Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Julie A. Dowling is Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Jonathan Xavier Inda is Associate Professor of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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GOVERNING IMMIGRATION THROUGH CRIME

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Governing Migrant Illegality Jonathan Xavier Inda and Julie A. Dowling......................................................................................................1Part I LAW AND CRIMINALIZATION............................................................................................................................................................371. The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant "Illegality" Nicholas De Genova................................................................................................................412. The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power Juliet P. Stumpf......................................................................................................593. The Security Myth: Punishing Immigrants in the Name of National Security Jennifer M. Chacón.......................................................................................77Part II MANAGING BORDERS..................................................................................................................................................................954. Constructing a Virtual Wall: Race and Citizenship in U.S.-Mexico Border Policing Josiah McC. Heyman....................................................................................995. Spectacle in the Desert: The Minuteman Project on the U.S.-Mexico Border Leo R. Chavez.................................................................................................1156. Bare Life: Border-Crossing Deaths and Spaces of Moral Alibi Roxanne Lynn Doty..........................................................................................................129Part III POLICING THE INTERIOR............................................................................................................................................................1457. The Rise and Fall of Employer Sanctions David Bacon and Bill Ong Hing..................................................................................................................1498. Arizona's SB 1070: Setting Conditions for Violations of Human Rights Here and Beyond Rogelio Sáenz, Cecilia Menjívar, and San Juanita Edilia García.....................1659. Immigration as Local Politics: Re-Bordering Immigration Through Deterrence and Incapacitation Liette Gilbert...........................................................................181Part IV DETENTION AND DEPORTATION.........................................................................................................................................................19510. Pursuant to Deportation: Latinos and Immigrant Detention David Manuel Hernández..................................................................................................19911. "¿Quien sabe?": Deportation and Temporality Among Transnational Mexicans Deborah A. Boehm........................................................................................21712. Exiled by Law: Deportation and the Inviability of Life Susan Bibler Coutin............................................................................................................233Part V IMMIGRANT CONTESTATIONS............................................................................................................................................................24913. (Re)Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha Josue David Cisneros........................................................................25314. Left Out but Not Shut Down: Political Activism and the Undocumented Student Movement Roberto G. Gonzales..............................................................................26915. From Border Control to Border Care: The Political and Ethical Potential of Surveillance James P. Walsh................................................................................285Index......................................................................................................................................................................................303

Chapter One

Nicholas De Genova

Mexican migration to the United States is distinguished by a seeming paradox that is seldom examined: while no other country has supplied nearly as many migrants to the US as has Mexico since 1965, virtually all major changes in US immigration law during this period have created ever more severe restrictions on the conditions of "legal" migration from Mexico. Indeed, this seeming paradox presents itself in a double sense: on the one hand, apparently liberalizing immigration laws have in fact concealed significantly restrictive features, especially for Mexicans; on the other hand, ostensibly restrictive immigration laws purportedly intended to deter migration have nonetheless been instrumental in sustaining Mexican migration, but only by significantly restructuring its legal status as undocumented. Beginning in the 1960s, precisely when Mexican migration escalated dramatically—and ever since—persistent revisions in the law have effectively foreclosed the viable possibilities for the great majority who would migrate from Mexico to do so in accord with the law, and thus have played an instrumental role in the production of a legally vulnerable undocumented workforce of "illegal aliens"

This study elaborates on the historical specificity of contemporary Mexican migration to the US as it has come to be located in the legal (political) economy of the US nation-state, and thereby constituted as an object of the law, especially since 1965. More precisely, this chapter interrogates the history of changes in US immigration law through the specific lens of how these revisions have had a distinct impact upon Mexicans in particular. Only in light of this sociolegal history does it become possible to sustain a critical perspective that is not complicit in the naturalization of Mexican migrants' "illegality" as a mere fact of life, the presumably transparent consequence of unauthorized border crossing or some other violation of immigration law. Indeed, in order to sustain an emphatic concern to de-naturalize the reification of this distinction, I deploy quotes throughout this chapter, wherever the terms "legal" or "illegal" modify migration or migrants.

In addition to simply designating a juridical status in relation to the US nation-state and its laws of immigration, naturalization, and citizenship, migrant "illegality" signals a specifically spatialized sociopolitical condition. "Illegality" is lived through a palpable sense of deportability—the possibility of deportation, which is to say, the possibility of being removed from the space of the US nation-state. The legal production of "illegality" provides an apparatus for sustaining Mexican migrants' vulnerability and tractability—as workers—whose labor-power, inasmuch as it is deportable, becomes an eminently disposable commodity. Deportability is decisive in the legal production of Mexican/migrant "illegality" and the militarized policing of the US-Mexico border, however, only insofar as some are deported in order that most may ultimately remain (undeported)—as workers, whose particular migrant status has been rendered "illegal." Thus, in the everyday life of Mexican migrants in innumerable places throughout the US, "illegality" reproduces the practical repercussions of the physical border between the US and Mexico across which undocumented migration is constituted. In this important sense, migrant "illegality" is a spatialized social condition that is inseparable from the particular ways that Mexican migrants are likewise racialized as "illegal aliens"—invasive violators of the law, incorrigible "foreigners," subverting the integrity of "the nation" and its sovereignty from within the space of the US nation-state. Thus, as a simultaneously spatialized and racialized social condition, migrant "illegality" is also a central feature of the ways that "Mexican"-ness is thereby reconfigured in racialized relation to the hegemonic "national" identity of "American"-ness (De Genova, 2005). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is nevertheless crucial to locate these conjunctures of race, space, and "illegality" in terms of an earlier history of the intersections of race and citizenship. That history is chiefly distinguished, on the one hand, by the broader historical formulation of white supremacy in relation to "immigration" and, on the other, by the more specific legacy of warfare and conquest in what would come to be called "the American Southwest," culminating in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which occasioned the first historical deliberations in the US over questions concerning the citizenship and nationality of Mexicans.

THE "REVOLVING DOOR" AND THE MAKING OF A TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY

Originating in the shared, albeit unequal, history of invasion and war by which roughly half of Mexico's territory came to be conquered and colonized by the US nation-state, the newly established border long went virtually unregulated and movement across it went largely unhindered. During the latter decades of the 19th century, as a regional political economy took shape in what was now the US Southwest, mining, railroads, ranching, and agriculture relied extensively upon the active recruitment of Mexican labor (Acuña, 1981). There was widespread acknowledgment that Mexicans were encouraged to move freely across the border and, in effect, come to work without any official authorization or documents (Samora, 1971; García, 1980).

After decades of enthusiastically recruiting Chinese migrant labor, among the very first actual US immigration laws was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. So began an era of immigration regulation that sought to exclude whole groups even from entry into the country, solely on the basis of race or nationality. Eventually, with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1917, an "All-Asia Barred Zone" was instituted, prohibiting migration from all of Asia (Hing, 1993). In the wake of repeated restrictions against "Asiatics," Mexican migrant labor became an indispensable necessity for capital accumulation in the region. During and after the years of the Mexican Revolution and World War I, from 1910 to 1930, approximately one-tenth of Mexico's total population relocated north of the border, partly owing to social disruptions and dislocations within Mexico during this period of political upheaval, but principally driven and often directly orchestrated by labor demand in new industries and agriculture in the US (cf. Cardoso, 1980).

During this same era, a dramatically restrictive system of national-origins immigration quotas was formulated for European migration and put in place through the passage of the Quota Law of 1921, and then further amplified by the Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act). The 1924 law's national-origins system limited migration based on a convoluted formula that made unequal numerical allotments for immigrant visas, on a country-by-country basis. In effect, this regulatory apparatus had confined migration from the entire Eastern Hemisphere to approximately 150,000 annually; within that ceiling, it had guaranteed that roughly 85% of the allotments were reserved for migrants from northwestern European origins (Reimers, 1985 [1992]). Drawing upon 42 volumes (published in 1910 and 1911 by the US Immigration Commission) that compiled "findings" concerning the "racial" composition and "quality" of the US population, the 1924 Immigration Act codified the gamut of popular prejudices about greater and lesser inherent degrees of "assimilability" among variously racialized and nationally stigmatized migrant groups. The Congressional Record bears ample testimony to the avowed preoccupation with maintaining the "white"/"Caucasian" racial purity of "American" national identity—"an unmistakable declaration of white immigration policy" (Hutchinson, 1981, 167). Remarkably, in spite of the vociferous objections of some of the most vitriolic nativists and, more importantly, as a testament to the utter dependency of employers upon Mexican/migrant labor, particularly in the Southwest, migration from the countries of the Western Hemisphere—Mexico foremost among them—was left absolutely unrestricted by any numerical quotas.

It is revealing that the US Border Patrol, from 1924—when it was first created—until 1940, operated under the auspices of the Department of Labor. By the late 1920s, the Border Patrol had very quickly assumed its distinctive role as a special police force for the repression of Mexican workers in the US (Ngai, 2004). Selective enforcement of the law—coordinated with seasonal labor demand by US employers—instituted a "revolving door" policy, whereby mass deportations would be concurrent with an overall, large-scale importation of Mexican migrant labor (Cockcroft, 1986). Although there were no quantitative restrictions (numerical quotas) on "legal" Mexican migration until 1965, Mexican migrants could nonetheless be conveniently denied entry into the US, or deported from it, on the basis of a selective enforcement of qualitative features of immigration law, beginning at least as early as the 1920s.

During this era, the regulatory and disciplinary role of deportation operated against Mexican migrants on the basis of rules and regulations governing who would be allowed to migrate, with what characteristics, how they did so, as well as how they conducted themselves once they had already entered the country. Thus, attempted entry could be refused on the grounds of a variety of infractions: a failure upon entry to pay a required immigrant head tax and a fee for the visa itself, or perceived "illiteracy," or a presumed liability to become a "public charge" (due to having no prearranged employment), or on the other hand, violation of prohibitions against contracted labor (due to having pre-arranged employment through labor recruitment). Likewise, Mexican workers could be subsequently deported if they could not verify that they held valid work visas or could otherwise be found to have evaded inspection, or if they could be found to have become "public charges" (retroactively enabling the judgment of a prior condition of "liability"), or to have violated US laws, or to have engaged in acts that could be construed as "anarchist" or "seditionist." All of these violations of the qualitative features of the law rendered deportation a crucial mechanism of labor discipline and subjugation, not only coordinated with the vicissitudes of the labor market but also for the purposes of counteracting union organizing among Mexican/ migrant workers (cf. Acuña, 1981; Gómez-Quiñones, 1994).

With the advent of the Great Depression of the 1930s, however, the more plainly racist character of Mexican illegalization and deportability became abundantly manifest. Mexican migrants and US-born Mexican citizens alike were systematically excluded from employment and economic relief, which were declared the exclusive preserve of "Americans," who were presumed to be more "deserving." These abuses culminated in the forcible mass-deportation of at least 415,000 Mexican migrants, as well as many of their US-citizen children, and the "voluntary" repatriation of 85,000 more (Hoffman, 1974). Notably, Mexicans were expelled with no regard to legal residence or US citizenship or even birth in the US—simply for being "Mexicans."

In the face of the renewed labor shortages caused by US involvement in World War II, however, the United States federal government, in a dramatic reversal of the mass deportations of the 1930s, initiated the mass importation that came to be known as the Bracero Program, as an administrative measure to institutionalize and regiment the supply of Mexican/ migrant labor for US capitalism (principally for agriculture, but also for the railroads). The Bracero accords were effected unceremoniously by a Special Committee on Importation of Mexican Labor (formed by the US Immigration Service, the War Manpower Commission, and the Departments of State, Labor, and Agriculture) through a bilateral agreement with Mexico. Predictably, the US Department of Agriculture was granted primary authority over the program. Ostensibly an emergency wartime measure at its inception in 1942 (Public Law 45), the program was repeatedly renewed and dramatically expanded until its termination in 1964. This legalized importation of Mexican labor meant that migrant workers, once contracted, essentially became a captive workforce under the jurisdiction of the US federal government, and thus a guarantee to US employers of unlimited "cheap" labor. In addition to this protracted contract-labor migration, however, the Bracero Program facilitated undocumented migration at levels that far surpassed the numbers of "legal" braceros—both through the development of a migration infrastructure and through employers' encouragement of braceros to overstay the limited tenure of their contracts. Preferring the undocumented workers, employers could evade the bond and contracting fees, minimum employment periods, fixed wages, and other safeguards required in employing braceros (Galarza, 1964). Indeed, as early as 1949, US employers and labor recruiters were assisted with instantaneous legalization procedures for undocumented workers, known as "drying out wetbacks" (Calavita, 1992). Some have estimated that four undocumented migrants entered the US from Mexico for every documented bracero. Early in 1954, in an affront to the Mexican government's negotiators' pleas for a fixed minimum wage for braceros, the US Congress authorized the Department of Labor to unilaterally recruit Mexican workers, and the Border Patrol itself opened the border and actively recruited undocumented migrants (Galarza, 1964; Cockcroft, 1986). This period of official "open border" soon culminated, predictably in accord with the "revolving door" strategy, in the 1954–1955 expulsion of at least 2.9 million "illegal" Mexican/migrant workers under the militarized dragnet and nativist hysteria of "Operation Wetback" (García, 1980). Thus, the Bracero years were distinguished not only by expanded legal migration through contract labor, but also by the federal facilitation of undocumented migration and the provision of ample opportunities for legalization, simultaneously coupled with considerable repression and mass deportations.

LEGISLATING MEXICAN "ILLEGALITY"

Prior to 1965, as already suggested, there were absolutely no quantitative restrictions on "legal" migration from Mexico imposed at the level of statute, and none had ever existed. There had literally never before been any numerical quota legislated to limit migration from Mexico. This was true for all of the countries of the Western Hemisphere (excluding colonies), and so has implications for nearly all Latino groups (with Puerto Ricans as the very important exception), but none of these countries has ever had numbers of migrants at all comparable to those originating from Mexico. Furthermore, the reformulation of the legal specificities of "illegality" in 1965 and thereafter, it bears repeating, transpired in the midst of an enthusiastic and virtually unrelenting importation of Mexican/migrant labor (increasingly impervious even to the ebbs and flows of unemployment rates). The end of the Bracero Program in 1964 was an immediate and decisive prelude to the landmark reconfiguration of US immigration law in 1965. Indeed, anticipating unemployment pressures due to the end of the Bracero Program, the Mexican government simultaneously introduced its Border Industrialization Program, enabling US-owned, labor-intensive assembly plants (maquiladoras) to operate in a virtual free-trade zone along the US border. As a result, migration within Mexico to the border region accelerated. By 1974, one-third of the population of Mexico's border states was comprised of people who had already migrated from elsewhere, and a mere 3% of them were employed in the maquiladoras (Cockcroft, 1986, 109). Thus, a long established, well organized, deeply entrenched, increasingly diversified, and continuously rising stream of Mexican migration to the US had already been accelerating prior to 1965, and circumstances in the region that might induce subsequent migration to the US simply continued to intensify. As a consequence of the successive changes in US immigration law since 1965, however, previously unknown quantitative restrictions—and specifically, the apparently uniform application of numerical quotas to historically distinct and substantially incommensurable migrations—became central to an unprecedented, expanded, and protracted production of a more rigid, categorical "illegality," for Mexican/migrant workers in particular, than had ever existed previously.

(Continues...)

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