Of the many changes the world has undergone in the last few decades, few have stirred more intense public anxiety and controversy than the phenomenon of global migration. With the exception of the global war against terrorism, to which it is often directly connected, the migration of people largely from the global South into countries and cities of the global North—in search of work, reprieve from violence and conflict, and new life possibilities—has provoked the most virulent forms of opposition, discrimination, and policing directed at immigrants, particularly in the liberal democracies of North America and Western Europe. In the U.S., aggressive state measures militarize the policing of the U.S.-Mexico border; federal agencies conduct terrorizing raids in homes and workplaces, arresting and detaining thousands of foreign-born citizens who languish in prison without formal charges for indefinite periods; and citizen organizations target recent immigrants for the degradation of their communities' "quality of life," (a rash of practices that a NY Times editorial recently decried as "The Great Immigration Panic").[1] Meanwhile, the French state deported nearly 14,660 undocumented immigrants in the first five months of 2008 to meet President Sarkozy's goal of deporting 25,000 "illegals" each year; new immigration laws prevent families from being re-united with relatives who are legal residents in France, and language tests, French values exams and DNA-testing remain conditions of residency. Sarkozy also proposes implementing national origin quotas to limit the number of immigrants coming from certain parts of the world, particularly Africa.[2]

In response not only to the oppressive anti-immigrant laws and penalizing measures undertaken by the state, but also to the everyday inequities and discriminatory treatment experienced by immigrants in the U.S. and France, protests, demonstrations, riots and strikes by and on behalf of immigrants in both countries (the historic rallies for justice for immigrants that took place across the U.S. in 2006; the nationwide riots of immigrant youth protesting unemployment and discrimination in France in November 2005; and most recently the unprecedented wave of sit-ins and strikes of illegal immigrants in Paris demanding legal status) have brought to the forefront of public awareness the deep conflicts within many nations about the actual terms and visions of their imagined collective identity and belonging.[3] This "immigration crisis" is held to be such a widely-shared problem, particularly among nation-states of the "developed" world, that French President Sarkozy's once politically controversial plan of implementing a European-clampdown on illegal immigration when he takes over as EU President this month (July 2008) is on the verge of being adopted by the rest of the EU states. Meanwhile, exacerbated by existing and proposed antagonistic immigration policies, political and social conflicts over the treatment of immigrants within these countries and across the world only continue to deepen.[4]

How do we understand these conflicts and crises over immigration that seem to plague nations everywhere? What roles do gender, race and sexuality play in these conflicts? And how might an attention to the operation of these forms of social difference provide alternative ways of viewing, understanding and addressing the plight of immigrants as well as the rights and privileges of citizenship and national belonging from which immigrants are increasingly excluded? In this special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, scholars attempt to answer these questions by examining different sites and contexts where conflicts over immigration arise, including crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border; immigrant detention and the U.S. prison system; debates about domestic labor and migrant women in the Philippines; racial profiling of Arab and/or Muslim men in the wake of 9/11 and the ongoing "war on terror" in San Francisco; scholarly and popular discourses on colonial history and religion in France; and urban violence in Paris and youth militia groups in Côte d'Ivoire. The different contexts of the U.S., Philippines, France and Côte d'Ivoire serve as comparative sites for viewing the nation-specific ways in which the crisis of immigration plays out as a global concern. Equally important, these contexts allow a view of the intersections of political, economic, social and cultural practices across nations, particularly between nations of the global North and of the global South, foregrounding the continuing importance of the global histories of colonialism to today's global relations.

Also in this issue, journalists, artists and activists critically depict and engage with the experiences and desires of immigrants in the U.S. as they struggle to make new lives for themselves in a place where they are seen not to belong. The contributors to this issue provide illuminating perspectives on the social imaginaries motivating and shaping the forms of unsettlement and anxiety that the "immigration problem" generates. Moreover, together they offer a comprehensive framework for understanding the dynamics of antagonism and violence that so often accompany the movement of peoples across national boundaries.

One might well view the global "immigration crisis" as the crisis of nationhood brought about by the contradictory political and economic effects of capitalist globalization. Those effects include the increased mobility of labor (and in particular outmigration from countries of the global South) as a consequence of the mobility of capital and the transnationalization of its production processes, and as a result of the devastation of local economies with the implementation of neoliberalist structural adjustment policies. They also include the formation of illicit transnational political (terrorist) networks that work to seize power and control over existing social orders, away from the global hegemony of the capitalist inter-state system. In the current moment, global migrant labor and transnational "terrorist" networks have often been conflated as interchangeable "threats" to the security, sovereignty and identity of the nation. As some of our contributors show, the fears that "illegal immigrants" provoke and the (moral/cultural as well as military/physical) "defenses" erected against them attest to more than a rational response to the problems they ostensibly pose to the safety, integrity and viability of the imagined community of the nation.

Indeed, beyond the politically and economically pragmatic reasons often offered as legitimation for the draconian measures nation-states are implementing to regulate both legal and illegal immigration, a plethora of social and cultural concerns and anxieties, premises and constructions, motivates and shapes both official and popular responses to the increasingly visible presence of non-citizen immigrants or "alien residents" in local communities and the "threat" these immigrants pose to prevailing norms of life and collective belonging. The contributors to this issue suggest that these concerns and anxieties are not mere ideological covers for more rational political and economic logics, as the argument about the contradictory effects of globalization on nationhood might lead us to believe; rather these deeply embodied structures of affect, which bear long histories of social construction and material practice, are themselves forces of organization and motivation, shaping the very forms that globalization and nationalism take, including the desiring-movements of people across national borders and the anxious efforts to repel, contain or expel them. Dominant moral and cultural anxieties and desires expressed and invigorated by prevailing narratives and images about immigrants can thus be seen as both supports and sources for the practices and policies of states.

We begin this issue then with an examination of the representations and narratives of immigration in popular culture and mainstream media. For There Will Be No Home for You, Basia Winograd put together a creative montage of clips from recent Hollywood films showcasing some of the prevailing, stereotypical narratives about immigration and immigrants that circulate in the popular imagination, as well as more sympathetic portrayals that attempt to explore the complexity of immigrants' experience and subjectivity. Here we find utopic versions of the American promise of assimilation, opportunity and reward ("life, liberty, happiness") that awaits the hard-working new arrival; cynical representations of the opportunism, materialism, and criminal violence of immigrants in search of their own selfish fortunes; critical depictions of the degradation and debasement undocumented immigrants suffer in a place that cannot or will not recognize their social value or accomplishments; and poignant renderings of the isolation, exclusion, and longing that immigrants experience in their new surroundings.

As an immigrant herself, the media journalist Maria Hinojosa recognizes the importance of telling the stories of immigrants—the daily fear, exploitation and vulnerability undocumented immigrant workers have to live with to do work that is vital to the U.S. economy, as well as the increasing hostility and violence they face as a consequence of the current crackdown on immigrants and the anti-immigrant sentiments of conservative politicians constantly voiced in the public sphere, differentiating between them and us, between immigrants and citizens, even as the very identity of Americans, with the exception of Native Americans, is that of immigrants. In her documentary Immigrant Nation, Hinojosa featured some of these stories, while alluding in her talk to the parts of the stories that were suppressed by CNN, the television network for which she worked. Hinojosa ends her talk with an inspiring real-life story about how it is possible for the social divisions of race, sexuality, and immigration status that otherwise separate people to fall away when their humanity becomes visible to each other.

While Hinojosa offers us a hopeful vision of, as she says, "who we can be—borderless in our country," convinced that the representation of "the humanity that the people don't see" among immigrants is central to the realization of this vision, contributors in Part II of our issue focus their critical attention to precisely the forms of social difference and historical inequities that persistently structure immigrants' exclusion from national human belonging. In "The Gender of Sovereignty," Lisa Lowe asserts that it is the dominant paradigm of "politics" as defined by nation-state sovereignty that provides the legitimating framework for U.S. legislation criminalizing immigration as well as for the "war on terror" currently waged on behalf of global democracy. The normative gendered understanding of the liberal, democratic nation-state as the primary agency of "politics," whose sovereign power depends on control of its borders and the populations within and outside those borders, does not only obscure the historical and structural inequalities between imperial nations and former colonial nations on which present-day capital-labor relations have been built. Upheld and promoted by mainstream US political science and informing U.S. political policy, this perspective effectively produces the very rule of nation-state sovereignty. Furthermore, it ignores and devalues the politics of popular and radical social movements that operate beneath the level of the state and transnationally, in particular, multilateral solidarities forged amongst subordinate social groups across the non-elite world, which exceed and counter this international norm of governance.

Against this normative view and practice of politics, Lowe calls for an interdisciplinary feminist analysis that recognizes "new forms of transnational politics that establish and practice an alternative meaning of 'sovereignty' in domains that the social sciences have normally bracketed as 'culture'." Exemplifying such transnational politics, cross-border feminist projects on the U.S.-Mexican border call attention to contemporary processes of globalization which promote the production and transnational movement of racialized, gendered labor and, more, call for social and environmental justice to counter the disposability of life that defines the treatment of this labor and characterizes the gendered violence of the border export-processing zones where women workers and their children work and live. Indeed, cross-border organizing highlights the fact that the territorial borders delineated and controlled by the sovereign power of the state are also borders between "who matters and who is dispensable," between who is human and who is less than human, between valued life and "life devoid of value."

Lowe's instantiation of this alternative political rearticulation of the border "as a dehumanized social space, a gendered necrospace," finds resonance in Natalie Sokoloff's and Susan Pearce's depiction of the growing rate of incarceration of foreign-born women as a consequence not of increasing crime rates (research has documented a decrease in crime rates since 1995), but rather of more aggressive federal immigration policies and procedures. In their article, "Locking Up Hope: Immigration, Gender, and the Prison System," Sokoloff and Pearce argue that new immigration laws, which have greatly expanded the range of infractions punishable by deportation, enhanced enforcement of existing laws, including more aggressive detention and deportation procedures, and harsher penalties for non-violent crimes, such as fraud, drug offenses and sex work, which account for the incarceration of 70 percent of women inmates, have all contributed to the quadrupling of the prison population between 1980 and 2005 (and an eight-fold increase in the number of women in prison, the majority of which consist of women of color and immigrant women). While the history of U.S. immigration policy has long reflected the notion of "inferior" immigrants' tendency towards criminality, recent developments in immigration policy and practice have resulted in the increasingly criminalized treatment of immigrants and the blurring of the boundaries between immigration policy, which is under civil law, and police-enforced criminal law.

This close correlation between criminality and immigration is reflected in depictions of immigrant criminal networks in popular film (see Winograd's montage) and, as Sokoloff and Pearce point out, in the frequent use of the term "illegals" in public discourse, which "summons up an image that conflates the civil infraction of entering the country without documents with a more serious infraction of criminal law." The conception of the "immigration problem" as a matter for the police and the criminal justice system undoubtedly informs both public anxieties and state responses. Indeed, in the last couple of decades, the U.S. national debate over immigration has been renewed and intensified by popular, as well as state initiatives to curb the growing influx of undocumented workers from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa, not only by denying them and their children basic rights to education, housing, and health care, but also by criminalizing their status and subjecting them to increasingly militarized forms of regulation and punishment.

The proposed House Bill 4437: "Border Protection, Antiterrorism, Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005" exemplifies one such legislative initiative to criminalize undocumented immigrants. HR Bill 4437 sought to make "unlawful" U.S. presence an "aggravated felony" and to punish those who assist or protect undocumented immigrants. Met with unprecedented protest demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of immigrants in many cities across the U.S. in May 2006, the proposed bill ultimately failed. However, the objective of criminalizing "illegals" has found other means of being realized. On May 23, 2008, 270 undocumented immigrant workers were criminally charged and sentenced for working with false papers.[5] Described by Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor and former senior civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department, as completely unprecedented and as signaling "a startling intensification of the criminalization of immigration law," the indictments are part of the Bush administration's intensified "crackdown" on illegal immigration and aggressive defense of "national security."

It is not only the state, however, that is using criminal law to battle "illegals." In June 2008, a civilian group, "The Federation for American Immigration Reform," filed a federal lawsuit that would make renting to undocumented immigrants a criminal enterprise, equivalent to racketeering.[6] Like the many local housing ordinances proposed and in some cases adopted in cities and counties across the U.S., this suit is yet another effort to curb "illegal immigration" and its various "harmful effects" by denying undocumented workers housing. As Paula Ioanide argues, premised on cultural fantasies of "swelling numbers of undocumented immigrants intent on exploiting welfare resources (for which the undocumented are already mostly ineligible), usurping American jobs, causing fiscal economic crises, spreading poverty, crime and disease through overpopulation," these civic-initiated legal measures follow "the logic of triage: cut off the basic and vital life sources for undocumented immigrants in order to preserve the 'health' of the enfranchised, the legitimate and the included."[7]

This differentiation between lives within the law of the nation (citizens, "legal" residents) and lives beyond the pale of that law ("illegals") becomes then a matter of distinguishing between lives worth saving and lives that are expendable. As a practice of making this distinction, the criminalization of immigrants and their exclusion from vital resources of life thus highlights the constitution of the border as a zone of social death, which Lowe suggests is the condition of nation-state sovereignty exercised at once in collusion with and in contradiction to economic forces of globalization. Moreover, it underscores the structural connections that Gina Dent and Angela Davis draw between the prison and the border, as constitutive limits of the "free world," understood to be the world of liberal democracy.[8] Within both state-run and private prisons, where thousands of foreign-born citizens are detained indefinitely as their deportation is decided, immigrants are "disappeared" behind bars, subjected to laws that do not afford them protection or other basic legal rights granted to citizens, unaccounted for even in death.[9] Perhaps, we might say, already exiled from the "free world" to a condition of social-civil death, where their actual deaths no longer merit legal notice.

In "'I Would Wish Death on You...' Race, Gender, and Immigration in the Globality of the U.S. Prison Regime," Dylan Rodriguez forcefully argues that rather than an exception to the logic of the U.S. state (signaling a shift in governance in the post-9/11 era), immigrant criminalization and detention constitutes an extension of the regime of carceral violence historically exercised by the U.S. state and fundamental to the very intelligibility of "America." Critiquing such claims made in a report on the detention and deportation of U.S. Filipinos with the enforcement of Homeland Security measures in the context of the U.S. "war on terror," Rodriguez attributes the astronomical growth of immigration prisons to the globalizing expansion of the social logic and racial technologies of punishment constitutive of the "good" power of American hegemony. As he asserts, "the 'post-9/11' formation of the Homeland Security State, the 2004 spectacle of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and accelerated immigrant criminalization/detention can be understood as particular significations of a regime of dominance that is neither (only) local nor (erratically) exceptional, but is at once mobilized, proliferating, and global."

The contributors above highlight the role of gender in the structuring of state power and its violent exercise in the control of immigration. While Sokoloff and Pearce depict the forms of gendered violence immigrant women experience, which lead to, and are exacerbated by, incarceration, Lowe draws attention to the gendered meaning of U.S. sovereignty as a power that inheres in the nation-state's capacity to determine life and death and, further, to the gendered effects of the contradictions between the narrow exercise of national sovereignty and the labor demands of global capitalism which are evidenced in the disposability of female life at the border. Together with Dylan Rodriguez's own related view of gender "as a durable and multivalent carceral technology of state violence," these perspectives show the ways in which the sovereign power of the U.S. nation-state depends on the production and containment and/or expulsion of disposable populations through institutionalized practices of racial and gendered violence. The criminalization of immigrants and their systemic exclusion from the rights and resources of civil and social life can thus be viewed as productive of the very sovereign liberal, democratic nation-state that appears to be threatened by them.

While the above authors focus on the role of gender and race in shaping immigration policies and practices on the part of the U.S., a major "receiving" country, Robyn Rodriguez examines the role of gender and sexuality in shaping state migration policies and civil society demands for migration policy reform in the Philippines, a major "sending" country (and source of global domestic labor). In "Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines," Robyn Rodriguez shows how constructions of Filipina women migrants by both the Philippine state and civil society actors draw on a patriarchal logic, upholding dominant notions of gender and sexuality to which women migrant workers are disciplined to conform. In response to the national political crisis sparked by reports of the exploitation and sexual abuse of migrant Filipina domestic workers abroad, public debates about migration policy and feminist activist interventions on behalf of women migrants reveal deeply gendered anxieties and assumptions about women's labor, women's role in the family, the Philippine state's role with respect to its own migrating population and its subject-status on the global stage. Such affective responses, which are predicated on class and gender devaluations of domestic work as well as idealized notions of feminine sexuality, shape the policies of migrant nation-states as well as the kinds of labor they "export." Public affects deeply structured by gender and sexuality are also central in creating and maintaining dominant forms of belonging among immigrants as well as their "host" societies, reinforcing the construction of nation as a familial, domestic space regulated by a paternal state.

The focus on affect as a key site for the making of labor and nation is also central to the contributions of Martin F. Manalansan IV and Mary Pat Brady. In "Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm," Manalansan critiques the heteronormative conceptions of care work that underlie recent social science scholarship on "feminized" global migration. Against this scholarship's tendency to naturalize the heteronormative links between femininity, domesticity and the emotional work of migrant labor, Manalansan explores alternative narratives of "how [migrant] subjects labor with, for, and beyond desire, care, pleasure and money," calling for an approach to the international "chain of care" through which Third World migrant labor is brought to the First world as "a series of conflicting and diverse bonds between labor, emotions and corporeality that do not line up neatly in terms of gender binaries and normative familial arrangements." By queering the particular migrant population of domestic workers to include "gay men, single and married women with no 'maternal instinct,' and trangendered persons," Manalansan calls attention to the multiple ways in which non-normative affects constitutively shape the global flows, performance and subjective lives of migrant labor, which nation-states actively seek to regulate.

Similarly, Mary Pat Brady calls attention to the homoerotic desires and heteronormative anxieties shaping U.S. public attitudes towards "illegal" immigration. In "The Homoerotics of Immigration Control," Brady argues that homophobic responses to unacknowledged homoerotic fantasies of immigrant men and non-normative forms of social belonging and enjoyment highlighted by the gay rights movement helped to structure contemporary anti-immigrant hysteria and the new Nativism. Brady compellingly shows how the homophobic panic sparked by queer mobilization around AB101, a bill extending protection of gays and lesbians against discrimination on the job, came to be channeled into widespread support for the anti-immigrant referendum, Proposition 187. As she writes, "What tied 101 and 187 together was in part the presumed assumption that both 'the gay agenda' and the 'immigrant agenda' took aim at the patriarchal white family, threatening to expose its homoerotic implications on the one hand, its vulnerability to multiple forms of desires, and on the other, its presumed status as a privileged, racialized site of consumption and protected locale for national reproduction."

Brady demonstrates that the dovetailing of anti-gay rights and anti-immigrant sentiments of the 1990s into the new Nativist nationalism of the contemporary moment rested on a deep public investment in, and anxiety about, the regulation and promotion of a heteropatriarchal white family structure as the proper site of consumption and reproduction.[10] Public anxiety about the family and its right to social service and resources also depended on the broad economic and social changes brought about by the financialization and globalization of the U.S. economy and its debilitating effects on the single-wage "nuclear family." Such anxiety promotes the nation as a sanctified domestic space (homeland as property) for heteronormative Anglo-patriarchal enjoyment.

Brady argues that President Clinton marshaled these national anxieties into new programs for welfare reform and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, shifting the focus of debate away from the "rights" immigrants deserved and/or the "burdens" they caused and placing a new emphasis on their "illegality." This "new grid of intelligibility where legality became the central hermeneutic" is fundamental to the intensified criminalization of immigrants, which we've seen, and to the sheer indifference that meets what Brady calls "the slow-motion massacre of immigrants," which has been enabled by the new Nativism and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is this legal hermeneutic that allows the recontextualization of the 3,000 plus deaths that have occurred on the border since its militarization in 1994 as "a kind of passive capital punishment for an immigrant's willingness to skirt entry regulations," making any sympathy for these losses of life out of bounds. What Brady compellingly highlights in her analysis are the ways in which racialization and sexualization are productive of each other and, further, constitutive of immigrant "illegality," a limit-category that places affective borders on human belonging and feeling.

Nadine Naber also attends to racial, sexual and gendered processes of affective containment in the policing of Arab/Muslim immigrants in the aftermath of 9/11. In "'Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!' Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11," Naber describes what she calls the "emotive incarceration" or circumscription of emotions, identities and behaviors that Arab immigrants and Arab Americans experienced as a result of federal government, media and popular discourses on terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, and the forms of racist harassment directed against them as "enemies" of the nation. Such discourses attributed the malleable and incoherent category of "Arab-Middle Eastern-Muslim" immigrant men with an inherent potential for violence and terrorism, thus inciting a whole range of judicial, legislative, administrative measures and policies that targeted non-citizens from Muslim-majority countries as well as naturalized U.S. citizens from Muslim-majority countries. Hate crimes and harassment disproportionately targeted a whole range of persons on the basis of bodily features perceived as signifiers of an inherent spiritual inheritance that constituted a moral, cultural, civilizational, as well as political-military threat to the "American" nation. Situated in the context of the war against terrorism and the inordinate concern with national "security" this war fosters, Naber's essay draws attention to the way racist, sexist and homophobic discourses that conflate Islam, Arabs, and terrorism into an amorphous and malleable category of civilizational threat to liberal democracy, constitute an entire semiotics undergirding and guiding the targeting of immigrants and non-immigrants.

Miriam Ticktin, Paola Bacchetta and Ruth Marshall discuss the role of anti-Islamic discourses as well as many of the above issues comprising the "immigration crisis" as they play out in the context of France and Côte d'Ivoire, providing another lens for understanding this urgent question and its global dimensions. In "A Transnational Conversation on Colonialism, Immigration, Violence and Sovereignty," Ticktin, Bacchetta and Marshall all observe the revival of discourses of colonialism in political discourses in France today, and in particular the revival of a colonial notion of world history that is also shared by French postcolonies in Africa, from where much of immigration to France comes. Bacchetta notes how public discussions about Islam and immigrant communities become framed through a colonial grid of intelligibility, shaping anti-immigrant laws and attitudes (such as the 2004 law banning the Islamic headscarf in schools and the racist representations of the 2005 revolts in suburban slums) even as, as Ticktin observes, a historical amnesia that allows current forms of discrimination against immigrants and their children to be disconnected from colonialism. And Marshall argues that the radical pro-regime youth, militias and student organizations in Côte d'Ivoire defend neo-nativist or ethno-nationalist conceptions of citizenship that are precisely about struggling against colonial visions of history, even as they themselves reproduce the terms of that history. All three underscore the continuing legacies of colonialism in debates about immigration today, both in France and in its African postcolonies, demonstrating that what appear to be national problems must in fact be understood within a global context, irrevocably shaped by long-standing relations between metropolis and periphery, or between the global North and the global South. In this view, the seemingly contradistinctive "cultures" that now appear to find themselves inevitably, even fatally (civilizationally) opposed to each other, are the products of conjoined, mutually-determined histories, bound as well as separated by the violence of those relations.

Ticktin and Bacchetta discuss the ways in which this violence comes to be troped in dominant narratives of immigrant subjects in highly gendered ways. Echoing Naber's ethnographic observations in the U.S., they point out how, within the colonial grid of intelligibility everywhere operative in French public life, Muslim women must take on the role of victims of a violence attributed to Islam itself while barbaric Muslim men take on the role of the agents of such violence. Indeed, despite the fact that people of color in France are the objects of a whole range of racist forms of violence, public discourses about the violent acts of immigrant people of color (in particular men of color, and especially Muslim men) continue to hold sway, reinforcing dominant notions of their being subjects-out-of-control, as State and media narratives of the 2005 riots attest (for which Ticktin and Bacchetta provide alternative accounts). At the same time, Marshall observes that while such acts of violence within the metropolis are assimilated into categories of delinquency (and, as we've seen, criminality), the violence of war, as it is coded in Côte d'Ivoire as well as in other places in the periphery, is beginning to be understood as a legitimate exercise of sovereign power, of the individual self as much as, if not more than, of the collective. This modality of power ("to dominate others, to seize what one wants to seize"), which is privileged in the social imaginary by the prevalence of a form of government "in which extraction, unproductive expenditure, predation, the extravagance and excess of violence are central," Marshall argues, is implicated in redefinitions of manhood that entail the violent treatment of women as objects and signs of masculine power.

In their discussion, Ticktin, Marshall and Bacchetta connect gendered and racialized coding of violence as a modality of expression and power to both the emergence of new forms of religion and to global problems of labor. In contrast to dominant discourses about the relation between religion and violence, Marshall notes how both neo-nativist discourses against local immigration within Côte d'Ivoire as well as in Africa more generally, and Islamic reformism and Pentacolism, which have emerged throughout the continent, are modes of engaging with questions of origins, selfhood and belonging in a context of profound global unsettlement and mobility. Ticktin situates these connections between religion and violence in the context of the astronomical growth of unemployed urban slum populations as a consequence of global neoliberalism. While Marshall suggests that the territorialization of citizenship and fixing of identity and belonging in specific spaces, land and heritage, is tied precisely to the global crisis of labor and labor mobility, Bacchetta remarks on the negative coding of this mobility of postcolonial labor in the French context in terms of illicit trade and contaminating flows (drugs, trafficking)—constructions we also witness in the U.S.

What this discussion highlights for us are the ways in which global problems come to be articulated and coded through conflicting narratives about "immigration" and nationhood. Structured by gender, race, and sexuality, such narratives shape the actions of individuals as well as states, and the forms of conflicts we now witness emerging everywhere. While West African youth commit "immigration-suicide," as Marshall says they call it, an act of escape from the dead-end conditions they face at home that is also conceived as a form of possible resurrection or miracle, and, as Baccheta points out, their forms of revolt in the metropolis are acts of survival and profound affirmations of the desire to live, the French and U.S. governments frame their own policies and measures toward immigrants in unacknowledged secular-Christian and Christian fundamentalist ways. They thus produce for their societies normative and therefore acceptable forms of Islam compatible with normative forms of selfhood, belonging and being in the world. These contradictions between dominant and subordinate ways of engaging with crises and problems whose origins and sources are global rather than local spell grave differences for the fates of peoples. Constructed through social differences of race, gender, sexuality and nationality, the borders on belonging erected to contain these contradictions create "life zones" where some may thrive, and "death zones" where others are left to perish. And yet, even as these borders continue to be reified, hardened, and fixed in both the metropolis and the periphery, the irony and the hope is that transnational connectivities continue to define the current moment—both the transnational connectivities of states and private corporations, and the transnational connectivities of global culture and social movements—attesting to the powerful operation of social imaginaries that are increasingly global and transnational.

In the last part of this issue, we see and hear how the theoretical issues discussed in the previous part play out in the lives of immigrants themselves. In her illuminating documentary, Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side), Natalia Almada depicts the desires and struggles of Mexican immigrants as they hope for better lives by crossing the border. As she points out in her introduction to the film, her insider-outsider, bi-cultural perspective (as a Mexican-American) allows her to represent the experiences of aspiring migrants, their families and their smugglers, as well as the drug trade in which many become involved as the sole means of livelihood and mobility, beyond the moralistic narratives that dominate debates about them. The experiences and aspirations of this particular "illegal" migrant flow, punctuated by the haunting ever-present reality of death (captured in the image of crosses on the desert), are rendered through the corrido, the popular narrative song form, which becomes the mode of expression through which migrants participate in a form of cultural belonging on the border.

Reading a passage from her short story, "A Wife's Story," Bharati Mukherjee presents an Indian immigrant's perception and experience of the insulting representations of non-white immigrants on Broadway and the indifference and ignorance with which these representations are received by the dominant white community. Kayhan Irani's performance, "We've Come Undone," shows the emotional effects of racist targeting against Muslims and its conflation of heterogeneous identities through the experience of a Sikh woman who receives a Muslim-hate phone call. Both Mukherjee and Irani explore the painful conflict of perceptions between dominant white citizens and non-white immigrants through the experience of immigrants. Meanwhile, activist Malik Ahmed relates a story that highlights the divergence between anti-racist and anti-homophobic agendas with respect to Muslims. In "A Threat to Queens Pride," Malik Ahmed tells of the panic generated within the gay community by the presence of two converted Muslims picketing the Queens Pride parade, even as the latter passes through neighborhoods of Muslim immigrant communities, suggesting some of the conflicting ways homophobia and racism intersect with each other and the challenges these conflicts pose for immigrant struggles. Finally, we end the issue with a solidarity statement made by the activist organization, Queers for Economic Justice. "Queers and Immigration: A Visionary Statement" outlines the political challenges facing queer immigrants as they struggle against anti-immigrant legislation, redrawing some of the salient critiques of the premises of the dominant ways of addressing the "immigration crisis" that we've seen, but also, very importantly, concluding with practical demands that would make a profound difference for the lives of all immigrants.

All of these contributions offer us multiple ways of recognizing both the intimate and global dimensions of the "immigrant crisis" and the gendered, racialized and sexualized forms of figuration, narrative and affect that shape the actions of states, communities and individuals. We are led to see the role that forms of imagining social difference play in the coding, and therefore shaping, of violence and sovereign power; the legitimacy of personhood and collectivity; the imagination and performance of labor; acts of survival in the face of disposability versus state protection of valued life; criminality and mobility; and the very possibilities of living and belonging in a world both deeply connected and riven with conflict. Together they call upon us not only to better understand both these connections and these conflicts, but also to struggle to imagine and realize, by transforming the prevailing forms of social difference that police us, more open and just possibilities of living and belonging.

Endnotes

1. "The Great Immigration Panic," The New York Times, I 3 June 2008. [Return to text]

2. Katrin Bennhold, "Sarkozy moves quickly to tighten immigration laws," International Herald Tribune, 12 June 2007. Kara Murphy, "France's New Law: Control Immigration Flows, Court the Highly Skilled". Ruben Navarrette, "Immigration Here? It's Worse in France," 27 April 2008. [Return to text]

3. Lisa Bryant, "Illegal Immigrant Workers in Paris Want Resident Status in France," VOAnews.com, 14 May 2008. [Return to text]

4. This "European Immigration Pact" entails compulsory biometric visas, compulsory language and cultural value lessons, more difficult application processes for refugee status, and more effective detention and deportation procedures. "Sarkozy's EU immigration agenda 'plain sailing,'" EurActiv.com, 5 June 2008. Sarah Latiner, Ben Hall, and Jan Cienski, "Sarkozy calls for immigrant crackdown," FT.com, 28 May 2008. [Return to text]

5. Julia Preston, "270 Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push," The New York Times, 24 May 2008. [Return to text]

6. "Group Wields Racketeering Law Against Landlords to Combat Illegal Immigration," The New York Times, 22 June 2008. [Return to text]

7. Paula Ioanide, "American Cultural Fantasies: Gendered Racism and Ethical Witnessing in the Post-Civil Rights Era," PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2008. [Return to text]

8. "We continue to find that the prison is itself a border. This analysis has come from prisoners, who name the distinction between the 'free world' and the space behind the walls of the prison." Angela Davis and Gina Dent, "Prison as a Border: A Conversation on Gender, Globalization, and Punishment," Signs, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2001, 1236-1237. [Return to text]

9. "No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated." Nina Bernstein, "Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in U.S. Custody," The New York Times, 5 May 2008. [Return to text]

10. As George Lipsitz shows, the coding of the homeland and property associated with the American way of life (and the space of the family) as white was accomplished by means of U.S. government support of suburban development after World War II (in response to Black migration into urban centers and increased migration from Mexico and Latin America). George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Cited in Paula Ioanide, "American Cultural Fantasies: Gendered Racism and Ethical Witnessing in the Post-Civil Rights Era." [Return to text]