Punishment, Race, and the Organization of U.S. Immigration Exclusion

Abstract

Although the punitive character of the U.S. immigration enforcement regime has been noted, less research has inquired into the productivity of punishment beyond detention and deportation, the particular rationale of punishment, and the way in which punitive enforcement shapes (rather than targets) race. By analyzing antimigrant rhetoric and the practices of immigration enforcement, I argue that punishment is best understood as a violent material reassertion of the narrative of the United States as a nation of laws. My biopolitical approach to immigration innovates by (1) conceptualizing the process through which race becomes a biopolitical divide, (2) noting that the construction of race also shapes the meaning of whiteness, and (3) showing the particular ways in which sovereignty, discipline, and biopower are combined in the U.S. immigration enforcement regime. I illustrate these claims by examining policies and practices that characterize contemporary immigration enforcement and find that punishment fulfills functions of regeneration, discipline, or moralization, among others, and treats different subpopulations of migrants differently. Even inclusionary interventions involve processes of subjectification among the beneficiaries. I conclude by examining the implications of this framework for understanding the current political stalemate.

Immigrants as Symbolic Assailants

“…Further, despite the "color-blind" process of immigration policy making and implementation, the salient discourse of Latino threat (L. Chavez, 2013) in public and political rhetoric; the growing representation of Muslim immigrants in the post 9/11 "war on terror" (Jamal & Naber, 2007); and the disproportionate number of Hispanics arrested, detained, and deported (Flores, 2014) suggest that crimmigration has become a racialized and ethnicized project (Provine & Doty, 2011;Valdez, 2016). Thus, with the overrepresentation of racial and ethnic (especially Mexican) minority groups in the construction of the crimmigration apparatus, the symbolic connections between immigration, undocumented immigrants, minority groups, and crime have jointly produced "tough-onimmigration" legislation and enforcement of the past two decades (J. G. Longazel, 2012).…”

The Politics of Punishment and Protection: A Comparative Historical Analysis of American Immigration Control, 1990–2017

“…Second, current explanatory accounts tend to focus closely, but separately, on cultural, demographic, economic, and political theses, or what I call “macrosocial analyses,” such as globalization and neoliberalism, xenophobia and anti‐immigrant sentiments, minority threat, sovereignty crisis and the state role (governmentality), and citizenship (Aas and Bosworth ; Aas ; Golash‐Boza ; Valdez ). These accounts are vague when it comes to explaining how those factors interact and describing the processes and mechanisms by which they produce crimmigration.…”

Reconceiving Immigration Politics: Walter Benjamin, Violence, and Labor

“…This is an important insight for the purposes of my intervention, in the extensive literature on Latina/o Studies and Political Thought that denounces the “social suffering” produced by state power in the realm of immigration enforcement (Menjívar and Abrego 2012). 4 Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego tie these violent outcomes to the merging of immigration and criminal justice law, which radically alters migrants’ everyday lives and their self-conception through violent state practices of surveillance, detention, and deportation (2012, 1413; see also Sampaio 2015; Valdez 2016). Although the urgency of outlining the shape of the immigration regime and its violence warrants the focus on the violent outcomes, taking Benjamin seriously shifts the focus from outraged condemnation of the excessiveness of violence to a critical reflection on the meaning and function of violence in the mythical economy.…”

“…The difference between the violence of domestic partners and that sanctioned by the state is their contrasting position vis-à-vis mythologies of law and understandings of responsibility outlined earlier. Women’s victimization by the state—although often unacknowledged—preserves the law because, by punishing brown women, the state confirms their mythical status as threatening lawbreakers and a potential drain on welfare resources (Cisneros 2013; Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo 2014; Valdez 2016), and reasserts the United States as a country of laws. By contrast, domestic violence affecting women in US territory puts in question the central narrative of the rule of law that disavows nonauthorized violence—particularly gendered violence—and marks it as foreign.…”