Nicholas De Genova

The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement

This important collection examines deportation as an increasingly global mechanism of state control. Anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, and sociologists consider not only the physical expulsion of noncitizens but also the social discipline and labor subordination resulting from deportability, the threat of forced removal. They explore practices and experiences of deportation in regional and national settings from the U.S.-Mexico border to Israel, and from Somalia to Switzerland. They also address broader questions, including the ontological significance of freedom of movement; the historical antecedents of deportation, such as banishment and exile; and the development, entrenchment, and consequences of organizing sovereign power and framing individual rights by territory. Whether investigating the power that individual and corporate sponsors have over the fate of foreign laborers in Bahrain, the implications of Germany’s temporary suspension of deportation orders for pregnant and ill migrants, or the significance of the detention camp, the contributors reveal how deportation reflects and reproduces notions about public health, racial purity, and class privilege. They also provide insight into how deportation and deportability are experienced by individuals, including Arabs, South Asians, and Muslims in the United States. One contributor looks at asylum claims in light of an unusual anti-deportation campaign mounted by Algerian refugees in Montreal; others analyze the European Union as an entity specifically dedicated to governing mobility inside and across its official borders. The Deportation Regime addresses urgent issues related to human rights, international migration, and the extensive security measures implemented by nation-states since September 11, 2001. Contributors : Rutvica Andrijasevic, Aashti Bhartia, Heide Castaneda , Galina Cornelisse , Susan Bibler Coutin, Nicholas De Genova, Andrew M. Gardner, Josiah Heyman, Serhat Karakayali, Sunaina Marr Maira, Guillermina Gina Nunez, Peter Nyers, Nathalie Peutz, Enrica Rigo, Victor Talavera, William Walters, Hans-Rudolf Wicker, Sarah S. Willen

The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant “Illegality”

Mexican migration to the United States is distinguished by a seeming paradox that is seldom examined: while no other country has supplied nearly as many migrants to the US as Mexico, major changes in US immigration law since 1965 have created ever more severe restrictions on “legal” migration from Mexico in particular. This paper delineates the historical specificity of Mexican migration as it has come to be located in the legal economy of the US nation-state, and thereby constituted as an object of the law. More precisely, this paper examines the history of changes in US immigration law through the specific lens of how these revisions with respect to the Western Hemisphere, and thus, all of Latin America, have had a distinctive and disproportionate impact upon Mexicans in particular.

Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality': the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion

Abstract Border policing and immigration law enforcement produce a spectacle that enacts a scene of ‘exclusion’. Such spectacles render migrant ‘illegality’ visible. Thus, these material practices help to generate a constellation of images and discursive formations, which repetitively supply migrant ‘illegality’ with the semblance of an objective fact. Yet, the more these spectacles fuel anti-immigrant controversy, the more the veritable inclusion of the migrants targeted for exclusion proceeds apace. Their ‘inclusion’ is finally devoted to the subordination of their labour, which is best accomplished only insofar as their incorporation is persistently beleaguered with exclusionary campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself a form of subjugation. At stake, then, is a larger sociopolitical (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion. This we may comprehend as the obscene of inclusion. The castigation of ‘illegals’ thereby supplies the rationale for essentializing citizenship inequalities as categorical differences that then may be racialized.Abstract Border policing and immigration law enforcement produce a spectacle that enacts a scene of ‘exclusion’. Such spectacles render migrant ‘illegality’ visible. Thus, these material practices help to generate a constellation of images and discursive formations, which repetitively supply migrant ‘illegality’ with the semblance of an objective fact. Yet, the more these spectacles fuel anti-immigrant controversy, the more the veritable inclusion of the migrants targeted for exclusion proceeds apace. Their ‘inclusion’ is finally devoted to the subordination of their labour, which is best accomplished only insofar as their incorporation is persistently beleaguered with exclusionary campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself a form of subjugation. At stake, then, is a larger sociopolitical (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion. This we may comprehend as the obscene of inclusion. The castigation of ‘illegals’ thereby supplies the rationale for essentializing citizenship inequalities as...

New keywords : migration and borders

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity.

Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago

While fashionable but facile invocations of transnationalism and globalization have proliferated in recent academic discourse, scant attention has been paid to the more radical implications of these new socio-spatial formations. This article will adopt a critical transnational perspective derived from my ethnographic research among Mexican/migrant’ workers in Chicago to dislodge some of the dominant spatial ideologies that undergird a prevailing &dquo;common sense&dquo; about the United States and Latin America. Through the lens of what I would like to call &dquo;Mexican Chicago,&dquo; and revisiting some of

Racial transformations : Latinos and Asians remaking the United States

Moving beyond the black-white binary that has long framed racial discourse in the United States, the contributors to this collection examine how the experiences of Latinos and Asians intersect in the formation of the U.S. nation-state. They analyze the political and social processes that have racialized Latinos and Asians while highlighting the productive ways that these communities challenge and transform the identities imposed on them. Each essay addresses the sociopolitical predicaments of both Latinos and Asians, bringing their experiences to light in relation to one another. Several contributors illuminate ways that Latinos and Asians were historically racialized: by U.S. occupiers of Puerto Rico and the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, by public health discourses and practices in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles, by anthropologists collecting physical data—height, weight, head measurements—from Chinese Americans to show how the American environment affected “foreign” body types in the 1930s, and by Los Angeles public officials seeking to explain the alleged criminal propensities of Mexican American youth during the 1940s. Other contributors focus on the coalitions and tensions between Latinos and Asians in the context of the fight to integrate public schools and debates over political redistricting. One addresses masculinity, race, and U.S. imperialism in the literary works of Junot Diaz and Chang-rae Lee. Another looks at the passions, identifications, and charges of betrayal aroused by the sensationalized cases of Elian Gonzalez, the young Cuban boy rescued off the shore of Florida, and Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos physicist accused of spying on the United States. Throughout this volume contributors interrogate many of the assumptions that underlie American and ethnic studies even as they signal the need for a research agenda that expands the purview of both fields. Contributors . Nicholas De Genova, Victor Jew, Andrea Levine, Natalia Molina, Gary Y. Okihiro, Crystal Parikh, Greg Robinson, Toni Robinson, Leland T. Saito

Migration and Race in Europe: The Trans-Atlantic Metastases of a Post-Colonial Cancer

This article examines dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘integration’, as a politics of citizenship (and race) in contemporary (post-colonial) Europe. The argument unfolds through a critique of the nationalist complacencies and racial complicities in Jurgen Habermas’s remarks on ‘multiculturalism’ during the 1990s. With recourse to ‘underclass’ discourse, Habermas’s reflections were themselves a trans-Atlantic metastasis of a distinctly US ‘American’ hegemonic sociological commonsense with regard to, but actively disregarding, the fact of white supremacy. Habermas’s thoughts are critically situated alongside their subsequent metastasis, back across the Atlantic, into Francis Fukuyama’s recent invocations of ‘terrorism’ and his advocacy of the ‘American melting pot’ model as a trans-Atlantic prescription for Europe’s ailments. Treating ‘immigrants’ as a kind of societal illness, both are preoccupied by the same ‘problem’ — non-Europeans (as disaffected ‘minorit...

‘We are of the connections’: migration, methodological nationalism, and ‘militant research’

Abstract If there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and actualized as the territorial expression of state power. Therefore, the questions of methodological nationalism and what might be called ‘militant research’ are deeply interconnected, indeed, mutually constitutive. As scholars of ‘migration’ – and above all, as practitioners of ‘militant research’ – we must attend to a self-reflexive critique of our own complicities with the ongoing nationalization of ‘society’. Hence, as researchers or scholars of migration, we are indeed ‘of the connections’ between migrants’ transnational mobilities and the political, legal, and border-policing regimes that seek to orchestrate, regiment, and manage their energies. We are ‘of’ these connections because there is no ‘outside’ or analytical position beyond them. The larger juridical regimes of citizenship, denizenship, and alienage configure us to be always-already located within the nexus of inequalities that are at stake in these conflicts.AbstractIf there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility. The persistent reification of migrants and migration – even in critical migration studies –(re-)fetishizes and (re-)naturalizes the epistemological stability attributed to the (‘national’) state as a modular fixture of geopolitical space. In this regard, migration scholarship (however critical) is implicated in a continuous (re-)reification of ‘migrants’ as a distinct category of human mobility. Thus, the methodological nationalism that rationalizes the whole conjuncture of borders-making-migrants supplies a kind of defining horizon for migration studies as such. The dilemma of methodological nationalism has never been merely a problem of thought, however. It is indeed a manifestation of the veritable participation of researchers and scholars – whether consciously or unwittingly – in the very same sociopolitical processes and struggles through which the ‘national’ configuration of ‘society’ (or, the social field) is reified and ...

The Stakes of an Anthropology of the United States

Within anthropology itself there has not existed a large community of dense, vital critical discussion of work in the United States to give it sustained, systematic meaning. . . . So in the absence of anthropologists themselves defining a distinctive place for this body of research, the work itself becomes fragmented and is dispersed as case studies to be given their significance by other constituencies that more powerfully or more normally define the debates and discussions that articulate what the United States is as a social and cultural phenomenon. . . . Anthropologists join these discussions from the margins of their discipline and through terms usually not of their own making. They have a single point to make, a case to offer, however provocative or important, but rarely have they thought through the stakes of an anthropology of the United States (or of France or Britain) for the project of anthropology itself.

The European Question Migration, Race, and Postcoloniality in Europe

What is ‘Europe’? Who is a ‘European’? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ‘European Question’ has taken on a new significance and magnitude – above all in Europe itself, but also in its increasingly amorphous, externalised border zones and beyond. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, social movements were often pressed to address various political problems in terms of, for example, ‘the Jewish Question’ (or, in the United States, ‘the Negro Question’); thus, they approached these questions from the largely unexamined vantage point of relative privilege and power. In the wake of decolonisation on a global scale, this chapter proposes that there is an urgent need to critically formulate the European Question – as a problem of postcolonial whiteness – from the vantage point of transnational and intercontinental migration and the cross-border mobility of migrants. On a global scale, migration is implicated in socio-political and spatial conflicts that are defined on the basis of constructions of identity and difference, belonging and foreignness. Likewise, migration tends to be inseparable from ongoing socio-political processes of racialisation and racial formation. How, then, may we begin to examine anew the problems of European identity and the contradictory and competing productions of a European space – as racial formations and racial projects? By focusing a critical postcolonial lens on the very questions of European nationhood and ‘European’ identity more generally, the postcolonial politics of migration and race may serve to problematise some of the most urgent and dire perplexities of the contemporary European scene.