City of Angels, City of Immigrants
Several historical episodes have been crucial in making Los Angeles into the City of Immigrants that it is today. The first is the story of California in the last part of the 19th century—how it became a magnet for Asian immigration, but then became the crucible of laws that kept out Chinese laborers and then almost all Asian immigrants for much of the first half of the 20th century. The incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is part of this story. In the second episode, Mexican workers emerged as an essential part of the Southern California economy. At the same time, Mexican Americans were kept out of the mainstream of American life by practices that included discretionary law enforcement, mass deportations in the 1930s, and marginalization as an undocumented population. The third episode is Southern California’s role in the rise of immigration restrictionism and state and local enforcement of federal immigration laws. Proposition 187 in 1994 was a key landmark, but its rise and fall was more complex than is often appreciated. In the fourth episode, Los Angeles and California are now central to the “sanctuary” movement. State and local measures would offset federal enforcement, integrate immigrants regardless of status, and provide lawyers for immigrants facing deportation. These four episodes are distinct from each other, but they also reflect continuities that reveal the unique role that Los Angeles and the Southern California have played—and will continue to play—in the history of immigration in the United States.
Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and a teacher and scholar of immigration and citizenship, with influence across a range of academic disciplines and in federal, state, and local policymaking. His book, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford 2006) won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers as the year’s best book in Law and Legal Studies, and was chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (8th ed. West 2016), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. West 2013), and he has published many widely cited articles on immigration and citizenship. His most recent book, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), won the Association of American Publishers’ 2015 PROSE Award for Law and Legal Studies and was chosen by the Association of College and Research Libraries as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has received several teaching honors, including the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2014, and was one of 26 law professors nationwide profiled in What the Best Law Teachers Do (Harvard 2013). In 2017, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his current scholarly project, a new book with the working title, Migrants, Refugees, and Citizens.