This article explains how the economy of “illegality” produces not only a flexible and precarious labor force but in a continuous process of continuous decapitalization of immigrant subjects ranging from subtle practices, such as traffic ticket fines, to more violent ones, which include the indefinite confinement in a detention center. Through interviews with undocumented Mexican women living in Phoenix, Arizona, it is revealed how deportability and detainibility produce economic decapitalization and dispossession of physical and psychological security that has gendered connotations.
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