American federalism and racial formation in contemporary immigration policy: a processual analysis of Alabama’s HB56

Racialization scholarship identifies the state as a primary site of racial formation. Most of this research envisions the state as a uniform entity, with race-making occurring at a single level of political action. Analysing Latino racialization in immigration debates in Alabama, we argue that state-driven racialization occurs at multiple levels of governance. Although Alabama’s 2011 HB56 is widely recognized as state-enforced Latino racialization, we find that the bill resulted from mutually reinforcing racialization practices and policies that played out at multiple levels of immigration governance. These findings not only present a revisionist history of HB56, they suggest that any account of states and racialization requires a nuanced and complex understanding of the state, its institutional structure, and its operations. Individual state institutions may do different work as race makers, but race-making efforts by federal, state, and local actors interact to produce both racialized subjects and racial hierarchies.