Daniel Tichenor
Philip H. Knight Chair of Social Science and Director of the Program on Democratic Engagement and Governance | University of Oregon
Eugene, OR, UNITED STATES
Expert in immigration, elections, the presidency, and the influence of interest groups and social movements on the U.S. government.
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Biography
Daniel Tichenor is an expert in U.S. immigration history and politics, and has published extensively on the development of American immigration law and policy, patterns of anti-immigrant nativism, and national struggles over unauthorized immigration, refugees, and legal immigration priorities. He also studies the American presidency, Congress, political parties, and national politics, and is an expert in social movements like the Civil Rights movement and the new Christian Right.
Areas of Expertise (3)
Immigration
Elections
Politics
Links (3)
Media Appearances (10)
What makes immigration deals so hard
Christian Science Monitor print
2018-01-19
“It’s almost like an American Rorschach test, that people read into this issue all sorts of economic, cultural, social, religious, and foreign policy perspectives,” says Daniel Tichenor, director of the University of Oregon’s program on democratic engagement and governance. “There’s broad agreement that the system is broken right now, that we need some kind of deal to address these problems. But,” he notes, “we’ve been going a quarter-century without a serious immigration response.”
Trump opens new front on legal immigration
San Francisco Chronicle print
2018-01-14
“Our policies have always reflected a mix of opening and closing the gates for different kinds of immigrants,” Tichenor said. “Anxieties about the racial composition of newcomers, not to mention religious and ethnic identities, is a constant in the American tradition.”
Trump’s First Year Has Been a Disaster. Here’s Why I Have Hope.
New York Magazine print
2018-01-05
“You had Truman, Eisenhower, and other prominent national security, foreign policy leaders saying this is crazy, we have people escaping from behind the Iron Curtain who want a haven in the United States, and it helps our national security to welcome them here,” said Daniel Tichenor, author of Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America and a political scientist at the University of Oregon. “Just like Jim Crow and the suppression of African-American voters embarrassed us abroad, our immigration policies were so blatantly racist it really hurt the world’s perception of the U.S. as a global leader and democracy to be emulated,” he said.
Family ties drive U.S. immigration. Why Trump wants to break the ‘chains.’
The Washington Post print
2018-01-02
“You had Truman, Eisenhower and other prominent national security, foreign policy leaders saying this is crazy, we have people escaping from behind the Iron Curtain who want a haven in the United States, and it helps our national security to welcome them here,” said Tichenor, a political scientist at the University of Oregon. “Just like Jim Crow and the suppression of African American voters embarrassed us abroad, our immigration policies were so blatantly racist it really hurt the world’s perception of the U.S. as a global leader and democracy to be emulated,” he said.
With Ally in Oval Office, Immigration Hard-Liners Ascend to Power
The New York Times print
2017-04-24
Daniel Tichenor, an immigration politics scholar at the University of Oregon, called it “highly unusual” in the post-World War II era to have proponents of sharply reduced immigration in such high-ranking positions. “You would have to go to the 1920s and 1930s to find a comparable period in which you could point to people within the executive agencies and the White House who favored significant restrictions,” Mr. Tichenor said.
The Road To Trump’s Noxious Nativism On Immigration Was Paved By Centrists
Huffington Post online
2016-11-11
Republicans, said University of Oregon political scientist Daniel Tichenor, were “trying to crack down on a problem that their base perceived as critical” while Clinton was “trying to be reactive and I think quite skilled at . . . casting Republicans as broadly anti-immigrant.” The president won a greater share of Latino and Asian voters in 1996 than he had in 1992.
The Right Can Stop Losing on Immigration: Here’s What It Will Take
National Review online
2016-09-14
We’d be better off still if we adopted a richer vocabulary. Daniel Tichenor, currently a political scientist at the University of Oregon, offers a more nuanced typology in Dividing Lines (2001), a history of the decades-long conflicts over U.S. immigration policy. Recognizing that the motivations of participants in that debate are varied, Tichenor identifies four distinct groups, each driven by its own political interests and ideological commitments.
CURIOUS: Immigration Law In History
Jefferson Public Radio online
2016-09-09
Political Scientist Dan Tichenor at the University of Oregon can take us back into the history of immigration law. And he will, when he visits The Exchange with the first installment in what we envision as a continuing series highlighting research at the U of O. We call it CURIOUS/Research Meets Radio--with capital U and O. We get a lesson from Dr. Tichenor in the ebbs and flows of immigration law, and how those have played out politically over the years.
America and Immigration: An Uneasy Union
WBEZ Chicago online
2016-09-02
At the Monticello ceremony, Takeaway Host John Hockenberry moderated an immigration debate with Daniel Tichenor, Philip H. Knight professor of political science and program director and senior scholar of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon; and David Martin, the Warner-Booker distinguished professor of international law at the University of Virginia. Martin also served as principal deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security from 2009-2010. Today on The Takeaway, you’ll hear key excerpts from this debate, which mirrors the larger discussion currently playing out in America.
History Warns Against Alienating ‘Aliens’
Columbia Daily Tribune online
2016-07-26
In 1844, the Whig presidential ticket actively solicited endorsements from nativist groups. Whig vice presidential candidate Theodore Frelinghuysen even led several organizations that were “openly hostile to Catholicism and new immigration,” as recounted in the book “Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America,” by Daniel Tichenor, a political scientist at the University of Oregon.
Articles (3)
Historical set points and the development of presidential emergency power
Perspectives on Politics
2013 The recent outpouring of work on executive power during emergencies, inspired by the post-9/11 era, has significantly enhanced our legal and theoretical understanding of this crucial subject. A key flaw in this literature, however, is that it is historically un-rooted, either dismissing or ignoring important analytical and empirical insights from presidential research and from APD and historical-institutionalist perspectives. In this article, I argue that we can better explain patterns and variations in the use of presidential emergency power by paying careful attention to shifting historical set points for executive choice and action during security crises. In particular, the findings here underscore the episodic growth of new precedents, resources, and expectations for the White House in perilous contexts. The development of presidential emergency power reflects the potential for early executive choices to be repeated and legitimated over time, laying dormant as a “loaded weapon” to be used by future executives in similarly urgent circumstances.
'Rallying force’: The modern presidency, social movements and the transformation of american politics
Presidential Studies Quarterly
2013 This paper analyzes the important but elusive relationship between the modern presidency and social movements. Although the presidency-social movement nexus is fraught with tension, collaboration between the White House and social activists was indispensable to the important changes that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing especially on Lyndon Johnson's uneasy but critical relationship to the Civil Rights movement and Ronald Reagan's enlistment of the Christian Right into the Republican Party, we trace the emergence of a novel form of politics since the 1960s that joins executive prerogative, grass roots insurgency, and party polarization. Johnson¹s efforts to leverage presidential power to advance Civil Rights played a critical role in recasting the relationship between national administration and social movements, one that paved the way for a national conservative offensive. The relationship forged between Johnson and the Civil Rights movement has echoes in the similar joining of the Reagan presidency and the Christian right, an executive-insurgency alliance that instigated the transformation of the Republican Party and spurred the development a new presidency-centered party system by the end of the 1980s.
Solidarities and restrictions: Labor and immigration policy in the United States
A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics
2012 In American labor’s response to immigration over time, one can observe “a movement wrestling” between restrictionist and solidaristic positions. A crucial transformation of American labor’s response to immigration occurred from the 1930s to the 1960s which is attributed to four factors: changes in the structure and composition of the labor market, shifts in immigration flows, shifts in the attitudes of the labor movement toward immigrants, and the changing disposition of the American state toward unions. In this article we look at the policy choices and dilemmas that have faced the American labor movement since the 1940’s, putting forth a conceptual framework for understanding labor’s shifting positions over time and identifying critical moments in American political development. Having laid this foundation, we move on to a consideration of labor’s most recent positions concerning contemporary policy debates.