Constructing Mexican Immigrant Women as a Threat to American Families

How did Mexican immigrant women come to be framed as a threat to the American family? In this article, Mary Romero traces the political and media discourse that transformed ordinary women — mothers, workers, community members — into symbols of cultural danger and demographic invasion in the American imagination.

Romero analyzes the rhetoric deployed by anti-immigration activists, politicians, and media commentators who portrayed Mexican immigrant women’s fertility as a weapon, their families as burdens on public services, and their cultural practices as incompatible with American values. This discourse, Romero argues, draws on deep historical patterns of racial scapegoating while adapting them to contemporary anxieties about borders, demographics, and national identity.

The article examines how the construction of immigrant women as threats has real policy consequences — justifying raids, family separations, and the denial of basic services to some of the most vulnerable members of American communities. Published in the International Journal of Sociology of the Family, this research reveals the gendered dimensions of anti-immigration politics.