Date October 11, 2024

Student Spotlight: Marcos Montoya Andrade ’25

By Pete Bilderback

Senior International and Public Affairs concentrator Marcos Montoya Andrade's summer internship project at The League of United Latin American Citizens has earned national media attention.

Brown senior and International and Public Affairs (IAPA) concentrator Marcos Montoya Andrade is making news. Recent stories from CBS News, Newsweek, The Hill, Telemundo and others about how states have ramped up efforts to enact stricter immigration laws are based on research Montoya Andrade did during a summer internship with The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Montoya Andrade, who is a dual concentrator in economics, researched and wrote the report "A New Wave of Hate: The Anti-Immigrant Legislative Boon Since 2020," with LULAC Director of Research & Policy Ray Serrano.

Montoya Andrade completed an internship at LULAC, the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., during the summer following his junior year at Brown. When he arrived, he told Serrano, who served as his supervisor, that he wanted to work on a project that involved immigration. The issue has personal significance for Montoya Andrade, who emigrated from Guatemala to the U.S. with his family when he was six years old. "Ray [Serrano] and I sat down to develop a project together," he said. “Since immigration is one of the top issues in our presidential election, we knew there was a story that needed to be told.”

Montoya Andrade and Serrano decided that he would track the rise of anti-immigrant legislation in state legislatures since 2020. In doing so, Montoya Andrade discovered a sharp rise in the number of proposed laws classified as anti-immigrant. 233 anti-immigrant laws were proposed in 2024, up from 132 in 2023, 64 in 2022, and 51 in 2020.

Among other proposals, Montoya Andrade discovered bills that would criminalize unauthorized entry into the U.S. at the state level, outlaw "sanctuary" policies that limit local law enforcement's cooperation with federal immigration authorities and legislation that would crack down on non-citizen voting (which is already illegal and extremely rare).

"I went through all 50 state legislature websites searching for keywords, then collected all the bills I perceived to be anti-immigrant," said Montoya Andrade. "I looked at every year from 2020 to 2024 and built a database with over 560 entries. I also double-checked my work against Bloomberg Government's bill tracker."

In examining proposed legislation, Montoya Andrade said he tried to be as objective as possible before deeming a bill "anti-immigrant." "It's clear when a bill says its goal is to deter 'illegal immigrants' from coming to Idaho that you are looking at anti-immigrant legislation," he said.

I was very much involved at each step in the process, from creating the idea to gathering the data, writing the report, creating the visuals, editing it, and finally publishing it. I liked being involved at every single step.

Marcos Montoya Andrade IAPA Class of 2025

By the time he was done, Monotya Andrade's report was over 20 pages long. "Ray [Serrano] read it all and helped me edit it," said Montoya Andrade. "He also helped me to use neutral language that didn't sound biased," he said. "He helped me understand that while I might have my own personal opinion, the work shouldn't reflect that. You have to understand that you are writing for a large audience, and not everyone thinks like you. People won't take your work seriously if you use biased language," he added.

In addition to writing the report, Montoya Andrade said he created all the maps, tables, and graphics. "I was very much involved at each step in the process, from creating the idea to gathering the data, writing the report, creating the visuals, editing it, and finally publishing it," he said. “I liked being involved at every single step.”

Montoya Andrade said that the anti-immigrant rhetoric he found in these bills was familiar from his study of U.S. history. "This isn't anything new," he said, "If you go back in history, it doesn't take much time before you find anti-immigrant rhetoric." He cited The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was the first major law to restrict immigration into the United States. "That one was targeted toward people from China, and the target today is Latinos," said Montoya Andrade, “but the rhetoric was the same: Chinese laborers are taking our jobs, they're lowering our wages, they're ruining our culture, and so forth. In the 1920s, people said the same things about immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy and Ireland.”

Another characteristic of these bills that Montoya Andrade found is that they are overwhelmingly partisan. "Very few Democrats support these bills," he said. “There were over 4,000 Republican co-sponsors of these bills compared to only 28 Democrats.”

According to Montoya Andrade, many of the bills he discovered were largely symbolic in nature. "Immigration is legally recognized as a federal power," he said, "The states have limited power to regulate it." He also noted that few of the bills introduced ended up becoming law. "Only 13.2% of the bills introduced passed, while the average passage rate for all other bills is around 27%," he said, “So a lot of this is performative. It's legislators trying to score political points by stoking fear.”

But Montoya Andrade maintains that the rise in anti-immigrant legislation at the state level shouldn't be dismissed as inconsequential. "The states are what we call 'policy labs,'" he said. They can act as experimental labs where certain organizations and legislators launch trial runs for national legislation.

"Much of the legislation is divisive and counterproductive," said Montoya Andrade. Among the most controversial bills that were passed was the Texas law known as SB4. SB4 authorizes Texas state law enforcement to arrest, jail and deport migrants, powers the U.S. Constitution delegates exclusively to the federal government. The Biden administration challenged the law in court, and a federal judge agreed it was unconstitutional. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked implementation of the law while it weighs its legality.

Future plans for Montoya Andrade include moving to Washington, D.C., to do policy analysis, possibly at a non-profit like LULAC. Eventually, he wants to earn either a law degree or a Ph.D. In the meantime, he intends to continue his studies after graduating in the spring, and he hopes to do so at Brown. "Brown and Watson gave me the skills I needed to do such an ambitious project," he said. He intends to apply to Watson's Master of Public Affairs (MPA) Program. "I love Watson, and one of the great things about the MPA program is that, although it's structured, you are still able to explore personal interests through electives."