Introduction: Borders on Belonging

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. ¹ 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.” ²

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. ³ 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. ⁴ 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.

1. “Group Wields Racketeering Law Against Landlords to Combat Illegal Immigration,” The New York Times, 22 June 2008.[↑]
2. Paula Ioanide, “American Cultural Fantasies: Gendered Racism and Ethical Witnessing in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2008.[↑]
3. “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.[↑]
4. “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.[↑]