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>> 229 9 When an Interpreter Could Not Be Found Naeem Mohaiemen The Visible Collective was a coalition of artists, educators, and legal activists exploring contested migrant identities, including religion as an externally imposed, imperfect proxy for ethnicity, within the context of post-2001 security panic. The collective’s first projects (Casual Fresh American Style and Nahnu Wahaad, but really are we one?) were part of the group show Fatal Love: South Asian American Art Now (2005) at the Queens Museum of Art in New York. Curated by Jaishri Abhichandani and Prerana Reddy, Fatal Love was a response (and perhaps rebuke) to the narrow framing of the India-centric, “blockbuster” show Edge of Desire, premiering that same year at the Queens Museum and the Asia Society. Fatal Love was also a platform for a generation of South Asian artists in the diaspora, including Asma Ahmed Shikoh (Vanwyck Blvd, featured elsewhere in this anthology), Anna Bhushan, Iftikhar and 230 > 231 even at a time of intensified scapegoating of Muslim immigrants. While Fareed Zakaria’s cachet rose with his ability to explain “what do they think,” his successor at Newsweek, Tunku Varadarajan, went a step further when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he was willing to go through racial profiling.3 Working-class migrants, lacking class privilege, experienced racial profiling very differently from all this. When border security looks at “Muslim” identity, it is of course a mirage of a category (defined usually, and often incorrectly, by visual appearance, surname, place of origin, and passport), but to the extent such screening measures are deployed, those most likely to be racially profiled are low-income migrants, not high-skill financiers, journalists, and technocrats. * * * Right-wing anti-immigrant groups were able, after 2001, to rebrand themselves as superpatriots. The rise of the Minutemen militia came about in this context. At the same time, American nativism was tempered , even after 2001, by a pro-immigrant sentiment that seemingly (perhaps temporarily) had sturdier roots here than it does in Europe. Consider in this context the Reagan era, when a 1986 law4 gave amnesty and a path to legalization for undocumented migrants who had been in the United States since 1982, or had worked on a farm as seasonal labor. The political process, in this instance, rewarded those immigrants who were willing to give labor, especially on the farm—a landscape of labor deficit and symbolism, as well as a source for subsidised agribusiness. But in more recent times, such laws seem less likely (although the DREAM Act is an exception) because undocumented migrants are now paired with the idea of a “security threat,” in spite of counterexamples such as the Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczinsky, Aryan Nation, and Earth Liberation Front cases. In Europe, anti-immigrant groups had trajectory and resonance as far back as the 1970s. In Germany, church and antiracist groups had tried to popularize the slogan “Kein Mensch ist illegal” (no human is illegal) with mixed success. They also joined forces with other European coalitions pressing for the rights of “sans papiers” (those without papers). But these concepts became much harder to argue in the last decade. After the 2005 London bombings, antimigrant sentiment 232 > 233 These processes of hypervisibility and “othering” are not unique to South Asian, Arab, or other (presumed “Muslim”) migrant groups, nor are they new developments after 2001. An ongoing history of demonization of immigrant groups might include racial epithets (“wop,” “dago,” “spic”); signage (“No Niggers, No Irish, No Dogs”); popular culture (corrosive anti-Semitism, especially up to World War II); the psuedoscience of racial physiognomy (a magazine feature during World War II that identified “differences” between a “Jap” as enemy and “Chink” as ally); whispering campaigns (targeting German Americans during both world wars); incarceration (Japanese American internment); public hearings (the Second Red Scare and House Un-American Activities Committee); and profiling (“driving while black”). While there has been a continued evolution of “suspect” groups within the body politic, it is to be noted that as one minority group becomes the target population, some members of other minority groups can become cheerleaders for this new policing. Juan Williams and Michelle Malkin are two examples of people of color who are public advocates for profiling tactics. This is a familiar strain within race-divisive politics, revealed also in the fractures over affirmative action battles in California, where Asian American, Latino/a, and African American communities at times diverged, based on a calculus of what did or did not directly...

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