humanity questionable” (p. 199).
Mae Ngai (2004) points out that “marginalized by their position in the
lower strata of the workforce and even more so by their exclusion from
the polity, illegal aliens might be understood as a caste, unambiguously sit-
uated outside the boundaries of formal membership and social legitimacy”
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 27
(p. 2); this was an understanding evident among the responses. But what is
social work’s relationship to law? What is its responsibility for critiquing or
upholding social codes and legal policies? There are long-standing practice
arenas in social work where the articulation of law, illegality, and the pro-
vision of social services do occur: substance abuse, juvenile delinquency,
child neglect or abuse, and so on. But in none of these cases does the ille-
gality of clients’ behaviors excise the clients’ right to inclusion as recipients
of social services. What makes immigration status different? What is it about
this particular illegality that renders the undocumented outside the pale, the
irredeemable Other? Just as immigration policy is “constitutive of America’s
understanding of national membership and citizenship, drawing lines of
inclusion and exclusion that articulate a desired composition—imagined if
not necessarily realized—of the nation” (Ngai, 2004, p. 5), immigration status
appears to be, for many practitioners in our study, the place where lines of
distinction between the deserving and the undeserving are drawn.
Undeserving Bodies
One explanatory thread is found in the preponderance of responses express-
ing deep concerns about the scarcity of social service resources and the
negative impact undocumented immigrants are perceived to have on those
already insufficient resources. “It is a tragedy to witness U.S. citizens suffer-
ing because they cannot afford the healthcare they deserve and have earned
working all of their life; yet illegal immigrants are able to obtain emer-
gency medical care indefinitely.” The tenor of the commentary on this issue
ranged from vehement condemnations of the undocumented as parasitic
aliens: “I see many abuses of the health care system. We treat clients with
chronic diseases who come to the US because treatment is ‘free.’ Yet, they
are able to go on extended vacations to Asia, drive nice cars, use stolen (pur-
chased) social security numbers, etc.” to those who argued: “We, as social
workers, should be at the forefront of this issue. We should be supporting
and advocating for our immigrant families to obtain the services they need.”
But the majority of respondents were conflicted: “The nature of our profes-
sion drives us to want to help everyone, but that sometimes conflicts with
feelings of it just not being fair that people can come in illegally and be a
drain on the system.”
As a whole, this group of responses nearly always counterposed undoc-
umented immigrants against citizens, and in some responses, also to “legal”
immigrants.
I do not wish to deny essential services and support to illegal immi-
grants but there are so many needy ”citizens” and legal immigrants who
need those supports, jobs, and health care who cannot afford them or
there is insufficient quantity to meet the need. Every emergency hospital
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28 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
treatment that is provided to an illegal immigrant uses scarce resources
for citizens and those immigrants who waited in line and entered the
Country legally. Every job taken by an illegal immigrant denies that job
to a citizen or legal immigrant. Those jobs are not jobs no one else would
take. Perhaps if workers were scarcer the employers would have to pay
a living wage to attract them; or the workers could unionize to force
better wages.
Undocumented immigrants are held, in these constructions, as a pop-
ulation undeserving of social services not only because they are illegal
occupants of the communal space within the United States but because
they threaten the rightful place of legitimate inhabitants of that space. Such
a calculus of inclusion is predicated upon a legalistic construction of belong-
ing that views undocumented immigrants not only as “a potential ‘economic
burden’ or a ‘security risk,’ but an affront to conventional notions of citizen-
ship, which equate political, social, and civil rights with the criterion of legal
residence” (Kretsedemas, 2008, p. 553).
Social psychologists have shown, moreover, that “resource stress and
the salience of a potentially competitive outgroup lead to perceived group
competition for resources” (Esses, Dovidio, Jackson, & Armstrong, 2001,
p.394). As the following response illustrates, resource competition is, addi-
tionally, viewed as a zero-sum game in which “the more the other group
obtains, the less is available for one’s own group” (Esses et al., 2001, p.394):
My biggest issues re: Illegal/Undocumented Immigrants is that most that
I work with do not have insurance. I work in Oncology. I will see an
Undocumented person receiving free treatment sitting next to a senior
citizen that is about to claim bankruptcy, having gone through all retire-
ment money and having paid into the “system” his entire life. I really
struggle with that.
That among our respondents, this perception of resource stress and compe-
tition is most often expressed by hospital social workers is, in our view, a
function of the fact that emergency medical care is the only public ben-
efit legally available to undocumented populations. As one respondent
explained, greater exposure does not result in greater tolerance but in a
heightened sense of conflict:
Before I became a social worker, my views were much more liberal and
“pro” immigration. Now that I have worked as a social worker, I see how
much undocumented immigrants drain our social service systems and
require much more service than they provide. Thus, becoming a social
worker has made me less sympathetic to the plight of undocumented
workers in this country.
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 29
Whether the undocumented immigrants benefit or burden society in
overall economic terms is said to be a “matter of dispute” (Finch, 1990,
p. 245). But that the estimated 8.3 million undocumented immigrant workers
(Passel & Cohn, 2009) are a significant part of the American labor force and
the U.S. economy, providing “services that support the lifestyle of not just
the prosperous but many middle-class Americans” (Ngai, 2004, p. 266), is dif-
ficult to refute. Furthermore, taxes paid by undocumented immigrants who
are ineligible to claim those services constitute the bulk of the “more than
$586 billion accumulated in the earned suspense file, or unmatched Social
Security Administration (SSA) contributions” (U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
2008, p. 6), increasing by about $66 billion each year. The undocumented
also pay real estate, sales, and other consumption taxes that fund the major-
ity of schooling and other local services (Capps & Fix, 2005). That the
undocumented can be said to drain social service resources is, in other
words, not so easily established.
For the respondents in this group, then, the ethical conflict lies between
the core professional imperative to serve all who need help and the discom-
fiting sense that serving the undocumented—an illegal and therefore already
illegitimate and undeserving population—also diminishes the resources of
the legitimately deserving citizens. Given the actual problems of resources
in social services, such a perspective is not difficult to understand or to
sympathize with. But, as in the discussion about the illegitimacy of law ver-
sus undocumented bodies, there is a complicating factor to this seemingly
reasonable perspective. Just as our respondents tended to problematize the
presence of undocumented immigrants rather than immigration law, that
which is faulted in this case is the “illegal” population that needs ser-
vices rather than the sociopolitical structures that continually keep resources
scarce. As the two following responses illustrate, even those who iden-
tify systemic problems conflate the scarcity of resources with the usage of
resources by the undocumented:
I work in a medical hospital and work with both illegal and legal immi-
grants on a daily basis. I am fortunate enough to see the drain that
illegal immigrants are putting on our health care system. There are many
Americans that don’t receive care because they cannot afford it but ille-
gal’s come into our hospitals and get the care they need for free. The
current system is NOT working.
We have a very broken system. In the state of Arizona illegal immigrants
can get outpatient dialysis paid for when citizens can’t even get basic
healthcare/AHCCCS/Medicaid. There is something very wrong with this
when undocumented people get services that citizens can’t even get. If
the general public had any idea there would be an outrage!
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30 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
Alien Bodies
Problematizing immigrants for their purported inability and/or unwillingness
to surrender their alien culture and to acquire ours has been a consistent
theme in the American discourses about immigration (Hing, 1997; Park &
Kemp, 2006; Takaki, 1990). But although the ideals of Americanization,
assimilation, and the belief in a monolithic and essentialized “American”
culture and identity have long been problematized, for many respondents
“the force of the sentiments which leads groups of ‘us’ to give themselves an
‘ethnic’/linguistic identity against the foreign and threatening ‘them’ cannot
be denied” (Hobsbawm, 1990, p. 170). In many instances, our respondents
invoked this discourse of assimilation to uphold and reinforce their percep-
tions of the undocumented as a problematic population and to substantiate
the judgment that they are, therefore, an undeserving population. Lack of
English proficiency, in particular, was characterized as both a marker signify-
ing the undocumented immigrants’ problematic lack of assimilation as well
as a sense of entitlement to undeserved consideration to which this lack of
assimilation attests. Two respondents explained:
I no longer feel appreciated for the work I do with our undocumented
patients. It appears they now come expecting and demanding free ser-
vices, refuse to speak English even though they can, and feel they are
more entitled than others. In the past my attitudes were different because
there didn’t seem to be such an attitude of entitlement.
I believe immigrants should come in legally and be required to learn
English and work in gainful, legal employment if they plan to stay. I think
we should have a limited (1 to 2 years) amount of time for them to
accomplish these tasks [ ....] While I believe in valuing the customs of
your culture of origin (I still value my Norwegian roots), I don’t believe
that as immigrants people should expect the receiving country to accom-
modate the culture of the immigrant by changing the culture of America
(or any other country). If I chose to immigrate back to Norway, I would
do so because I wanted to enmesh myself in that culture. I would not
expect the Norway government to accommodate my specific needs.
Whereas in earlier examples, the undocumented were counterposed
against citizens, in this group of problematizing responses, the nonassimila-
tive undocumented were most often compared to authorized immigrants,
current and past who, it was said, eagerly and quickly learned and
assimilated.
I have many Tibetan friends who have immigrated legally and are great
assets to the country. All learn English, and still keep their culture alive.
I am appalled at the illegal aliens from Mexico/South America who live
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 31
here for 20+yrs who expect free health care and have never bothered to
learn English. If I moved to France (or where ever...), I would certainly
learn the language (and I am language impaired!) and try to become part
of the ‘tribe.” My grandfather & his bros came from Yugoslavia and they
all learned English, integrated into society.
I can’t tell you how many immigrants we have as patients that have been
in the US for 5, 10, 20 years that do not speak English and therefore need
interpretation services. (I don’t really have an issue with needing these
services, but to not know any English after that long, I think is wrong.)
Many of our grandparents came from other countries, mine from Italy,
and they learned quickly to speak English.
That other immigrant groups’ assimilation was as swift, straightforward,
and unidirectional as these respondents seem to believe it to have been is
itself questionable. As Edith Abbott (1924) once remarked, most European
immigrants “(except perhaps for the English Protestants) were attacked as
unassimilable immigrants in an earlier generation” (p. 89) and were deemed
similarly lacking in both ability and willingness to learn English and to melt
into the American fold. Whatever the accuracy of their historical reconstruc-
tions, a dividing line between the good immigrant and the bad immigrant
was clearly being drawn by these respondents.
In these responses, moreover, the “legal” become conflated with the
English-speaking and the English-speaking, and therefore “legal,” with the
assimilated; the antithesis is the “illegal,” non-English-speaking, unassimi-
lated, entitled, recalcitrant and thus undeserving undocumented immigrant.
I believe immigrants help our country more than hurt it b/c they are hard
working and contribute to the cultural diversity, which I’ve always loved
about our country. However, ALL immigrants would do a lot better in this
country if it was mandatory for them to learn English (and if our country
established English as the national language), b/c this would help them
to assimilate into American life better as well as help other U.S. citizens to
become more tolerant of their differences if they aren’t already. It would
also be better to have more legal and less undocumented immigrants.
One respondent’s opinion, that “there is a great deal of hostility toward
people who may speak a different language or have different customs, and
that the assumption is that anyone who does so is undocumented and this
makes the problem for the undocumented and the legal immigrant com-
pounded” is substantiated by the responses in our study. These responses,
in other words, blur “the lines between legal status, ‘race,’ and culture,
where concerns about illegal immigration are conflated with the cultural and
demographic changes resulting from immigration in general” (Kretsedemas,
2008, p. 554).
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32 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
Discourses about culture (often via the vehicle of language) were most
often used by our respondents who, “informed by sympathetic liberal-
ism” (Ong, 1996, p. 738), abjure explicitly racist ideology and terminology.
Official and public perception of undocumented immigrants have and con-
tinue to construct “illegal aliens” as a racialized population (Ngai, 2004).
One respondent’s query, “Why is so much emphasis placed on the border
with Mexico and not so much with the Canadian border? Our country still
has a long way to go with addresses or racist attitudes,” cannot be easily
dismissed. But such constructions of undocumented immigrants cannot be
explained only as simple examples of racism or xenophobia. Research into
the mechanics of prejudice in general as well as anti-immigration sentiment
specifically, indicate that the problematization of undocumented immigrants
is “a complex attitude resulting from an interplay between various concerns
and moderating beliefs about immigration’s consequences” (Palmer, 1996,
p.180). In a study on California’s Proposition 187, Lee, Ottati, and Hussain
(2001) showed, for example, that beliefs about obedience to law have effects
on attitudes “independent of ethnicity, prejudice, and economic considera-
tion. This argues against the claim that beliefs about legal obedience merely
serve to justify motivations that are rooted in these alternative concerns”
(p. 440). Such attitudes are, in other words, manifestations of a complex
imbrication of problematizing discourses.
As noted in earlier sections, what is missing here is the recognition
of the structural forces that shape the lives of undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants, “literally hunted down on the streets, at work,
and even in their own homes late at night,” are targets of “sophisticated state
techniques of surveillance and discipline, and looming clouds of vulnerabil-
ity and indeterminacy now overshadow their everyday lives” (Willen, 2007b,
p. 13). Leaving aside the question of whether assimilation is even a desirable
goal, and one that fits within a liberal ideology of plurality and inclusion,
the question to be considered here is how such a population under threat,
in a perpetual liminal space (Chavez, 1991), is to integrate into a society of
which it is not considered a viable part. What is the role of society and its
legal and political structures in preventing such integration?
A Structural Analysis
The Western world’s democratic states’ neoliberal policies of globalization
and deterritorialization of the movement of capital while reinforcing its
national territorial borders against a similarly free migration of human beings
have been criticized as unjust strategies that enrich the powerful and fur-
ther impoverish the poor of the world (Sassen, 2000). Public and political
debate about the detrimental effects of economic policies such as the North
American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) on Mexico and “the role that
American world power has played in the global structure of migration”
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 33
(Ngai, 2004, p. 11), have also questioned the reliance of the domestic
economy on undocumented and migrant labor.
The identification of such sociopolitical structures as being important
forces in shaping immigration was found most often in responses that can
be described as evincing a positive attitude toward the undocumented.
“It is all political,” one such respondent opined. Perhaps most important,
these responses marking globalization, neoliberal restructuring of market
capitalism, and global inequalities as being pertinent factors in explain-
ing immigration identified them as being forces responsible for creating
migrant streams and as determining immigration policies. “Illegal immigra-
tion is about poverty,” one respondent declared. “There are studies that
show as wages go up, border traffic goes down. Let’s stop talking about walls
and start talking about sound global economic policies!” Another respon-
dent insisted that “instead of building walls between the United States and
Mexico, we should be investing in education, training partnerships, and
infrastructure to increase opportunities in Mexico so there wouldn’t be a
need to cross the border for better jobs.”
The key difference between these views and their counterparts that cri-
tique the “broken” system for allowing undocumented immigrants to access
services to the detriment of citizens, is that in these, immigration is explained
contextually: as a phenomenon beyond individual behavior, shaped by the
factors of political economy and socio-legal structures, domestic and global.
As two respondents illustrate:
I believe that immigration is a problem, in that our country is so lim-
ited in social services resources as it is. I don’t believe, however, that
a blanket policy reducing immigration is effective. My belief is that the
countries from where we get the most undocumented immigrants are
suffering, partly due to our U.S. foreign policies [...]. I also think that it
is disgusting to call a person “illegal,” I believe in a global community
and that no person should ever be considered illegal. It is devaluing and
dehumanizing to call immigrants by that term.
Immigration is a social policy and economic issue more so than a crim-
inal justice issue which regretfully is how it seems to be considered by
many. More thought should go into cross-border planning so that the
economy of other countries is considered as the most important point of
intervention for policy and action rather than oversimplifying solutions
such as building fences.
These macro-analyses of immigration, in other words, located the prob-
lem of immigration within the context of the sociopolitical environment
rather than in the bodies of undocumented immigrants.
As one respondent reflected, “We, sadly, as a discipline, have failed
to make a serious advocacy effort on behalf of immigrants in the US. We
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34 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
seem to stop at individual solutions for clients and fail to address larger
systemic issues that impact the people that we work with.” This lack of
attention to structural issues is, according to several respondents, reflected
in the education and training of social workers.
Your survey made me realize how ignorant I am in the area of dealing
with immigrants. I think I’ve concentrated on trying to be being culturally
sensitive to people without focusing on their “immigration status”—
I really have no idea re: the scope of the problems that immigrants face.
I also feel pretty ignorant regarding the numbers of immigrants and the
problems in providing services to this population.
Curricula, a respondent suggests, must include more than cultural diver-
sity trainings to better prepare students to respond effectively to the needs of
the field: “Social workers need additional training and information on how
best to serve undocumented immigrants. While administrative mandates for
diversity training MAY provide some focus on legal immigrants, the special
issues for [the] undocumented go untaught.” Another respondent explained:
I know quite a bit about the Hispanic culture but am sorry to say that
I don’t know that much about immigration policy or law. I would really
like to gain some knowledge in this area and make that part of the field
instruction for social work students at my site.
Finally, one respondent’s plea: “Can you please help Social Workers
to get more information about illegal/immigration laws?” reverberates as
a plaintive summary of the gaps in the profession’s current approach to
preparing practitioners to analyze critically the phenomenon of immigration
and to work effectively with immigrants.
CONCLUSION
Through the use of varied discursive mechanisms that differentiate the legit-
imate from the illegitimate and the deserving from the undeserving, our
respondents constructed the borders of social work. Ngai (2004) notes that
Americans “like to believe that our immigration policy is generous, but
we also resent the demands made upon us by others and we think we
owe outsiders nothing” (p. 11). Invoking the discourses of law, citizenship,
and nationalism, many respondents in our study constructed undocumented
immigrants as outsiders, aliens in legal, social, and cultural terms, existing
beyond the borders of the national community while living in its midst. Such
constructions render social services as status-dependent goods, deserved
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 35
by legitimated members of society and unmerited by those made illegit-
imate by law. Other respondents, conversely, constructed undocumented
immigrants as the victims rather than the perpetrators of transgressions.
Critiquing U.S. policies, domestic and foreign, and economic structures,
national and international, rather than individual migrants, such construc-
tions used the discourses of human rights to formulate basic social services
as being inalienable rights rather than status-dependent endowments.
Our own position on the topic at hand is that the content of social jus-
tice in social work cannot be bound by national borders or constrained by
existing regulations. As the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 13th, 14th,
15th, and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution attest, borders shift, and
the valuation of what constitutes a full human being and who is a viable
member of the polity change; such designations are temporary and contin-
gent. It is both historically naïve and ethically hazardous to accept without
critique and contestation existing laws as being valid guides to legitimizing
some and not others as acceptable members of society. If social work is, as
we believe it to be, as much about advocating for social change as it is about
ameliorating social needs, then the views of practitioners as well as those of
society at large that reify and maintain naturalized taxonomies of worth and
belonging must be continually challenged.
Invoking the ideas of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the anthro-
pologist Seth Holmes (2007) writes, “If social scientists are to work toward
positive social change, we must join with others in a broad effort to denat-
uralize social inequalities, uncovering linkages between symbolic violence
and suffering” (p. 61). Symbolic violence—a tacit, unconscious mode of
domination—occurs through the making of taken-for-granted distinctions
that reinforce existing power inequities (Bourdieu, 1989). Its “form par excel-
lence,” according to Bourdieu (1989), is the making of “groups” (p. 23),
which are always and already assigned with differential value and legitimacy.
Working toward social change must include, in our view, the foundational
task of recognizing and making explicit the relationship between the sym-
bolic power at work in the binaries that pit the undocumented against
citizens, the authorized immigrant against the undocumented, and the con-
ditions of social, legal, and political exclusion to which the undocumented
are relegated.
Given this position, it is all the more tempting for us to argue that one
set of respondents has values while the other does not; that one reflects the
ideals of social work while the other does not. In our analysis, however, the
issue is far more complex. What is clear, as one respondent argued, is that
the profession cannot sit idly by:
I believe the profession of social work, and all professionals who choose
to work in this area, have an obligation to look at the root of problems
we are facing in our country and to be a voice for real solutions rather
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36 Y. Park and R. Bhuyan
than reactionary and short-sighted answers. The more we allow any
part of our population to become marginalized, the more we will see
problems of desperation and violence.
The difficulty we identify, however, is that there are profound differ-
ences of opinion among our respondents, as there is in the nation at large,
about what constitutes the “root of the problems,” the “real solutions” and,
perhaps most important, who can be included in “our population.” Social
work is said to be a value-based profession. Indeed, the issue here is not a
lack of values on either side, but an arguable overabundance of divergent
values. The differences in the respondents’ constructions of undocumented
immigrants is, in other words, at heart a conflict of how the values and ideals
are defined: where the borders of social work should be drawn to include
and exclude; who is conceived as being part of the imagined community;
and which persons are deemed to merit the benefits of those ideals and
principles.
That social workers, like the general public, have differing, even
opposing views on the contentious issue of immigration is unsurprising.
Examinations of the history of social work with immigrants show that the
profession, like other segments of society, has always exhibited a conflicted
stance on immigration and immigrants (Park, 2008; Park & Kemp, 2006).
This is to say, simply, that social workers live and practice within a par-
ticular socio-political context; their views are shaped by prevailing beliefs
and mores of their society in their particular historical moments (Martinez &
Gualda, 2009), just as their practices are delimited by laws and policies for-
mulated within those specific environments (National Association of Social
Workers, 2008b).
But how should a profession that promotes the ideals of plurality and
a diversity of voices make sense of these dissents within its own profes-
sional ranks? Reaching for a consensus on the what constitutes the right
and the good within social work, an absolute agreement on how and what
should be thought and acted upon by social workers is the usual path. Such
agreements are, however, not only an impossibility in a field as wide and
diverse as social work but a goal ultimately antithetical to its avowed values
of diversity and multivocality, the very same values that justify advocacy for
and concern about undocumented immigrants. What is necessary, in our
view, is not the push for a singular directive or professional unanimity but a
more radical move: a call for explicit discussions of open disagreement. The
post-Marxist sociologists Ernst Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) insist that
“agonistic pluralism,” a commitment to civil debate that acknowledges plu-
ralism’s “inherently conflictual aspect” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 756) is fundamental
to the practice of a “radical democratic politics” (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985).
However difficult, engagement in a model of pluralism that conceptualizes
an ideological opponent as “somebody with whose ideas we are going to
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Social Workers’ Commentary on Undocumented Immigrants 37
struggle, but whose right to defend those ideas we will not put into ques-
tion” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 755), in our view, is also a necessary precondition to
the practice of a more radical social work that confronts the construction of
polarizing binaries that delimit dissent and resistance to structures of power.
In highlighting the need for the nation to engage in serious discussions on
the topic of immigration, Gelfand and Bialik-Gilad noted that “a policy deci-
sion, even a decision to take no action, should be based on public debate
about the effects of the decision. (Gelfand & Bialik-Gilad, 1989, p. 27). No
such discussions have taken place within social work. Martinez and Gualda
(2009) note that “social workers in the USA have not been particularly active
in trying to modify the public’s vision of immigrants” (p. 301). In our view,
before social workers in the United States can or should become active in
modifying the public’s vision, vigorous debate, discussion, and argument
geared toward the critical examination and clarification of its own visions
and beliefs are absolutely necessary.
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