Cities and Social Movements Immigrant Rights Activism in the US, France, and the Netherlands, 1970-2015

Through historical and comparative research on the immigrant rights movements of the United States, France and the Netherlands, Cities and Social Movements examines how small resistances against restrictive immigration policies do – or don’t – develop into large and sustained mobilizations.

• Presents a comprehensive, comparative analysis of immigrant rights politics in three countries over a period of five decades, providing vivid accounts of the processes through which immigrants activists challenged or confirmed the status quo
• Theorizes movements from the bottom-up, presenting an urban grassroots account in order to identify how movement networks emerge or fall apart
• Provides a unique contribution by examining how geography is implicated in the evolution of social movements, discovering how and why the networks constituting movements grow by tracing where they develop
• Demonstrates how efforts to enforce national borders trigger countless resistances and shows how some environments provide the relational opportunities to nurture these small resistances into sustained mobilizations
• Written to appeal to a broad audience of students, scholars, policy makers, and activists, without sacrificing theoretical rigor

Walter Nicholls is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. His main areas of research have been the role of cities in social movements and immigration. He has published widely in journals including Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Theory and Society, Theory, Culture and Society, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Environment and Planning A. His study of the undocumented youth movement in the United States was published as The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford University Press). 

Justus Uitermark is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include Urban Studies and Political Sociology. He has published widely in journals including American Sociological Review, Political Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Social Networks and PLoS ONE. His Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics was published by University of Amsterdam Press. 

Series Editors' Preface ix

Acknowledgments x

1 Sparks of Resistance 1

2 Rethinking Movements from the Bottom Up 13

Part I The Birth of Immigrant Rights Activism 37

3 Making Space for Immigrant Rights Activism in Los Angeles 39

4 Radical Entanglements in Paris 54

5 Placing Protest in Amsterdam 71

Part II Urban Landscapes of Control and Contention 89

6 The Laissez�]Faire State: Re�]politicizing Immigrants in Los Angeles 91

7 The Uneven Reach of the State: The Partial Pacification of Paris 116

8 The Cooptative State: The Pacification of Contentious Immigrant Politics in Amsterdam 138

Part III New Geographies of Immigrant Rights Movements 157

9 Los Angeles as a Center of the National Immigrant Rights Movement 161

10 Paris as Head of Splintering Resistances 188

11 Divergent Geographies of Immigrant Rights Contention in the Netherlands 209

12 Conclusion: Sparks into Wildfires 227

Notes 239

References 245

Index 262

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