Illiberal Promises: Two Texts on Immigration and Moral Debt

As of this writing, a new immigration bill promising undocumented migrants a “pathway to citizenship” has made its way through key votes in both houses of the U.S. Congress, its success enabled by an amendment to spend as much as forty-six million dollars militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border. President Barack Obama, who has in five years overseen the deportation of more undocumented immigrants than any other U.S. president, plans to sign the bill into law later this year, authorizing the expansion of the border patrol to forty thousand agents, the construction of a seven-hundred-mile border fence, and the use of unmanned drones to police the sky over the Rio Grande (Cowen and Ferraro 2013). And all at a time when the rate of immigration from Mexico is not increasing, but remains steady (D’Vera et al. 2012).

One lesson of this irrational political dealing, these solutions without a problem, is clear: the rhetoric of our lawmakers, the volley of media cliché and political scheming, grows denser and more complicated all the time. In exchange for the illusion of progress and humanitarian goodwill, the Obama administration will preside over an elaborate, wasteful, and oppressive infrastructure, lining the pockets of security contractors while substantiating our mass media’s most paranoid fantasies. The effects of what seems to be mere political negotiation are to be material and corporeal; every assault and trauma, every suicide in an immigrant detention center or along a stretch of border fence will reveal that even the rhetoric of immigration can be a force of life and death.

Two recent books address this convergence of mind, body, and the political: Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages and Lisa Marie Cacho’s Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. These works treat amnesty and immigration as discursive technologies of liberal governance, the “freedom” that, as Foucault says, is “never anything other … than a relation between the governors and the governed” ([1978–79] 2010, 63). Nguyen and Cacho push strongly at narratives and images that constitute and enhance such technologies, those that claim to “win hearts and minds” and provide a “pathway to citizenship,” and see in this elaborate system the workings of permanent moral debt.

Nguyen applies theories of the gift and reciprocity—articulated by Mauss, Derrida, and Bourdieu—to the U.S. government’s frequent “humanitarian” military interventions during the cold war. The United States provided sanctuary to refugees from the decolonizing global South, who were in turn obliged to make a pledge of service not unlike forms of debt bondage in the colonial era; in addition to labor and civil and military service, refugees from Vietnam and elsewhere were and are expected to express loyalty to the United States, its strategic international programs, and its regimes of development and Westernization. Nguyen pursues what supposedly constitutes the gift—“pipe dreams, bogus concepts, and moral luck” (24)—but spends more time working on the terms of reciprocity, which often mask the imbalance of power wherein “liberalism creates the conditions under which one is free to be free” (73). Nguyen finds varied narratives of freedom and reciprocity in media scripts, in speeches by politicians, generals, and analysts concerning the United States’ brutal, ten-year war in Vietnam. She sees these narratives recast and contested in the works of present-day artists and filmmakers in Vietnam and among its diaspora.

Throughout her analysis, Nguyen emphasizes the enduring demands of war images, their silent imperatives, what she calls the “imperial forms and forces that endure beyond the cessation of military intervention and occupation” (27). She discusses depictions of refugee camps in Timothy Linh Bui’s film Green Dragon, arguing against the imperial tendency to pathologize the stateless, to diagnose them with what she calls “the refugee condition.” Here she borrows from...