it’s intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do “jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays – and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

I have to disagree. This argument — that undocumented immigrants do work that “no one else wants” or “no one else is available to perform” masks both extant forms of institutional discrimination AND the fact that undocumented immigrants are hired to perform work under abusive conditions rather than hired to perform work for which no other workers are available. Their desirability as workers is not about general scarcity — it is about specific forms of exploitation.

You overlooked the fact that not all immigrants “do well” in America. Undocumented immigrants (primarily but not exclusively Latino) continue to supplement America’s permanent racial underclass as David Jaeger documents in a paper recently posted on the Center for American Progress website (http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1528891).
African Americans and other castelike minorities do not provide enough low skilled workers for the US economy. Jaeger notes, “if the undocumented were removed from the labor force, there would be a shortfall of nearly 2.5 million low-skill workers.”

There is a big difference bewteen a cultural logic and a conspiracy. For instance, when employers systematically promote fellow whites over blacks they may simply be looking for people “like themselves” who they feel comfortable hanging out with. But the result is racism nonetheless. Multiply that on a societal scale and you begin to see what institutional racism looks like. It isn’t inevitable, but it isn’t a negligble force either.

I find his article “The new “peculiar institution” useful, but only when reading it in the context of an ethnography that deals with caste exclusion (in prison, ghettos, etc). Otherwise, one gets the idea that this caste exclusion contiuum is made up of an overarching historical machinery in which humans have little influence, and more importantly, which doesn’t take into account the experience of ghetto residents or inmates. The logic is sound, but what are the mecanisms of these changes, and where are the actors? This isn’t a critique of Wacquant because it’s a short article and he’s also done participant-observation stuff–I just think both perspectives (macro and micro) are essential to interpret the situation (and are represented pretty well in Philippe Bourgois’s In search of respect).

However, in terms of Wacquant’s thoughts on the situation of caste exclusion and “anti-ghettos” in France, I can say that my experience in the field has completely contradicted his reflection (in strong marxist tradition) that French youth whose parents came from North or sub-saharan Africa “feel French” and that it’s class, not ethnicity that matters in their disenchantment and protest. I have to say, all evidence I’ve seen thus far goes against such an interpretation. When was the last time Wacquant came to the Paris suburbs?

Maybe it’s de Tocqueville syndrome….

Kerim–hmmm, what school could that be? (it seems we have the same alma mater).

I’m all for acknowledging historical contingency, but contingency isn’t destiny.