The Incorrigible Subject of the Border Spectacle

Nicholas De Genova

To contemplate the framing of public discourse and political debate concerning migration is to confront 'the border'. Indeed, borders manifest themselves as the crystallisation of all the material and practical techniques and technologies that define the ostensible 'inside' from the putative 'outside' of nation-state space, the partition of which is what literally constitutes 'migration' as such. After all, if there were no borders, there would be no migrants – only mobility (De Genova 2013b). Or, taking a cue from the classic slogan of the Chicano liberation movement in the United States: We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us (Acuña 1996, 109). Indeed, it is across and through borders that the distinction between citizens and (non-citizen) migrants, 'natives' and 'foreigners', is produced. In short, the border is the frame that delivers up 'migration' as a reified and fetishised object. Indeed, 'the border' itself is similarly the fetishised, thing-like effect of socio-political relations and spatial practices of bordering. Thus, a Border Spectacle (De Genova 2002; 2005, 242–49; 2012; 2013a) generates a proliferation of discourses and images that seem to unrelentingly verify the objectivity of a real thing – the border – and likewise serve to lend a semblance of credibility to the notion that particular types of cross-border human mobility can be understood to be 'illegal'. But how might we begin to appreciate the subjectivity that animates this spectacular process of objectification?

This chapter approaches the politics of migration by first identifying the subjectivity and autonomy of migration as the catalyst against which various regimes of immigration law-making and border enforcement are inevitably apprehensible as reaction formations. Situating the tactics and techniques of bordering as intrinsically political, the chapter reflects upon the differences that such bordering produces and how these effects serve to mediate the antagonism of the capital-labour relation. Thus, the ostensibly 'national' politics of migration is inextricable from the global (postcolonial) politics of labour subordination. What constitutes the specificity of this configuration of the political in 'political' economy, therefore, fundamentally corresponds to the embodied (racialised) inscriptions of borders on migrants, and contributes to the expansive ubiquity of immigration policing that transposes borders onto the racialised bodies of migrants throughout the putative 'interior' of nation-state space. Drawing upon examples from the United States, the proliferation of the purview of a deportation regime can be understood to manifest the continuous struggle to subordinate the incorrigible subjectivity and autonomy of migrant labour that animates the spectacle of the border.

MIGRANT SUBJECTS

'¡Aquí Estamos, y No Nos Vamos! [Here we are, and we're not leaving!]' So rings out the resounding affirmation of migrant presence in the contemporary United States. Here indeed is a defiant and joyful affirmation of the irrepressible and inextricable presence of migrants – in this instance, specifically, Latin American migrants – within the space of the US nation state. These migrants' bold proclamation of their presence stakes a claim to space, and asserts a sense of entitlement to appropriate and inhabit the United States, to make it a space of belonging. When migrants chanted this slogan during the unprecedented mass mobilisations of 2006, as they marched in their millions all across the United States to defeat what would have been the most punitive immigration law in the country's history, they repudiated the notion that, as migrants, they could be treated as 'foreigners', people 'out of place' – displaced, disposable, deportable.

In the context of these mobilisations, the ubiquity and emotive power of the ¡Aquí Estamos! chant can be understood in terms of a queer politics of migration (De Genova 2010b). For, the assertion 'Here we are, and we're not leaving!' is quite consonant with the renowned chant of queer mobilisation: 'We're here, we're queer, get used to it!' Both are defiant affirmations of presence that literally ask for nothing, petition for nothing, appeal for nothing, demand nothing. This comparison is especially illuminating when considered in light of the second half of the migrant struggle chant, which follows '¡Aquí estamos y no nos vamos!' with the rejoinder '¡Y si nos sacan, nos regresamos!' [Here we are, and we're not leaving! And if they throw us out, we'll...