The End of 'Civil Rights' as We Know it?: Immigration and Civil Rights in the New Millenium

This Article considers how emerging critical scholarship contributes to our understanding of the civil rights implications of immigration law and its enforcement. It further analyzes how immigration generates, and will continue to generate, new civil rights controversies in the United States for the foreseeable future. The nation has only begun to appreciate how Mexican migration has impacted the entire nation, not just the southwestern portion of the country, and contributed to the creation of new civil rights controversies. For example, the ability to obtain a driver's license has civil rights implications for undocumented Mexican immigrants. Civil rights issues associated with border enforcement, language regulation, cultural difference, and notions of equal citizenship and full membership, in all likelihood will continue to arise. Importantly, the nexus between immigration and civil rights has tightened as the overlap between immigrant and minority status grew after Congressional repeal of the discriminatory national origins quota system in the federal immigration laws in 1965. Put differently, the great majority of today's immigrants are people of color. Civil rights remedies must adapt to ensure that discrimination on the basis of citizenship status does not effectively amount to racial discrimination. To further complicate matters, increasing rates of interracial marriage, accompanied by growing numbers of mixed race people, contributes to new and different civil rights concerns. Consequently, if truly committed to the antidiscrimination norm, civil rights law must change to address the nation's changing racial demographics. In short, this Article contends that the United States is bound to see the end of civil rights -- and civil rights law -- as we know it today.