Reconceiving Immigration Politics: Walter Benjamin, Violence, and Labor

Abstract

This article theorizes the circulation of violence in the realms of immigration and labor. Through Walter Benjamin, I conceptualize the relationship between racial violence and law, and note that although violence can support the authority of law, excessive violence makes law vulnerable to decay. This tension between authority and excess is eased by humanitarianism. I find clues for disrupting this circulation in Benjamin’s twin notions of the real state of exception and the general strike, introduced two decades apart and invested in theorizing how labor and other marginalized groups threaten the stability of law supported by violence. This reconstruction proceeds alongside an examination of the contemporary US regime of immigration enforcement, which combines the excessive violence of detention and deportation with marginal humanitarian adjustments, which ultimately legitimate violence. On the disruptive side, a Benjaminian reading of labor activism by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers offers three dimensions of emancipatory politics: (a) practices of refusal (to engage on the terms of the immigration debate), (b) the establishment of historical constellations (of racial regulation of labor constitutive of law), and (c) divine violence (through exposure of lawful violence in the food production chain).

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

“…Moreover, inclusionary humanitarian responses to racial hostility should also be avoided because they recast the problem as one of victims of endemic violence in the Global South requiring assistance, rather than understanding poverty and migration as entwined with western self-and-other-determination (Valdez 2020, 97–101; 2021, 20–22). These strategies reinforce, rather than challenge, the racial affect that sustained white democracy and would isolate, rather than support, emancipatory projects spearheaded by Black and brown groups that are both antiracist and anticapitalist (Dawson 2016; Threadcraft 2017; Apostolidis 2019; Valdez 2020, 101–5).…”

At the Borders of the Body Politic: Fetal Citizens, Pregnant Migrants, and Reproductive Injustices in Immigration Detention

“…Racialization―processes that label immigrants, their fetuses, and their children as non-white―strengthens victim-blaming narratives while weakening support for birthright citizenship. Because debilitation is racialized, it bolsters political support among ethnonationalists while concealing structural violence by appealing to humanitarian narratives and replacing spectacular deaths with less visible slow deaths or maimings (Puar 2017, 11; Valdez 2020). Debilitating pregnant immigrants reinforces racist representations of “alien” mothers as deviants, “anchor babies” as fraudulent citizens, and “illegal” immigrants as criminals.…”

“…Expanding Puar’s account of debilitation’s relationships to larger systems of power, I argue that debilitating pregnant migrants is economically and ideologically productive under neoliberalism, even as it contradicts neoliberalism’s globalizing and diversifying dimensions. Extending political theories of immigration (e.g., Valdez 2016; 2020), I analyze how radical-right reproductive politics are driven by ethnonationalist visions of the nation’s future, enacted through vivid but ineffectual performances of territorial sovereignty, and enforced with sovereign power and biopower. Together, debilitation and paralegality construct a delicate pro-life/anti-immigrant compromise that protects profits and confirms sovereign authority over bodies and borders while displacing responsibility for reproductive injustice.…”

The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

“…While the difference between these two conceptions may at first seem significant, both perspectives frame the central question in terms of legality and in turn overlook the political work that lynching performed. Therefore, rather than interrogating the basis of lynching's normative justification (or lack thereof [Kirkpatrick 2008]), I suggest we instead attend to the political productivity of the violence itself (Valdez 2020). On the view developed here, lynching is best understood as a form of what Benjamin termed "mythic violence"-a violence that at once subtends and sustains the legal order (Benjamin 1986, 294-95).…”