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.1 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.”
- Julia Preston, “270 Immigrants Sent to Prison in Federal Push,” The New York Times, 24 May 2008. [↩]
