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Chapter 4. Homo Laborans, Statelessness, and Terror: Economic Deregulation and the Strengthening of Sovereignty
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4 HOMO LABORANS, statelessness, and terror Economic Deregulation and the Strengthening of Sovereignty In this chapter, I would like to suggest that two programs—the U.S. guestworker program and the Border Industrial Program (or maquila program)— are spaces created in reaction to perceived political and economic emergencies. Both programs are legal and operate outside normal laws and practices, and both are viewed as temporary. But not only have they lasted far beyond the original “emergencies” that inspired their creation, but they also have a significant impact on low-tier informal work in the same industries. Although both are assumed to be free zones—meaning that they are supposed to be purely economic in nature—they serve two major political purposes. First, they seek to control entry (particularly illegal entry) into the United States and thus are instruments of immigration policy in general. Second, they contribute to the greater control and surveillance of low-tier immigrants, including the fortification of the border. In this way, these programs resolve the apparent split between those who are allegedly pro-immigration and anti-immigration by ensuring that immigrants are at once highly exploitable and politically rightless (and therefore easily tracked and deported). Although both programs are portrayed as manifestations of American generosity to poorer countries, they are in reality instances of neoliberal policies that achieve at least three things: greater capital mobility, increased 91 HOMO LABORANS, statelessness, and terror worker immobility, and, if possible, increased control over all low-tier immigrant workers (including an attempt to control illegal workers).1 These two programs are significantly marked by the law (surveillance, a border fence, and other attempts to fortify the border) and lawlessness (whether through deregulation, toxic dumping, or lawbreaking with impunity). Importantly, they demonstrate how neoliberal policies undercut democratic equality and the rule of law, and yet strengthen state sovereignty through the suspension of law. Both are not only crystallizations of ideal neoliberal economic policies but also political policies—namely, how to deal with poorer immigrants , or would-be immigrants, of color. Gender roles, mixed with racial stereotypes, further complicate matters, explicitly highlighting femininity in the case of the maquila program and more tacitly oriented toward male workers in the guest-worker program. I will first investigate the conditions of each program, focusing on how economic deregulation, coupled with the suspension of political rights, approaches what Giorgio Agamben calls a situation of “bare life.” This is to pick up on underemphasized elements of Agamben’s work, such as the use of prerogative power domestically and systematically, in a nonwar situation , and effecting a deterritorialized space through the suspension of not just political rights but also economic regulation and rights. I also briefly consider how the language of charitableness, economic reasonableness, and consent and contract all serve to obfuscate the highly dangerous conditions these workers occupy. As Carole Pateman has argued that legal reasoning about marital rape has been Hobbesian rather than democratic, I want to suggest that these employment contracts are similarly construed.2 In effect, they are contracts that lead to the suspension of an individual’s rights, and yet according to Hobbesian logic, they are legitimate. In contrast, Locke’s ideal contract is not legitimate in conditions of coercion or if it effectively renders obsolete all other rights. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx lambasted that “unconscionable freedom, Free Trade!,”3 and similarly challenged the appearance of equality and freedom in the labor contract. More recently, Agamben has discussed how this veneer of consent simply shows that democracies can cynically use the notion of mutuality to mask unequal power relations.4 My aim in this chapter is to highlight the political aspects of two related programs that have been discursively depoliticized, and to show the intimate relationship between the interests of global capital and the strengthening of sovereignty. For this reason, as I have argued in previous chapters, workers are not merely “invaders,” welfare parasites, or job [34.206.1.144] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:42 GMT) 92 american immigration after 1996 stealers, but also potential enemies or terrorists. Because the programs create free zones, they “deterritorialize national territory”5 and make participants stateless; accordingly, any democratic solution to these issues must be transnational rather than national. Both create a sort of “free trade zone,” affecting not only participants but also informal and formal labor relations outside these programs. Very broadly, free trade zones maximize corporate freedom based on governmental acquiescence and minimize workers’ rights, deregulating safety, health...