Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

8. The Rights of Respectability: Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants

190 chapter 8 The Rights of Respectability Ambivalent Allies, Reluctant Rivals, and Disavowed Deviants Lisa Marie Cacho In the spring of 2006, we witnessed a national mass mobilization opposing House Bill 4437, the Border Protection , Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act, also known as the Sensenbrenner Bill. Among the many undemocratic measures proposed, this bill, if passed and enacted, would increase crimes considered aggravated felonies, intensify mandatory punishments, allow indefinite detentions , and deny entry to all nationals from countries that either deny or delay accepting deportees. People of all colors across the nation organized to oppose H.R. 4437. Referred to as the immigrant rights movement, activists coordinated demonstrations, marches, walkouts, rallies, and a nationwide boycott referred to as “A Day without an Immigrant.” The movement incorporated people of all ages and various political leanings; protestors’ demands ranged from humane immigration reform to full amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Unquestionably, an inspiring moment for antiracist , pro-immigrant activists, artists, and academics of all colors, it was also a moment that could not help but be haunted by the many national The Rights of Respectability 191 mobilizations, demonstrations, and protests that should have happened, but never did. For some, the hope evoked by the Immigrant Movement aggravated rather than abated the tensions, resentments, and anxieties between and among racial and ethnic groups. We witnessed such media representations during and after the demonstrations and protests for immigrant rights as exemplified in news headlines, such as “Growing unease for some blacks on immigration”; “The black-brown divide: An alliance seems natural, but what separates Latinos and African Americans has to be examined first”; “Immigrants, other minorities must find unity”; and “Blacks split on support for illegal immigrations: Many are backers, but fight for jobs spurs foes.”1 Sharing a similar socioeconomic status, but conferred differential access to jobs and resources, working-class African Americans and undocumented Latinas/os are structurally and ideologically positioned to be both ambivalent allies and reluctant rivals.2 Although both undocumented Latina/o immigrants and working-class African Americans are consigned to low-wage work in the service economy , they are not necessarily provided equal access to the jobs within that realm, nor are they necessarily paid comparable wages for very similar occupations. On the one hand, it seems that their collective class struggles could easily form the basis for cross-racial alliances to fight against common adversaries (such as the prison industrial complex) or to fight for improving access to social resources (such as more equitable funding for public education). On the other hand, their different social positions in those classed struggles—as citizens or immigrants, as overexploited or chronically unemployed—also situate both aggrieved groups as competitors over the same low-wage jobs and limited social resources, players within a zero-sum game. But Latinas/os and African Americans are not only potential economic competitors. Various processes of globalization, international policies, U.S. government regulations, and cultural representations have also differently criminalized both aggrieved groups and differently denied them full social membership and political participation in the United States. Any argument for civil or immigrant rights cannot be disentangled from racialized and gendered discourses of (Black) criminality and (Latina/o) illegality. African Americans and Latinas/os necessarily must negotiate their respective exclusions from political and legal rights in relation to one another. To 192 Lisa Marie Cacho counter implicit or explicit stereotypes of criminality or illegality, writers and activists represent both aggrieved groups as members of heterosexual families, which not only repudiates racialized criminality or illegality but also recuperates respectable domesticity. For example, those who support amnesty for undocumented immigrants often represent the undocumented population as desperately hard-working families, which redefines border crossing without papers from an irrefutable “crime” to one of many necessary sacrifices that immigrants’ make for their families. These representations, however, leave intact racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions of criminality. In other words, even by disentangling “illegality” from “criminality,” the faulty and dangerous logic that legitimates and justifies increased surveillance, incarceration, deportation, and state regulation is not challenged, only the stereotype. Consequently, those considered socially or sexually “deviant” must be erased and negated because the pressures to assume “respectability” make it necessary to exclude certain men and women of color from the “moral grammar” of rights discourse all together.3 Respectable Representations According to comparative race scholar Helen H. Jun, “the institution of citizenship constitutes a narrow discursive field within which differentially...