The year 2006 will go down in history as the year when immigration moved definitively to the center stage of American national politics. For more than 20 years, political elites have been able to contain and marginalize this intractable and emotional issue, dealing with it discreetly and episodically. But over time, the number of newcomers – both legal and illegal – has continued to grow and is now reaching historic proportions. Meanwhile, the dispersion throughout the United States of immigrants formerly concentrated in a few gateway states has contributed to the nationalization of this issue.

The politics of immigration changed fundamentally in 2001, when the George W. Bush administration seized on the issue in order to build support among Hispanics and to open a dialogue with Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, one of the few heads of state eager to do business with the new president. This was the rare occasion when a major national political figure did not merely react to events or seek the protective cover of a study commission but grabbed immigration with both hands to further his own objectives. Sidelined by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush's immigration initiative reemerged in January 2004 with his proposed guestworker program. That proposal jump-started a debate over illegal immigration that was then fueled by tough enforcement legislation passed by the House of Representatives in December 2005.

In comparing the influence of different political institutions on minority mobility, the conventional approach is to look at social and economic outcomes. This essay will go further and scrutinize the standards by which such outcomes are evaluated. What levels, rates, and disparities of mobility are acceptable, or not, to minority groups and other political actors? The standards used to answer these questions are typically treated as exogenous to the political institutions being studied. These standards are the product of many societal forces, to be sure. But they are fundamentally shaped by politics. Indeed, as conceptions of distributive justice, such standards are themselves political outcomes and are arguably more important than social and economic outcomes.

In the US context, such discussions inevitably address the impact of political machines on the mobility of ethnic and racial groups. Machines are usually compared with trade unions, social democratic or labor parties, and Progressive reforms. Here, too, this essay will go further and compare machines with the post-civil-rights regime that has effectively replaced them. I call this regime “post-civil-rights” because it grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and, like all successful movements, has become institutionalized. My intention is to show the advantages and disadvantages of each, for minorities as well as for the larger society. Again, the focus here will be on how each regime has shaped expectations of minority mobility.