Introduction: Borders on Belonging
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.
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