Review of Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigration Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston, by Shannon Gleeson

Abstract

One way to understand a social phenomenon is to interrogate the forces that come to bear on that phenomenon. Couched against the exigencies of immigration policy, Shannon Gleeson's book Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigration Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston attempts to call out the forces that bear on geographic disparities in access to legal recourse for the undocumented immigrant worker. To this end, Gleeson, through case study, examines the localized implementation of immigrant rights enforcement between two cities with notable undocumented immigrant populations: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas. Gleeson's overarching account of the recourse disparities between the two cities may be understood in terms of the varying degrees to which cultural and institutional entities assimilate under localized conditions. She charts these assimilationist dynamics mainly by examining the mandates of federal enforcement agencies, industrial relations entities, civil society advocacy groups, and national consulates.