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In the fall of 2003, the United States Congress and the Bush administration were getting serious about immigration control . Earlier that year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), founded in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, had assumed full responsibility for border security. Flush with new funds from DHS’s rapidly increasing budgets, officials from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (BCBP) were testifying on Capitol Hill to build support for a vast expansion of military capacities and a major extension of fencing along the U.S.–Mexico border. A BCBP official justi- fied these new steps to curb illegal immigration by invoking the newly inaugurated war on terror, saying: “The priority mission of BCBP is to prevent terrorists and terrorist weapons from entering the United States. This extraordinarily important priority mission means improving security at our physical borders” (Garcia 2003). The Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC), a progressive organization concerned with immigrants’ rights, saw such extravagant bombast as typifying the agency’s persistent blurring of the lines between terrorism and immigration . “Ranking migrants on the terrorist threat list has become standard practice for BCBP,” decried the IRC (Garcia 2003). In an era when public authorities and private citizens’ groups routinely voice suspicions that immigrants are the agents of death and destruction in America, there is not much incentive for people to listen to what immigrants have to say about why they are here and what their lives are like. There are also obvious reasons for those who have migrated here from other countries to stay quiet about these things. And so the debate about immigration control and reform proceeded then, as it does today, largely through native-born Americans’ statements about immigrants and proposals for what to do to and (less often) for immigrants. Immigrants, in other words, were then and remain the objects for discussion and analysis, the targets of apprehension Introduction: Immigration, Power, and Politics in America Today xiii strategies, the dangerously inscrutable entities whose likely responses to carrot-or-stick incentives were the subject of predictive calculation and ceaseless debate. How many more miles in Arizona should the wall be lengthened to keep them out? How many more “detention facilities ,” as the prisons for undocumented immigrants are euphemistically known, are needed to keep them in but under lock and key? How steeply should they be fined if “we” grudgingly give them a chance to legalize? Should they be required to learn English as a condition of staying? When agents discover that they are in the country without legal documents, should they be saddled with civil violations or arrested and held on criminal charges? These are the questions that have held center stage as immigration issues have risen to recently unparalleled prominence in U.S. public discourse, as the 2008 presidential primary campaigns illustrated. They are noteworthy for the inert, passive position they assign to the people whose futures the pundits and policymakers ruminate over and presume to govern. This book responds to such silencing of immigrants in U.S. popular culture and policy debates by reintroducing their voices as workers, political activists, and narrators of power. It calls attention to what immigrants say about their experiences through a process of political citation and engagement that resists the rituals that keep things in order when immigrants do get the chance to appear and speak in U.S. public culture. Even in these moments, immigrants tend to be presented in ways that reinforce the claims of elite debates to superior rationality and legitimacy. Think of the last time you saw a story about illegal immigration via the U.S.–Mexico border on a television news program. If the news segment included an interview with an immigrant , you probably heard that person make remarks that invited you to attach a personal face and story to an otherwise abstract policy problem . Probably, it was something like “I just want to work and support my family” or “I don’t know when I’ll see my children again.” Then the interlude for empathy predictably gave way to the pronouncements of experts who, from their detached, “objective,” and therefore presumably trustworthy positions, cited the statistics and general arguments to which the merely “subjective” and particularistic points of view were supposed to defer. But what if instead of hearing in an immigrant’s life story the voice of “authentic” personal experience, so different from the ostensibly xiv Introduction [18.226.93.207] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 09:15...

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