American Immigration After 1996: The Shifting Ground of Political Inclusion

Conclusion: The Right to Rights?

Conclusion The Right to Rights? In this chapter, I will argue that cosmopolitan politics—a commitment to democratic practices and rights performed on multiple levels—is the necessary solution to the problems I have considered in this book. But I would first like to frame this solution in terms of the critiques I have offered thus far. In this book, I have explored how a controversial immigrant group is caught up in three important processes: the continued primacy of the nation-state in defining political belonging; the operations of global capital in national territory; and the deployment of the war on terror, which has shaped recent immigration policy and rhetoric. I have analyzed these processes in terms of policy making, popular views and stereotypes, economic trends, and the activity of civil society. Since the mid-1980s, but particularly beginning in the mid-1990s, U.S. policy has initiated greater efforts to tighten the border, increase deportations, boost arrests of “criminal aliens,” and cut off incentives to migrate to the United States by restricting access to the social safety net.1 These efforts have been supported in the media and by increased anti-immigration grassroots activity. At the same time, there are significant challenges to the wish for a self-contained, bordered country: immigration, both authorized and unauthorized, continues at very high rates; global capital “denationalizes national territory” in a variety of ways and affects labor standards and work conditions; and the new, undeclared wars on terror and drugs necessarily efface borders in the United States and abroad. These challenges in turn reinforce the anxious desire to seal the border; to protect from foreign invasion; and to preserve national integrity, including the nation’s “core values.”2 The backlash since 2006 is evidence of these anxieties. Specifically, the immigration proposals of 2006 –7 posited immigrants as exploitable labor (from the “pro”-immigrant camp) or security threats (the anti-immigration camp). As I argued in the introduction and the previous 122 american immigration after 1996 chapter, these two positions have been inextricably bound to each other and reveal far more about American political concerns than they do about the immigrant groups targeted in these proposals. Further, although the two positions reflect historical trends of marginalizing “labor immigrants,” they are also relatively new and unique given the greater predominance of neoliberal politics and the wars on terror and drugs. There are two significant consequences to these views of controversial immigrants. In the first place, they portray immigrants as individuals who are simply leaving their home countries due to poverty and overcrowding.3 This picture of individual rationality is divorced from migrant pathways that have historically been established, economic demands for “cheap” and “docile” labor, and linkages to these groups and areas that the United States has actively developed. It allows conventional interpretations of immigration to emphasize economic factors apart from all other elements that inspire an individual or family to leave their country. It also serves as a justification for neoliberal policies aimed at making workers’ status purely economic at the expense of political protections, rights, and action. In turn, the economic viewpoint is indicative of a hierarchy of needs in which work under any conditions is primary and democratic agency and action is not only secondary , but seen as threatening and disruptive. Second, the key categories of liberal politics reinforce the portrayal of immigrants in individual, economic terms. Liberal notions such as the social contract, the individual as the unit of analysis, equality, and free will paradoxically depoliticize understandings of immigrants’ situation. Among other things, these analytical categories obscure the effects of alarmist and nativist discourse, media portrayals of hyper-reproduction and disease,4 and policies that treat controversial immigrants as threats to national security. That is, they emphasize the notion of individual choice without considering context of reception, how policies shape actions, and the importance of family ties or community. Hence, the liberal perspective of individual rights, individual volition, rationality, and the mutuality of contracts functions with the economic perspective to privilege the economic at the expense of the political. Not surprisingly, the United States’ stance toward human rights and development has operated according to the same logic by fostering economic development to the detriment of democracy, broadly conceived. This is important to note for three reasons: (a) these policies are allegedly designed to aid development in poorer countries and stop the flow of immigration into the United States, but in fact they often initiate or reinforce significant [13.59.218...