advocates, the development of a strength in asylum law advocacy in particular, and a specialization in issues of women, family groups, and unaccompanied minors. “humanitarian” Receiving this legal contention is a complex array of federal judges of varied degrees of sympathy toward immigrant rights or central government prerogative, and the actual accumulated legal statutes and common law, so far leading generally to pro-immigrant decisions. While the broad tendency of the politics has been enforcement-oriented, the pro-Central American networks of advocates, service providers, and lawyers has had significant effects in lessening this; in some ways, with limits, resistance has worked. The central perspective of critics of Central Americans is that they are the latest wave of unauthorized American invaders of the imagined white national community. That they are acting on a legal opportunity (request for asylum) is largely ignored; the core is inherited moral and political ideas from opposition to unauthorized Mexican immigration, and relatedly, fear of harm coming from the United States through the threatened outer border, particularly the one with Latin America (Mora and Christianakis, 2015). The opposition to Central Americans revitalized the anti-immigrant activist movement residing near or (more often) traveling to the border region, who had been in decline because of bad, often bizarre behavior by key activists from 2008 onward (murder, murder-suicide, child molestation [Southern “Minutemen” Poverty Law Center, n.d., Neiwert, 2014, Lemon, 2016]). The Central American influx gave them a new devil” to mobilize against (Cohen, 1972). “folk As described earlier, the key opponents have been demonstrators mobilized at attempted transfer and release sites in the early summer 2014 (more needs to be learned about the particular actors in these mobilizations), Republican politicians (above all in Arizona and Texas [Mora and Christianakis, 2015]), and the alliance between officers of the National Border Patrol Union and
advocates, the development of a strength in asylum law advocacy in particular, and a “humanitarian” specialization in issues of women, family groups, and unaccompanied minors. Receiving this legal contention is a complex array of federal judges of varied degrees of sympathy toward immigrant rights or central government prerogative, and the actual accumulated legal statutes and common law, so far leading generally to pro-immigrant decisions. While the broad tendency of the politics has been enforcement-oriented, the pro-Central American networks of advocates, service providers, and lawyers has had significant effects in lessening this; in some ways, with limits, resistance has worked. The central perspective of critics of Central Americans is that they are the latest wave of unauthorized American invaders of the imagined white national community. That they are acting on a legal opportunity (request for asylum) is largely ignored; the core is inherited moral and political ideas from opposition to unauthorized Mexican immigration, and relatedly, fear of harm coming from the United States through the threatened outer border, particularly the one with Latin America (Mora and Christianakis, 2015). The opposition to Central Americans revitalized the anti-immigrant activist movement residing near or (more often) traveling to the border region, who had been in decline because of bad, often bizarre behavior by key “Minutemen” activists from 2008 onward (murder, murder-suicide, child molestation [Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d., Neiwert, 2014, Lemon, 2016]). The Central American influx gave them a new “folk devil” to mobilize against (Cohen, 1972). As described earlier, the key opponents have been demonstrators mobilized at attempted transfer and release sites in the early summer 2014 (more needs to be learned about the particular actors in these mobilizations), Republican politicians (above all in Arizona and Texas [Mora and Christianakis, 2015]), and the alliance between officers of the National Border Patrol Union and
south-texas-7-18-16.docx