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Article Excerpt
ALTHOUGH THE UNITED STATES IS A COUNTRY BUILT ON IMMIGRATION, MANY U.S. immigration policies and practices, particularly in the 20th century, have been framed around overt and covert prejudice, the shifting demands of a labor market for the accumulation of capital, and the principle of family unity. Historically, people of color have experienced institutionalized cultural and economic racism in the United States. For immigrants, issues such as legal status, class, gender, ethnicity, and race intersect in complex ways as they negotiate their day-to-day lives and economic livelihoods in the United States. Constructed as "the other" by the state and by those segments of the dominant group interested in maintaining the status quo, these immigrants experience considerable discrimination. They encounter borders and boundaries in accessing resources, opportunities, safe public spaces, and services.
Municipalities throughout the United States have witnessed strong, organized opposition to meeting the increasing need for affordable housing, quality jobs, and safe public spaces for marginalized and vulnerable immigrant populations. One form this opposition takes is popularly known as NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard). Dear (1992) defines NIMBYism as "the protectionist attitudes and exclusionary/ opposition tactics adopted by community groups facing an unwelcome development in their neighborhood." Responses to NIMBY movements require the attention of action researchers interested in social justice. The impact of NIMBY opposition has serious consequences. It can lead to increased financial costs, delays in and even the denial of affordable housing, safe public spaces, and services for those in need. It exacerbates tensions and hostilities among groups and communities in neighborhoods. It perpetuates common myths and stereotypes that contribute to oppressive policies and practices toward marginal and vulnerable populations. Addressing NIMBYism also helps us to examine how communities are defined in neighborhoods. What are the values and priorities of these communities? What types of power and control do communities exercise in supporting or hindering the access of ethnic minorities (particularly poor immigrant women and men) to safe public spaces and services?
Community-based organizations that support ethnic minority immigrant victims/survivors of domestic violence and workers participating in day labor markets frequently encounter the problem of NIMBYism. Policy discourses that portray immigrants as criminal, dangerous, and undeserving of sympathy or services reinforce and rationalize concerns over declining property values, increased taxes, rising unemployment, higher crime rates, and diminished quality of life. Racial and class segregation, the transient nature of shelter residence and temporary employment, and the use of spaces in unexpected ways fuel mistrust and misunderstanding of those perceived as outsiders belonging to unfamiliar cultures. These cultural and structural obstacles impede the efforts of community-based organizations to provide neighborhood-friendly housing and official hiring sites that promote the human security of shelter residents and day laborers in these communities.
Drawn from an ongoing collaborative action research project, this article explores the problem of NIMBYism encountered in two cases where community organizations, the New York Asian Women's Center and the Workplace Project, sought to create spaces and services for immigrants. Using a contextual analysis, we address major forms of NIMBYism, which is conceptualized as the informal policing of physical and symbolic boundaries to maintain places of domination and control. In both cases, opponents sought to impose physical boundaries indirectly through pressuring politicians and directly through endangering the safety of immigrants. To legitimate their opposition, opponents also constructed discourses of victimization that presented immigrants either as oppressive or as oppressed persons whose status victimized residents.
NIMBYism as Informal Boundary Policing
We conceptualize place as regulated spaces of domination with physical and symbolic boundaries delimited by multiple markers such as ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, class, and other factors (Abraham, 1995, 2000; Barth, 1969; Olzak, 1983; Reskin, 1988). Who enters (and who does not), what can be done (and what cannot be done), and what services are provided (or are not provided) reflect the norms, agendas, and institutional control of the most powerful social groups. We expect NIMBYs to view themselves as the custodians or guardians of place. NIMBYs actively resist initiatives to share space in new ways that support less-powerful groups, believing such changes in their neighborhoods to be unwelcome and undesirable.
Forms of Boundary Policing
NIMBY movements informally police physical boundaries in two ways. First, they pressure governments to take actions that restrict immigrant uses of public places and services. Second, members of NIMBY movements engage, individually and collectively, in threats, intimidation, isolation, marginalization, and violence against immigrants inhabiting public places and using publicly supported services.
NIMBY movements attempt to mobilize support for their informal policing of physical boundaries through boundary making in discourse. Boundary making involves creating symbolic distinctions between social groups. Who "we" are is defined in contradistinction to negatively represented others (Taylor and Whittier, 1992). In a content analysis of focus group discussions about immigrants in Rotterdam, Verkuyten, de Jong, and Masson (1995) identify four forms of boundary making: labeling, metaphors, concretization, and commonplaces. Through these forms, residents created representations of authorities as discriminating against them by providing special and unfair treatment to undeserving "foreigners." These representations categorize residents as sympathy-worthy, and immigrants and the state as condemnation-worthy (Losecke, 1993).
Similarly, we expect members of NIMBY movements to construct discourses that present their members as victims, while depicting immigrants and their allies as villains or abusers of the space, services, and "rights" of legal and cultural citizenry of the United States. By drawing boundaries in reference to multiple, highly visible markers (e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, and class), NIMBY movements construct threat-ladened discourses whereby the entry or presence of certain immigrants in a given neighborhood jeopardizes the well-being of residents. Support by public officials for immigrant services is presented as an abandonment of regulatory responsibilities, victimization of law-abiding citizens, an injustice, as well as a betrayal of the public trust. Social movements research suggests that the emotionality, narrative fidelity, and emphasis upon injustice of these discourses help NIMBY movements to recruit and sustain members (e.g., Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992).
By inverting social inequalities, NIMBY discourses encourage beliefs that legitimate the status quo. Dominant group members are seen as disempowered, disenfranchised, and victimized. Minority group members are viewed as politically powerful, oppressive, manipulative, and appropriating what is not rightfully theirs. As seen with the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, such beliefs can contribute to the mass exclusion of minorities from communities (Petonito, 2000).
Nonetheless, NIMBY movements must often counter widely circulating discourses that, using certain markers, construct immigrants as victims. In these instances, we do not expect NIMBYs to challenge these discourses, but instead to argue that the victim status of immigrants will result in the victimization of other residents. The construction of these residents as victims may include drawing upon discourses on perceived "vulnerable groups," such...
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