AB101 enlisted the State of California’s legal infrastructure to protect people from forms of discrimination that had heretofore gone unrecognized. In substantially linking “rights of citizenship” to sexual identities, AB101 resexualized citizenship—or rather, uncoupled it from presumptive heteronormativity. Extending the mantle of “rights” challenged the abstraction of citizenship as neutral, and revealed it to be fully imbricated in the creation and support of heterosexuality. AB101 also confirmed the possibility that alternate structures of desire and consumption might thrive outside of the bounds of middle-class heterosexuality. In their response to Wilson’s ultimate approval of a similar measure, Lou Sheldon and others suggested that the broadening of citizenship to include more than the heteronormative did indeed threaten the heteronormative, arguing that this effort to gain protection came at the expense of “families.” Gays deserved the blame for the faltering political economy of the heteronormative family, not socio-economic shifts.
As Kitty Calavita has argued, every round of anti-immigrant fervor can be contextualized not simply in terms of how immigrants served as scapegoats for a particular crisis, but also in terms of the ways in which Nativist content varies as ideological needs shift. She notes, for example, that at different moments over the course of the last century, the demonized immigrant has served as “strikebreaker,” “socialist and anarchist,” “depressor of wages,” and, most recently, as “tax burden.” 1 Calavita argues that the central motif of Proposition 187—the immigrant as a leech on social services, as a figure who exploits the safety net and drains the tax coffers—emerged only after the social safety net had been rendered highly vulnerable. That is to say, the restructuring of the national economy and the attempt to dismantle the welfare state were well underway before the immigrant narrative changed. No longer the exploited, depressor of wages for working “Americans,” the immigrant had become a fiscal burden to taxpayers.
If the debate over gay “rights” metamorphosed into Prop 187, it shifted again when Clinton took 187 national with Operation Gatekeeper and, later, welfare reform. Clinton shifted the emphasis from what immigrants “deserved”—emergency care, education, police protection—and what problems they caused or eliminated—depressed wages, labor shortages—to a rhetoric centered on their status as “legal” or “illegal.” He deployed his anti-immigrant policies and the development of Operation Gatekeeper by producing a new grid of intelligibility where legality became the central hermeneutic. The emphasis, Clinton repeatedly claimed, should not be on all immigrants, but rather on those who entered the country informally or stayed beyond their visa. By emphasizing such “illegality” he shifted the focus in the U.S. imaginary to immigrants’ criminality, to their supposedly bad behavior, and away from issues of labor, wages, and poverty. And by emphasizing immigrants as criminals with a wanton disregard for the law, he transferred the anxiety of what immigrants might want or demand from the U.S. (i.e., social services, protection from exploitation) and from what they might contribute to the country at large, to the utopian fantasy of a neutral criminal justice system. Under his guidance, new laws were passed that as Jennifer Chacon argues, “conflated illegal immigrants with crime” and also “operated to reify the links between all immigrants and criminality.” 2
In this light, the subsequent 3000 plus deaths have nothing to do with the transformation of the world economy, or with NAFTA, or with the ongoing impact of the Dirty Wars in Central America, nothing to do with the cost of living, nothing to do with the lack of affordable food or the polluted water supplies. These deaths have been machined through the mill of legality to become nearly the proper punishment for violating an unquestioned and naturalized law. In other words, the emphasis on legality removes the deaths from the context of a policing system that forces people to enter the U.S. political territory (they are always already in U.S. economic territory) in highly dangerous ways. Instead it contextualizes these deaths as a kind of passive capital punishment for an immigrant’s willingness to skirt entry regulations.
Put differently, whatever sentiment might be mobilized by the sight of horrific deaths remains out of bounds, left behind in the narrative tangle that inscribes illegality as out of reach of the sentimental. The survivors of the dying season, due to their ontological status as illegal, cannot “access normativity” and therefore cannot, it would seem, lay claim to the sort of sympathy that might be used to build a movement to change violent policing practices. 3 They are stuck in the “it serves them right” realm where sympathy for their experiences remains out of bounds. Any movement to build a large-scale tale of horror, one that would mobilize an affective response to the daily deaths and violence, and to the imprisonment and policing practices they support, and thereby to produce a culture that questions such policies, has been dissipated by this emphasis on criminalization. Immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths. In the long, twisted corridor from AB101 to the daily deaths of immigrants, the state’s responsibility to ensure rights is transmogrified into its privilege to kill.
- Kitty Calavita, “The New Politics of Immigration: “Balanced-Budget Conservatism” and the Symbolism of Proposition 187.” Social Problems 43:3 (August 1986): 284-305.[↑]
- Jennifer Chacon, “Unsecured Borders: Immigration Restrictions, Crime Control and National Security.” Connecticut Law Review 39: (July 2007).[↑]
- Jose Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)” Theatre Journal, 52:1 (March 2000): 67-79 68.[↑]
