Migrants at the Center: Expulsion Regimes, Self-Representation, and Translocal Lives

An expanded regime of expulsion haunts the globe. Refugees from long-past or current wars, legal residents with "irregular" backgrounds, "enemy" or undesirable minorities and "aliens," as well as the undocumented live under the sign of expulsion on all continents. In the US, this regime is tied to the growing demonization of migration and policies and practices of the past decade, whose scale and impact have been massive. Despite official rhetoric about the legitimacy of legal immigration, it is clear that the notion of the US as "a nation of immigrants" has been in the process of dismantlement. Popularized by John F. Kennedy in the 1960s, this phrase, and its ideology, which occludes conquest, slavery, and expulsion, had served as a core of official national identity until fairly recently. The post-2001 border and immigration restrictions and targeting of the undocumented have been amplified more recently with selective limitations of legal migration through bans of particular nationals, proposals to eliminate "chain migration" and birthright citizenship, the telling removal of the phrase itself in 2018 from the federal immigration agency's mission statement, and much more. While the immigrant no longer stands for the nation, the undocumented or "illegal" migrant has risen to the position of an essential other to sovereignty itself and is the key figure mobilizing the new securitization, the bedrock of "homeland" identity in the new millennium. As scholars like Mae Ngai have shown, the shifts regarding unauthorized status and criminality predate 2001, setting the stage for the current moment. In two new books, Ana Raquel Minian's Undocumented Lives (2018) and Rebecca Schreiber's The Undocumented Everyday (2018), the "migrant" rather than the "immigrant," and the "undocumented," rather than the potential "new American," occupy the center of the analysis of national identity and belonging. These indispensable studies enable us to deepen our understanding of the sources and consequences of this new regime, showing up the willed blind spots of Kennedy's notion and exposing the historical and current policies that have shaped, and, often, diminished or devastated the lives of migrants' and those of their families across borders. Significantly, the authors do dual work in highlighting migrants' own feelings, ideas, aesthetics, and actions regarding their condition as well as rigorously exploring practices and policies at federal and local levels and their transnational impact. In doing so, these scholars also debunk certain myths about migrants' silence and hiding as a permanent and universal position and the politics of recognition and visibility as a route to a more just world.

In the US, potential deportees—so far mainly the undocumented—are permanently "in the shadows" as goes the common metaphor, and live and work "under" everything: "under cover," "under the radar," "under the table." The nondeportable might be in contact with the deportable every day and not even register it. Lurking, hiding, and slipping by are the main action verbs with which the expellable have been associated, when they are not maligned as criminals. Yet migrant activism and self-representation through media and other narratives have changed the perception that migrants are invisible, abject victims of empire and nationalism despite their condition of being "impossible" and "deportable" subjects (see De Genova, "Migrant 'Illegality'"; Ngai). The 2006 mass mobilization emblematized by the description "A day without an Immigrant" as well as the interventions of the DREAMers, despite the subsequent repressions and reprisals, made evident the plight but also the presence of the undocumented (see Chavez 171–72, 185–86). Most remain "in the shadows," but more undocumented people take risks to assert themselves, their communities, their stories, and their demands publicly.

While disobedience and "autonomy" are embedded in border crossing itself, as Nicholas De Genova has argued ("Incorrigible Subject"), scholars have also positioned migrant activism as the performance of transgressive "acts of citizenship" (Isin and Nielsen), especially in urban spaces (Sassen). Boldly, the undocumented have engaged in storytelling, art, and...