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Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination How a nation treats the immigrant speaks volumes about the nation. This is especially true for the United States, which regards itself as a nation of immigrants. How the United States treats the immigrant is part of the “project of national self-definition . . . [which] includes not only deciding whom to admit and expel, but also providing for each alien’s transition from outsider to citizen.”1 This project of national self-definition with regard to the immigrant inevitably intersects with the national project with regard to this country’s racial minorities. A critical examination of this project may help us negotiate the tensions created by changing demographics as we decide what kind of nation we want to be. The immigrant signifies a person in a specific relation to the nation and contains within it a sense of movement—the immigrant has moved or is moving, crossing a border to get from “there” to “here.” What negotiations must the immigrant make in traversing the border to gain entry into the United States? Once “inside,” what other borders remain? The immigrant may learn after crossing the border that she has not left it behind, that the border is not just a peripheral phenomenon. She may learn, through the juridical and extrajuridical policing of the border, that she carries the border with her. Indeed, to be an immigrant is to be marked by the border. This is not to say that all immigrants are marked in the same way. Some immigrants are able to “pass” while others (and sometimes even their U.S.-born descendants) remain perpetual foreigners. One key component in the construction of “the immigrant” and its relation to “the nation” is the operation of the border in constructing national identities. The border is not something “found” on the geopolitical periphery . Instead, the border is itself a social construct, and it is through its flexible operation that the border helps to construct and contain the nation and the national community. 2 27 By defining the national, the border represents a bridge (and barrier) between the national and the international. The border connects (and interrupts ) the inter/national such that it is the enabling condition for conceptions of both the national and the international. Some analysts, prompted by the increasing flow of information and capital across borders, have heralded the end of the nation-state.2 However, news of the nation-state’s demise is premature. Although borders have become increasingly porous to flows of information and capital, borders are constricting when it comes to the movement of certain persons. This is particularly curious, because it is the very flow of capital across national borders that helps create the flow of people. The “developed” world uses porous borders to extract resources from the rest of the world, disrupting the economies and cultures of the “developing” world. These disruptions push people out of their native lands and into “developed” nations in the form of immigrants. While “developed” nations are happy to extract resources, they seem less happy with the influx of immigrants. The result is the simultaneous and contradictory reconfiguration of nation-states through trade agreements such as GATT or NAFTA, which limit each nation-state’s exercise of sovereignty over its borders where trade is concerned,3 along with a rearticulation or renewal of the nationstate through their exercise of sovereignty over their borders when it comes to the movement of certain persons. This control is often expressed along problematic racialized lines. Stated differently, the nation-state is reasserting itself (and perhaps re-creating) itself through control over immigration. In this chapter, I begin by examining the entry of the immigrant into the racialized space of the United States. Centering the analysis on the immigrant tells us much about the political economies of race and nativistic racism, which operate to construct immigrant, racial, and national identities . I then turn to the operation of the border and its role in constructing the nation and the national community. Placing the immigrant at the center may tell us much about the complex terrain of U.S. race relations. The Immigrant and the Inter/National Within the national sphere, the entry of the immigrant into a racialized state such as the United States offers an opportunity to examine the racial structures that undergird and constitute this nation-state. We might question official state apparatuses such as the census, which might be described as an official identity producer, and...

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