Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

18. Rights in a Transnational Era

402 chapter 18 Rights in a Transnational Era Monisha Das Gupta The post-9/11 treatment of immigrants in the United States, particularly those of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent, has reanimated an interest in the civil rights entitlements of those who, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status, are perceived as threats to U.S. national security. The imagery of the civil rights movement was powerfully and repeatedly invoked by activists and the liberal mainstream media alike in 2006, when hundreds and thousands of immigrants marched in the spectacular rallies across the country between March and May. They were protesting proposals in Congress to make felons out of an estimated 11 to 12 million people who lived and worked in the United States but were undocumented. Many hailed this mobilization and these acts of civil disobedience on the part of immigrant students and workers to be the new civil rights movement. While the demands for legalization are racialized as a Hispanic issue , those for due process and First Amendment rights are raised most dramatically in the case of South Asians and Arabs, who at this moment are profiled as terrorist. Both sets of demands, when cast as civil rights, display the unquestioning belief in citizenship as the privileged route to rights. In these contestations over who can belong to the nation and what Rights in a Transnational Era 403 rights immigrants can have, indigenous perspectives remain obscured. Native American scholar and activist Andrea Smith observes, “By instituting repressive immigration policies, the U.S. government is once again asserting that it—and not indigenous nations—should determine who can be on these lands.”1 Furthermore, she shows that the media only cover those indigenous views that shore up support for increased border controls. In this chapter, I juxtapose three types of rights talk—migrant, indigenous , and civil. The first two question the adequacy of the third. Full citizenship , which is the goal of civil rights–oriented visions of justice, naturalizes and reinscribes the policing functions of borders that territorialize racialized, ethnicized, and gendered notions of belonging. The civil rights framework formulates the lack of or the routine violation of rights of subjects inhabiting a national space as second-class citizenship, a condition that needs to be corrected through struggles for full national belonging .2 For indigenous peoples colonized by the United States, the struggle for sovereignty cannot, by definition, be contained within a civil rights framework that hinges on U.S. citizenship. Decolonization would mean substantive independence from the United States. The sovereign political entity that would emerge from this break need not take the form of the modern nation-state, as scholars like Andrea Smith have established.3 For immigrants, accessing rights only through citizenship ignores the realities of border crossing in a world where neocolonialism and imperialism have led to massive displacement. When people on the move find their rights abridged at the moment of border crossing and find their mobile bodies used to bolster xenophobic nationalism, the need for rights has to be imagined within transnational flows rather than within nationally bounded spaces. Transnationalism offers a useful analytical tool for the purpose of tracing the intersections between immigrant and indigenous struggles because it can effectively disclose the relationship of national borders to rights. I foreground this understanding of transnationalism over its more available uses that trace the interpenetration of nationally bounded spaces and the transversal social and political fields within which immigrants craft their identities and politics.4 The conceptualization of immigrant rights without an accompanying reliance on citizenship comes out of my decadelong work with and about South Asian immigrant women’s, queer, and labor organizations in the United States. The marginal social location of 404 Monisha Das Gupta the members of these organizations alert them to the disciplining functions of borders, which define not only the identity of citizens but also the identity of the nation-state itself as a sovereign, self-governing entity. The immigrants’ innovative methods of claiming rights outside of nationbased regimes recognize borders as power effects that determine who can have what rights. Borders produce the biopolitics that create the racialized , gendered, sexualized, and classed distinctions between nationals and aliens. This kind of rights talk is nonintuitive because it means that the immigrants fundamentally question the violence of national border setting and its creation of the citizen as the spatially rooted and privileged bearer of rights. Transnationalism can...