Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

Introduction: Toward a Redefinition of Citizenship Rights

1 Introduction Toward a Redefinition of Citizenship Rights Rachel Ida Buff A Long, Global Struggle Using the following chant, marchers in Milwaukee’s second Day without Latinos (May 1, 2007) addressed President George W. Bush directly: Bush, ¡Escucha! (Bush, listen!) Estamos en la lucha. (We are in the fight.) Unlike many other such rhymes being chanted bilingually that day, this one was recited only in Spanish. This means either that the 70,000 marchers present were confident of Mr. Bush’s fluency in the language or that, by addressing him in Spanish, they wished to indicate a struggle already taking place in realms they understood well, suggesting that he become aware of it. It is the central contention of this book that the rights of immigrants in the United States have been grounds for a long struggle, indeed. Leaving their prior homes for a multitude of reasons, including war and political upheaval, economic transformations and downturns, religious and gender oppression, cultural and climate change, migrants from all over the world have arrived in nations like the United States. They have come as pioneers 2 Rachel Ida Buff and contract laborers, indentured servants and seekers of fortune, enslaved workers and military brides, businesswomen and adoptees, craftsmen and activists, homesteaders and sojourners, students and refugees. In their new homes, they have created communities by imagining new identities and remembering old ones. They have maintained ties to prior homelands, sometimes when places like a sovereign Poland or a free Haiti have no longer existed geopolitically.1 These prior homelands have often loomed large in the shaping of ethnic identities. Migrants have returned home, temporarily or to stay. In so doing , they have created connections between countries. These connections, in turn, have transformed the nations to which they return, as well as the United States. The United States defines itself as a “nation of immigrants.” The evolution of this definition has been one of many responses to the new arrivals. Migrants to these shores invented an idea of Euroamerican identity while displacing Native American nations during the colonial period, and then they turned around and borrowed from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace to write a national constitution. Since that time, the nation as a whole has dealt with questions of who is to be included in the nation and who is to be kept out. These issues translate, in the present day, into questions of homeland security and border control. They also, crucially, define what citizenship means and who can have it. The writers represented in this collection consider the ways in which immigrants to the United States have transformed ideas of citizenship and rights through the cultural and political struggles that Lisa Lowe has called “immigrant acts”: “the acts of labor, resistance, memory and survival, as well as the politicized cultural work that emerges from dislocation and identification.”2 At this crucial historic moment, in which a militarized national security state surveys the results of an increasingly global economy from atop a ribbon wire fence, immigrants have mobilized in stunning numbers. They have attempted to influence national public policy toward border control and, more broadly, toward the new global economy in which employers and factories are free to relocate but workers are often constrained by national immigration policy. These mobilizations are only the most recent and visible immigrant acts. This volume tries to understand these recent mobilizations in a com- Introduction 3 parative historical context, linking immigrant struggles across time and space. Immigrants have imported ideas about politics and have used these ideas to shape their struggles for citizenship and rights on these shores. Through migration, the very ideas of nation and citizen have been reshaped . This struggle, then, has been both long term and global. This book combines the work of scholars in law, the humanities, and the social sciences with the writings of activists deeply involved in the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Often, writers whose day jobs are as activists write history and cultural criticism. In turn, those teaching at the university find themselves talking to activists and participating in immigrant rights mobilizations. In my own work, a scholarly interest in immigration and citizenship has led me to research the question of who is, and who is not, able to attend public institutions of higher education like the one at which I teach in Wisconsin. In the course of my research on undocumented students’ rights to education, I...