Professor Inés Valdez was the recipient of an award from the Western Political Science Association for her paper, "Punishment, Race, and the Organization of U.S. Immigration Exclusion," at their annual meeting in Vancouver last week. The award was for best article published in Political Research Quarterly in 2016.

Her paper examines the way in which narratives of white victimization support a system of immigration enforcement that makes everyday life tougher for immigrants. The paper focuses on three realms of toughness: lived experience, working conditions, and paths to citizenship to illustrate the punitive character of immigration enforcement and surveillance. She shows how enforcement narratives and practices construct a criminal racialized immigrant where there was none in order to justify the massive apparatus of enforcement. In closing, the paper discuses the Obama administration legislative strategy and ultimate stalemate during his administration in light of the proposed theory.