Discipline and Commoditize: How U-Visas Exploit the Pain of Gender-Based Violence

Abstract

U-Visas are granted to immigrant survivors of gender-based crimes. I use critical discourse analysis to examine 100 U-visa cases. I present two arguments. First, U-Visa adjudication establishes a panoptics of pain that disciplines survivors. The panoptics of pain transforms immigrant suffering into objects of scientific knowledge. Second, U-Visas establish an economy of pain that commoditizes survivors’ suffering. The economy of pain establishes transactional exchanges between immigrants and state agencies while generating economic profits for carceral corporations. I conclude with microlevel policy reforms to make U-Visas less exploitative of petitioners, and macrolevel policy reforms to empower working-class immigrants and prevent gender-based violence.

Figures of Crime: Victims, Criminals, and Crime-fighters at the Crossroads of Criminalization and Social Justice (Guest Editors' Introduction)

“…Shifting the framing of female prisoners from threatening and notorious to primarily passive and deserving, this historical construction of the offender as a victim dominated debates on the specificity of women's carcerality and led to the materialization of social justice claims in the form of low-security, treatment-oriented, and genderresponsive prisons. As in Agata Dziuban's (2024) study of the sex worker figure in Poland, the framing of criminal figures as in need of care facilitated a perception of penal institutions as care-givers, an amalgam of carceral and welfare practices in which institutional punishment and institutional care are tightly connected (Abbasi, 2020).…”

Misrecognitions of Victimhood: Discretionary Power of Street-level Bureaucrats in Humanitarian Visas

“…The seeming necessity of crafting T visa narratives that conform to the dominant stereotypes around trafficking arguably contributes to the re-traumatizing nature of the process. Ghazah Abbasi (2020, 477) calls this “the panoptics of pain,” arguing that “state agencies discipline subjects through a seemingly ceaseless interrogation of their deepest wounds.” Many interviewees expressed similar sentiments, noting that the traumatic details of clients’ experiences often had to be rehashed in excruciating detail in order to satisfy USCIS adjudicators, particularly if they issued a RFE that questioned the severity of their experience or other key details of their trafficking. As Lipsky (1980) and others (for example, Maybritt and Spire 2014; Biland and Steinmetz 2017) point out, street-level bureaucrats are often implicitly involved in mediating aspects of the constitutional relationship of citizens to the state: “In short, they hold the keys to a dimension of citizenship” (Lipsky 1980, 4).…”

“…Combined, the requirement to share such explicit detail in order to be recognized as a deserving victim, as well as the constant threat of deportation throughout the process, particularly after the Trump administration’s notice-to-appear order was issued, ensure that the T visa process reinforces the state’s power and, in some ways, undermines the humanitarian motives of this visa (Beckett and Herbert 2010; Abbasi 2020). It is notable in this regard that most interviewees specifically mentioned that the level of detail required in narratives and the degree to which USCIS adjudicators scrutinized them increased under the Trump administration.…”

Confronting Historical White Supremacy in Social Work Education and Practice

“…Key behaviors and patterns surface as lack of self-esteem, rage manifested into violent anger, and internalized racism. These behaviors and patterns have been pathologized, and the profession of social work exploits and profits from them (Abbasi, 2020;Kroehle et al, 2020;Morley et al, 2017). The impact of race on social work is evident in the broader historical racial formation illuminated above and must be read critically as an aspect of current and past legislation, policies, and the delivery of social service in the United States.…”