Borders 1ac
We begin with the story of Prudenica Martin Gomez, who died while
attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.
Doty, Associate Professor School of Politics & Global Studies, 11
[Roxanne Lynn, Published April 12, 2011. “Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral
alibi.” Page 601-602. http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/d3110.pdf. RH]
On Friday, 6 July 2007, volunteers with two local humanitarian groups in Tucson, Arizona,
Humane Borders and Samaritans, went in search of Prudencia Martin Gomez, age 18 from
Guatemala. She was headed to Oakland, California, to join her boyfriend/fiance¨ and had been
missing since 11 June in the Ironwood National Forest, a 129 000-acre expanse of land, in the
Sonoran Desert 25 miles northwest of Tucson. There are no facilities in the Ironwood National
Forest, and visitors are warned of the hazards of the extreme heat. Human beings simply
cannot survive in this part of the southwestern deserts for as long as Prudencia had been
missing, so there was no pretense that they would find her alive, and they did not. The official
location of her body was recorded as GPS: N32 0 25.455/W1110307.80 (Arizona Daily Star
2010). Prudencia had fallen ill and had been unable to continue. Her fellow travelers left her
with water, but it was not enough. She was only a mile south of a Humane Borders' water
station, but a mile can be a very long way in the desert, in the month of June, when one has
already walked a long distance. Authorities determined that Prudencia had died on 15 June.
The recorded high temperature on that day was 115˚F. Prudencia was a contemporary version
of what Agamben (1998) refers to as bare life, life that can be taken without apology,
classified as neither homicide nor sacrifice. She was US border policy stripped to its essence.
And hers, tragically, is not an isolated example. In 2004 Mario Alberto Diaz, 6 feet tall with a
black belt in karate and working on a masters degree in biology crossed the border near
Sasabe, Arizona. His body was discovered twenty days later in a creek in the foothills of the
Sierrita Mountains (Bourdeaux, 2004). In the summer of 2005 the Pima County medical
examiner in Tucson, Arizona, had to rent a refrigerated tractor-trailer to store the bodies of
migrants due to the record number of deaths that year (Arizona Republic 2005). The deadly
trend continues. Even as apprehensions have steadily declined, deaths continue to rise
(McCombs, 2009).(6) The migrant death count for fiscal year 2009 is the third highest since
1998. In the fifteen-year period since ``prevention through deterrence'' was first introduced
approximately 5000 migrants have died, though near universal agreement exists that
estimates of migrant deaths are undercounts and the actual number is likely much higher
(Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, 2007). When they debated, formulated, and put into effect
the various border control operations collectively known as prevention through deterrence,
policy makers likely had never heard of GPS: N32 025.455/W1110307.80 or the Ironwood
National Forest or the Sierrita mountains or the many other locations at which migrant bodies
have been, and continue to be, found. However, it is arguably inconceivable that they did not
know of the harsh conditions to which migrants would be subjected under this border
strategy. The Border Patrol's own blueprint for one of the early and well-known
manifestations of the new operations, Operation Gatekeeper, noted that it would channel
migrants to locations where ``the days are blazing hot and nights freezing cold''.(7) In this
section I argue that the prevention through deterrence border control strategies exemplify
Foucault's theoretical writings on how biopower, sovereign power, and racism can be
articulated with one another thus to function in concert. While biopolitics, as formulated by
Foucault, is generally understood as being concerned with the governance and regulation of a
population in matters such as health and sexuality, it is also consistent with what Agamben
refers to as bare life. For Foucault the emergence of the ``problem of the population'' coincided
with the development of an art of government wherein the main concerns of government were
on the wealth, longevity, health, and sexuality of the population, giving rise to the notion of
biopower as ``making life live'' (Foucault, 1991). Through regulations in these matters, subjects
become entangled in the practices of statecraft. Agamben has critiqued what he calls
Foucault's ``progressive disqualification of death'' (ie the circumscription of the issue of death to
discussions of classical sovereign power), offering a conceptualization of biopower which
focuses on the ways in which sovereign power produces a radical exposure abandoning
subjects, stripping their identities to that of bare life, and thereby creating spaces of exception
or a ``juridical void'' which permits abuses and killings without punishment.(8) While
Agamben's theorizations of biopower and its relation to bare life are invaluable for
understanding how modern power works, he arguably draws a bit of a strawman when it comes
to Foucault. In Society Must be Defended, Foucault poses the following question. How can
biopower, whose function is to improve life and prolong its duration, kill? ``How can the power
of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? ''
(2003, page 254). His definition of `killing' is not ``simply murder as such, but also every form
of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for
some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejections, and so on'' (page 256).
Clearly Foucault recognizes that biopower does not preclude the taking of life. He responds to
his own question by turning to race, suggesting that race performs two functions: (1) it
introduces a break in the domain of life under power's control between what must live and
what must die thus fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls, and (2) it
establishes a relationship between life and death. ``If you want to live, you must take lives,
you must be able to kill'' (2003, pages 254 ^ 255).
Death and suffering on the border is increasing with each passing day—the
government formulates border security in ways that funnel migrants into the
harshest conditions of nature and most dangerous passageways into the US.
Thousands of deaths can be attributed to US border security.
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
As of March 2006, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation attributed more than 3,000
deaths to a single southern California border operation known as Operation Gatekeeper.97
Numerous other operations have been put into place in the U.S.-Mexico border region. All
have had similar deadly impacts. Despite the death toll, the U.S. government continues to
pursue enforcement operations with great vigor. Indeed, Congress consistently enacts
proposals designed to bolster border enforcement, with such proposals often representing the
only items of political consensus when it comes to immigration reform. Operation Gatekeeper
demonstrates the U.S. government’s callous indifference to the human suffering caused by
its aggressive border enforcement policy. In the words of one informed commentator, “[t]he
real tragedy of [Operation] Gatekeeper . . . is the direct link . . . to the staggering rise in the
number of deaths among border crossers. [The U.S. government] has forced these crossers to
attempt entry in areas plagued by extreme weather conditions and rugged terrain that [the
U.S. government] knows to present mortal danger.”98 In planning Operation Gatekeeper, the
U.S. government knew that its strategy would risk many lives but proceeded nonetheless. As
another observer concludes, “Operation Gatekeeper, as an enforcement immigration policy
financed and politically supported by the U.S. government, flagrantly violates international
human rights because this policy was deliberately formulated to maximize the physical risks
of Mexican migrant workers, thereby ensuring that hundreds of them would die.” 99
Apparently, the government rationalized the deaths of migrants as collateral damage in the
“war” on illegal immigration. Even before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a reputation for
committing human rights abuses against immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.100
Created to police the U.S.-Mexican border, the Border Patrol has historically been plagued by
reports of brutality, shootings, beatings, and killings .101 Amnesty International, American
Friends Service Committee, and Human Rights Watch have all issued reports documenting
recent human rights abuses by the Border Patrol.102
Furthermore, the politics of border crossing and border security are thoroughly
steeped in biopolitics—the border manages the distinction between desirable
and undesirable life and delineates the contours of bare life.
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 526) MM
Performativity of the public sphere: The ‘issue’ of asylum seekers lies at the very heart of the
broader issue concerning the constitution of the public sphere . For Butler democratic
participation in the public sphere is enabled by the preservation of its boundaries, and by the
simultaneous establishment of its ‘constitutive outside’. She argues that in contemporary
Western democracies numerous singular lives are being barred from the life of the legitimate
community , in which standards of recognition allow one access to the category of ‘the
human’. In order to develop a set of norms intended to regulate the state organism, biopolitics
needs to establish a certain exclusion from these norms, to protect the constitution of the polis
and distinguish it from what does not ‘properly’ belong to it. The biopolitics of immigration
looks after the bodies of the host community and protects it against parasites that might want
to invade it, but it needs to equip itself with tools that will allow it to trace, detect and
eliminate these parasites. Technology is mobilized to probe and scan the bare life of those
wanting to penetrate the healthy body politic: through the use of fingerprinting, iris recognition
and scanners in lorries travelling, for example, across the English Channel, the presence and
legitimacy of ‘asylum seekers’ can be determined and fixed.4 The bio-politics of immigration is
thus performative in the sense of the term used by Butler; through the probing of human
bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate members of the community is
established. This process depends on a truth regime already in place, a regime that classifies
some bodies as ‘genuine’ and others (be it emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in lorries in
which they have been smuggled to the ‘West’, or confined to the leaky Tampa ship hopelessly
hovering off the shores of Australia) as ‘bogus’. The bare life of the host community thus
needs to be properly managed and regulated , with its unmanageable aspects placed in what
Agamben (1998) calls a relation of exception. But the question that remains occluded in these
processes of ‘life management’ is ‘[w]hich bodies come to matter - and why?’ (Butler 1993, p.
xii).
This border biopolitics results in several impacts: the first is that border manage
is a murderous enterprise that results in political death, exclusion, and a loss of
value to life.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
Embedded within this biopolitical overdetermination is a murderous enterprise. Murderous
not insofar as it involves extermination (although this might still be the case) but inasmuch as it
exerts a biopower that exposes ‘someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some
people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2003 [1976]:
256), and inasmuch as it is ‘based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive
violence’ (Zylinska, 2004: 530); a symbolic violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of
‘naming’ as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida argue ‘asylum seekers’, ‘detainees’,
‘deportees’, ‘illegal immigrants’, etc) as well as a material one (for example, placing ‘asylum
seekers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ in detention centres), attesting to that epistemic impulse to
resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and the residual of disciplinary powers that seek to
eliminate and ostracise the unwanted-other through the insidious refashioning of the ‘final
solution’ for the asylum and immigration ‘question’. Such an image has been captured by
Braidotti (1994: 20): Once, landing at Paris International Airport, I saw all of these in between
areas occupied by immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had arrived,
but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious transit zones, waiting. The dead,
panoptical heart of the new European Community will scrutinize them and not allow them in
easily: it is crowded at the margins and non-belonging can be hell. The biopolitics of borders
stands as the quintessential domain for this kind of 11 sorting, this kind of racism pervading
Western socio-political imaginary and permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial
sovereignty despite its monolithic use of euphemism. It is precisely this task of sorting and this
act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border security and surveillance are designed
making ‘the management of misery and misfortune … a potentially profitable activity’ (Rose,
1999: 260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism (Coward, 1999: 18)
where ‘control’ and ‘security’ are resting upon vast investments in new information and
communications technologies in order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate, the
infiltration and ‘riskiness’ of the ‘unwanted’. For instance, in chapter six of the White Paper,
‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’ (2002), the UK government outlines a host of techniques and
strategies aimed at controlling borders and tightening security including the use of Gamma X-ray
scanners, heartbeat sensors, and millimetric wave imaging to detect humans smuggled in
vehicles.
We internalize border-thinking—the disciplinary capacities of border security
reach into the very core of human being and reduce life to mere calculability.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
Subtle, internalised, and smooth (but not all too smooth) as it is, (post)panoptical surveillance
induces a certain conscious relation to the self and organises the ‘criteria’ for inclusion and
exclusion (Rose, 1999: 243). Borders are thus the spatio-temporal zone par excellence where
surveillance gives substance to the working of biopolitics and the manifestation of biopower. In
this case mobility itself becomes intrinsically linked to processes of the ‘sorting’ of individualised
citizens from massified aliens. We can almost forgive theorists such as Bauman (1998, in Boyne,
2000: 286) for wanting to articulate a dichotomous logic that hinges on the notion of border,
for, at times and at least with regard to circulation (that is, the circulation of ‘people’, for as far
as ‘commodities’ and ‘capital’ are concerned, their free movement is encouraged and sustained
by the global capitalist machine), the world seems to be divided into two. Those who have
European/American/Australian/Canadian passports and those who do not. We all know all
too well what difference this makes in terms of border crossing. Nevertheless, such
conceptualisation misses the point that borders are not merely that which is erected at the
edges of territorial partitioning and spatial particularity, but more so borders are ubiquitous
(Balibar, 2002: 84) and infinitely actualised within mundane processes of ‘internal’
administration and bureaucratic organization 1 blurring the dualistic logic of the inside and
the outside on which Western sovereignty is calibrated. The point is that in addition to this
crude dual division within the global world order there are further divisions, further
segmentations, a ‘hypersegmentation’ (Hardt, 1998: 33) at the heart of that monolithic
(Western) half which functions by means of excluding the already-excluded on the one hand
and incorporating the already-included and the waiting-to-be-included excluded on the other.
This is done more or less dialectically, more or less perversely, including and excluding
concurrently ‘through a principle of activity’ (Rose, 1999: 240) and interwoven circuits of
security. Surveillance is the enduring of exclusion for some and the performance of inclusion
for others to the point where it becomes almost impossible to demonstrate one’s ‘inclusion’
without having to go through the labyrinth of security controls and identity validation,
intensified mainly, but not solely, at the borders. It is in similar contexts that Balibar (2002: 81)
invokes the notion of ‘world apartheid’ in which the dual regime of circulation is creating
different phenomenological experiences for different people through the ‘polysemic nature’
(Balibar, 2002: 81) of borders. For as we have discussed, borders are not merely territorial
dividers but spatial zones of surveillance designed to establish ‘an international class
differentiation’ and deploy ‘instruments of discrimination and triage’ (Balibar, 2002: 82)
whereby the rich asserts a ‘surplus of right’ (Balibar, 2002: 83) and the poor continue to
exercise the Sisyphean activity of circulating upwards and downwards until the border
becomes his/her place of ‘dwelling’ (Kachra, 2005: 123) or until s/he becomes the border
itself. Sadly, to be a border is to ‘live a life which is a waiting-to-live, a non-life’ (Balibar, 2002:
83). The biopolitics of borders is precisely the management of that waiting-to-live, the
management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those who are forcibly
placed in detention centres), and at times, it is the management of death. The death of
thousand of refugees and ‘clandestine’ migrants drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait
of Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the world’s largest mass grave), asphyxiated in
trucks (as was the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants who died in 2000 inside an airtight truck at the
port of Dover), crushed under trains (the case of the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in
the US-Mexican border for example). It is the management of ‘bodies that do not matter’. It is
the management of the bodies of those to whom the status of the ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben,
1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management of those whose death has fallen into the abyss of
insignificance and whose killing is not sacrificial (except to the few). On the other hand, the
biopolitics of borders is also the management of ‘life’; the life of those who are capable of
performing ‘responsible self-government’ (Rose, 1999: 259) and self-surveillance i.e. those who
can demonstrate their ‘legitimacy’ through ‘worthy’ computer-readable passports/ID cards
that provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing of identity and citizenship at the
border.
The fulcrum of biopolitics at the border is racism.
Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and
Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]
“Society Must Be Defended”culminates in Foucault’s chilling account of a tendency immanent
to bio-politics, a tendency to what he has elsewhere designated as Athanato-politics,” and its
basis in what he here terms state racism. The question that Foucault raises in his final lecture in
this course, is how can mass murder and extermination become instantiated in a regime of
biopower: If it is true that the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that
disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will the power to kill and
the function of murder operate in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object
and its objective? ... How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political power to kill, to
call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill ... ? Given that this power’s
objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the
function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? (p. 254) For
Foucault, it is here that racism, which, indeed, has a long history, intervenes, and now becomes
inscribed in the basic mechanisms of the modern state. According to Foucault: … broadly
speaking, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the
principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member
of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. … The
specificity of modern racism … is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of
power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power. We are
dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the
workings of a state that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of
the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of - the way biopower functions
through - the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and
activation of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of racism (p. 258).
State racism then emerges, when in a regime of biopower, internal or external threats lead
the state to engage in mass death: “Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism
alone can justify the murderous function of the State” (p. 256).
Racism outweighs all other impacts
Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White America, 1991, p. 15556
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences and limitations, ghettos
and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It
shackles the victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white
people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving
the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color by
poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects of
uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison will
inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be
dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the
possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and
cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who
know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger of selfdestruction seems to be drawing ever more near. The results of centuries of national and
worldwide conquest and colonization, of military buildups and violent aggression, of
overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching the point of no return. A
small and predominantly white minority of global population derives its power and privilege
from sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the world and
ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.
Furthermore, biopolitics culminates in genocide.
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 9, BW)
Agamben writes that the sovereign nomos is the principle that joins law and violence to
establish the territorial of order. The sovereign occupies the point indistinction between
violence and law. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre wrote that sovereignty
demarcates a space established and constituted by violence. This violence cannot be
separated from a principle of unification that subordinates all social practices. Through its
monopolization of vio¬lence the state claims to create a space where society is perfected for
all, though in fact it is the interests of a minority class that are enforced. The Westphalian
state system, held as a defining element of modernity, established the principle of territorial
sovereignty in international law. Galina Cornelisse defines the concept of “territoriality” as the
founding of political authority on demarcated territory (Cornelisse 2010). Though the idea of
universal human rights emerged after 1945, these rights became inextricably tied to national
citizenship and hence state sovereignty. It is this sovereignty that finds itself under attack by
globalization, the free movement of labor across borders. Under globalization, the State must
fight irrelevancy by reconstituting itself through the production of bare life. This is why,
according to Schinkel, deportation and detention are not shortcomings of the state under
globalization but its fulfillment (Schinkel 2009). According to Foucault, another decisive event
of modernity was the inclusion of bare life in the political realm as a subject. The focus on this
bare life as an object of the calculations of state power is the practice known as biopolitics,
which finds its ultimate expression in the “camp.” Agamben understands this causal chain as
crucial to addressing modern democratic state’s contradictions. The most horrific events of the
20th century, especially Nazism and the death camps, can be traced to this stumbling block of
Western democracy: that it seeks to bring about people’s happiness in the realm of bare life,
which tragically brings democracy into collusion with totalitarianism. The camp is thus the
“nomos of the political space in which we live,” leading Agamben to the disturbing conclusion
that the state of exception has become the rule, and in truth we are all homo sacer. The
absolute biopolitical space of the “camp”, which establishes the “political space” of modernity
(Schinkel 2010: 8), is topologically different from the prison because the prison is securely
embedded in the juridical realm, while the camp is the space of the exception which makes
the juridical realm possible. As the localization of the state of exception where sovereign power
confronts bios, bare life, without mediation, the camp is a “realm of experimentation, exercise
and symbolic reproduction of the violence of sovereign power” that also sends an ambiguous,
threatening message to the outside world (Minca 2005). We shall see below how these concepts
are tangibly realized in the deportation regime of the United States.
Thus the plan: the United States federal government should open its border
toward the United Mexican States.
Opening the border gives up on the notion that we, as a nation, are in control
of who we are. This refusal is the core of redefining our relationship to
biopolitics.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Although it is often argued that Levinas as well as Derrida’s unconditional hospitability cannot
be unproblematically (or even possibly) translated into a political action (Metselaar 2003, p. 9)
insofar as it is merely articulated at the level of the dual self-Other relationship rather than
sociality as a whole (this being particularly true of Levinasian ethics), their vision is, nonetheless,
salient in terms of provoking a radical transformation in social and political imaginaries and
invoking the exigency of a ‘politics of generosity that would foster rather than close off
different ways of being’ (Diprose 2002, p. 172). Such politics will not proceed from ‘a
hermeneutics of depth’ (Rose 1999, p. 196) in which subjectivity is wrought around selfcontainment, self-sufficiency and self-determinacy, presented as a project to be
accomplished. Instead, it might find its point of departure in the potential encounter with the
other and the total exposure to embodied alterity. For it is the experience of encountering
and being-exposed-to that infuses the crisis ‘into the hyphen at the heart of the nation-state’
(Coward 1999, p. 12) and undoes any immanentist attempt to essentialise identity,
commonality and belonging. Whilst it is unclear as to how such an ethico-political vision may
be put into practice (perhaps this ‘not-knowing-how’ would save this alternative vision from
being turned into yet another figure of immanentism), it may be that the rejection,
transgression and obliteration of immigration controls are to be regarded as the touchstone of
this radical ethico-politics and an epitome of the necessary shift from politics of borders to
politics of singularities where ‘No One Is Illegal’ (Cohen 2003).
In a world of biopolitics, our aff is a radical ethical act. The only ethical
question in the context of politics dominated by the Camp is how we can
acknowledge and reconfigure our relationship to the Other.
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 533-35) MM
The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and prospective guests - even,
or perhaps especially , unwanted ones - is, according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical
problem. ‘ It is always about answering for a dwelling place , for one’s identity, one’s space,
one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida 2000, pp.
149/151, emphasis added). Of course, this absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as
crazy, self-harming or even impossible. But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is
always suspended between this unconditional hyperbolic order of the demand to answer for
my place under the sun and open to the alterity of the other that precedes me, and the
conditional order of ethnos, of singular customs, norms, rules, places and political acts. If we see
ethics as situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer why we always
remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond to it, or, in fact, why we will be
responding to it no matter what. Even if we respond ‘nonethically’ to our guest by imposing on
him a norm or political legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in
the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended period of time, send him back,
cut off his benefits or place him in a detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical
call. In this sense, our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction , which does not of course
mean that we will ‘respond ethically’ to it (by offering him unlimited hospitality or welcome).
However, and here lies the paradox, we will respond ethically to it (in the sense that the
injunction coming from the other will make us take a stand, even if we choose to do nothing
whatsoever and pretend that we may carry on as if nothing has happened). The ethics of
bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws and acts of the polis and
delineating some new forms of political identification and belonging . Indeed, in their
respective readings of Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law
towards the foreigner that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can be altered
but also that we can think community and kinship otherwise. If traditional hospitality is based
on what Derrida calls ‘a conjugal model, paternal and phallocentric’, in which ‘[i]t’s the familial
despot, the father, the spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of
hospitality’ (2000, p. 149), openness towards the alien and the foreign changes the very nature
of the polis , with its Oedipal kinship structures and gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due
to new family affiliations developed by queer communities but also as a result of developments
in genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of national identity and kinship that
protects state boundaries against the ‘influx’ of asylum seekers is to be left wanting. This is not
necessarily to advise a carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all
passports and opening all borders (although such actions should at least be considered ), but
to point to the possibility of resignifying these laws through their (improper) reiteration.
Enacted by political subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of tension with the
normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie these laws, the
laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf.
Butler 1993, p. 231).It is precisely Butler’s account of corporeality and matter, of political
subjectivity and kinship, which makes Levinas’ ethics (and Derrida’s reworking of it) particularly
relevant to this project. Although the concepts of the body and materiality are not absent from
Levinas’ writings - indeed, he was one of the first thinkers to identify embodiment as a
philosophical blindspot - Butler allows us to redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter
and question the mechanisms of their constitution. Her ‘others’ are not limited to ‘the stranger’,
‘the orphan’ and the ‘widow’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the more acceptable others who
evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the drag
queen / people whose bodies and relationships violate traditional gender and kinship structures
- that matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of universalization, Butler mobilizes
us against naturalizing exclusion from the democratic polis and thus creates an opportunity
for its radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not thus amount to
waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum seeker to knock, and extending a helping
hand to him or her. It also involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my
life to the extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a stranger in
the skin of my own home.
We control all the internal links to their policy and framework impacts – as long
as the paradigm of modern politics is biopolitics, the aff is the only way to
overcome the demonic nature of the management of life.
Dean, 04 – professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle (Mitchell, “Four Theses on the
Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/
5december2004/dean.pdf)//HK)
Fourth thesis: Bio-politics captures life stripped naked (or the zoē that was the exception of
sovereign power) and makes it a matter of political life (bios). Today, we seek the good life
though the extension of the powers over bare life to the point at which they become
indistinguishable. In this formulation, the emergence of a government over life in the
eighteenth century does mark a rupture in forms of rule, which the search for an ʻoriginary
structureʼ of sovereignty cannot capture. For Foucault, the nature of this rupture is the
displacement, articulation or re-inscription of sovereignty within a peculiarly modern form of
politics, bio-politics. However, this capture of the government of the state by bio-powers is
already present in the structure of sovereignty. It would be a mistake, in this sense, to view
Agambenʼs quest for the structure of sovereignty, with its multiple thresholds, as ahistorical,
that is, as insensitive to temporal thresholds. His thesis offers a kind of history of modernity.
Here, the demonic character of modern states lies in the possibility that the thresholds that
maintained bare life as a state of exception are breaking down. Zoē is entering into a sphere of
indistinction with bios in modern politics. For Agamben the paradigm of modern politics—the
new Nomos—is not the liberal governing of freedom, but the concentration camp. The camp
is the material form of the stabilization of the state of exception, the excluded inclusion, both
inside and outside modern political and legal ordering. Because the camp is established by law
as a space of exception, it is subject to no order itself, only direct police command. It is thus a
space of ordered disorder in which bare life enters into a zone of indistinction with legal
order. While such views may appear to lead to a kind of radical condemnation of many
instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to develop humane processing procedures for
asylum seekers, the idea of mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of
analysis and spheres of contestation rather than a site of dogmatic rejection. We have become
used to a style of criticism in which liberal notions of the individual citizen have been revealed
to be constituted through a series of exclusions (of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane,
the poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5, December 2004 28 biopower today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to disability, criminality and insanity.
The inclusion of women through their state of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting
questions concerning sovereign violence given womenʼs historic biological relationship to the
reproduction and care of human life. This relationship, itself excepted under the universality of
law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required to take responsibility for sovereign
decisions. If we are to take Agamben seriously, this desire for inclusion may have the effect not
simply of widening the sphere of the rule of law but also of hastening the point at which the
sovereign exception enters into a zone of indistinction with the rule. Our societies would then
have become truly demonic, not because of the re-inscription of sovereignty within bio-politics,
but because bare life which constituted the sovereign exception begins to enter a zone of
indistinction with our moral and political life and with the fundamental presuppositions of
political community. In the achievement of inclusion in the name of universal human rights, all
human life is stripped naked and becomes sacred. Perhaps in a very real sense we are all homo
sacer. Perhaps what we have been in danger of missing is the way in which the sovereign
violence that constitutes the exception of bare life—that which can be killed without
committing homicide—is today entering into the very core of modern politics, ethics, and
systems of justice.
Borders Affirmative Core
Border Conditions Inherency
Migrant Conditions Bad
The mobility regime creates a social division, segregating those that seem
suspicious into prisons, ghettos, and quarantines- sometimes detaining them
indefinitely on nothing more than a suspicion of a threat.
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
The mobility regime also operates within the perimeters of privileged localities, countries, and
economic and political blocs. It is useful to distinguish between those elementary forms that
work through the prevention of exit (e.g., prisons) and those elementary forms that work
through the prevention of entry (e.g., gated communities). While these two forms of social
isolation address and manage different social strata, and while they operate on the basis of
almost diametrically opposite logics, they may be sociologically located along a continuum of
practices designed to consolidate a mobility regime in general and to strategically distance
suspect social elements in particular. Indeed, while there are strong sociological reasons not to
collapse such distinct phenomena as prisons and gated communities into a single category,
there are also other sociological reasons to treat them both as products of distinct strategies of
group power; in the former case, the power of dominant groups to stigmatize, isolate, and
immobilize suspect groups by controlling their exit rights, and in the latter case, the power of
dominant groups to isolate themselves from suspect groups by controlling their rights of entry
into certain designated social spaces. Specifically, we may thus see the integrated riskmanagement system of the mobility regime as predicated upon two pillars: segregating
suspect social elements in prisons, urban ghettoes, and quarantines on the one hand, and
sheltering privileged groups in gated communities, secured work places, and guarded
shopping malls on the other (Davis 1990). In this section, the concept of quarantines refers to
multiple forms of containment and imprisonment. Quarantine, in general, operates by
identifying and distancing people perceived as dangerous by subjecting them to particular
treatment protocols. Foucault (1980)—while not specifically discussing a mobility regime—
theorized the development of modern governance in relation to various forms of quarantine.
Medieval cities, wrote Foucault, already relied on two types of measures to deal with perceived
threats such as leprosy and plague: exclusion and quarantine (Curtis 2002). Urban authorities in
later times, pressured by the bourgeoisie, dealt with the politicosanitary menace by perfecting
the instrument of quarantine. Yet what started as urban politics of health later converged
with other forms of containment to become an important element of modern
“governmentality” (Foucault 1991, 1980). Also on the privileged side of border fences, the
mobility regime still relies on the old methods of using prisons, penitentiaries, detention
camps, and a host of other types of quarantines to isolate social elements perceived to be
dangerous. With the world’s largest prison population, the United States imprisons at a far
greater rate than both rich and many impoverished and authoritarian countries. On a per capita
basis, the United States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland,
five times more than Tanzania, and seven times more than Germany12 (Garland 2001; Wacquant
2001). Affirming a no-compromise approach to jailing, as well as a conceptual fusion between
immigration and terrorism, the U.S. Department of Justice also announced that
undocumented immigrants could be detained indefinitely, without bond, if the government
provided evidence that their release might threaten national security.
In order to counteract the deportation efforts of the states they live in,
migrants destroy their identity documents, essentially rendering themselves
without any rights. The migrants live bare lives and suffer from inhumane acts
of violence.
Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia, Undocumented Migrants and
Resistance in the State of Exception, p 12, http://aei.pitt.edu/33054/1/ellermann._antje.pdf)
As liberal states have stepped up their deportation efforts, migrants, in particular
unsuccessful asylum seekers, have sought to escape the state’s reach by destroying or
hiding their identity documents. This act of resistance is far from exceptional. While the
following figures and illustrations all refer to immigration enforcement in Germany, they
could easily apply to control contexts elsewhere in the advanced democratic world.
German interior officials estimate that, in the mid-1980s, immigration authorities had to
obtain travel documents for about 30 to 40 percent of all asylum seekers. By the year
2000, the population of “undocumented” asylum applicants is estimated to have
increased to 85 percent (Böhling 2001). The dilemma that an unknown identity poses to
the state is aptly captured by a deportation officer’s account of the resistance strategies
of illegal migrants: “People have started to realize, ‘if they don’t know who I am, they
can’t touch me.’1 What is important to note is that homo sacer’s ability to render herself
unidentifiable is ultimately contingent on bare life. The lives of illegal migrants and refugees in
many ways exemplify the condition of rightlessness that marks bare life. “The
territorialization of life means that the refugee is put in a position where she lacks
apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid workers or the police. The
refugee is outside the law. Levels of innuendo and violence unthinkable to regular human
beings, citizens, are regularly perpetrated against the refugee or asylum seeker. The refugee
as homo sacer describes the condition of exclusion that those exempt from the normal
sovereignty are subject to.” (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004, 41)
Government border operations have empirically been strategized to increase
human suffering and death tolls and strips crossers of their human rights
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
As of March 2006, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation attributed more than 3,000
deaths to a single southern California border operation known as Operation Gatekeeper.97
Numerous other operations have been put into place in the U.S.-Mexico border region. All
have had similar deadly impacts. Despite the death toll, the U.S. government continues to
pursue enforcement operations with great vigor. Indeed, Congress consistently enacts
proposals designed to bolster border enforcement, with such proposals often representing the
only items of political consensus when it comes to immigration reform. Operation Gatekeeper
demonstrates the U.S. government’s callous indifference to the human suffering caused by
its aggressive border enforcement policy. In the words of one informed commentator, “[t]he
real tragedy of [Operation] Gatekeeper . . . is the direct link . . . to the staggering rise in the
number of deaths among border crossers. [The U.S. government] has forced these crossers to
attempt entry in areas plagued by extreme weather conditions and rugged terrain that [the
U.S. government] knows to present mortal danger.”98 In planning Operation Gatekeeper, the
U.S. government knew that its strategy would risk many lives but proceeded nonetheless. As
another observer concludes, “Operation Gatekeeper, as an enforcement immigration policy
financed and politically supported by the U.S. government, flagrantly violates international
human rights because this policy was deliberately formulated to maximize the physical risks
of Mexican migrant workers, thereby ensuring that hundreds of them would die.” 99
Apparently, the government rationalized the deaths of migrants as collateral damage in the
“war” on illegal immigration. Even before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a reputation for
committing human rights abuses against immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry.100
Created to police the U.S.-Mexican border, the Border Patrol has historically been plagued by
reports of brutality, shootings, beatings, and killings .101 Amnesty International, American
Friends Service Committee, and Human Rights Watch have all issued reports documenting
recent human rights abuses by the Border Patrol.102
Poor law enforcement along the border feeds the human trafficking business
which results in slavery and prostitution
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Today, because of the money to be made in this black market, criminal syndicates thrive in the
trafficking of human beings. A product of ill-considered law enforcement , these syndicates
resemble the crime networks that emerged in response to the federal government’s efforts
during Prohibition’s ban on the commerce in alcohol. Criminal elements grew and asserted
control over a new lucrative industry. But it gets worse. Some undocumented immigrants have
been enslaved. Reports of slavery have increased dramatically in the past few years. One
2005 report concluded as follows: Our research identified 57 forced labor operations in almost
a dozen cities in California between 1998 and 2003, involving more than 500 individuals from
18 countries. . . . Victims labored in several economic sectors including prostitution and sex
services (47.4%), domestic service (33.3%), mail order brides (5.3%), sweatshops (5.3%), and
agriculture Bordering on the Immoral | 113 (1.8%). . . . Victims of forced labor often suffer
severe hardships and deprivations. Their captors often subject them to beatings, threats, and
other forms of physical and psychological abuse. They live in conditions of deprivation and
despair. Their captors may threaten their families. Perpetrators exert near total control over
victims, creating a situation of dependency. Victims come to believe they cannot leave. . . . They
are terrified of their captors but also fear law enforcement, a fear often based on bad
experiences with police and other government officials in their countries of origin.105
The immigrant’s plight in making it to the “Land of the free” paradoxically risks
life and limb and sells themselves into a probable slavery
Johnson 07 (Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Law, and Mabie-Apallas
Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis.
“Opening the Floodgates”, pg. 200, BW)
Although immigration reform has been the topic of extensive public discussion, there has been
no legislative proposal put on the table that would address the fact that the U.S. immigration
laws are dramatically out of synch with the social, economic, and political realities of modern
immigration in the global economy. Moreover, today’s immigration laws are wholly
inconsistent with the moral underpinnings of the United States of America. Put simply, the U.S.
immigration laws are broken and must be fixed. Fixing them requires true comprehensive
immigration reform, not mere tinkering at the margins. Consider the incontrovertible facts.
Immigrants make up about 10 percent of the U.S. population. As many as 12 million
undocumented immigrants live in the United States. This large population exists even though, in
the 1990s, the U.S. government dramatically bolstered border enforcement with Mexico and
engaged in a number of high profile, military-style operations in border cities like El Paso, Texas,
and San Diego, California. In an attempt to avoid the Border Patrol, undocumented immigrants
today travel through isolated deserts and mountains, literally risking life and limb in hopes of
making it to the land of the free and the home of the brave. As a result, over the past decade,
thousands of migrants, almost all of them citizens of Mexico, have died attempting to cross
the Southwest border. Besides its deadly consequences, heightened immigration enforcement
has spurred a booming industry in the trafficking of human beings. Criminal smugglers today
charge undocumented immigrants thousands of dollars for passage to the United States.
Smugglers show little respect for the safety of their human cargo and, at times, abandon
migrants to die in the desert or on the high seas. Many migrants fortunate enough to survive
the journey are forced to work as indentured servants to pay off the debts of passage to
smugglers. Because trafficking arrangements are not in the least bit regulated, exploitation and
abuse run rampant.
Trafficking results in abuse and forced labor
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Besides its deadly consequences, heightened immigration enforcement has spurred a booming
industry in the trafficking of human beings. Criminal smugglers today charge undocumented
immigrants thousands of dollars for passage to the United States. Smugglers show little
respect for the safety of their human cargo and, at times, abandon migrants to die in the
desert or on the high seas. Many migrants fortunate enough to survive the journey are
forced to work as indentured servants to pay off the debts of passage to smugglers. Because
trafficking arrangements are not in the least bit regulated, exploitation and abuse run
rampant.
Exclusion of economic equality infringes on international human rights
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
The most frequently invoked substantive ground for excluding noncitizens is that they are
“likely at any time to become public charges.”11 The public-charge exclusion squarely conflicts
with the anticaste foundations of U.S. law.12 One of the promises of America is the potential
for upward economic mobility. No person’s station in life is dictated by class or caste. To that
end, the framers of the U.S. Constitution prohibited titles of nobility. Nonetheless, the publiccharge exclusion cements economic disparities in place for those denied entry into the United
States. Through this barrier, the United States slams the door on poor and working people
and thus denies access to the American Dream to those most in pursuit of it. Immigration law
allows the United States to do at its borders what it cannot do within them. Because the
Constitution guarantees free movement between the United States, individual states cannot
erect borders to limit entry. Therefore, efforts by individual states to prevent the poor living
in other states from migrating into their jurisdictions have been Bordering on the Immoral | 89
found to be unconstitutional infringements on the right to travel.
Immigrant Detainees Suffering
Immigration detainees are skyrocketing, meanwhile the conditions in these
prisons remain inhumane
Griesbach 2010 (Kathleen UC San Diego “Immigration Detention, State Power, and
Resistance: The Case of the 2009 Motín in Pecos, Texas” pgs. 8-10) TYBG
The incarceration of men like Galindo reflects the recent trend to turn over illegal immigrants to
the justice system for criminal prosecution since 9/11, rather than deporting them as
previously22, particularly with the advent of Operation Streamline. On December 2, 2009, the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released a report that in 2009, 369, 483
people were held in custody by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2009, which
is double the number of immigrants detained ten years ago23. This reflects the increase in
border and immigration enforcement following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
particularly through initiatives like Operation Streamline, the 2005 Bush initiative which dictated
federal criminal charges for anyone detained crossing the US-Mexico border illegally”.24 The US
maintains the largest immigration detention center in the world; by the end of 2007, 961 jails
and prisons housing detainees were either directly owned by or under contract with the
federal government.25 Rampant human rights abuses include particularly poor or nonexistent
medical services, a lack of legal services for detained immigrants, and squalid living conditions.
Detained migrants face imprisonment in county jails, privately run federal detention centers, or
other privately run federal prisons – often with convicted criminals26. The success of private
prison management as an unregulated capitalist enterprise explains the inhumane living
quarters, lack of medical services (so glaringly obvious in the case of José Manuel Galindo’s
death), and lack of legal resources for detainees.27 Another policy in common practice by ICE is
the transfer of countless prisoners from detention center to detention center, often at great
distances from each other and without informing family or the detainee’s legal counsel if he/she
has one (effectively destroying the inmate’s defense).28
Immigrants Excluded
The system of immigration control creates exclusionary social hierarchies that
are clear in society, with the 3rd border of exclusion of “inferior” Latinos. They
are then forced into a grey where they are stripped of their basic rights
Griesbach 2010 (Kathleen UC San Diego “Immigration Detention, State Power, and
Resistance: The Case of the 2009 Motín in Pecos, Texas” pgs. 14-15) TYBG
Uneven power relations multiply and endure within the system of immigration control.
Luibhéid stresses that “relations of power and inequality at the border cannot be separated
from inequitable global relations that structure migration patterns from social hierarchies
within the United States”38. These relations of exclusion have been more dramatically
enforced in recent years, with the increase in criminal punishment for illegal immigrants,
without consideration of extensive transnational familial relations. Immigrants are completely
beholden to a system of power relations directly dictated by documentation status, as
Galindo’s story illustrates. Foucault stresses that power emanates through discourse, which is
internal to the power relations that pervade society. Mike Davis’s discussion of the “3rd border”
beyond the border zone and interior enforcement to Latino social exclusion (through the
racialization of space) in Southern California illuminates the extension of disciplinary power
and the creation of “Other”ness from the political regime to informal society39. Davis
discusses and the recent segregationist tactics of wealthy neighborhoods to exclude workingclass Latinos from formerly public venues. A main strategy is the incursion of high fees for
“non-residents” of wealthy neighborhoods in the San Gabriel Valley, for example. This “Third
Border” aims to keep Latinos away from public destinations like parks in affluent white
neighborhoods like San Marino’s Lacy Park.40 This exclusion extends a long trend of
discriminatory policing, working as a “magnification” of disciplinary power exercised
unequally toward Latinos (many of them immigrants). The third border’s segregation
complements the first and second borders’ attempt to “exclude Mexican immigrants from entry
into the U.S” through force. Thus, “the third border serves as a new form of racial segregation
deep within the country”, 41 multiplying and perpetuating the power of the State and its upper
echelons over immigrants. This latter definition of the normalizing quality of disciplinary power
within institutions characterizes many recent immigration laws and particularly the treatment of
US immigrant detainees both within the US and abroad. Yet as Giorgio Agamben argues, the
legal treatment of immigrant detainees in some cases operates in a gray area outside the law,
which becomes normalized in the “State of Exception”. Agamben argues that under the USA
Patriot Act immigrant detainees like the Taliban captured in Afghanistan do not even have the
status of persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither prisoners nor
persons accused, but simply “detainees”, they are the object of a pure de facto rule, of a
detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since
it is entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.44Though most immigrants
detained within the US for minor offenses like Galindo are a different case than suspected
terrorists, the record of legal and human abuses within the prisons and in the justice system
reflect the same lack of judicial and human oversight to which Agamben refers. The disturbing
fact that the majority of detainees have not been convicted of any crime demonstrates the
exercise of disciplinary power far outside the spirit of “normal” law. The official Immigration
and Customs Enforcement database showed on January 25, 20009 that of 32,000 total
immigrants in detention, 18,690 had no criminal conviction, even for illegal entry; 400 of those
without convictions had been in detention for at least a year.
Social services have been withheld from “aliens” solely because of their social
standing in an unregulated utopian society.
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses
of migrant domestic workers [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of
Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
For Rancière, democracy is about “the power of those who have no¶ qualification for
exercising power.” It is “the count of the uncounted—or¶ the part of those who have
no part” (2004, 304–5). As McNevin sums up:¶ “Resistance occurs as outsiders attempt
to recast their identity as politically¶ legitimate subjects of justice” (2006, 138).¶ Inside
Isin and Rygiel’s abject spaces, immanent outsiders have enacted ¶ themselves as
political by exercising rights that they do not have, thereby¶ turning bare life into
political life (2007, 186). Scholars have termed these¶ political stagings as widely as
“insurgent citizenship” (Isin 2002), “acts of¶ citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen 2008), “noncitizen citizenship” (Gordon¶ 2005), “democratic cosmopolitanism” (Honig 2001), or
“abject cosmopolitanism”¶ (Nyers 2003). For instance, Isin and Rygiel point to acts of ¶
suturing mouths by refugees in protest against state asylum laws and setting ¶ boats on
fire in order to avoid being sent off to offshore detention centers¶ (2007, 193). They
also find acts of resistance in the “sanctuary city” ¶ movements across Europe and
Canada where state law is suspended to¶ provide hospitality to aliens, as well as the
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” campaigns¶ in the United States that forbid city workers to
inquire into a person’s¶ status to ensure access to social services (198–99). In his study
of¶ the antideportation campaigns by the refugee group, Action Committee ¶ of NonStatus Algerians (CASS) in Montreal, Peter Nyers further cites¶ political acts such as
regular assemblies, weekly information pickets, delegation¶ visits to immigration
offices, public demonstration and marches,¶ and leafleting against deportations at
airports (2003, 1083). Through¶ these public and collective demonstrations,
undocumented subjects mark¶ themselves as visible and audible and write themselves
into a status of recognition.
The paradigm of suspicion criminalizes the mobility of immigrants, the
impoverished and other agents of suspect.
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
In speaking about a paradigm of suspicion, I mean that the primary principle for determining
the “license to move,” both across borders and in public spaces within borders, has to do
with the degree to which the agents of mobility are suspected of representing the threats of
crime , undesired immigration, and terrorism, either independently or, increasingly,
interchangeably. Apart from terrorism, being a newly articulated form of organized transnational violence (Tilly 2004),6 the perceived threats of crime and immigration, and particularly
their mutually constitutive interplay, are part of the history of modernity. The residents of the
modern cities that absorbed Europe’s new urban proletariat in the 19th century retained a
profound mistrust of people without established connections. This mistrust has been an
important engine in the increasing formal criminalization of mobility itself, from the concept
of “criminal vagabondage” in France, where mobility was the crime, through a series of
vagrancy panics in Britain, to increasing legal hostility to vagrants and anxiety about “crimes of
mobility” in the United States (Cole 2001:9). It is also no coincidence, therefore, that early
efforts to create reliable identification systems were based on the simultaneous development of
police records, photographic methods, and the perfection of the passport system (Deflem 2002).
The conceptual link between immigration and social vices such as crime, disease, and moral
contamination has gripped the public mind long before the present era and continually shapes
immigration policies and border-control measures. Mobility is perceived as a suspicious
activity especially when it relates to those without property. Immigration seekers aside,
consider the policy that guides the grant of nonimmigrant visas to the United States. The
standard reason for refusing to issue a visa, when such a reason is given, is that the applicant did
not qualify under Section 214(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This section is premised
upon a paradigm of suspicion that stipulates that every foreigner seeking to enter the United
States is considered an immigrant as long as he or she did not convince the immigration
officer that at the time of the application he or she was eligible for a nonimmigrant status. To
convince the immigration officer, one has to show proof of “strong ties” to the country of origin,
such as a permanent job or ownership of property, in fact identical in nature to the old need to
establish “settled connections.” Both the European and American media are flooded with
reports and studies that link immigration and crime, often mediated through indicators of
poverty. In the Netherlands, for example, reports abound about such links, citing scientific
evidence that illegal immigrants are by far more likely to be involved with crime and singling out
Moslem “culture of religious extremism” as a factor. While crime records are not kept according
to ethnicity, Dutch police and government officials have publicly linked a rise in crime to
immigrants, and according to criminologist Chris Rutenfrans, 63 percent of those convicted of
homicide are immigrants—Moroccans, Antilleans, and sub-Saharan Africans being the chief
culprits.7 In the United States, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies
published a study showing that immigrants and their minor children now account for almost
one in four persons living in poverty. The proportion of immigrant-headed households using at
least one major welfare program is 24.5 percent compared to 16.3 percent for native
households and the poverty rate for immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) is
twothirds higher than that of natives and their children, 17.6 percent versus 10.6 percent
Border Policies Bad
Closed borders punish human beings for their unlucky birthplace, contributing
to eternal human suffering, inequality, human trafficking, slavery and death
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Although arbitrary constructs that are nothing more than legal fictions, borders contribute to
human suffering and economic inequality. The accident of place of birth may effectively
create a life of relative opportunity or deprivation. Today, however, it is far easier than ever
before to rectify that accident. Migration between nations is more common in the twenty-first
century than it ever has been. Goods, services, and people regularly flow across borders.
Elaborate transportation networks exist to move people and goods quickly and inexpensively all
over the world. A fundamental question for any body of immigration law and policy therefore
is whether it should facilitate migration and increased access to economic opportunity and
social mobility or whether it simply should reinforce the inequalities attributable to the luck of
the draw. At a fundamental level, “[a]n open entry policy is a broad attack on the problem of
morally arbitrary suffering and inequality.”55 Open entry is more egalitarian than closed
borders, allows for the possibility of a more just world, and recognizes that people should not
be trapped for life by the random occurrence of place of their birth. Consequently, an
anticaste justification for open borders, which has also been an important basis for much of U.S.
constitutional law, warrants the most serious consideration. Other moral justifications exist as
well, many of them stemming from the immoral consequences of current U.S. immigration
law. Open borders can help eliminate the immoral consequences that directly result from
the nation’s efforts to close the borders, including racial discrimi- 102 | Bordering on the
Immoral nation, exploitation in the labor market, human trafficking and slavery, and deaths
resulting from border enforcement.
Government Policies render immigrants exploitable, change is vital for the
system
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Labor exploitation is a special problem with respect to immigrants from Mexico. Mexican
citizens are the largest group of immigrants in the United States. The U.S. government’s
policies have, over time, encouraged their entry into this country, using them to supply an
inexpensive, exploitable labor force beneficial to American employers and consumers. But
the same government that encourages their migration has wholly failed to protect them from
exploitation and abuse. It has persistently allowed these poor people to remain vulnerable to
exploitation. Moral obligations grow out of such treatment but have yet to be recognized by
the U.S. government. In order to bring U.S. immigration law into line with the nation’s moral
compass, change is essential . The system, by almost all accounts, is broken. The fundamental
question about which there is serious difference of opinion is the solution. The immigration
issues that face the United States will not go away due to wishful thinking or tough talk.
Such responses, unfortunately, dominate public discussion of immigration in the United States.
Closed borders promotes isolation and the profound acknowledgement of “the
other”
Johnson 2007 (Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Open borders could help ameliorate some of the problems experienced by Mexican immigrants
and Mexican-American citizens. Legal distinctions between immigrants and citizens, which are
currently central to the immigration laws, serve to create in-groups and out-groups, promote
interethnic tension, and breed discrimination against perceived outsiders. By tending to
render such distinctions irrelevant, liberal admission policies would promote full community
membership for all people living and working in U.S. society. By minimizing, if not wholly,
eliminating, the importance of immigration distinctions between people in the United States, a
liberal admissions system would also tend to dampen the institutionalized stigmatization of
domestic minorities, such as Mexican-Americans, who share into ancestries with disfavored
immigrants. In so doing, the law would help to promote the integration of noncitizens and
certain groups of U.S. citizens U.S. society.
Borders are Discriminating
Border controls serve discriminatory intentions of segregation
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Another way of evaluating immigration restrictions proves instructive in evaluating their racial
impacts. Border controls have been characterized as a form of employment discrimination
against noncitizens because they effectively bar many foreigners from accessing the U.S. labor
markets.63 Under the existing border controls, the persons barred from seeking domestic jobs
are predominantly people of color from the developing world. Border controls thus serve to
racially segregate international labor markets. The discriminatory impacts of immigration
regulation can be seen starkly in the post–September 11 heightened scrutiny of noncitizens.
Almost all of the legal measures taken in the war on terror have been directed at the immigrant
community, resulting in racially disparate consequences. The recent governmental targeting of
Arabs and Muslims demonstrates how immigration law conveniently can be employed to fo104 | Bordering on the Immoral cus upon disfavored minority groups. This targeting was
accompanied by a precipitous rise in private racial discrimination and hate crimes directed
against Arabs and Muslims in the United States.64
Immigration laws label immigrants as disposable and racially unequal in the
class system
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication).
Not coincidentally, the disposable labor force that immigration law has helped to create in
the United States is composed primarily of immigrants of color from the developing world.133
In effect, we see the existence of a new racial caste system in the United States that has
replaced the old system that existed in the days of Jim Crow. The current immigrant labor
system is nothing less than a variant of the old sharecropping system in the South. Poorly paid,
exploitative jobs are reserved for marginalized immigrants of color. Immigration law thus
contributes to racial stratification in the U.S. labor market. In this way, labor exploitation
overlaps with concerns about the racial discrimination embedded in the U.S. immigration
laws and their enforcement.
Closed borders purposely target people of color, the disabled and ill
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
The poor are not the only group that, although enjoying the protection of the laws within the
country, is denied that protection at the border. Joining the poor as inadmissible “aliens” who
are barred from entry into the country are disabled persons. In the United States, they are
protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act.14 At the border, however, the disabled can
be denied admission into the country simply on account of the fact that they are disabled .15
Congress also has acted to exclude persons with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV),
even though the U.S. Public Health Service concluded that HIV-positive noncitizens do not
pose a significant health risk to the general population.16 Despite technically complying with
the colorblindness demanded by the U.S. Supreme Court,17 modern immigration laws also
have racially disparate impacts. People of color are disproportionately barred from entering
the country. Such a result is in tension with the nation’s stated commitment to equality under
the law.18 Although discrimination against the poor, the disabled, HIV-positive persons, or
racial minorities would be patently unlawful if directed against citizens in the United States, it
is nothing less than routine under the U.S. immigration laws. One is left to wonder what the
moral justifications could be for keeping these groups out of the United States. The elaborate
system of controls that inflicts disparate impacts on people of 90 | Bordering on the Immoral
color raises similar questions. All of these excluded groups seem to fall squarely within the
category of the “huddled masses” for whom the nation has long—and loudly—declared itself
open. There is, however, a simple answer. Most of the exclusionary categories in U.S.
immigration law are not based on fairness, equality, or any respect for individual rights.
Instead, the restrictions and exclusions are based on crude and arbitrary utilitarian
calculations of the relative costs and benefits offered by different groups of immigrants to
U.S. society. Of course, such considerations are the antithesis of a liberal devotion to individual
rights.
Migrant Conditions is a D-Rule
Migrant abuse is a D-rule – inclusion of the state re-entrenches hierarchies of
power
Hayter, Migration activist and graduate of Oxford University, 2004 (Theresa, Open
Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) MM
By far the most important reason for opposing immigration controls is that they impose
harsh suffering and injustice on those who attempt to migrate , or to flee for their lives and
liberty. The issue is whether the purposes immigration controls are intended to serve justify the
imposition of such suffering. Controls are supposed to stop people migrating to the countries
which enforce them. They are supposed to preserve and enhance the wealth of those
countries against the perceived threats posed by immigration, and so to reassure people who
believe that uncontrolled immigration might reduce them to Third World conditions. They are
supposed to meet the concerns of racists and so reduce racism. They are supposed to control
crossborder crime. In none of these objectives are they very effective or useful. In reality they
increase, rather than decrease, both racism and crime , and they threaten to undermine the
human rights not just of migrants and refugees, but of the existing inhabitants of the rich
countries which are trying to exclude them. Immigration controls should be abandoned.
We must consider global mobility and human rights first and understanding the
global political system is key
Salter 2006 [Mark, Assistant Professor at The American University in Cairo, “The Global Visa
Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives 31]
The field of migration studies has been hamstrung by two dominant approaches: microstudies
of migration networks, and macrostudies of push-pull factors. This article argues for the
consideration of a different kind of micropolitics of power, that of the border itself. We must
investigate the legal state of exception at the border and the ways that these exceptions are
instantiated in laws and policies. The interface of the body and the body politic is hotly
contested, and scholars need to take seriously the question of admission and exclusion to the
political community at its border, not solely from an immigration/refugee rights perspective
but from a wider view of the global mobility regime and human rights. This corporealism must
also take into account the management of international populations through biopolitics in
creating, classifying, and policing specific kinds of international bodies, and the way in which
political technologies of individuals such as passports, visas, and frontier control educate mobile
subjectivities in kinds of obedience and auto-confession. We must ask: How does the global
mobility regime foster conditions under which we reorganize ourselves into international
bodies and characterize those bodies as national or stateless, laboring or leisured, healthy or
diseased, and safe or pathological? This is aided by understanding the visa as part of a global
biopolitical system. In the loose visa regime, we see the control of population through the selfconfession of our status as national, working, healthy, and safe bodies through application
procedures. We need to unpack the way in which visa systems erase the middle ground
previously occupied by gastarbeiter programs and shunt economic migrants into the category of
asylum seekers, a category that does little to acknowledge the material basis of well-founded
fears of economic persecution. Some of this work has been done by human rights–based
advocacy groups like Statewatch and Amnesty International, but we also need to conduct close
ethnographies of the bureaucracies responsible for the management of these decisions.¶
Confession Is Good for the Soul In particular, I see two dangers in this corporal/confessional
regime. The issue of consent is erased on both technological and governmental levels. First, the
body comes to testify or confess for the subject without the consent or even perhaps knowledge
of the subject. Leaving aside the sociological issue of the ways in which body politics are
constructed through stereotypes, there is an issue of data being collected, analyzed, and
assigned to a particular body without any kind of check or balance. Second, the dynamics of
these data flows are not transparent. Once this corporeal information is added to our
governmental profile, we have little way of tracking its progress through private and official
channels. As David Lyon and Elia Zureik have argued elsewhere, the burden of surveillance falls
disproportionately on the poor and marginal.78 We must be vigilant of the expansion of state
policing powers, especially at the borders where the operation of state power is both naked
and hidden from view.
The protection of individual rights of migrants outweighs the sacrifice that must
be made by the citizen as a result of a moral obligation
Pevnick 11 [Ryan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University,
Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, p.
100-101, AJM]
What is needed, in regard to our first question, is a principle that prioritizes rights by giving
them a special, but not absolute, weight. Unhappily, specifying that principle is a task I can only
leave to a better mind. For us, the important point is only (once again) that those from noncompliant territories should -like traditional refugees- be granted priority admissions, and there
is an obligation to grant entity to such individuals at least up to the point where allowing
more to enter promises to generate significant costs. In regard to the first question, we saw
that while a commitment to individual rights surely demands at least some willingness to
sacrifice the general welfare, it is much less clear how far this willingness to sacrifice must go.
Likewise, in regard to the question of the limits of a plausible duty to rescue, it seems clear that
we ought to be willing to accept some sacrifice. Consider the following example: You are
preparing dinner for an evening date (the other person has yet to arrive) when you hear a faint
knock at the door. Opening the door reveals a severely bloodied individual. It is clear that the
person requires immediate transportation to the hospital. In this case, I think it is clear that
there exists a duty of assistance to stop preparations for your date and aid the individual. It
would be morally unacceptable to explain, while gently shutting the door, that you have a
risotto going on the stove that will surely be ruined- along with the rest of your evening - if you
leave. While assisting the person requires you to accept some cost (rescheduling or delaying
your date), it nevertheless seems incumbent upon you to do so. We might, then, agree that
there is a duty to rescue that requires accept- ing some limits on the pursuit of our own
interests (Singer 1972). Nevertheless, the extent of such limits remains unclear. Contrast our
first case with the one that follows: An individual in Nazi Germany, overcome by the plight of
her Jewish compatriots, decides to secretly hide Jews and help them escape the country. She
does this despite recognizing that her chance of pulling off the task without eventually being
detected and punished accordingly is small. This case is importantly different from the first one.
We regard the Schindlers of the world as heroes. They, because of the risk they undertake,
leave the world of moral requirements and embark upon the supererogatory. While we
perhaps hope that- faced with such a situation -we might reveal ourselves to be of the same
character, [yet] those who fail to do so, instead neither contributing to nor preventing
atrocities, are not blameworthy. Instead, they reveal themselves to be mere mortals rather
than heroes. The primary reason for our different reactions to the cases is that the individual in
the second case assumes a serious burden or cost. If caught, she faces severe and costly
punishment above and beyond the mere inconvenience of a missed date. We can see this by
fancifully revising the first case so that rather than one bleeding individual there are 2, then 8,
then 100, then 1000, and so on. As the numbers increase, so too do the demands imposed on
he who would provide assistance. What was at first a sacrificed date becomes a sacrificed
weekend which, in turn, becomes a holiday from work and eventually the forgoing of significant
life projects. The difference between the required action and the saintly action seems to lie[s]
in the degree of self-sacrifice.27 These distinctions, though far too rough, set the parameters
of the debate: when refuge can be provided at minimal cost, it is surely required. When the
cost imposes important risks or constraints on our lifestyle, it begins to enter[s] the category
of supererogatory. Candidly, I do not know how to further specify this condition (for example,
how much risk or self-sacrifice is one obliged to take on?), and so we are left with a much too
vague directive: allow economic refugees (those from severely impoverished areas) until it
begins to have an important effect on the political community's standard of living. At such a
point, there is still reason, albeit no longer dispositive, to allow further entry. While I wish that
I could say something more specific about this guiding principle, I doubt whether we can get to a
more precise conclusion from widely accepted premises or shared intuitions. Despite not having
adequate answers to these questions, we have enough to- at least for the moment- guide our
thinking about immigration policy. In particular, there is reason to significantly liberalize
restrictions on those from severely impoverished areas and to continue to do so, step by step,
until there is good reason to think that substantial costs are thereby being imposed. While
these costs can- in principle - be either material or in the form of radical and abrupt cultural
changes (as discussed in chapter 6), I see no reason to think that current levels of immigration
from very poor regions impose anything like such costs. And, again, even once significant costs
begin to be imposed by the entry of economic migrants, there nevertheless remains reason to
continue to grant entry. Such reason is just no longer clearly dispositive. Thus, at present, there
seems to be good reason to admit far more individuals from economically failing (or noncompliant) states.
Narrative Card
We present the story of Prudenica Martin Gomez, an example of the migrants
who died while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border as a result of
migrants’ classification as bare life by the border patrol.
Doty, Associate Professor School of Politics & Global Studies, 11
[Roxanne Lynn, Published April 12, 2011. “Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral
alibi.” Page 601-602. http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/d3110.pdf. RH]
On Friday, 6 July 2007, volunteers with two local humanitarian groups in Tucson, Arizona,
Humane Borders and Samaritans, went in search of Prudencia Martin Gomez, age 18 from
Guatemala. She was headed to Oakland, California, to join her boyfriend/fiance¨ and had been
missing since 11 June in the Ironwood National Forest, a 129 000-acre expanse of land, in the
Sonoran Desert 25 miles northwest of Tucson. There are no facilities in the Ironwood National
Forest, and visitors are warned of the hazards of the extreme heat. Human beings simply
cannot survive in this part of the southwestern deserts for as long as Prudencia had been
missing, so there was no pretense that they would find her alive, and they did not. The official
location of her body was recorded as GPS: N32 0 25.455/W1110307.80 (Arizona Daily Star
2010). Prudencia had fallen ill and had been unable to continue. Her fellow travelers left her
with water, but it was not enough. She was only a mile south of a Humane Borders' water
station, but a mile can be a very long way in the desert, in the month of June, when one has
already walked a long distance. Authorities determined that Prudencia had died on 15 June.
The recorded high temperature on that day was 115˚F. Prudencia was a contemporary version
of what Agamben (1998) refers to as bare life, life that can be taken without apology,
classified as neither homicide nor sacrifice. She was US border policy stripped to its essence.
And hers, tragically, is not an isolated example. In 2004 Mario Alberto Diaz, 6 feet tall with a
black belt in karate and working on a masters degree in biology crossed the border near
Sasabe, Arizona. His body was discovered twenty days later in a creek in the foothills of the
Sierrita Mountains (Bourdeaux, 2004). In the summer of 2005 the Pima County medical
examiner in Tucson, Arizona, had to rent a refrigerated tractor-trailer to store the bodies of
migrants due to the record number of deaths that year (Arizona Republic 2005). The deadly
trend continues. Even as apprehensions have steadily declined, deaths continue to rise
(McCombs, 2009).(6) The migrant death count for fiscal year 2009 is the third highest since
1998. In the fifteen-year period since ``prevention through deterrence'' was first introduced
approximately 5000 migrants have died, though near universal agreement exists that
estimates of migrant deaths are undercounts and the actual number is likely much higher
(Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, 2007). When they debated, formulated, and put into effect
the various border control operations collectively known as prevention through deterrence,
policy makers likely had never heard of GPS: N32 025.455/W1110307.80 or the Ironwood
National Forest or the Sierrita mountains or the many other locations at which migrant bodies
have been, and continue to be, found. However, it is arguably inconceivable that they did not
know of the harsh conditions to which migrants would be subjected under this border
strategy. The Border Patrol's own blueprint for one of the early and well-known
manifestations of the new operations, Operation Gatekeeper, noted that it would channel
migrants to locations where ``the days are blazing hot and nights freezing cold''.(7) In this
section I argue that the prevention through deterrence border control strategies exemplify
Foucault's theoretical writings on how biopower, sovereign power, and racism can be
articulated with one another thus to function in concert. While biopolitics, as formulated by
Foucault, is generally understood as being concerned with the governance and regulation of a
population in matters such as health and sexuality, it is also consistent with what Agamben
refers to as bare life. For Foucault the emergence of the ``problem of the population'' coincided
with the development of an art of government wherein the main concerns of government were
on the wealth, longevity, health, and sexuality of the population, giving rise to the notion of
biopower as ``making life live'' (Foucault, 1991). Through regulations in these matters, subjects
become entangled in the practices of statecraft. Agamben has critiqued what he calls
Foucault's ``progressive disqualification of death'' (ie the circumscription of the issue of death to
discussions of classical sovereign power), offering a conceptualization of biopower which
focuses on the ways in which sovereign power produces a radical exposure abandoning
subjects, stripping their identities to that of bare life, and thereby creating spaces of exception
or a ``juridical void'' which permits abuses and killings without punishment.(8) While
Agamben's theorizations of biopower and its relation to bare life are invaluable for
understanding how modern power works, he arguably draws a bit of a strawman when it comes
to Foucault. In Society Must be Defended, Foucault poses the following question. How can
biopower, whose function is to improve life and prolong its duration, kill? ``How can the power
of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? ''
(2003, page 254). His definition of `killing' is not ``simply murder as such, but also every form
of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for
some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejections, and so on'' (page 256).
Clearly Foucault recognizes that biopower does not preclude the taking of life. He responds to
his own question by turning to race, suggesting that race performs two functions: (1) it
introduces a break in the domain of life under power's control between what must live and
what must die thus fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls, and (2) it
establishes a relationship between life and death. ``If you want to live, you must take lives,
you must be able to kill'' (2003, pages 254 ^ 255).
Biopower Links
Link—Population Management
Modes of surveillance along the border are a form epistemic control. Invoking
the border is a good example of this control.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005[Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
With the increasing uncertainties of post September 11 world, the issue of surveillance is given
renewed importance through the discourses surrounding the proliferation of ‘control’
technologies and the rhetoric of (in)security pervading contemporary politics. Electronic
technologies are seen to be intensifying the ‘capacity’ and ubiquity of surveillance creating
‘new’ forms of social control. Not that the newness of the current modes of surveillance is to
be regarded from a merely ontological vantage point and especially not as ‘a shift to a new type
of society’ (Rose, 1999: 237) per se but more so from the epistemic informationisation and
hybridisation of control and monitoring facilitated by the spread of digital technologies which
lend to the emerging trends of surveillance their label of newness while sustaining the existing
status quo of society. Examples of these technologies include DNA fingerprinting, electronic
tagging, drug testing, health scans, biometric ID cards and passports, smart closed circuit
television, etc, all of which rely on algorithmic techniques as well as ‘body parts’ in order to
perform their function of surveillance. Whilst there is a myriad of issues pertaining to the
phenomenon of surveillance, each of which deserve a thorough examination both theoretically
and empirically, this paper will be mainly concerned with one specific aspect of surveillance and
its relation to biopolitics and the ways in which surveillance stands as the emblem of the
magnitude and dimension of that which constitutes the management of life and death. In so
doing, the ‘border’ will be invoked as the principal example of the interwoven relationship
between surveillance and biopolitics all the while drawing upon the work of Foucault and
others in order to elucidate the theoretical foundations of the relationships as well as the
existing juxtaposition of bodies and technologies at the border.
The Panopticon is a metaphor for surveillance along the border. This
surveillance causes two forms of biopolitical control in the form of extreme
order and in extreme exclusion.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005[Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
In a chapter called Panopticism, Foucault (1975) begins by outlining two major forms through
which discipline and surveillance were exerted. The first being the spatialisation of the plaguestricken town by means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as placing individuals
within enclosures and under severe and permanent supervision. Such surveillance involves
‘tactics of individualizing disciplines’ (Foucault, 1975: 199) which proceed from a system of
‘permanent registration’ (registering the details of each inhabitant of the town) as well as
mechanisms of distribution (in which each inhabitant is related to his place, his body and his
condition) so that the disease is met by order, eradicating any confusion that may emerge out
of the ‘mixing’ of bodies, be these living or dead. The second organisational form is that of the
treatment of the leper which, unlike ‘the plague and its segmentations’, functions by means of
separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community through mechanisms of
‘branding’, ‘dichotomisation’ and ‘exile-enclosure’. From these two different images (plague
and leprosy) which underlies the two different projects (segmentation and separation), Foucault
goes on to explain the two ways of exerting (political) power: discipline on the hand (as is the
case with the plague), and exclusion on the other (as is the case with leprosy). However, and
despite the difference of the two modes, they are ‘not incompatible ones’ (Foucault, 1995:
199) for power functions by way of excluding the ‘infected’ (here, the image of the leper stands
as an emblematic figure of ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘madmen’, etc, just as the image of the
plague symbolises ‘all forms of confusion and disorder’) and individualising the excluded so
much so that lepers (all those who are symbolised by this image) are treated as plague victims
(all those who are caught up within disorderly spaces). Hence, power is but a concurrent
amalgamation of the two forms, and according to Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon is par
excellence ‘the architectural figure of this composition’ (1975: 200). Bentham’s utilitarian plan
for a prison which is based on an observing supervisor placed in a central tower and who can
see without being seen, serves as a compelling paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is
intrinsic to the compound power of exclusion and individualization. As Elden (2002: 244)
explains, the model of the Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of the figurative leper) ‘is
rigidly regimented and controlled’ (as is the case with the figurative plague victim). The idea
that ‘visibility is a trap’ (Foucault, 1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall tower at the centre
does not necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that ‘collective’ individualities are
overridden by separated ‘individualities’ (the treatment of lepers as a plague victims – the
trinity of segmentation, individualisation and separation) and that power is ‘unverifiable’
(uncertainty about whether/when one is being watched), is what makes the model of
Panopticon such a subtle and effective architectural apparatus. Power does not need to be
enforced but merely ‘internalised’ through mechanisms of self-regulation. Such mechanisms
render the observed as simultaneously the bearer (subject) of and the one subjected to power.
Not that the Panopticon is merely a method of observation devoid of other disciplinary modes
of power but it is also a machine that could be used to ‘carry out experiments, to alter
behaviour, to train or correct individuals’ (Foucault, 1975: 203) within a variety of institutional
spaces, ranging from prisons to schools, hospitals, factories, etc. It is, hence, the way in which
the metaphor of the Panopticon encapsulates different technologies and spaces of
surveillance and discipline that Foucault places the notion of disciplinary society under the
umbrella of panopticism in order to capture the diagrammatic strategies underlying power
relations and in which ‘positions’ and ‘identities’ are fundamental features vis-à-vis the
functioning of ‘panoptical’ surveillance.:
Social Institutions within borders reinforce the control on immigration and the
management of life.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
Other surveillance techniques involve the use of biometrics which consists of an ‘enrolment
phase’ (European Commission, 2005: 46) where physical attributes such as fingerprints, DNA
patterns, retina, iris, face, voice, etc are used to collect, process, and store biometric samples
onto a database for subsequent usage during the ‘recognition phase’ in which these data are
matched against the real-time data input in order to verify identity. Authorities have been keen
on integrating biometric identifiers into ID cards and passports as a means of strengthening
security, enhancing modes of identification and facilitating the exchange of data between
different countries. Further application of biometrics in information sharing can be seen in the
EU-wide database EURODAC (Koslowski, 2003: 11), used to store the fingerprints of asylum
applicants in order to prevent multiple applications in several member states or what is referred
to as the so-called ‘asylum shopping’. Added to that, the employment of a broad array of
private actors (employers, banks, hospitals, educational institutions, marriage register offices,
etc) to perform the role of ‘gatekeepers’ (Lahav, in Koslowski, 2003: 5) (or more accurately,
‘borderkeepers’) and reinforce immigration controls from within the internal and ubiquitous
borders, constituting ‘a multiplicity of points for the collection, inscription, accumulation and
distribution of information relevant to the management of risk’ (Rose, 1999: 260), and the
administration of life and death.
The conceptualization of borders has become a tool of the privileged and
powerful to block and contain mobility.
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
The first principle of division that governs the mobility regime is that which separates
privileged countries and regions from most other regions of the world , in effect turning the
latter into suspect countries. It is typically within these suspect countries that we find large
concentrations of dispossessed groups, located in lesser regulated areas such as slums or in
the more regulated confines of refugee camps. Concurrently, such countries are perceived as
social spaces that have the potential of exporting criminal elements, terrorists, and
undocumented immigrants into the more privileged social spaces of the globe. Thus, while the
traditional function of guarded borders was conceived in terms of the need to defend
sovereignty (physically against organized violent invasion and symbolically as an affirmation of
national identity), the mobility potential that globalization processes facilitate simultaneously
produces the conceptualization of borders in terms of the need to protect a perceived stable
and secure social fabric from unwarranted infiltration by suspect populations. Of course,
borders are not a new invention. Yet, it is noteworthy that the rational and systematic closure
of national borders in general and the use of border controls to prevent immigration in
particular are a modern phenomenon. Tilly (1992), theorizing the history of state-building in
Europe, pays only cursory attention to borders despite the fact that control over bounded
territories is inseparable from his very definition of a state. Rather than using the concept of
borders, Tilly (1992) finds that rulers normally tried to establish both a secured area within
which they could enjoy the returns from coercion and a fortified buffer zone to protect the
secured area. However, once such buffer zones could be turned into secured areas in and of
themselves, rulers initiated drives for creating newly expanded buffer zones (1992:184). Borders
acquired a more significant meaning only in tandem with the consolidation of the modern
national state, when governments began to “control movement across frontiers, to use tariffs
and customs as instruments of economic policy, and to treat foreigners as distinctive kinds of
people deserving limited rights and close surveillance” (1992:116). However, the regime of
movement in the present era is not unlike previous regimes in its primary reliance on
physical barriers as means of blocking and containing mobility . These elementary practices, in
turn, are based on the quite conventional methods of constructing fences. Accordingly, and in
tandem with free trade agreements, an eight-foot fence stretches along the 2,000 miles border
between Mexico and the United States, from Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California. As it
ends in the Pacific Ocean, between San Diego and Tihuana, the fence is 15 feet high. Hundreds
of names are scribbled on the Mexican side of the fence, a kind of unofficial memorial to
those killed while trying to outsmart the U.S. Operation Gatekeeper. Before it stretches a few
100 feet into the ocean, the fence also cuts across Friendship Park (Parque de la Amistad), so
titled in 1971 as a gesture to the Mexican people (Nevins 2001; Andreas 2000).
The immigration regime is a tool used by the government to manage
populations
Salter 2006 [Mark, Assistant Professor at The American University in Cairo, “The Global Visa
Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives 31]
There is a Catholic mnemonic to recall how to cross one’s self: “spectacles, testicles, wallet, and
watch.” This rhyme is an excellent entry into the importance of confession in the recognition of
the self as an international self. In addition to recalling the notion of appeal to authority that is
never quite authorized (hence the need for a pneumonic), it also marks the stations of the
modern state: vision and surveillance, health and reproduction, commerce and capital, and
time. The gesture refers at once to an absolution of sorts and a sanctification of actions and
words. A penitent’s presentation to the agent of God to name his sins, in return for which he is
given absolution, stands as a central metaphor in under- standing the modern relationship
between individual and state. Foucault poses the question of obedience and society in a
genealogical frame: “How is it that in Western Christian culture the government of men
demands, on the part of those who are led, not only acts of obedience and submission but
also ‘acts of truth,’ which have the peculiar requirement not just that the subject tell the truth
but that he tell the truth about himself, his faults, his desires, the state of his soul, and so
on?”60 This part of the mechanism for the creation of the modern subject who knows himself
in relation to the confessionary state is a function of “unconditional obedience, uninterrupted
examination, and exhaustive confession” and “appears as an indispensable component of the
government of men by each other.”61 Though not traced by Foucault himself, the
confessionary complex (obedience, examination, confession) provides a crucial link between
the “political economy of the body”62 and the biopolitical governmentality of international
management of populations. It is not simply that the international population is managed, but
that we come to manage ourselves through the confessionary complex. Foucault describes the
importance of “the way by which, through some political technology of individuals, we have
been led to recognize ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of nation or
of a state.”63 Balibar relates the governmental function of the border as the limit of
community to the process of identity-formation: “The normality of the national citizen-subject
. . . is also internalized by individuals , as it becomes a condition, an essential reference of
their collective, communal sense, and hence of their identity. . . . As a consequence, borders
cease to be purely external realities .”64 The confessionary complex is a structure framed by
law and instantiated in various practices at the border (and in the faces of agents of the state).
The border is inextricably linked to sovereignty
Salter 2006 [Mark, Assistant Professor at The American University in Cairo, “The Global Visa
Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives 31]
On his entry to the United States, Oscar Wilde was asked the customary question: He
apocryphally replied “I have nothing to declare except my genius!”4 This act of confession
before the vanguard of governmental machinery is crucial to both the operation of the global
mobility regime and the operation of sovereign power. It is those first acts of examination,
obedience, and confession that establishes the fundamental relationship between sovereign
and subject, between the body politic and a particular body. Sovereignty and boundary
maintenance are inextricable: “since there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can
only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence.”5 The border
represents a unique case of entry into the social contract; it is not an entry that is inherited or
claimed by right but a status that is requested. Following R. B. J. Walker, I would argue that
border practices are examples of the “very concrete practices” that instantiate the abstract
doctrines of sovereignty.6 Conventional political accounts of migration focus on masses of
moving populations (broad demographic and social trends) or the public policy process by which
the regulation of those populations are constrained or enabled.7 My account here seeks to turn
traditional analysis on its head and ask: What if we were to put the individual body at the center
of our analysis of the border? The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and
frontier formalities manages an international population through and within a biopolitical
frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be
international.
The border is a state of exception where the sovereign has absolute rule
Salter 2006 [Mark, Assistant Professor at The American University in Cairo, “The Global Visa
Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives 31]
What makes the border a state of exception? The sovereign decides the political status of the
individual as they cross the frontier: national, stateless, refugee, foreigner, alien. This decision
is absolute. The agent of the sovereign’s customs decides not only the nationality and status of
foreigners but of all travelers. There is a zone of indistinction wherein a traveler possesses not
even his/her nationality unless it is confirmed by the decision of the sovereign. Nothing can
compel a particular decision; no appeal can be made; the only expulsion that bears any
intersovereign consequence is denationalization or becoming a refugee. Thus, the traveler only
gains some kind of advantage with other sovereigns once s/he can prove that s/he is abject, will
be afforded no protection whatsoever, that one is bare international life, a seeker of refuge, a
life that without state rights but subject to the law of states. Only the national border may be
considered a state of exception, as opposed to other social or spatial borders. Entry to a house
is plainly governed by a set of legal restrictions on the power of the state, such as the US
Fourth Amendment right to be protected from unreasonable search. However, rights are
configured quite differently at the border.21 In the United States, the authority by which the
Customs and Border Patrol is empowered to search border-crossers is different from that of
police [19 U.S.C. 1467], which derives from an early congressional act of July 31, 1789 [1 St. 43].
It is the very space of the border that makes the burden of law different. The threshold between
law and force is spatialized or rather conditional on a particular mobility: “searches made at the
border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and
examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of
the fact that they occur at the border.”22 The right to detain, examine, and search travelers is
defined in relation to their foreignness, their origins “outside,” which renders them without
protection while under question at the border. Searches within state’s territory and at the
border bear two different standards: “probable cause” is replaced by “reasonable suspicion.”
Thus, state actions at the border are a special case of law. “Border searches, then, from before
the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, have been considered to be ‘reasonable’ by the single
fact that the person or item in question had entered into our country from the outside.”23 That
which is outside both constitutes and threatens the integrity of the inside, and the decision to
include/ exclude both defines the population of the state and gives lie to the presumed
homogeneity and stability of that community.24 This situation of permanent threat is
neutralized through the successful management of risk at the border in a way that renders
threat permanent and insolvable. The visa regime, and the delocalization of the border that it
represents, is emblematic of this management.
The border is used by the state to harness people for labor
Salter 2006 [Mark, Assistant Professor at The American University in Cairo, “The Global Visa
Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,”
Alternatives 31]
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that “the body is molded by a great many
distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by
food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances.”57 To this, I would
add that there is an internationalization of the body: through biometric capture, the
assignation of risk profiles according to race, gender, ethnic, national and religious scripts, and
the visa system within the institutions of customs and immigration controls. The visa system
as an essential component in the attempt of the state to claim a monopoly over legitimate
movement classifies mobile bodies as legitimate through the schema of production and
subjection. We have already seen the criteria by which this management of population is
organized: labor, health, and risk. To understand the way this governmentality creates
populations and individuals, I will use two of Foucault’s key ideas: biopolitics and political
technologies of the individual. Foucault’s writings on the topic of biopolitics ground this analysis.
Foucault examined the concomitant evolution of industrial and institutional techniques of
modern governance through an investigation of how mobile, productive, healthy, moral
bodies were constructed, schooled, policed, and harnessed for labor.58 His investigation of the
how the penal system in particular led into the evolution of a disciplinary society stopped at the
borders of the state, but in principle can be expanded to encompass a biopolitics of
international relations: the management of international bodies. Fundamental to the evolution
of the modern state was the control over mobility of citizens, which Foucault illustrates
architecturally in the panopticon and plague town, Timothy Mitchell within Egyptian schools and
urban architecture, and John Torpey through state passports.59 What these authors neglect is
the international aspect of this control of mobility. Following work by Barry Hindess, Nevzat
Soguk, and William Walters, who describe a structure of international management of
population through the regulation of citizenship, refugees, and stateless persons, the
international control of persons is just as vital to the stability of the modern state system as the
domestic control of mobility. We can see the ways in which the visa system contributes to the
definition and control of international populations: through the ascription of biopolitical
characteristics in terms of labor skill or capitalization, epidemic or health liability, and risk or
normalcy.
Biopower sets up a way for the liberal governance to administer the prosperity
of the population, ensuring the human continuation to be the “proper” way.
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and citizenship/democracy
studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses of migrant domestic workers
[Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship,” Women’s Studies
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Michel Foucault has conceptualized the modern form of power as¶ “bio-power,” wherein the
essential measure of liberal governance is to oversee¶ the welfare of the population (wealth,
longevity, health, etc.) through¶ mechanisms of calculation, monitoring, regulation, and
utilization, such¶ that citizen life will be fostered productively in the interests and security of¶
the state (1980a; 1997). Biopower taps into the bodies and souls of human¶ subjects to
ensure the reproduction of the social body in a “proper” mode¶ and “proper” way (Foucault
1980b). As a technique of liberal governance,¶ the inscription of subjects into modern
citizenship initiates modern state’s¶ systematic surveillance of its population. David Lyon
points out that the¶ civil, political, and social rights granted to citizens in the age of
modernity¶ imply that “people had to be registered, and their personal details filed, ¶
which of course paradoxically facilitated their increased surveillanceӦ 66 Bare Life,
Interstices, and the Third Space of Citizenship¶ (2001, 294). New and minute forms of
surveillance and control were¶ established via documentary identification of citizens (i.e.,
birth certificates,¶ driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, passports, bankbooks, credit¶
cards) throughout liberal societies by the last quarter of the twentieth century¶ (294).
Rather than an autonomous species standing in opposition to¶ corporate bureaucratic power,
citizenship is itself entangled in the webs of¶ surveillance and subjection, discipline and
normalization as a constitutive¶ part of liberal governance in the making of citizen-subjects
Link—Citizenship
The perception of citizenship creates the dichotomy that is known as society.
The state is able to focus it zoepolitical forces on those it does not deem worthy
of the political life.
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 9, BW)
To address the distinction between zoe, bare life, and bios, political life, Willem Schinkel
suggests that biopolitics be understood in two dimensions: the zoepolitical and the
biopolitical. Zoepolitics, externally directed, focuses on the bare life of people outside the
state, including Guantanamo detainees and immigration detainees. Biopolitics, directed
internally towards people within state’s territory but outside of “society,” focuses on the
boundaries of the social body. Citizenship thus functions as a mechanism of population
control that enables the exercise of biopower on both dimensions (Schinkel 2010: 19). Space,
both social and physical, is the linchpin of illegality and immigration detention, and we can see
that bare life inhabits a social space structured on a polarity of oppositions in the zone of
indistinction. Next we will examine how spatial ideas proceed from the figure at the opposite
pole from the homo sacer, the sovereign.
The idea of “citizenship” is inherently exclusive, the government uses borders
to make this exclusion possible
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
Central to this politics of particularity is the principle of inclusion (of good particulars) and
exclusion (of bad particulars) through which ‘the idea of norma- tive universality’ (Zylinska 2004,
p. 524) is established in relation to constitutive particularity. Particularity in a sense could be
understood as the partitioning of differences and the demarcating of spatiality based on the
‘universal’ values of autonomy and self-governing, manifested in the notion of statehood. The
production and formulation of the particular citizen within particular state is initially
performed through modes of inclusion and exclusion whereby individual, communal and
national identities are conceived of in terms of dichotomies of self and other, of inside and
outside, of belonging and alien, and so on. The state, as such, represents itself as the locus par
excellence of spatial particularity – terri- toriality – through the politicisation of its borders, the
principle by which the concept of citizen is made possible. For without a state, the particular
character of the citizen dissolves into universality (being a human) and without citizens, there
could be no state (Coward 1999, p. 9). This interdependent relationship between state and
citizens is in fact what produces the spurious needs and rationalisation of division and
containment which find their expression in the ruling of sovereignty. Such a relationship also
[this]explains why each time the question of immigration is raised by governments, there is a
tendency to invoke the notion of ‘people’ i.e. ‘citizens’ in order to substantiate the will to
exclusion and total enclosure
Link—Securitization
Deterrence at the border is also a symbolic power which re-inscribes the
stability of the border.
Doty, Associate Professor School of Politics & Global Studies, 11
[Roxanne Lynn, Published April 12, 2011. “Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral
alibi.” Page 605. http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/d3110.pdf. RH]
The significance of prevention through deterrence in terms of the techniques of biopower can
be found in the fact that it has not, nor arguably was it ever intended, to completely eliminate
unauthorized immigration (Nevins, 2010, page 114). Like the border policies prior to it,
prevention through deterrence was in part a `border game', rife with symbolic power which
functioned to reaffirm the significance of the boundary between Mexico and the United States
and at the same time asserted/reasserted the sovereignty of the latter.(18) However, it
inaugurated a new intensity in that US border policies became much more than a symbolic game
in the sense that crossing the border without authorization now became an extremely
dangerous proposition in which death lurked in every new migrant crossing route, through
formidable mountain ranges and along desolate, heat-scorched desert lands. In terms of the
operation(s) of power, the significance of this new border strategy lies in a subtle shift from
the dominance of sovereign, juridical power to biopower. I say `subtle' because I do not mean
to suggest that juridical power and biopower are opposed to one another. Clearly, they work
together in this case, and it is a matter of emphasis that I am suggesting here. Juridical power
intensified the US border enforcement regime. However, biopower is clearly evident as the
newly intensified enforcement regime produced a radical exposure for migrants which
stripped them of their humanity and permitted their killing without punishment.
Link—Racism
This perception of migrants as ‘inferior’ is inextricably linked to the state – its
inclusion cements biopolitical control
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 524-25) MM
The notion of biopolitics comes from Michel Foucault, who in the final section of The History of
Sexuality puts forward a claim that, in modernity, ancient sovereign power exerted over life
and death has been replaced by bio-power: ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of
death’ (1984, p. 138). Biopolitics thus describes the processes through which Western
democracies, with all their regulatory and corrective mechanisms, administer life by exercising
power over the species body (1984, p. 139). What is now at issue, according to Foucault, is not
so much ‘bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty’ as instantiating the idea and sense
of the norm, which is supposed to regulate society and ensure the intactness of its sovereign
authority. The biopolitics of immigration - one of the forms through which bio-power is
enacted in Western democracies and through which life is ‘managed’ - thus contributes to the
development of the idea of normative universality, against which particular acts of political
(mis)practice can be judged. And yet, as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau have
demonstrated in numerous works, the notion of universality proposed in official political
discourses always entails (or is contaminated by, as Laclau has it) a certain particularity.
Indeed, the universal juridico-political acts acquire their ‘universal’ value only if they draw on
the particularity of the official and non-official regulatory mechanisms that are supposed to
exclude whatever may pose a threat to this idea of universality. This is to say, they rely on
state legislation already in place, on the concept of citizenship embraced by the democratic
community, but also on ‘public opinion’ that has to be taken into account and responded to.
Border Framing Impacts
Impact—Otherization
Immigration policy is not neutral – it presupposes superiority as a citizen of the
state while simultaneously tagging migrants as ‘parasites,’ creating an us-them
mentality
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 526) MM
Performativity of the public sphere: The ‘issue’ of asylum seekers lies at the very heart of the
broader issue concerning the constitution of the public sphere . For Butler democratic
participation in the public sphere is enabled by the preservation of its boundaries, and by the
simultaneous establishment of its ‘constitutive outside’. She argues that in contemporary
Western democracies numerous singular lives are being barred from the life of the legitimate
community , in which standards of recognition allow one access to the category of ‘the
human’. In order to develop a set of norms intended to regulate the state organism, biopolitics
needs to establish a certain exclusion from these norms, to protect the constitution of the polis
and distinguish it from what does not ‘properly’ belong to it. The biopolitics of immigration
looks after the bodies of the host community and protects it against parasites that might want
to invade it, but it needs to equip itself with tools that will allow it to trace, detect and
eliminate these parasites. Technology is mobilized to probe and scan the bare life of those
wanting to penetrate the healthy body politic: through the use of fingerprinting, iris recognition
and scanners in lorries travelling, for example, across the English Channel, the presence and
legitimacy of ‘asylum seekers’ can be determined and fixed.4 The bio-politics of immigration is
thus performative in the sense of the term used by Butler; through the probing of human
bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate members of the community is
established. This process depends on a truth regime already in place, a regime that classifies
some bodies as ‘genuine’ and others (be it emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in lorries in
which they have been smuggled to the ‘West’, or confined to the leaky Tampa ship hopelessly
hovering off the shores of Australia) as ‘bogus’. The bare life of the host community thus
needs to be properly managed and regulated , with its unmanageable aspects placed in what
Agamben (1998) calls a relation of exception. But the question that remains occluded in these
processes of ‘life management’ is ‘[w]hich bodies come to matter - and why?’ (Butler 1993, p.
xii).
The global mobility regime is premised on a paradigm of suspicion, working as a
counterbalance to universal rights, and creating further inequality in the world
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
In contrast, the theoretical contribution I propose in this article is to conceive processes of
globalization as also producing “their own,” so to speak, principles of closure. I posit that
above and beyond tensions such as between national sovereignty and human rights, we are
witnessing the emergence of a new cultural/normative global principle that operates as a
counterbalance to the normative principle of global human rights. We are witnessing the
emergence of a global mobility regime, oriented to closure and to the blocking of access,
premised not only on “old” national or local grounds but on a principle of perceived universal
dangerous personhoods (hereinafter referred to as “a paradigm of suspicion”). The analytical
framework of this article is that the mobility regime is constructed to maintain high levels of
inequality in a relatively normatively homogenized world .5 In practice, this means that local,
national, and regional boundaries are now being rebuilt and consolidated under the increased
normative pressure of, and as a counterbalance to, the universal human rights regime. Thus,
in contrast to the tendency to announce the “death of distance” (Cairncross 1997) and to
declare a “mobility turn” (Urry 2003), in this article, I seek to conceptualize and theorize
globalization in terms of processes of closure, entrapment, and containment. Specifically, I
emphasize the extent to which processes of globalization are also concerned with the
prevention of movement and the blocking of access. I posit that such processes should neither
be theorized as a systemic malfunction nor as the unintended consequences of globalization.
Rather, following the terminology of Simmel ([1908] 1950), I argue that the social nearness that
globalization allows for is also constitutive of simultaneous processes of social distance.
The mobility regime profiles people, objectifying them as suspects and enabling
the paradigm of suspicion to justify restriction and containment
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
Profiling, and specifically racial and ethnic profiling, attracts significant attention from
sociologists, public policymakers, and legal experts.15 In the United States, racial profiling
commonly refers to any police-initiated action that relies on race, ethnicity, or national origin
rather than on particular individual behavior as criteria for selecting whom to stop or arrest
(Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000). Here, I would like to expand the notion of profiling to
cover a whole range of practices aimed at both one’s physical and social identity that are
undertaken by a host of mobility regime market and governmental agents. I treat profiling and
more precisely, biosocial profiling , as an emergent technology of social intervention that
objectifies whole strata of people by assigning them into suspect categories, thereby
enabling the paradigm of suspicion to be translated into elaborate practices of containment .
In contrast to the modality of law, which punishes and locks away through a binary
guilty/innocent distinction, and in contrast to the modality of the disciplines, which corrects
behavior and occasionally quarantines through bell-curve matrices of normalization (Hunt 1992;
Foucault 1977), profiling predicts behavior and regulates mobility by situating subjects in
categories of risk. Now two qualifications of the above formulation must be immediately
introduced. First, laws and disciplines are not substituted for profiling. Legal regulation and
disciplinary procedures are widely applied and certainly play a central role in facilitating
imprisonments, deportations, and a host of other types of containment. Rather, it would be
more accurate to say that profiling emerges as a more discrete technology of intervention that
facilitates and complements the regulation of mobility by legal and disciplinary means.
Moreover, while laws and regulations may formally enable governance through profiling, they
nonetheless lack the instruments and the type of gaze that allows profiling to function as a
mode of spatial containment that is able—on the ground—to maintain the selectivity of
boundary-crossing and to effectively distinguish those who are licensed to move from those
who are not.
As with the past, the segregation and alienation of the Mexicans is due to the
American unwillingness to simply encounter the Other. They simply
characterize the Other as inferior and dehumanize them, which turns into an
issue of de facto segregation. Immigration bills (CIR) cannot be applicable due
to the deep rooted perceived inferiority of immigrants
Astor 2009 (Avi, Post-Doc @ University of Michigan, later Pompeu Fabra University,
Department of Poltical and Social Sciences, “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the
Making of Operation Wetback”, Latino Studies (2009) 7, 5/29, http://www.palgravejournals.com/lst/journal/v7/n1/full/lst200856a.html)
The practices of government agencies not only increased the number of undocumented
immigrants in the United States, but also worked to isolate them from the social and political
life of communities in the Southwest. A common practice of the INS was to disappear during
the harvest season and then to magically reappear once the harvest was over to apprehend
undocumented workers once their services were no longer needed (President's Commission on
Migratory Labor, 1951; García, 1980). Aside from exposing the INS to be a tool of grower
interests, this prevented immigrants from integrating into the social life of the communities in
which they resided. A study conducted in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas at the time
attests to the social isolation of the immigrant population in the Southwest. The sociologists
who conducted the study, Lyle Saunders and Olen Leonard (1976 (1951)), write that the typical
immigrant “establishes few or no intimate ties of friendship – except occasionally with other
wetbacks – and has human contacts only with the group with whom he works and lives and with
the employer or foreman who hires him” (p. 45). Immigrants often lived in makeshift camps
that were isolated from the rest of the community, or if they did manage to rent a place in town,
it was almost always in the “Mexican” sections, which were segregated from the “Anglo”
sections. During harvest season, when many immigrants were present, it was even common for
them to live out in the open due to their employers’ unwillingness to give them shelter.
Mexican immigrants were also excluded from recreational facilities and certain commercial
enterprises. A quote by a Texas politician exemplifies the attitudes that justified such
segregation:¶ Although there is no discrimination in the Valley, of course there is segregation
in a few things, but that is for hygienic, not racial reasons. Spanish-speaking people live in
their own part of town and have their own businesses. They prefer it that way. They are
excluded from swimming pools and barber shops. The exclusion from pools is because it is not
possible to tell the clean ones from the dirty, so we just keep them all out. We just can’t have
all those dirty, possibly diseased people swimming with our wives and children. (Saunders and
Leonard, 1976 (1951), p. 67)¶ Through the practices of government agencies and social attitudes
regarding Spanish-speaking populations, Mexican immigrants were reduced to what Agamben
(1998) calls “bare life.” Lacking legal protection and political inclusion, immigrants had no
recourse for complaint when they were mistreated or underpaid. However, the absence of legal
protection and political inclusion alone does not explain why Mexican workers were so
frequently the objects of discrimination and abuse. Rather, it was their isolation from social
life that hindered general social awareness of the abuses they suffered and prevented people
from the communities in which they resided from seeing them as social beings, rather than
cheap labor or potential threats. The only advocate Mexican immigrants had was the Mexican
government. However, the relative weakness of the Mexican state and its poor bargaining
position made such advocacy ineffective (Calavita, 1992). Consequently, the welfare of Mexican
immigrants was completely at the discretion of their employers and others with whom they
interacted. This is well illustrated by Saunders and Leonard (1976 (1951)), as they write,¶ During
the summer of 1950, the authors heard a good many accounts, pro and con, about the health
conditions and services available to wetbacks. They ranged from the quite callous account of
one farmer who playfully chased a wetback with a tractor, crushed his foot, and then turned
him over to the Immigration Service for return to Mexico, to humanitarian behavior of an
employer who paid medical bills averaging two hundred or more dollars each month for the
care of his wetback employees. (p. 48)¶
Immigrants are always an inch away from exclusion from the geopolitical space
of the United States and are labeled as “Illegal” by the community, stripping
away the core of their humanity and their worth in the democratic process.
Johnson 2007 Dean of UC Davis School of Law(Kevin R., 2007“Opening the Floodgates;
Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws”)
The fear of deportation haunts many immigrants. They know that they can be torn away from
established lives, family, friends, and community in an instant for lacking the proper
immigration papers or for even something as minor as failing to file a change of address form
with the U.S. government within ten days of moving. The undocumented immigrant who drives
a car without a license faces the possibility of deportation every time he turns the key. An
immigrant’s entire life in the United States is constantly at risk.¶ Immigrants become easy
targets for harsh treatment because they have a distinctively negative image in popular
culture. Although not officially found in the omnibus immigration law, the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1952, the emotion-laden phrase “illegal aliens” figures prominently in
popular debate over immigration.1 “Illegal aliens,” as their moniker strongly implies, are lawbreakers, abusers, and intruders, undesirables we want excluded from our society . The very
use of the term “illegal aliens” ordinarily betrays a restrictionist bias in the speaker. By
stripping real people of their humanity , the terminology helps rationalize the harsh
treatment of undocumented immigrants under the immigration laws.¶ Immigrants, as
noncitizens, have little direct input in the political process, a process that ultimately controls
their destinies. Unlike other minority groups, they cannot vote. Although interest groups, such
as Latina/o and Asian-American advocacy groups, advocate on behalf of immigrants along with
citizen minorities, they have limited political clout in arguing for fair treatment of people who
cannot vote. Politicians generally do not court the “immigrant vote.” In the end, immigrants’
interests can be ignored by lawand policymakers in ways that other citizen minorities’ simply
cannot be.2¶
Impact—Dehumanization
Borders are dehumanizing: they allow the government to determine who is
worthy of existing
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
At the level of absolute separation, the figure of nation-state, as it were, is constructed as an
autonomous and unified entity whose ontological immanence is premised on sovereignty and
self-sufficiency in such a way that the need for exposure (the clinamen) is regarded as obsolete.
That is not to say, however, that the possibility of exposure is entirely eliminated from such
figure. Instead, exposure becomes that which relates to exteriority only in terms of exchange
value and flow of capital – in fact, this kind of exposure is encouraged as it sustains the
doctrine of free market and perpetuates capitalism – as well as the emerging modes of
measurement which are also applied on human beings, such as quota for asylum seekers and
points system for work permits and residence. Nevertheless, measure here is not only the
quantifying of dimensionality (How many asylum seekers and immigrants should be let in?) –
although this is often presented in some political discourses as the salient point, but more so,
measure is the quantifying of ‘responsibility’ (Nancy 2000, p. 180) so much so that the question
becomes not only ‘how many?’ but ‘which?’ (Which asylum seekers are ‘genuine’? Which
asylum seekers should one be responsible to? Which (skilled/needed) immigrants should be
given the right to enter and reside? Which marriages are not sham? In short, which
‘existences’ are deemed worthy of living ?). In such a context, measure becomes concurrently
the embodiment of exposure as well as enclosure, both of which are, nonetheless, operated
within the intentionality of absolute separation.
Through the process of the physical and cultural border separating the U.S.
from Mexico, migrants have become hated and dehumanized as the “other” by
the government and the people of the privileged America.
Johnson 2007 Dean of UC Davis School of Law(Kevin R., 2007“Opening the Floodgates;
Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws”)
Despite the rising death toll, there is no sense of urgency among the public and
policymakers to put an end to the human tragedy. Rather, the death beat goes on.
Complacency in the United States over the deadly state of border affairs suggests a
blindness or indifference to the true human suffering that directly results from
border enforcement. Enforcing the border has proven to be extremely difficult. Rather
than formulate policies that work, it is far easier to dehumanize the migrant as the
“other” and to consider the deaths of “illegal aliens” as simply collateral damage as
the nation seeks to defend against a “foreign invasion.”¶ In response to immigration
reform proposals, an immigrant civil¶
rights movement emerged in the
United States. Protesting the punitive measures under consideration in the U.S.
Congress, marchers demanded that immigrants be fairly and humanely treated. In
March 2006, more than 100,000 people marched in the streets of Chicago to protest
proposed reform legislation, and, soon after, more than half a million people marched in
Los Angeles. Cities across the United States saw similar protests.4¶ Despite this emerging
movement, the public as a whole remains deeply divided about immigration. Many
Americans register vocal opposition to immigration and immigrants. In an April 2005 Fox
News poll, 91 percent of the persons surveyed believed that undocumented
immigration was a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem, primarily because of
the feared impact of immigrants on jobs, the economy, and national security. At the
same time, however, more than 60 percent of those polled favored giving
undocumented immigrants temporary worker status, and only 43 percent favored
eliminating all forms of public assistance, including education and health benefits, to the
undocumented.5 This poll, consistent with many before and after, exemplifies the
nation’s profound ambivalence about undocumented immigrants.¶ Ambivalence among
the U.S. public, however, can quickly turn into fear and loathing . The public expresses
outrage at any hint of “criminal aliens” preying on citizens or immigrants abusing the
social welfare system. In 1994, California voters supported an initiative known as
Proposition 187 by a 2–1 margin. Absent judicial intervention, the law would have
denied benefits, including a public education, to undocumented immigrants and cracked
down on “criminal aliens.”6 The strong political support for Proposition 187 convinced
then-President Clinton to greatly increase federal border enforcement and rapidly
militarize the U.S.Mexico border.7 Although the federal budget as a whole shrank over
the 1990s, the budget of the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service
skyrocketed as border enforcement became a national priority.
Impact—Causes Bare Life
The border and containment strategies reinforce borders and attempt to define
who is and is not a citizen or part of a population. This reduces non citizens to
bare life and justifies their death
Doty, Associate Professor School of Politics & Global Studies, 11
[Roxanne Lynn, Published April 12, 2011. “Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral
alibi.” Page 603-604. http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/d3110.pdf. RH]
Before considering how this phenomenon has played out in US border control strategies I want
to highlight two interrelated issues that are addressed somewhat peripherally or implicitly by
Foucault but that are key when it comes to examining border politics and policies. First is the
issue of citizenship. Foucault's writings refer to the population, but clearly the population is
not a monolithic, all encompassing entity. Foucault's writings on biopolitics can and have been
interpreted to mean the local or national population thus lending credence to the criticism of his
neglect of the international. However, as noted earlier, when his ideas are put to work in the
arena of border policies, the international looms large, and it becomes clear that the definition of who is part of the `the population' and who is not is to a great extent what is at stake.
So the issue of citizenship and the citizen is vitally important.(9) For the citizen to live, the
undocumented must be permitted to die. Those lacking citizenship are potentially bare
life.(10) The second issue that warrants consideration is how Foucault understands race.
Foucault asks, ``What in fact is racism?'' and refers to the appearance of distinctions, a hierarchy
amongst races, and racism's inscription within the state (Foucault, 2003, page 254). However, he
is vague on precisely what race is. I am not suggesting that this imprecision needs to be
corrected or that it is a lacuna in Foucault's writings. I call attention to this so as to maintain a
space for an under- standing of race that can incorporate `differentialist' or `neoracism', which is
highly significant in understanding how race enters into contemporary border politics. Nation,
citizen, and race have been historically intertwined in complex ways that are virtually
impossible to unravel. This is clearly illustrated in contemporary immigration policies in the
United States and throughout the world. The origins of the `prevention through deterrence'
strategy nicely illustrate connections between the local, national, and global/international
and highlight how policies designed for the management of populations at local levels cannot
always be considered solely local or national issues. More than this, though, the very
distinctions between local, national, and international can be a key aspect of such policies.
Three government efforts of the early 1990s that can arguably be considered examples of
biopolitics were key to the beginnings of the US border blockade: (1) Operation
Blockade/Hold the Line in El Paso, Texas, in 1993; (2) the passage of Proposition 187 in
California in 1994; and (3) Operation Gatekeeper in the San Diego/Tijuana area 1994.(11) All of
these were, in various ways, focused on issues pertaining to the population and were
ostensibly very local in nature. However, they were ultimately intimately connected to the
international and to rein- forcing the boundaries between the two. The process of enacting
such a reinforcement involved attempts to define precisely who constituted the population.
Operation Blockade began far from the center of sovereign US power in the relatively isolated
area of El Paso, Texas, which is located at the tip of West Texas. Surrounded by desert, this area
in 1993 was the second busiest sector for undocumented border crossings. The busiest was the
San Diego sector. Silvester Reyes, the Border Patrol chief of the El Paso sector, unilaterally
launched Operation Blockade on 19 September 1993, deploying 400 agents and their vehicles
along a 20-mile stretch of the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Nevins, 2010,
page 111). Prior to this the border patrol strategy had been to apprehend unauthorized
entrants after they had crossed the border. This meant that hundreds of thousands who were
suspected of being undocumented migrants were stopped every year. Most of those stopped
were El Paso residents of Hispanic appearance. Not surprisingly, this led to charges of racial
profiling (Dunn, 2009, page 12).With Operation Blockade, apprehensions dropped 80 ^ 90%.
The strategy received much favorable national publicity and was quickly replicated in October
1994 with Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego, California (Nevins, 2010, page 111). The local
situation in California was also a significant factor leading up to Operation Gatekeeper,
specifically the debates over and eventual passage of Proposition 187, also known as the Save
Our State ballot initiative. Proposition 187 was an antiimmigrant measure that proposed to
deny public education from elementary to postsecondary levels, social services, and public
health care (excluding emergencies) to unauthorized immigrants. It was passed by 59% of
California's electorate. The proposition resulted from the efforts of local immigration control
groups in California as well as the national antiimmigrant organization, Federation for
Immigration Reform (FAIR)(12) National level politics were also key factors leading to the border
build up of the early 1990s. The antiimmigrant backlash loomed as a potential threat to then
President Bill Clinton's reelection. Gatekeeper was followed by Operation Safeguard in central
Arizona in 1995, which ``redirected illegal border crossings away from urban areas near the
Nogales port-of-entry to comparatively open areas'' (National Border Patrol, 2000). Operation
Rio Grande was launched in south Texas in 1997, which encompasses McAllen, Brownsville, and
Laredo (National Border Patrol, 2000).
The borderlands have become a state of exception, which is ultimately the
most oppressive of the zones of exclusion. The state of exception destroys the
human rights offered to those outside the state of exception and reduces those
in the state of exception to living in an indefinite state of bare life, with no
chance of escape.
Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia, Undocumented Migrants and
Resistance in the State of Exception, p 2-4, http://aei.pitt.edu/33054/1/ellermann._antje.pdf)
Giorgio Agamben’s seminal work on the relationship between the individual and the¶ sovereign
state is anchored in the concepts of “homo sacer” and “state of exception.” Homo¶ sacer, a
figure of Roman law, embodies what Agamben terms “bare” or “depoliticized” life¶ (1998).
Under Roman law, a man convicted of certain crimes was banished from society and¶ stripped
of his rights as a citizen. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s description of the “naked life” of¶ the
refugee (Arendt 1973), Agamben juxtaposes the bare life of homo sacer who subsists in¶ zones
of exclusion and rightlessness with the citizen’s “politicized” and rights-based life. The¶ existence
of homo sacer is central to Agamben’s understanding of sovereign power because the¶
possibility of rights-stripping reveals a schism between the individual’s biological existence,
on¶ the one hand, and her political life, on the other. Reduced to bare, or biological, life, the¶
refugee is rendered politically insignificant. Agamben elaborates on this relationship between
sovereign power and bare life in his historical treatise State of Exception (2005). The notion of
state of exception reflects the augmentation of government powers during times of emergency
when state sovereignty is perceived to be under threat. In states of emergency, governments
suspend elements of the normal legal order and strip individuals of the rights that mark
politicized life. The state of exception is thus the ultimate expression of state sovereignty as
the power to proclaim the emergency and suspend the operation of law. Agamben’s
understanding of life in the state of exception reflects a conception of rights as fundamentally
grounded in the institution of national citizenship. Following Arendt, Agamben rejects the
notion that human rights are viable outside the confines of membership in the nation-state.
Instead, “the so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any
protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens
of a state” (1998, 126). Accordingly, it is those excluded from citizenship—the refugee, the
stateless person, the illegal migrant—who most fundamentally represent bare life in the
exception. In Agamben’s work, the zone of exception is most clearly embodied in the detention
center and (concentration) camp. In State of Exception, Agamben treats the detention center at
Guantanamo Bay not only as the exception’s incarnation, but also as a case whose
exceptionalism surpasses that of comparable zones of exclusion: “What is new about President
Bush’s order [of November 13, 2001] is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual,
thus producing a legally unnamable an unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in
Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not
even have the status of persons charged with a crime according to American law. Neither
prisoners nor persons accused, but simply “detainees,” they are the object of a pure de facto
rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as
well, since it is entirely removed form the law and from judicial oversight.” (2005, 4-5)
Agamben’s description of bare life in Guantanamo thus suggests that the denial of citizenship
rights not only deprives individuals of the prospect of ever leaving behind bare life, but the
related denial of a legal identity completely strips homo sacer of any state protection
whatsoever. In Homo sacer and State of Exception, Agamben focuses his theoretical lens on the
sovereign’s power over the individual. Sovereign power in the state of exception appears
totalitarian in nature: not only does it hold complete sway over the individual, but, in
contemporary societies, the state of exception is permanent, rather than temporary (2005, 2).
While Agamben’s notion of sovereign power does not explicitly rule out the possibility of
resistance against the state, there does not appear to be much scope for acts or disobedience.
To borrow from Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007), “bare life is, in extremis, that condition of
abjection from which no thought of resistance is possible. Power and resistance are separated
by the decisionist sovereign who identifies the space of the law and its limits. …. Sovereign
power is the decisive exercise of control over subjects, including the confinement of subjects
to a position of bar abjection.” (2007, xxi)
The border divides the population into superiors and inferiors and articulates
criteria for the interior and the exterior. This results in both the management of
life and death that both end in biopower and a loss of value to life.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
Subtle, internalised, and smooth (but not all too smooth) as it is, (post)panoptical surveillance
induces a certain conscious relation to the self and organises the ‘criteria’ for inclusion and
exclusion (Rose, 1999: 243). Borders are thus the spatio-temporal zone par excellence where
surveillance gives substance to the working of biopolitics and the manifestation of biopower. In
this case mobility itself becomes intrinsically linked to processes of the ‘sorting’ of individualised
citizens from massified aliens. We can almost forgive theorists such as Bauman (1998, in Boyne,
2000: 286) for wanting to articulate a dichotomous logic that hinges on the notion of border,
for, at times and at least with regard to circulation (that is, the circulation of ‘people’, for as far
as ‘commodities’ and ‘capital’ are concerned, their free movement is encouraged and sustained
by the global capitalist machine), the world seems to be divided into two. Those who have
European/American/Australian/Canadian passports and those who do not. We all know all
too well what difference this makes in terms of border crossing. Nevertheless, such
conceptualisation misses the point that borders are not merely that which is erected at the
edges of territorial partitioning and spatial particularity, but more so borders are ubiquitous
(Balibar, 2002: 84) and infinitely actualised within mundane processes of ‘internal’
administration and bureaucratic organization 1 blurring the dualistic logic of the inside and
the outside on which Western sovereignty is calibrated. The point is that in addition to this
crude dual division within the global world order there are further divisions, further
segmentations, a ‘hypersegmentation’ (Hardt, 1998: 33) at the heart of that monolithic
(Western) half which functions by means of excluding the already-excluded on the one hand
and incorporating the already-included and the waiting-to-be-included excluded on the other.
This is done more or less dialectically, more or less perversely, including and excluding
concurrently ‘through a principle of activity’ (Rose, 1999: 240) and interwoven circuits of
security. Surveillance is the enduring of exclusion for some and the performance of inclusion
for others to the point where it becomes almost impossible to demonstrate one’s ‘inclusion’
without having to go through the labyrinth of security controls and identity validation,
intensified mainly, but not solely, at the borders. It is in similar contexts that Balibar (2002: 81)
invokes the notion of ‘world apartheid’ in which the dual regime of circulation is creating
different phenomenological experiences for different people through the ‘polysemic nature’
(Balibar, 2002: 81) of borders. For as we have discussed, borders are not merely territorial
dividers but spatial zones of surveillance designed to establish ‘an international class
differentiation’ and deploy ‘instruments of discrimination and triage’ (Balibar, 2002: 82)
whereby the rich asserts a ‘surplus of right’ (Balibar, 2002: 83) and the poor continue to
exercise the Sisyphean activity of circulating upwards and downwards until the border
becomes his/her place of ‘dwelling’ (Kachra, 2005: 123) or until s/he becomes the border
itself. Sadly, to be a border is to ‘live a life which is a waiting-to-live, a non-life’ (Balibar, 2002:
83). The biopolitics of borders is precisely the management of that waiting-to-live, the
management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those who are forcibly
placed in detention centres), and at times, it is the management of death. The death of
thousand of refugees and ‘clandestine’ migrants drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait
of Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the world’s largest mass grave), asphyxiated in
trucks (as was the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants who died in 2000 inside an airtight truck at the
port of Dover), crushed under trains (the case of the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in
the US-Mexican border for example). It is the management of ‘bodies that do not matter’. It is
the management of the bodies of those to whom the status of the ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben,
1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management of those whose death has fallen into the abyss of
insignificance and whose killing is not sacrificial (except to the few). On the other hand, the
biopolitics of borders is also the management of ‘life’; the life of those who are capable of
performing ‘responsible self-government’ (Rose, 1999: 259) and self-surveillance i.e. those who
can demonstrate their ‘legitimacy’ through ‘worthy’ computer-readable passports/ID cards
that provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing of identity and citizenship at the
border.
Living in a bare life nature strips people of political rights and leaves them in a state of
“suspended life and suspended death”
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses
of migrant domestic workers [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of
Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
In Homo Sacer, Agamben looks at the modern concentration camp as¶ the paradigmatic
case of the ultimate state sovereignty that intersects¶ juridical power and biopower.
Constituted as a state of exception, the¶ Charles T. Lee 59¶ camp designates a space
where the inmates are neither living as political¶ subjects endowed with juridical
protections nor declared dead or outside¶ the rule of law (Agamben 1998). Rather,
placed in a lingered state of “bare¶ life,” the camp dwellers are stripped of political
rights and reduced to a biological¶ minimum, a state of “suspended life and suspended
death” (Butler¶ 2004, 67).¶ As a state of exception, the camp signifies an external space
while¶ remaining immanent and attached to the juridico-political order (Isin¶ and Rygiel
2007, 183). In Agamben’s words, “The exception does not¶ subtract itself from the rule;
rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise¶ to the exception and, maintaining itself in
relation to the exception, first¶ constitutes itself as a rule” (1998, 18). Inside the camp,
the norm and the¶ exception are indistinguishable: the exception is found to be part of
the¶ rule, and sovereign power is both legal and outside the law, both “outside ¶ and
inside the juridical order” (15). In “legally” suspending the validity¶ of the law,
sovereignty interjects normalcy and exceptionality and defines¶ its power through
interstitiality in constituting the camp where “exclusion ¶ and inclusion, outside and
inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter into a¶ zone of indistinction” (9) For
Agamben, this interstitial zone signifies a breakdown of “subjective¶ right and juridical
protection,” a space of abjection where laws are¶ completely suspended and anything
becomes possible (170). The subjects¶ caught within the camp are “so completely
deprived of their rights and¶ prerogatives that no act committed against them could
appear any longer¶ as a crime” (171). Furthermore, the zone of bare life is not only
juxtaposed¶ to the democratic order, but is necessary for its continuing function. In the ¶
words of Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, “It is through the¶ exclusion of the
depoliticized form of life that the politicized norm existsӦ (2004, 33). The normalcy of
biopolitical life depends upon the fringe elements¶ of bare life to signify itself as the
norm. Sovereignty and biopower¶ are inextricable: “sovereignty is the ability of the
sovereign to step outside¶ the law in order to (re)establish the biopolitical regularity or
normalcy¶ of life necessary for law itself, the juridical order, to function” (Hannah ¶ 2008,
59). Sovereignty perpetuates interstitial zones in maintaining the¶ normalcy of the body
politic.¶
Migration study’s prove that there are two conclusions to the framework of
migration, first, subjects who are not constituted as “citizens” are intentionally
left so that they work as a part of the neoliberal normalcy, and second,
irregular migrants are deemed naked in the context of normalcy due to their
lack of official status left without juridical protections or human rights.
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses
of migrant domestic workers [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of
Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Agamben’s “camp” thus provides a compelling framework for migration ¶ studies that
generally results in two conclusions: (1) unauthorized¶ migrants, as subjects who are neither
citizens nor strangers, are deliberately¶ left in an exceptional state of irregularity in order to
be constituted¶ as a productive part of neoliberal normalcy ; and (2) irregular migrants are¶
reduced to the state of homo sacer, a nakedness of sheer life without official¶ status to
demand juridical protections of citizenship or human rights . Yet¶ despite the powerful
parallel between the camp and undocumented migrate Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third
Space of Citizenship¶ it is notable that what begins for Agamben (and his migration
studies¶ followers) as an open-ended space of interstitiality posited in sovereignty¶ (i.e.,
camp, border, detention center)—a zone between life and death, inside¶ and outside,
citizenship and illegality—in the end slides into an immobile¶ closure when it comes to the
undocumented, who are forced to scramble¶ between a rigid binary between political life
(legality, rights, citizenship)¶ and bare life (illegality, no rights, nonparticipation). Such
bipolar mapping¶ invites questioning, as one wonders whether it validly accounts for ¶
the complex and intricate power relations in refugee and immigrant struggles ¶ in various
locations. Even if the borderland of unauthorized migration¶ embodies a juridical
nonspace that one “cannot celebrate”
Taking away subjective rights creates a world where any discipline is possible and
depravity appears as a crime. In order to have bio political life there must be bare life
to prove its norm
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses
of migrant domestic workers [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of
Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
For Agamben, this interstitial zone signifies a breakdown of “subjective¶ right and
juridical protection,” a space of abjection where laws are¶ completely suspended and
anything becomes possible (170). The subjects¶ caught within the camp are “so
completely deprived of their rights and¶ prerogatives that no act committed against
them could appear any longer¶ as a crime” (171). Furthermore, the zone of bare life is
not only juxtaposed¶ to the democratic order, but is necessary for its continuing
function. In the¶ words of Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, “It is through
the¶ exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the politicized norm exists” ¶ (2004,
33). The normalcy of biopolitical life depends upon the fringe elements¶ of bare life to
signify itself as the norm. Sovereignty and biopower ¶ are inextricable: “sovereignty is
the ability of the sovereign to step outside¶ the law in order to (re)establish the
biopolitical regularity or normalcy¶ of life necessary for law itself, the juridical order,
to function” (Hannah¶ 2008, 59). Sovereignty perpetuates interstitial zones in
maintaining the¶ normalcy of the body politic.
Political intervention divides humanity into either citizenship or bare life non
participation. Forcing “subjects” to behave as a citizen of a postcolonial state
driving a stagnant ideological “life cycle”
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses
of migrant domestic workers [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of
Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Yet while chronicling such resistant¶ acts constitutes an urgent political intervention that
counters the state of¶ abjection, by understanding citizenship as solely visible and
audible political¶ acts, this line of critique actually falls into Agamben’s rigid binary that ¶
divides humanity into political life (citizenship) and bare life (no rights,¶
nonparticipation)—with the only difference being that the latter, by way¶ of her citizenlike political acts, can now transform and elevate into the¶ position of the former.
Importantly, both Agamben and his critics alike¶ have yet to extend his analysis of the
interstitiality of sovereign power to¶ 58 Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of
Citizenship¶ examine the corresponding, interstitial agency of the abject that sidesteps ¶
the binary of bare life and citizenship life.I venture an alternative conception that
conceives of citizenship¶ not only as juridical institutions or political acts, but as a
hegemonic¶ cultural script that sustains liberal governance in reproducing a “normal” ¶
and “proper” mode of social life that interpolates how subjects should ¶ behave as
citizens. This liberal cultural script of citizenship, articulated¶ through different
subscripts, such as membership, politics, economics, and¶ life, governs and regulates
numerous material-cultural spheres of social life¶ in liberal and postcolonial states and
regions and reproduces a stagnant¶ ideological “life cycle” of citizenship for human
subjects.
Biopower views population in multiplicity and wipes away all individual
identity. Biopolitical mechanisms by the government are taken for granted and
perpetuated by the individuals themselves.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005[Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
To begin with, and as proposed by Michel Foucault (2003 [1976]), the concept of biopolitics
entails the notion of biopower which, unlike the theory of sovereign right (‘to take life or let
live’), is not concerned with the practice of power over the individual/social body but acts at
the level of massification instead of individualisation (2003 [1976]: 243). It preoccupies itself
with the notion of population in its multiplicity and on the global scale and thereby overrides
the old right of sovereignty with that of ‘to make live and to let die’. What characterises
biopower is not so much discipline directed at ‘man-as-body’, as was the case in disciplinary
society, but the will to control and regulate ‘man-as-species’ in a preventive way so much so
that biological life becomes the main problem and the salient concern of politics. Biopolitics is
the process by which biopower is exerted and life is managed with the aim to achieve
‘equilibration’, ‘regularity’ (Foucault, 2003 [1976]: 246) and ‘normality’ through mechanisms of
control and modes of intervention which are ‘immanent’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 230, and
Nancy, 1991: 3) to all areas of life and encompass a myriad of subtle practices operating at the
level of relations between human beings. This (historical/political) passage from disciplinary
society to control society as Deleuze (in Hardt, 1998: 23, Rose, 1999: 233, and Hardt and Negri,
2000: 22-3) has it is what marks the fundamental shift from centralised power of institutions
(such as prisons, schools, hospitals, family, etc) toward rhizomatic networks of control which
proceed far beyond explicit disciplinary deployment of power to much more dynamic and
implicit forms inscribed into the practices of everyday life. They are necessarily less
authoritarian than the former mode of coercive power (Hardt, 1998: 27). From Foucault and
passing through Deleuze, it can be understood how what is in question is the dispersion and
omnipresence of biopower within the various transactions, relations and flows which render
individuals as ‘dividuals’ (Deleuze in Rose, 1999: 234) characterised by their capacities and
identified by their pins, profiles, credit scoring, etc, rather than their subjectivities. This
withering away of subjectivity is what makes biopower more effective and less obtrusive
(Rose, 1999: 236). Without subjectivity, the possibility of resistance fades into the immanent
arrangements and administrative operations of biopolitics. It is in similar light that Foucault
(2003 [1976]: 246) asserts that biopolitics does not intervene in a therapeutic way nor does it
seek to individualise and modify a given person. This would entail the production of
subjectivity itself. Instead it functions at the level of generality with the aim to identify risk
groups, risk factors and risk levels, and therefore anticipate, prevent, contain and manage
potential risk, all through ‘actuarial analysis’ and ‘cybernetics of control’ (Rose, 1999: 235, 237)
rather than diagnostic scrutiny of the pathological individual. In such a model of power the state
is no longer the sole agent of control but individuals/communities themselves participate in
their own self-monitoring, self-scrutiny and, self-discipline through mundane and taken-forgranted regulatory mechanisms such as alcohol level testing, community care, technologies of
contraception, vaccinations, food dieting, training and other forms of ‘technologies of the self’
(Foucault, 1988). These technologies of the self ‘operate through instrumentalizing a different
kind of freedom’ (Rose, 1999: 237); different not in a quantitative sense but insofar as it comes
part and parcel of a process of responsiblisation through which individuals are made in charge
of their own behaviour, competence, improvement, security, and ‘well-being’.
The stateless citizens stuck in the state of exception have nothing to lose, and
are filled with desperation, and through this individualized resistance, they
present the greatest threat to the reign of the sovereign power.
Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia, Undocumented Migrants and
Resistance in the State of Exception, p 4-5, http://aei.pitt.edu/33054/1/ellermann._antje.pdf)
What is the nature of resistance in the state of exception? Rarely do acts of
noncompliance by those reduced to bare life amount to collective acts of civil disobedience.
Homo sacer exists in a state of abjection where the scope of resistance falls far short of
the resource-demanding standard of organized political action. Instead, the cases of
resistance explored in this paper constitute individual acts of desperation that resemble
what James Scott aptly termed the “weapons of the weak.” These everyday forms of
resistance include acts of “passive noncompliance, sabotage, subtle evasion, and
deception” (1985, 31). By contrast to institutionalized politics, then, everyday resistance
distinguishes itself by its “implicit disavowal of public and symbolic goals” and is
concerned “with immediate, de facto gains” (1985, 33). In other words, the nature of
resistance in the state of exception is individualized, rather than collective, oriented toward
short-term, rather than systemic change, and fought by means that present an indirect, rather
than direct, challenge to sovereign power. For illegal migrants, acts of resistance range from
the extreme of hunger strikes and suicide attempts to acts of physical resistance and escape,
to the destruction of identity documents. Resistance as an act of desperation only constitutes
a viable course of action once the individual has nothing left to lose. In the state of exception,
resistance arises from the circumstance that the individual already has lost all claims against
the state and thus has little to fear from defying state orders. In other words, the power of
resistance lies in the freedom from constraints that limit the scope of noncompliance for
those who still have sufficient standing to fear the loss of rights. Ironically, then, it is
homo sacer’s extreme political powerlessness that is at the root of resistance and thereby
presents a potential threat to sovereign power.
Immigrants, both legal and not, have been targeted and turned into the
accursed – Living in a structure without structure, this is bare life.
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 20, BW)
The archaic-sounding formulation that the homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed has
been realized in the bare life of the immigration detainee. One hundred and seven migrants
died in ICE custody from 2003 to 2010, many under circumstances only revealed to the public
years after the fact, through investigations by the New York Times and National Public Radio
(Bernstein 2010). Unlike criminals who must be executed through a formal juridical process, the
immigration detainee can die invisibly under the localized sovereignties of ICE officers and
prison guards, with no one held accountable. While a sacrifice would be an execution, an
inclusion as a citizen, the migrant homo sacer is killed through his exclusion from state-granted
rights. Attorneys and advocates attempting to secure medical treatment for detainees have
often found that while a clear chain of institutional accountability is in place for those
incarcerated under criminal statutes, when immigration detainees suffer abuse or neglect no
formal structure exists (Macri 2004). The immigration detainee inhabits a zone of indistinction
that is not just theoretical or rhetorical. Furthermore, this zone is not a static place but a
passage or process through a zone of indistinction that we will later look at more closely as a
topology. The bare life of the immigration detainee can be conceptualized in four stages:
“Illegality”: a migrant subject’s experience of living in a state of “illegality” or potential
“illegality,” in the territorial U.S.; Arrest (“apprehension”): an encounter between a noncitizen
and an enforcement agent that results in deportation or an attempt at prosecution under
immigration law; Detention: incarceration or bodily immobilization of a subject on the basis or
pretext of immigration enforcement; Deportation (“removal”): coercive transportation outside
the physical territory of the United States. Though these stages seem to follow a logical, causaltemporal progression, some of the most striking contradictions of the deportation regime
emerge when this sequence is disrupted. What became more apparent than ever before in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 was that “illegality” need not exist prior to the noncitizen’s
arrest. “IIlegality” is frequently created after the person’s arrest in order to legitimize it. Once
the overriding institutional imperative is created to produce deportable bodies, detention can
and does take place even in the absence of illegality. This has been shown recently in the
detention and even deportation of people who are citizens or permanent residents, often on
racialized grounds (Waslin 2010: 104). Further explication of these stages shows how the
potential for Illegality, deportability and detainability shape experience and events at least as
much as their actuality.
State intervention creates bare life
Kasli and Parla 2009[Zeynep and Ayse, “Broken Lines of Il/Legality and the Reproduction of State
Sovereignty: The Impact of Visa Policies on Immigrants to Turkey from Bulgaria,” in Alternatives 34, pg
204]
Sovereign states make the ultimate decision to include or exclude primarily by wielding the
power of separating the rights of the citizen from the rights of man.8¶ For Agamben, the
separation of rights of the citizen from the rights of man is consolidated through the
“irrevocable unification of the principle of nativity and the principle of sovereignty” in the
formation¶ of the nation-state, resulting in the “inclusive exclusion” of bare life from the
political life, or, of zoe from bios. As birth immediately becomes¶ nation, the immigrant’s
subjecthood, irrespective of other affiliations, becomes homo sacer (bare life), which is not
the subject in the law but subject to the law, suspended in a permanent state of exception.
Impact—Root Cause
The aff precedes political impact scenarios and is a pre-req to collapsing ‘usthem’ mentalities – rejection of ethical considerations makes your impacts
inevitable
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 533-35) MM
The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and prospective guests - even,
or perhaps especially , unwanted ones - is, according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical
problem. ‘ It is always about answering for a dwelling place , for one’s identity, one’s space,
one’s limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home’ (Derrida 2000, pp.
149/151, emphasis added). Of course, this absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as
crazy, self-harming or even impossible. But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is
always suspended between this unconditional hyperbolic order of the demand to answer for
my place under the sun and open to the alterity of the other that precedes me, and the
conditional order of ethnos, of singular customs, norms, rules, places and political acts. If we see
ethics as situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer why we always
remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond to it, or, in fact, why we will be
responding to it no matter what. Even if we respond ‘nonethically’ to our guest by imposing on
him a norm or political legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in
the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended period of time, send him back,
cut off his benefits or place him in a detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical
call. In this sense, our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction , which does not of course
mean that we will ‘respond ethically’ to it (by offering him unlimited hospitality or welcome).
However, and here lies the paradox, we will respond ethically to it (in the sense that the
injunction coming from the other will make us take a stand, even if we choose to do nothing
whatsoever and pretend that we may carry on as if nothing has happened). The ethics of
bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws and acts of the polis and
delineating some new forms of political identification and belonging . Indeed, in their
respective readings of Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law
towards the foreigner that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can be altered
but also that we can think community and kinship otherwise. If traditional hospitality is based
on what Derrida calls ‘a conjugal model, paternal and phallocentric’, in which ‘[i]t’s the familial
despot, the father, the spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of
hospitality’ (2000, p. 149), openness towards the alien and the foreign changes the very nature
of the polis , with its Oedipal kinship structures and gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due
to new family affiliations developed by queer communities but also as a result of developments
in genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of national identity and kinship that
protects state boundaries against the ‘influx’ of asylum seekers is to be left wanting. This is not
necessarily to advise a carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all
passports and opening all borders (although such actions should at least be considered ), but
to point to the possibility of resignifying these laws through their (improper) reiteration.
Enacted by political subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of tension with the
normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie these laws, the
laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf.
Butler 1993, p. 231).It is precisely Butler’s account of corporeality and matter, of political
subjectivity and kinship, which makes Levinas’ ethics (and Derrida’s reworking of it) particularly
relevant to this project. Although the concepts of the body and materiality are not absent from
Levinas’ writings - indeed, he was one of the first thinkers to identify embodiment as a
philosophical blindspot - Butler allows us to redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter
and question the mechanisms of their constitution. Her ‘others’ are not limited to ‘the stranger’,
‘the orphan’ and the ‘widow’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the more acceptable others who
evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the drag
queen / people whose bodies and relationships violate traditional gender and kinship structures
- that matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of universalization, Butler mobilizes
us against naturalizing exclusion from the democratic polis and thus creates an opportunity
for its radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not thus amount to
waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum seeker to knock, and extending a helping
hand to him or her. It also involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my
life to the extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a stranger in
the skin of my own home.
Modern otherization of immigrants occurs under an imperialist framework
fueled by the continual maintenance of the border
Hayter, Migration activist and graduate of Oxford University, 2004 (Theresa, Open
Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) MM
Immigration ‘problems’ are not a problem of excessive numbers of immigrants. They are a
problem of the racism of Europeans, North Americans and white majorities elsewhere, who
more or less explicitly harbour notions of the superiority of the white ‘race’, whatever that
may mean, and the undesirability of destroying the supposed homogeneity of their nation .
In the past these notions have been applied to virtually all new immigrants, whatever their
nationality or race. In the last forty years the main objects of anti-immigrant racism in Britain
and elsewhere have been, and are, people of African and Asian origin. In the 1950s and 1960s
British politicians tried to work out how to exclude ‘coloured’ Commonwealth citizens without
excluding white Commonwealth citizens and the much larger numbers of Irish immigrants,
without giving an appearance of discrimination and without causing offence to the governments
and peoples of the ‘multiracial Commonwealth’. Eventually they abandoned the attempt, and
immigration controls, from 1962 onwards, were at first covertly and then blatantly based on
racist discrimination not only against foreigners in general, but against particular types of
foreigners (see Chapter 2). The currently dominant form of anti-immigrant racism, that which
is directed against black and Asian people, and most recently Romany people, is sometimes
‘explained’ by the assertion that they are more easily identifiable as immigrants, or the
children of immigrants, than most of the other waves of migrants to Britain over the centuries.
But similar things have been said about the supposed ‘non-assimilability’ of other immigrants,
and in any case it is unclear why such distinctions should matter. The most convincing
explanation for the strength and persistence of anti-black racism is to be found in the myths
which the imperialists invented to justify to themselves the extreme forms of suffering they
imposed on their colonial subjects. These myths survive, permeate British people’s
consciousness, and infect the way all of us think and act. It would nevertheless be surprising if
prejudice against black people did not diminish in the same way as prejudice against earlier
immigrants has. Meanwhile, anti-immigrant hysteria is whipped up not only against black, Asian
and Romany refugees but also against other recent groups of refugees and migrants: Kosovans
and other white east Europeans. The primary targets of racism and xenophobia are now
refugees. Since the 1980s there have been rapid increases, from a low level, in the numberof
people coming from the Third World and eastern Europe to Britain and other rich countries to
seek asylum. The increase in asylum seekers followed the closing of borders against people
coming to seek work in the 1960s and 1970s. The government and others have made the false
logical leap that this means that asylum seekers are actually economic migrants trying to
exploit a loophole in immigration controls. A few are. But to claim that most asylum seekers
are ‘ bogus ’, as government ministers and the media often do, is false and unjust. They come
overwhelmingly from countries and regions in which there are repressive regimes, civil wars and
violent conflicts. Most of these are not the areas from which people had previously migrated to
work. There is in fact a connection between the two types of migration, but not in the way in
which those opposed to immigration see it. This is that imperialism bears much responsibility for
both of them. Imperialism created links between the colonies and the metropolis. While war,
conflicts and repression are often the product of many internal factors, including the chauvinism
of religious and ethnic majorities, various forms of nationalism and more straightforward
struggles for domination and wealth, it can be argued that some arise from centuries of
imperialist control, and in particular the imperialists’ divide-and-rule tactics and the boundaries
they drew on maps. Imperialism in its modern guise has created new forms of
impoverishment, which may exacerbate existing nationalist and ethnic tensions. When the
long postwar capitalist boom ended in the late 1970s, the rich countries succeeded in
transferring much of the burden of their own crisis to the Third World. The prices of Third World
countries’ exports of primary commodities and raw materials collapsed. When at the beginning
of the 1980s first the Reagan government in the United States and then European governments
raised interest rates to unprecedented heights, they massively increased the cost of servicing
foreign debt for governments in the Third World (which had been pressed to borrow at low or
even negative interest rates from Western banks seeking a ‘sinkhole’ for the money deposited
by oil-exporters in the 1970s). In order to force governments to continue to service their debt at
these new extortionate rates of interest, a cartel of the World Bank, the IMF, Western
governments and banks and Third World elites imposed cuts in public expenditure on social
services, wages and employment in Third World countries which bore most heavily on the poor
and urban wage earners. In Algeria the massacres started when the military denied election
victory to the FIS, an Islamic party, whose strength was built especially among the poor in urban
areas impoverished by the government’s turn to more orthodox pro-Western economic policies.
The imposition of IMF/World Bank ‘liberalisation’ in Yugoslavia led to severe poverty and
unemployment and heavy indebtednessto Western banks and financial institutions. In their
attempt to get Yugoslavia to service this debt, the IMF/World Bank forced the federal
government to cut investment and transfers to the regions. Michel Chossudovsky in a detailed
article on this issue says: ‘Secessionist tendencies feeding on social and ethnic divisions gained
impetus precisely during aperiod of brutal impoverishment of the Yugoslav population. ... The
“economic therapy” (launched in January 1990) contributed to crippling the federal State
system. State revenues which should have gone as transfer payments to the republics and
autonomous provinces were instead funnelled towards servicing Belgrade’s debt ... .’ This in
turn fuelled the populist nationalism which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and war
Militarized border discourse is the root cause of exclusion – the aff shifts from
questioning the migrant to questioning their forced eviction
Hayter, Migration activist and graduate of Oxford University, 2004 (Theresa, Open
Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) MM
In a more direct sense, repression and wars in the Third World are largely made possible
because both the regimes and those who fight them obtain weapons from the industrialised
countries, frequently with the help of official loans. Many of the world’s most repressive regimes
are supported, with aid for example, by European governments and the United States. Boththe
Nigerian and the Zairean governments, as well as many governments in Latin America and Asia,
were supported for years while they oppressed and tortured their peoples and stole their
wealth. When right-wing governments are thrown out or voted out by liberation the West
intervenes by cutting aid, boycotting trade and sometimes by military intervention
movements or left-wing political parties and attempt to carry out reforms and to redistribute
wealth to the poor, , directly or through its surrogates. It thus has direct responsibility, for
example, for refugees from Chile and from Angola, among others. The recent flow of refugees
from eastern Europe follows the introduction of capitalism and market systems and the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, most of which was welcomed and supported by the West.
In 1999 more than half of all asylum seekers in Europe were from the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, nearly all of them Kosovans. Those who assert that refugees and migrants are a
problem should examine the causes of forced migration, rather than blaming and punishing
refugees .
Impact—Securitization
The USfg is constantly attempting to further securitize the border in an attempt
to control the people attempting to cross it
Griesbach 2010 (Kathleen UC San Diego “Immigration Detention, State Power, and
Resistance: The Case of the 2009 Motín in Pecos, Texas” pgs. 5-6) TYBG
Foucault points out that the foundations of the modern state were made by soldiers as well as
jurists and philosophers; the continued use of military tactics as a primary method of
immigration control - particularly in border initiatives such as Operation Gatekeeper and
Operation Hold the Line of the 1990s -attests to the perpetuation of these origins of powerover by force14. In and of themselves, these tactics seem “natural” for any state interested in
regulating its population and controlling its outsiders. Disciplinary power operates within the
US through the system of immigration control as an extension of the “disciplined” encounters
with migrants at the border. The differentiation of individuals by documentation is essential in
the construction of the “Other.” The soldierly “tactics” of US border enforcement illustrate the
militarization of the national front to keep out an “Other” whose demographic characteristics
have historically been constructed through United States immigration policies from the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act and onward in more subtle ways. The surveillance and at times armed
expulsion of others once they enter the US, and not merely if they enter it illegally,
exemplifies the perpetuation of disciplinary power. As Eithne Luibhéid argues, Clearly,
inspection at the border is not a one-time experience but it is rather, as Foucault’s image of the
carceral archipelago suggests, a process that situates migrants within lifelong networks of
surveillance and disciplinary relations.15 Foucault’s discussion of “panopticism” illuminates
the evolution of institutions into disciplinary societies, through the extension of the
mechanisms of discipline throughout society in “the formation of what might be called in
general the disciplinary society”16. The theoretical Panopticon is a place of constant
surveillance, of power transmitted through the knowledge that others are watching. The
Panopticon shows us how “power is exercised, not simply held”17. In Bentham’s Panopticon
“each comrade becomes a guardian.” This calls to mind the Minutemen, the citizen activist
group engaged in voluntary civilian border “defense”. Their interventions in US border
enforcement contribute to the “surveillance” of the border, reinforcing the disciplinary power
exercised over would-be immigrants to the United States. They show that disciplinary power
is exercised on all levels of society, well beyond the auspices of the state. The same spirit of
“surveillance” characterizes federal collaboration with local authorities, in the form of 287 (g)
partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement. In 287
(g) partnerships (signed into effect with the Immigrant Nationality Act of 1996), ICE trains local
officials around the US to act in its capacity, aggressively seeking and capturing
undocumented migrants within local jails (“criminal aliens”) and in the local community.18 In
this way, the local police become “guardians”, exerting disciplinary power on behalf of federal
officials over immigrants illegally in the United States. The vast majority of migrants
apprehended through these strategies are Mexican19, and a great majority of these immigrant
detainees are charged for nothing more than illegal entry.20 The disciplinary power exercised
toward the immigrant population of course doesn’t end at the border; surveillance of
immigrants continues once they enter the country in the context of documentation status and
far beyond official records in social segregation. Immigrants enter the official records on
conditional terms or else stay in the shadows as “undocumented” migrants. Their immigration
status determines the amount of “surveillance” they face from the government, in the sense
that legal permanent residents or other non-citizens are in much greater danger of being
deported and can be denied citizenship for any misstep. The actions of their lives (tax activities,
criminal record) come under great scrutiny when they apply for citizenship or for other
government benefits. In the pursuit of adjusting or acquiring status, then, they are voluntarily
under government watch throughout the probationary period before citizenship is established,
if it is at all. Differentiation by immigrant status determines the degree of agency – to vote, to
get a higher education, or to walk without anxiety down the street. If, as Luibhéid argues,
immigration control is both a powerful symbol of nationhood and people and “a means to
literally construct the nation and the people in particular ways”21, then differentiation by
immigrant status - a way of exercising disciplinary power - presents many complications to a
coherent construction of who belongs and who is “Other”. Mixed status families exemplify this
difficulty. Though he had lived in the United States for almost 20 years, Jesus Manuel Galindo
had a different status than that of his wife, children, and extended family. As a result he was
expelled from the nation in which he had come of age and separated from his entire family, and
then sentenced to serve jail time for attempting to reunify with his family by crossing the
northern border
The issue with opening the border has long been framed under the concept of
“securitization” – Securitization fails in democratic regimes because the public
is often swayed by the overdramatized threat of terminal harms. As we “open
the border”, we want to lessen the dramatic portrayal of the perceived threat
and instead leave it up to politicization.
Astor 2009 (Avi, Post-Doc @ University of Michigan, later Pompeu Fabra University,
Department of Poltical and Social Sciences, “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the
Making of Operation Wetback”, Latino Studies (2009) 7, 5/29, http://www.palgravejournals.com/lst/journal/v7/n1/full/lst200856a.html)
Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation of bare life to the political
order, however, is not purely a relation of exteriority. Rather, bare life is the “zone of
indistinction” in which political life and natural life “constitute each other in including and
excluding each other” (p. 90). Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern political order, would be
meaningless without the presence, whether real or imaginary, of non-citizens. But the role
played by non-citizens in constituting the political order is contingent on their exclusion from
this order. Agamben sees this exclusive logic as the fatal flaw of the modern nation-state, and
attributes the myriad abuses suffered by refugees and denaturalized subjects during the last
two centuries to its immanent unfolding.¶ The utility of Agamben's insights derive from their
uncanny ability to highlight both the constitutive role that politically marginalized populations
play in shaping the modern political order and the logic of their exclusion from this order.
They are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens, refugees or stateless persons,
but by virtue of being the embodiment of pure life itself, which has no place in the modern
political order when decoupled from political existence. Scholars must be cautious, however,
not to lose sight of the fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life emerged from his analysis of
specific European events, most notably the Holocaust, and therefore may miss unique aspects
of the experiences of racism and exclusion in non-European contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance,
argues that Agamben's conception of racism is “Eurocentric,” as it defines racism as a “relation
of exception” and consequently overlooks the ways in which racism is built into social
institutions. Taking the Holocaust as the ideal-typical case of biopolitical exclusion, Hesse writes,
obscures other experiences of racist exclusion that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm.¶ As
I explain below, it is highly important to contextualize Agamben's concepts within the given
socio-historical setting in which they are employed, and to be attentive to processes that they
may overlook. Nevertheless, Hesse's critique of his framework does not do justice to Agamben's
unique and innovative definition of “relations of exception.” By focusing on the exception,
Agamben by no means wants to argue that racism and other exclusionary ideologies are not
built into social institutions. Indeed, he believes that relations of exception are constitutive of
the fundamental institutions underpinning the modern political order, namely sovereignty
and citizenship. Without the ability to call forth a state of exception, and without the presence
of non-citizens, sovereignty and citizenship would be meaningless. Following Benjamin (1965),
Agamben (2005) argues that the exception has become the rule in modern society, as it is built
into the basic workings of modern social and political institutions.¶ Agamben's argument does,
however, suffer from several shortcomings. The most serious is that it is overly teleological,
attributing essentially all atrocities committed against those at the margins of the political
community to the actualization of the logic inherent to the foundational principles of nationstates. Consequently, Agamben's ideas are not especially useful for explaining why xenophobic
sentiment and discriminatory practices crystallize during some periods and not others, or why
they target certain collectives but neglect others similarly situated economically and socially.
This shortcoming results, in part, from Agamben's overemphasis on political and legal exclusion,
and his neglect of the important role of social processes and practices in determining which
populations become marked as excluded and targeted by discriminatory policies, and when this
tends to occur.¶ Recent developments in the field of security studies, most notably the concept
of “securitization” developed by the Copenhagen School, provide the analytic tools necessary
for a more contextualized and historically based analysis of the exceptional politics discussed
so eloquently by Agamben. Waever (1995) originally developed the concept of securitization in
reaction to traditional conceptions of security, which confined issues of security to military
threats and their effects on international relations. Part of the rationale for confining the field of
security studies to military issues was that broadening it to address other sectors would lead to
a loss in analytic coherence and focus (Walt, 1991; Dorff, 1994). However, it also reflected an
identification of security threats with the referent objects of such threats, which were defined
exclusively in terms of state sovereignty. The radical move of Waever in developing the concept
of securitization, which has been elaborated further by Buzan et al (1998), was to shift the
emphasis of security studies away from referent objects alone and toward the processes by
which actors present threats (military and non-military alike) as a justification for emergency
measures and the transcendence of ordinary politics, as well as the outcomes of these
processes.¶ Securitization, according to Buzan et al, is a “speech act” that dramatizes and
presents an issue as of supreme priority. By claiming an issue is a matter of security, an agent
“claims a need for and a right to treat it by extraordinary means” (p. 26). Contrasting
securitization with politicization, Buzan et al write,¶ Politicization means to make an issue
appear to be open, a matter of choice, something that is decided upon and that therefore
entails responsibility, in contrast to issues that either could not be different … or should not
be put under political control. By contrast, securitization … means to present an issue as
urgent and existential, as so important that it should not be exposed to the ordinary haggling
of politics but should be dealt with decisively by top leaders prior to other issues. (p. 29)¶ A
person or group that makes a speech act, or “securitizing move” is a “securitizing actor.” But
just because an appeal to security is made, there is no guarantee that a given issue will be
securitized. The threat must also be seen as reasonable by the “audience” of the “speech act.”
The audience may very well regard the “securitizing move” as illegitimate and oppose
attempts to elevate the threat into the realm of security. Securitization is thus an intersubjective process, encompassing both the actor who makes the securitizing move and the
audience who perceives the move as legitimate. The possibility that securitizing moves may
fail is essential for understanding the functioning of securitizing discourses in liberal
democratic states, as opposed to dictatorial regimes. Securitization involves, at least to some
degree, public endorsement of the suspension of normal rules and procedures. Indeed, as
Agamben (2005) similarly points out, the power invested in the state during a state of exception
comes from the fact that the state's actions are viewed as having the force of law behind them,
even though they may violate the normal dictates of the law. However, unlike Agamben, who
talks very little about the conditions under which attempts to engage in exceptional politics are
likely or unlikely to be successful, Buzan et al specify a set of “facilitating conditions,” or
conditions under which a speech act can succeed in securitizing an issue. First, the speech act
must follow the grammar, or general structure, of security discourse. Second, the securitizing
actor must possess sufficient social capital to be convincing to the audience of the speech act.
Finally, the alleged threat must be perceived, at least to some degree, by the audience as a
legitimate threat to their well-being, rather than a fabrication used to further the interests of a
particular person or group. Thus, not just anyone can securitize an issue, and not just any issue
can be securitized.
Under the broad umbrella of the “Red Scare”, illegal immigrants have long been
labeled enemies of the nation and threats to national security. The
securitization goes as far as to dehumanize the Mexicans to the point where
their long-lost relatives, now of partial American descent and full citizenship,
despise them and shun them for self-preservation.
Astor 2009 (Avi, Post-Doc @ University of Michigan, later Pompeu Fabra University,
Department of Poltical and Social Sciences, “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the
Making of Operation Wetback”, Latino Studies (2009) 7, 5/29, http://www.palgravejournals.com/lst/journal/v7/n1/full/lst200856a.html)
Interests alone did not determine the way in which different social institutions and actors
embraced or resisted the securitizing rhetoric around immigration during the 1950s. The case of
unions and Hispanic civic organizations and their embrace of the securitizing rhetoric promoted
by the media, politicians and the INS illustrates the importance of looking at the broader social
field and historical context in which the discourses surrounding immigration and security were
embedded. The restrictive and xenophobic stance of unions toward Mexican immigrant workers
during the 1950s had roots dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
During this period, it was the norm for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and mainstream
unions to push for heavy restrictions on immigration, and to reinforce racism among the general
populace. Although there were a select few unions, such as the Industrial Workers of the World,
that espoused a more inclusive ideology of worker solidarity and encouraged immigrant
participation, such unions failed to attract a strong enough membership base to sustain
themselves over time (Mink, 1986).¶ The intensification of the Cold War and the atmosphere of
fear created by McCarthy and others who exploited the Red Scare placed unions in a
somewhat precarious position, as those sympathetic to worker interests were frequently
suspected of being sympathetic to communism as well. Consequently, unions, at least at the
federal level, took strong measures to distinguish themselves as allies, rather than enemies, in
the war against communism. In combination with their traditional xenophobic approach
toward dealing with questions of immigration, this led them to embrace wholeheartedly the
rhetoric linking immigration to communism.¶ In opposition to H.R. 355, Walter P. Reuther, the
president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), argued that the government's failure
to tighten border security and implicit encouragement of illegal entry into the United States
invited “fifth-column activities of subversion and sabotage” (United States, Congress, House,
Committee on Agriculture, 1954). A couple of months later, in April of 1954, William Schnitzler,
the secretary-treasurer of the AFL said that “Communists and potential spies and saboteurs”
were among the Mexican “wetbacks” entering the country, and that “Red-hunting Senators”
ignored this threat to national security because of the interest of big business in cheap labor
(Los Angeles Times, 1954a, 17). In addition to contributing to fears of direct communist
infiltration through the Mexican border, union leaders argued that the terrible exploitation of
Mexican immigrants was being used by communists and other ideologues to bolster antiAmerican sentiment by portraying the United States as a country completely focused on the
advancement of narrow economic interests and unconcerned with the welfare of ordinary
workers. Reuther, for example, stated that the administration was playing “directly into the
hands of Communist elements” in Central and South America, and that the legislation
allowing unilateral recruitment of farm labor “would give the Communists invaluable support
in their unceasing efforts to picture the United States as “the colossus of the north,” a Nation
motivated solely by narrow economic self-interest” (United States, Congress, House,
Committee on Agriculture, 1954, 76–77).¶ Hispanic civic groups also partook in the use of
securitizing rhetoric linking Mexican immigration to threats to internal security. The
tenuousness of the relationship between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants has roots
dating back to the nineteenth century. Up until the rise of the Chicano Movement and the civil
rights struggles that took place during the 1960s and 1970s, the main strategy of Hispanic civic
organizations was assimilationist. The goal was to become “white,” rather than to gain
acceptance as a national minority. Mexican Americans and long-term Mexican residents in the
United States perceived the entry of poor Mexican peasants into the Southwest not only as a
source of job competition, but also as a barrier to their full assimilation and acceptance in
American society, as they were often poor, illiterate and unfamiliar with the cultural and
linguistic norms of the United States (Sanchez, 1993; Gutierrez, 1995).
Securitization of the immigrant problem leads to a loss of identity for the illegal
immigrants and reduces government policy to a point where it is no longer a
problem of the economy but a problem of national security. This skews
government policy in uncontrollable and racist ways.
Astor 2009 (Avi, Post-Doc @ University of Michigan, later Pompeu Fabra University,
Department of Poltical and Social Sciences, “Unauthorized Immigration, Securitization and the
Making of Operation Wetback”, Latino Studies (2009) 7, 5/29, http://www.palgravejournals.com/lst/journal/v7/n1/full/lst200856a.html)
As this paper has shown, Operation Wetback was the culmination of a process of securitization
that had taken place over the course of several years preceding the summer of 1954. The
intensification of the Cold War provided the context within which it was possible for myriad
social actors, including politicians, the media and the INS, to advance claims linking
unauthorized immigration to the Red Scare that would not have been credible under different
circumstances. Other actors, including unions and Hispanic civic organizations, also took
advantage of the opportunity to use discourses linking immigration to national security in order
to advance their own struggles for position and recognition in society. Those who resisted such
securitizing moves, namely growers and politicians from the Southwest, did so solely out of
self-interest, and cared little about the welfare of undocumented immigrants themselves.
When growers were guaranteed an adequate and stable supply of bracero labor by government
authorities, they generally embraced plans to carry out the mass deportation of undocumented
workers so as to avoid the increasingly negative reputation that came along with employing
undocumented labor (Calavita, 1992).¶ With minimal social organization and integration into
US communities, due in large part to INS post-harvest deportations and spatial segregation,
undocumented immigrants remained faceless and invisible in US society, and they had few
advocates who genuinely cared about their well-being. Consequently, the securitizing moves
made by different actors were, by and large, accepted by the American public as a legitimate
justification for elevating the issue of unauthorized immigration out of the realm of ordinary
politics and into the realm of security. Once unauthorized immigration had been elevated into
the realm of security, ordinary laws and procedures no longer influenced what government
officials and agencies could or could not do. They had virtually complete discretion to deal
with the “wetback problem” as they saw fit. During the planning stages of Operation Wetback,
Brownell even suggested the possibility of shooting some undocumented immigrants to
discourage others from crossing the border (García, 1980). The mere consideration of killing as
a possible means of dealing with unauthorized immigration demonstrates the extreme dangers
that come with elevating an issue into the realm of security.
Impact—Violence
Immigration should be unlimited— limiting it leads to dangerous communal
fusion movements such as Nazism or Fascism
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
Instead of regarding being-in-common as the gathering together of individuals who share some
common property or essence –and in which the clinamen is removed from such gathering,
Nancy (1991, p. 26–7) offers an alternative under- standing of this concept. He asserts that
being-in-common is first and foremost being exposed to alterity through a relationship of
sharing, made possible by the Heideggerian notion of being-with (Mitsein) which goes beyond
commonality and identity politics. Such an understanding, albeit abstract due to its breaking
away from any spatial particularity, does indeed save individuals or rather singularities from the
danger of communal fusion (witnessed for instance in the movements of fascism and Nazism)
and the restraints of self-enclosure [like] (immigration controls for instance). For in Nancy’s
conceptualisation, singular beings are not regarded as absolute figures of immanentist politics
(i.e. citizens) but as beings whose experience of being-in-common is constituted through their
predicate-free existential/ ontological position of being-there (Dasein) and what they reveal to
each other in their exteriority (which forms their interiority) and their multiplicity (which forms
their uniqueness). The being-such of a singular being is irreducibly a being- with that draws its
sense of ‘selfness’ from the existence of ‘otherness’ without, however, having to live up to a
differentiating identity or a shared individuality that would place it within the confines of
categorisation i.e. suchness: ‘such-and- such being is reclaimed from its having this or that
property … (the reds, the French, the Muslims)’ (Agamben 1993, p. 1). Thus, the realisation or
rather actualisation of being-in-common is only possible insofar as singular beings are
‘whatever’ (ibid.) beings (not having any particular identity) whose ‘membership’ could not be
determined by or reduced to having/sharing ‘common’ characteristics. But a membership that
can only be experienced at the moment of exposure to singu- larity, at the moment of its ‘taking
place’ ‘…(which is itself without a place, with- out a space reserved for or devoted to its
presence)’ (Nancy 1991, p. 72). Exposure, sharing and being-with are thus constitutive of
being-in-common in such a way that belonging itself becomes a ‘bare’ belonging stripped from
any predetermined condition of membership (Agamben 1993, p. 84) or demarcated
territoriality. It is a belonging where ‘whatever’ (singularity such as it is – and this ‘such’ is
uniden- tifiable and fluid) belongs to ‘whateverness’ (unconditional being-in-common).
Immigration, in this sense, can be regarded as an aspect of exposure, sharing and being-with,
to which there could/should be no fixed limit or neat bordering .
The implication of regulated immigration is violence derived from this radical
breach of ethics
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
For when the issue of immigration is contemplated from an ethical standpoint, it becomes
possible to reveal not only the failure but also the ‘violence’ embedded within Western
politics (Metselaar 2003, p. 1). This political violence is epitomised in the policies of detention,
the treatment of refugees, the proposal of asylum quotas, the forced integration, or even, the
act of ‘naming’ (‘illegal immigrant’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’, ‘bogus’, ‘detainee’, ‘deportee’,
etc.), all of which breach the ethics of radical generosity toward otherness – in that ‘violence
does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their
continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves’ (Levinas
1969, p. 21). It is, hence, the call for ethics that puts the question of politics into doubt and
reconfigures the understanding of responsibility ‘for the Other’ (Levinas 1982, p. 95), for the
‘Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself’ (Levinas 1969, p. 39)4.
Conditional hospitality bad—leads to exclusion and violence
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
For conditional hospitality entails a measuring of actions, a calculation of responsibility and a
selection of those to whom one may/should be hospitable [or] responsible. This is indeed the
political hospitality manifested, for instance, in what Cohen (2003, p. 72) calls ‘economic elitism’
found in the schemes of points system and work permits which function by means of filtering
those who may economically contribute ‘more to the public purse’ (Spencer, in Cohen 2003, p.
73) from those who have ‘little or nothing to contribute’ (Cohen 2003, p. 73). Added to that the
current ‘Worker Registration Scheme’ in the United Kingdom relating to nationals of the new
European Union member states7 as well as the proposed quotas for asylum. Ramifications of
this political hospitality are [is] damaging and violent in that not only modes of discrimination,
inequality and exclusion are systematically implemented, but also, the absolute responsibility
for the Other is negated and overridden by an exigency for reciprocity or a demand for
repayment
Impact—Human Rights
Bioprofiling creates a web of nonegalitarian distinctions, undermining human
rights associated with globalization.
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
Bioprofiling, however, is not simply a more accurate and efficient way to validate one’s identity
and to cross it with relevant data on illegal immigration, crime, or terrorism. Bioprofiling
inscribes a designated category of suspicion on human bodies, facilitating a situation in which
one’s fingerprints testify to one’s travel log and consumption patterns along with one’s place of
origin, ethnic background, or religious affiliation. In this way, biosocial profiling transforms
mobility into a public performance, both in the sense of treating the human individual as a
mobile unit located within collective categories of suspicion and in the sense of subjecting a
relatively discreet social action to public scrutiny. Perhaps ironically, however, the
transformation of mobility into a moment of utmost exposure does not enhance social
proximity but rather maintains and facilitates a regime of social distance. Profiling represents a
distinct modality of power, in this case the power to immobilize, to create social distances, and
in general to police and regulate spatial behavior. Profiling has to be distinguished from other
modalities of power. Foucault characterized late modernity by arguing that an intricate web of
nonegalitarian distinctions — enabled by technologies of normalization— underwrites the
package of egalitarian and universal rights promised to individuals in liberal constitutions .
Normalization, as Foucault called it, announced an era of lesser reliance on physical punishment
in general and on the life-taking powers of law in particular. Rather, normalization uses
disciplinary techniques that manage life by subjecting individuals to an everexpanding list of
standards to which they are expected to conform. Perceiving people as “moral and rational
actors” (Simon 1988), normalization aspires to “change” people and to correct behavior. In
guiding sentencing policies, write Feeley and Simon (1992), this meant concerns with
rehabilitation and reform. However, the new penology, they argue, relies on actuarial
techniques rather than individual characteristics to determine punishment, aiming more at
efficient risk management than at rehabilitation (Feeley and Simon 1994, 1992). Because this
actuarial justice does not seek to change people but rather “to manage them in place” (Simon
1988:773), its logic seems to be in perfect fit with the mobility-curbing and mobilityconfining
tasks of biosocial profiling as well. Biosocial profiling, activated at the service of a mobility
regime, is not concerned with correction (whether through education, persuasion, or
sanctions), but rather with fixing individuals into given categories of suspicion. If various tests
serve the disciplines in their attempt to normalize individual behavior, then the classifications
of profiling serve the mobility regime in its attempt to block or contain individuals . Thus,
paraphrasing Foucault, we may argue that a dense web of nonegalitarian distinctions —
establishing a system of highly differential movement licenses— underwrites the universal
declarations of human rights that are so strongly associated with globalization.
Generic Biopower Impacts
Impact—Racism
Racism is a function of biopolitics used as a means to control populaitons
Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and
Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]
“Society Must Be Defended”culminates in Foucault’s chilling account of a tendency immanent
to bio-politics, a tendency to what he has elsewhere designated as Athanato-politics,” and its
basis in what he here terms state racism. The question that Foucault raises in his final lecture in
this course, is how can mass murder and extermination become instantiated in a regime of
biopower: If it is true that the power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that
disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will the power to kill and
the function of murder operate in this technology of power, which takes life as both its object
and its objective? ... How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political power to kill, to
call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill ... ? Given that this power’s
objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the
function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? (p. 254) For
Foucault, it is here that racism, which, indeed, has a long history, intervenes, and now becomes
inscribed in the basic mechanisms of the modern state. According to Foucault: … broadly
speaking, racism justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the
principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member
of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. … The
specificity of modern racism … is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or the lies of
power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power. We are
dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the
workings of a state that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of
the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of - the way biopower functions
through - the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and
activation of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of racism (p. 258).
State racism then emerges, when in a regime of biopower, internal or external threats lead
the state to engage in mass death: “Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism
alone can justify the murderous function of the State” (p. 256).
Race is a key facet implicated in the fabrication of bare life
Doty, Associate Professor School of Politics & Global Studies, 11
[Roxanne Lynn, Published April 12, 2011. “Bare life: border-crossing deaths and spaces of moral
alibi.” Page 607. http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/d3110.pdf. RH]
Race, as it pertains to immigration policies, is relevant to the criticisms and questions that have
been raised about Foucault's neglect of the international realm and specifically his lack of
attention to the operations of power beyond the local and national realms of the West. Jabri
(2007) points to the contemporary relevance of race, arguing that it is just as much a part of the
``late modern intervention into the societies of others'' as it was in the colonial past (Hing,
2009, page 23).When it comes to contemporary US border enforcement strategies, biopolitics
is implicated in the very construction of the boundaries that create a national realm as distinct
from an international realm, and race is clearly implicated in this. The racialized underpinnings
of various contemporary local legislations such as Proposition 187 discussed above as well as
the long history of overt and structural racism in US immigration policies culminate in the
undocumented migrant as bare life, a subject whose very existence is synonymous with
illegality and is therefore deemed a threat to US sovereignty and governance. The
unauthorized migrant becomes socially undesirable, and ultimately one who can be killed
without consequence. De Genova (2002) observes that ``the category `illegal alien' is saturated
with racialized difference and indeed has long served as a constitutive dimension of the
racialized inscription of `Mexicans' in the United States''. This is consistent with Balibar's (2005)
exploration of the phenomena of racism and his argument(s) that the categories of difference,
otherness, and exclusion are crucial to an examination of racism, especially in its multiple
forms, notably pertaining to what has been labeled differentialist or neoracism. Balibar (2005,
page 20) notes that ``globalization as such has, at least in principle, no exterior'' and that such
exterior as it exists to any degree ``is only reinforced by the working of political boundaries as
mainly instruments of security and control of the flows of populations with absolutely
unequal status and rights''. The unequal status and rights of populations frequently break
down along racialized lines.
Impact—Genocide
The biopolitical implications of the status quo create the ideological priming
needed for a holocaust
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 9, BW)
Agamben writes that the sovereign nomos is the principle that joins law and violence to
establish the territorial of order. The sovereign occupies the point indistinction between
violence and law. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre wrote that sovereignty
demarcates a space established and constituted by violence. This violence cannot be
separated from a principle of unification that subordinates all social practices. Through its
monopolization of vio¬lence the state claims to create a space where society is perfected for
all, though in fact it is the interests of a minority class that are enforced. The Westphalian
state system, held as a defining element of modernity, established the principle of territorial
sovereignty in international law. Galina Cornelisse defines the concept of “territoriality” as the
founding of political authority on demarcated territory (Cornelisse 2010). Though the idea of
universal human rights emerged after 1945, these rights became inextricably tied to national
citizenship and hence state sovereignty. It is this sovereignty that finds itself under attack by
globalization, the free movement of labor across borders. Under globalization, the State must
fight irrelevancy by reconstituting itself through the production of bare life. This is why,
according to Schinkel, deportation and detention are not shortcomings of the state under
globalization but its fulfillment (Schinkel 2009). According to Foucault, another decisive event
of modernity was the inclusion of bare life in the political realm as a subject. The focus on this
bare life as an object of the calculations of state power is the practice known as biopolitics,
which finds its ultimate expression in the “camp.” Agamben understands this causal chain as
crucial to addressing modern democratic state’s contradictions. The most horrific events of the
20th century, especially Nazism and the death camps, can be traced to this stumbling block of
Western democracy: that it seeks to bring about people’s happiness in the realm of bare life,
which tragically brings democracy into collusion with totalitarianism. The camp is thus the
“nomos of the political space in which we live,” leading Agamben to the disturbing conclusion
that the state of exception has become the rule, and in truth we are all homo sacer. The
absolute biopolitical space of the “camp”, which establishes the “political space” of modernity
(Schinkel 2010: 8), is topologically different from the prison because the prison is securely
embedded in the juridical realm, while the camp is the space of the exception which makes
the juridical realm possible. As the localization of the state of exception where sovereign power
confronts bios, bare life, without mediation, the camp is a “realm of experimentation, exercise
and symbolic reproduction of the violence of sovereign power” that also sends an ambiguous,
threatening message to the outside world (Minca 2005). We shall see below how these concepts
are tangibly realized in the deportation regime of the United States.
Impact—Value to Life
Biopolitcs is a murderous enterprise that results in political death, exclusion,
and a loss of value to life.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
Embedded within this biopolitical overdetermination is a murderous enterprise. Murderous
not insofar as it involves extermination (although this might still be the case) but inasmuch as it
exerts a biopower that exposes ‘someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some
people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on’ (Foucault 2003 [1976]:
256), and inasmuch as it is ‘based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive
violence’ (Zylinska, 2004: 530); a symbolic violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of
‘naming’ as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida argue ‘asylum seekers’, ‘detainees’,
‘deportees’, ‘illegal immigrants’, etc) as well as a material one (for example, placing ‘asylum
seekers’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ in detention centres), attesting to that epistemic impulse to
resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and the residual of disciplinary powers that seek to
eliminate and ostracise the unwanted-other through the insidious refashioning of the ‘final
solution’ for the asylum and immigration ‘question’. Such an image has been captured by
Braidotti (1994: 20): Once, landing at Paris International Airport, I saw all of these in between
areas occupied by immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had arrived,
but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious transit zones, waiting. The dead,
panoptical heart of the new European Community will scrutinize them and not allow them in
easily: it is crowded at the margins and non-belonging can be hell. The biopolitics of borders
stands as the quintessential domain for this kind of 11 sorting, this kind of racism pervading
Western socio-political imaginary and permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial
sovereignty despite its monolithic use of euphemism. It is precisely this task of sorting and this
act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border security and surveillance are designed
making ‘the management of misery and misfortune … a potentially profitable activity’ (Rose,
1999: 260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism (Coward, 1999: 18)
where ‘control’ and ‘security’ are resting upon vast investments in new information and
communications technologies in order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate, the
infiltration and ‘riskiness’ of the ‘unwanted’. For instance, in chapter six of the White Paper,
‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’ (2002), the UK government outlines a host of techniques and
strategies aimed at controlling borders and tightening security including the use of Gamma X-ray
scanners, heartbeat sensors, and millimetric wave imaging to detect humans smuggled in
vehicles.
Biopower renders life calculable, and allows for the government to have total
control over all aspects of life, devaluing it.
Inda, 2002 (Johnathan Xavier, Department of Chicano Studies at University of California
“Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Woman’s Body”, 100-101)
“For a long time ,” Foucault notes, “one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power
was the right to decide life and death” (History: 135). For instance, If an external enemy sought
to overthrow him, the sovereign could justly wage war, requiring his subjects to fight in defense
of the state. So, without directly proffering their death, the sovereign was sanctioned to risk
their life. In this case, he exercised “an indirect power over them of life and death” (135).
However, if someone hazarded to rebel against him and violate his laws, the sovereign could
exert a direct power over the transgressor’s life, such that, as penalty, the latter could be put to
death. The right to life and death, then, was somewhat dissymmetrical, falling on the side of
death: “The sovereign exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining
from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of
requiring.. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality
the right to take life or let live” (136). As such, this type of power, Foucault observes, was
wielded mainly as a mechanism of deduction, making it “essentially a right of seizure: of
things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself” (136). That is, power was fundamentally a right
of appropriation—the appropriation of a portion of the wealth, labor, services, and blood of the
sovereign’s subjects---one that culminated in the right to seize hold of life in order to subdue it.
The power of appropriation or of deduction, Foucault suggests, is no longer the principal form of
power in the West. Since the classical age, the mechanisms of power here have undergone a
radical transformation. Power now works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and
organize the forces under it”; it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying
them” (History: 136). Thus, in contrast to a power organized around the sovereign, modern
“power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion
was death, but with living beings, and the mastery if would be able to exercise over them would
be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more that the threat of
death, that gave power its access even to the body” (142-143). In short, political power has
assigned itself the duty of managing life. It is now over life that power establishes its hold and
on which it seeks to have a positive influence. This power over life, which Foucault calls
biopower, is most apparent in the emergence of “population” as an economic and political
problem in the eighteenth century. This “population” is not simply a collection of individual
citizens. We are not dealing , as Foucault notes, with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with
a composite body “with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates,
life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation”
(History: 25). The “population,” in other words, has its own form of order, its own energy, traits,
and dispositions. The management of this “population,” principally of its health, Foucault
suggests, has become the primary commitement as well as the main source of legitimacy of
modern forms of government: it’s the body of society which becomes the new principle [of
political organizations] in the nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be
protected, in a quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to restore the corporeal
integrity of the monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are employed such as the
segregation of the sick, the monitoring of contagions, the exclusion of delinquents.
(“Body/Power”: 55) The concern of government, then, is to produce a healthy and productive
citizenry. Its commitment is to the protection and enhancement of the health of particular
bodies in order to foster the health of the composite body of the population. This means,
according to Foucault, that “biological existence” has now come to be “reflected in political
existence” (history: 142). As such, biopower ultimately designates “what brought life and its
mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations” (143), its main overall concern being the
life of the population, that is, of the species body—the body that functions as the foothold of
biological processes pertaining to birth, death, health, and longevity. Simply put, the species
body and the individual as a simple living being have become what are at stake in a state’s
political tactics, marking the politicization of life, turning politics into biopolitics and the
state into a biopolitical state.
Impact—Bare Life
The end point of biopolitics is a state in which legal order is indistinguishable
from bare life
Dean, 04 – professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle (Mitchell, “Four Theses on the
Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004,
http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf)//HK
Fourth thesis: Bio-politics captures life stripped naked (or the zoē that was the exception of
sovereign power) and makes it a matter of political life (bios). Today, we seek the good life
though the extension of the powers over bare life to the point at which they become
indistinguishable. In this formulation, the emergence of a government over life in the
eighteenth century does mark a rupture in forms of rule, which the search for an ʻoriginary
structureʼ of sovereignty cannot capture. For Foucault, the nature of this rupture is the
displacement, articulation or re-inscription of sovereignty within a peculiarly modern form of
politics, bio-politics. However, this capture of the government of the state by bio-powers is
already present in the structure of sovereignty. It would be a mistake, in this sense, to view
Agambenʼs quest for the structure of sovereignty, with its multiple thresholds, as ahistorical,
that is, as insensitive to temporal thresholds. His thesis offers a kind of history of modernity.
Here, the demonic character of modern states lies in the possibility that the thresholds that
maintained bare life as a state of exception are breaking down. Zoē is entering into a sphere of
indistinction with bios in modern politics. For Agamben the paradigm of modern politics—the
new Nomos—is not the liberal governing of freedom, but the concentration camp. The camp
is the material form of the stabilization of the state of exception, the excluded inclusion, both
inside and outside modern political and legal ordering. Because the camp is established by law
as a space of exception, it is subject to no order itself, only direct police command. It is thus a
space of ordered disorder in which bare life enters into a zone of indistinction with legal
order. While such views may appear to lead to a kind of radical condemnation of many
instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to develop humane processing procedures for
asylum seekers, the idea of mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of
analysis and spheres of contestation rather than a site of dogmatic rejection. We have become
used to a style of criticism in which liberal notions of the individual citizen have been revealed
to be constituted through a series of exclusions (of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane,
the poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5, December 2004 28 biopower today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to disability, criminality and insanity.
The inclusion of women through their state of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting
questions concerning sovereign violence given womenʼs historic biological relationship to the
reproduction and care of human life. This relationship, itself excepted under the universality of
law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required to take responsibility for sovereign
decisions. If we are to take Agamben seriously, this desire for inclusion may have the effect not
simply of widening the sphere of the rule of law but also of hastening the point at which the
sovereign exception enters into a zone of indistinction with the rule. Our societies would then
have become truly demonic, not because of the re-inscription of sovereignty within bio-politics,
but because bare life which constituted the sovereign exception begins to enter a zone of
indistinction with our moral and political life and with the fundamental presuppositions of
political community. In the achievement of inclusion in the name of universal human rights, all
human life is stripped naked and becomes sacred. Perhaps in a very real sense we are all homo
sacer. Perhaps what we have been in danger of missing is the way in which the sovereign
violence that constitutes the exception of bare life—that which can be killed without
committing homicide—is today entering into the very core of modern politics, ethics, and
systems of justice.
Impact—Extinction
The pursuit of biopolitics creates dichotomies between the “evil” foreign and
the “secure” domestic, drawing boundaries that justify killing in the name of
saving life. This society of control spreads across the globe as the domestic
populous becomes ever more isolated
Campbell ’05 – Professor of Cultural and Political Geography in the Department of Geography
at Durham University in the UK (David, “The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports
Utility Vehicle,” American Quarterly 57.3 (2005) 943-972, JSTOR)
As an imagined community, the state can be seen as the effect of formalized practices and
ritualized acts that operate in its name or in the service of its ideals. This understanding, which
is enabled by shifting our theoretical commitments from a belief in pregiven subjects to a
concern with the problematic of subjectivity, renders foreign policy as a boundary-producing
political performance in which the spatial domains of inside/outside, self/other, and
domestic/foreign are constituted through the writing of threats as externalized dangers. The
narratives of primary and stable identities that continue to govern much of the social sciences
obscure such an understanding. In international relations these concepts of identity limit
analysis to a concern with the domestic influences on foreign policy; this perspective allows for
a consideration of the influence of the internal forces on state identity, but it assumes that the
external is a fixed reality that presents itself to the pregiven state and its agents. In contrast, by
assuming that the identity of the state is performatively constituted, we can argue that there
are no foundations of state identity that exist prior to the problematic of identity/difference
that situates the state within the framework of inside/outside and self/other. Identity is
constituted in relation to difference, and difference is constituted in relation to identity, which
means that the "state," the "international system," and the "dangers" to each are coeval in
their construction. Over time, of course, ambiguity is disciplined, contingency is fixed, and
dominant meanings are established. In the history of U.S. foreign policy regardless of the
radically different contexts in which it has operated the formalized practices and ritualized acts
of security discourse have worked to produce a conception of the United States in which
freedom, liberty, law, democracy, individualism, faith, order, prosperity, and civilization are
claimed to exist because of the constant struggle with and often violent suppression of
opponents said to embody tyranny, oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism,
and barbarism. This record demonstrates that the boundary-producing political performance
of foreign policy does more than inscribe a geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of
social space also involves an axiological dimension in which the delineation of an inside from
an outside gives rise to a moral hierarchy that renders the domestic superior and the foreign
inferior. Foreign policy thus incorporates an ethical power of segregation in its performance of
identity/difference. While this produces a geography of "foreign" (even "evil") others in
conventional terms, it also requires a disciplining of "domestic" elements on the inside that
challenge this state identity. This is achieved through exclusionary practices in which resistant
elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a discourse of "danger" with
threats identified and located on the "outside." Though global in scope, these effects are
national in their legitimation.12 The ONDCP drugs and terror campaign was an overt example of
this sort of exclusionary practice. However, the boundary-producing political performances of
foreign policy operate within a global context wherein relations of sovereignty are changing.
Although Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have overplayed the transition from modern
sovereignty to imperial sovereignty in Empire, there is little doubt that new relations of power
and identity are present. According to Hardt and Negri, in our current condition, Empire
establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It
is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the
entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities,
flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The
distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the
imperial global rainbow.13 As shall be argued here, the sense of fading national colors is being
resisted by the reassertion of national identity boundaries through foreign policy's writing of
danger in a range of cultural sites. Nonetheless, this takes place within the context of flow,
flexibility, and reterritorialization summarized by Hardt and Negri. Moreover, these
transformations are part and parcel of change in the relations of production. As Hardt and
Negri declare: "In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends
ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself,
in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one
another."14 While the implied periodization of the term postmodernization renders it
problematic, the notion of biopolitics, with its connecting and penetrative networks across and
through all domains of life, opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing the complex
relationships that embrace oil, security, U.S. policy, and the SUV. In Todd Gitlins words, "the
SUV is the place where foreign policy meets the road."15 It is also the place where the road
affects foreign policy. Biopolitics is a key concept in understanding how those meetings take
place. Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics arrives with the historical transformation in
waging war from the defense of the sovereign to securing the existence of a population. In
Foucault s argument, this historical shift means that decisions to fight are made in terms of
collective survival, and killing is justified by the necessity of preserving life.16 It is this
centering of the life of the population rather than the safety of the sovereign or the security of
territory that is the hallmark of biopolitical power that distinguishes it from sovereign power.
Giorgio Agamben has extended the notion through the concept of the administration of life
and argues that the defense of life often takes place in a zone of indistinction between
violence and the law such that sovereignty can be violated in the name of life.17 Indeed, the
biopolitical privileging of life has provided the rationale for some of the worst cases of mass
death, with geno- cide deemed "understandable" as one group s life is violently secured through
the demise of another group.18 However, the role of biopolitical power in the administration of
life is equally obvious and ubiquitous in domains other than the extreme cases of violence or
war. The difference between the sovereign and the biopolitical can be understood in terms of
the contrast between Foucault s notion of "disciplinary society" and Gilles Deleuzes conception
of "the society of control," a distinction that plays an important role in Hardt and Negri s Empire.
According to Hardt and Negri, in the disciplinary society, "social command is constructed
through a diffuse network of dispositifi or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs,
habits, and productive practices." In the society of control, "mechanisms of command become
ever more democratic, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the
brains and bodies of the citizens." This means that the society of control is "characterized by an
intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally
animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well
outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks."19
Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for social organization in the era of biopolitical
power, and it is a conception that permits us to understand how the effects of our actions,
choices, and life are propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a
conception that allows us to appreciate how war has come to have a special prominence in
producing the political order of liberal societies. Networks, through their extensive
connectivity, function in terms of their strategic interactions. This means that "social relations
become suffused with considerations of power, calculation, security and threat."21 As a result,
"global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principle of war is assimilated
into the very weft and warp of the socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical
relations."22 This theoretical concern with biopolitical relations of power in the context of
networked societies is consistent with an analytical shift to the problematic of subjectivity as
central to understanding the relationship between foreign policy and identity. That is because
both are concerned with "a shift from a preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose
relations are described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to beings-in-relation, whose
structures [are] decisively influenced by patterns of connectivity."23 At the same time, while
conceptual approaches are moving away from understandings premised on the existence of
physical and isolated entities, the social and political structures that are produced by network
patterns of connectivity often appear to be physical and isolated. As Lieven de Cauter argues,
we don't live in networks; we live in capsules. Capsules are enclaves and envelopes that
function as nodes, hubs, and termini in the various networks and contain a multitude of
spaces and scales. These enclaves can include states, gated communities, or vehicles with the
latter two manifesting the "SUV model of citizenship" Mitchell has provocatively described.24
Nonetheless, though capsules like these appear physical and isolated, there is "no network
without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules. Ergo: the degree of capsularisation
is directly proportional to the growth of networks."25 The result is that biopolitical relations of
power produce new borderlands that transgress conventional understandings of
inside/outside and isolated/ connected. Together these shifts pose a major theoretical
challenge to much of the social sciences, which have adhered ontologically to a distinction
between the ideal and the material, which privileges economistic renderings of complex social
assemblages.26 As we shall see, overcoming this challenge does not mean denying the
importance of materialism but, rather, moving beyond a simplistic consideration of objects by
reconceptualizing materialism so it is understood as interwoven with cultural, social, and
political networks. This means that "paying increased attention to the material actually requires
a more expansive engagement with the immaterial."27
Impact—Genocide
Biopolitics necessitates genocidal slaughters of entire groups of people in the
name of the survival of humanity writ-large
Rey Chow, Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 2002, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, p. 9-10
Let me attempt to reformulate Foucault’s argument in a somewhat different manner. When life
becomes the overarching imperative, his argument implies, all social relations become
subordinate to the discursive network that has been generated to keep it going, so much so
that even a negative, discriminatory fact such as racism is legitimated in the name of the
living. Rather than straightforwardly assuming the form of a callous willingness to kill, therefore,
racist genocide partakes of the organization, calculation, control, and surveillance
characteristic of power—in other words, of all the “civil” or “civilized” procedures that are in
place primarily to ensure the continuance of life. Killing off certain groups of people en masse
is now transformed (by the process of epistemic abstraction) into a productive, generative
activity undertaken for the life of the entire human species. Massacres are, literally, vital
events.6 If Foucault thereby shows how murder (a negative act) can be legitimated by a
valorization of life (a positive idea), his logic may, I think, also be turned around to demonstrate
that the valorization of life itself, by the necessity of practice, can give rise to processes of
discrimination, hatred, and, in some extreme cases, extermination. In other words, if the
notion of legitimation shows how murder can, indeed, make sense as part of a positive idea, the
reversal of Foucault’s logic shows that the material process of enforcing a positive idea
inevitably derails it into something destructive and unjust. It is, of course, always possible to
explain this derailment economically: since an infinite valorization of life cannot possibly be
sustained on the basis of finite resources, various forms of disciplinary and regulatory controls
must be introduced in order to handle population increases, thereby resulting in a hierarchical
situation in which resources are assigned to the privileged few rather than distributed equally
among all, etc. Yet this type of explanation—which sees unequal economic distribution as the
primary source of social injustice—does not seem adequate to account for the persistence of
racism, especially in places where there is actually sufficient wealth, where the democratization
of resources seems to some degree to have been achieved. How, in other words, is one to
account for an environment in which one may be allowed to stay alive, may be told that all is
equal, may be given access to many things, only then to realize that an insidious pattern of
discrimination continues systematically to reduce one to a marginal position vis-à-vis
mainstream society? Such an environment, which is characterized by a schism between the
positively proclaimed values of life, on the one hand, and an affective dis-ease felt by those
who sense they are nonetheless the targets of discrimination, on the other, cannot be
addressed purely on economic grounds. The schism in question is not simply a matter of lies
versus truths, or false ideology versus lived reality. It is rather, if we follow Foucault’s thinking,
symptomatic of the generative functioning of biopower itself. To illustrate this, some examples
may be useful.
Biopolitics legitimizes racism and genocide
Milchman and Rosenberg 5 (Alan and Alan, Both @ Queens College, Review Essay: Michel
Foucault: Crises and Problemizations, The Review of Politics vol67 no2, JSTOR)
"Society Must Be Defended "culminates in Foucault's chilling ac count of a tendency
immanent to bio-politics, a tendency to what he has elsewhere designated as "thanatopolitics," and its basis in what he here terms state racism. The question that Foucault raises in
his final lecture in this course, is how can mass murder and ex termination become
instantiated in a regime of biopower: If it is true that the power of sovereignty is increasingly
on the retreat and that disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how
will the power to kill and the function ofmurder operate in this technology of power, which
takes life as both its object and its objective? ....How, under these conditions, is it possible for
a political power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill... ?Given
that this power's objective is essentially tomake live, how can it let die? How can the power of
death, the function of death, be exercised in a political sytem centered upon biopower?
(p.254) For Foucault, it is here that racism, which, indeed, has a long history, intervenes, and
now becomes inscribed in the basic mechanisms of the modern state. According to Foucault:
…broadly speaking, racism justifies the death0function in the economy of biopower by
appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as
one is amember of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living
plurality.... The specificity
of modern racism... is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies, or
the lies of power. It isbound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power.
We are dealing with amechanism that allows biopower towork. So racism is bound up with the
workings of a state that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of
the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of—or the way biopower functions
through? the old sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and
activation of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of racism (p. 258). State
racism, then emerges, when in a regime of biopower, internal or external threats lead the
state to engage in mass death: "Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone
can justify the murderous function of the State" (p. 256). But, according to Foucault, what is it
that constitutes a group within the population as a "race?" Race is a "way of introducing a
break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live
and what must die" (p. 254). The basis for such a break in the biological continuum can be
ethnic or religious; it can be founded on sexual orientation, on deviance from a society's norms,
on mental or physical illness, or on criminality. Any such "cut" in the continuity of the species
can constitute a race in Foucauldian terms, so long as the "identity" in question is
meataphysically defined, attributed to the very being of the individual or group. Moreover, the
constitution of race entails "... the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described
as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is away of fragmenting
the field of the biological that power controls.... It is, in short, away of establishing a biologicaltype caesura within a population that appears in the biological domain" (p. 255). And on the
bases of such a caesura, the exclusion or elimination of the inferior race can be undertaken,
purportedly in the interests of the life and health of the superior race, those who are normal.
Race, for Foucault, is linked to the "dividing practices" through which a population can be
regulated and controlled in a bio-political regime. The Foucauldian notion of race is a novel
one, permitting us to see the numerous ways in which such dividing practices are instantiated in
the modern world, as so many manifestations of a racialization of politics, even where there is
no necessary genetic basis for the invidious distinctions that it entails.
Foucault's analysis of
state racism focuses on the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Nazism is seen as the "paroxysmal"
development of the technologies and mechanisms of biopower, while Stalinism has perfected
what Foucault terms a "social-racism," inwhich the state exercises its right to kill or eliminate
"class" enemies, the abnor mal, and "criminal" elements, no less metaphysically defined than
the Jews or "Gypsies" that were the target of the Nazis. Foucault's linkage of state racism and
the perpetuation of mass murder to ten dencies immanent to biopower, makes it clear that, for
him, regimes such as Nazism and Stalinism are not atavistic reversions to the premodern past,
but historically specific manifestations of tenden cies that are also found throughout the
modern, democratic, West. Indeed, in their essay "Situating the Lectures," the editors of
"Society Must Be Defended," Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, point out, "That there
would appear to be a very strange kinship between 'liberal societies' and totalitarian states, or
between the normal and the pathological, and sooner or later itmust be investigated" (p. 276). It
seems to us, that Foucault's meditation on biopower and "thanato-politics," provides a basis
for just such an investigation.7 Foucault's focus on the state racism of regimes such as Nazism
or Stalinism, now past, should not mislead us into think ing that his vision of a "thanatopolitics" was not a prospective one. Foucault lectured 15 years before the genocide in Rwanda
and the Moreover, bloody ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But these outbreaks of murderous state
violence and racism, the examples of which have continued multiply, confirm the danger that
Foucault saw ensconced within to the dispositif of bio-politics.8
Impact—Root Cause
Exception is the law of pure violence without logos: it declares itself as the
decider of which violences are and are not legitimate.
Doxdater 2008 [Eric, “The [Rhetorical] Question of Exception, For Now,” in Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies 5.2]
‘‘Will Americans Understand What It Means to Live in a State of Emergency?’’ On the day after
the day, this perceptive question was asked of me by a friend who struggled against the
emergency in South Africa that ran between 1985 and 1990. The answer could only be, ‘‘By and
large, no.’’ And, little has changed. In ‘‘relatively traditionless America,’’ as Hannah Arendt
once put it, the promise of a return to progress has done well to obscure the ‘‘grey zone’’ that
forms when a sovereign(’s) rule of law strives to sanctify and negate the normative power of
its own precedent.11 A reflection of his concern for the nature and cost of this hypocrisy,
Agamben’s letter is more than a rehearsal of Foucault’s thesis on biopolitics. Expressing a
preference not to participate in ‘‘efforts to convince us to accept as normal and humane those
means of control which have always been considered exceptional and properly inhumane,’’ the
letter offers an important clue about the operativity of the exception, that which is both ‘‘an
anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law’’ and a mythic violence
‘‘by means of which law seeks to annex anomie itself.’’12 Paradoxically, one is never fully in a
state of exception. An unformulatable manifestation of sovereignty’s structure, the declaration
of exception is also an event that dissolves and then appropriates the question of the political
itself; when everything and everyone is deemed suspect, the task of deciding the humanity of
living man is converted into a spiraling causality of fate, a form of life that is guilty as such.13
If Agamben’s philosophical claim about the paradigm of the camps confounded the New York
Times’ politically correct editorial desk, the exception’s unraveling of citizenship into bare life
can also be understood in terms of what Arendt called ‘‘general subjectivity,’’ a law of ‘‘pure
violence without logos’’ and a logos that obscures the power*the word and deed in
concert*which appears before and constitutes the law.14
Solvency
Solvency—Open Borders
We should reject the notion that “we” can control who “we” are.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, “Immigration Interrupted,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10.3]
Although it is often argued that Levinas as well as Derrida’s unconditional hospitability cannot
be unproblematically (or even possibly) translated into a political action (Metselaar 2003, p. 9)
insofar as it is merely articulated at the level of the dual self-Other relationship rather than
sociality as a whole (this being particularly true of Levinasian ethics), their vision is, nonetheless,
salient in terms of provoking a radical transformation in social and political imaginaries and
invoking the exigency of a ‘politics of generosity that would foster rather than close off
different ways of being’ (Diprose 2002, p. 172). Such politics will not proceed from ‘a
hermeneutics of depth’ (Rose 1999, p. 196) in which subjectivity is wrought around selfcontainment, self-sufficiency and self-determinacy, presented as a project to be
accomplished. Instead, it might find its point of departure in the potential encounter with the
other and the total exposure to embodied alterity. For it is the experience of encountering
and being-exposed-to that infuses the crisis ‘into the hyphen at the heart of the nation-state’
(Coward 1999, p. 12) and undoes any immanentist attempt to essentialise identity,
commonality and belonging. Whilst it is unclear as to how such an ethico-political vision may
be put into practice (perhaps this ‘not-knowing-how’ would save this alternative vision from
being turned into yet another figure of immanentism), it may be that the rejection,
transgression and obliteration of immigration controls are to be regarded as the touchstone of
this radical ethico-politics and an epitome of the necessary shift from politics of borders to
politics of singularities where ‘No One Is Illegal’ (Cohen 2003).
The aff breaks down the distribution of rights in terms of citizenship, giving rise
to universal personhood, and eliminating the distinction between citizen and
alien.
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
Hence, she finds that under the new conditions of global migration and an emergent global
regime of human rights, “the logic of personhood supersedes the logic of national citizenship”
(1994:164) and that “citizenship is losing ground to a more universal model of membership
anchored in transcendent and de-territorialized notions of personal rights” (1994:3). Studying
illegal immigration and guest-workers in both Europe and the United States, and with different
normative concerns than those of Soysal in mind, Jacobson nonetheless seems to share with
Soysal some core theoretical observations. In his Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the
Decline of Citizenship, Jacobson (1996) argues that the combined effect of trans-national
migration and the emergence of a sweeping trans-national regime of human rights brings
about the erosion of the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely, citizenship.
Under the emergent global human rights regime, he argues , the notion of “universal
personhood” comes to dominate the social and political imagination. Subsequently, rights
are increasingly predicated on residency rather than on citizen status, eroding the very
distinction between citizen and alien and compromising the link between territorially
bounded national sovereignty and citizenship. Both Soysal and Jacobson, therefore, seem to
share the view that normative or cultural globalization—here conceptualized in terms of an
emergent global human rights regime—is a process that profoundly challenges the heretofore
sacred notion of bounded territoriality and its bundle of associated citizenship rights. The
perceived tension is thus between the trans-national (“open”) principle and the national
(“close”) principle. In other words, to the extent that some states or political blocs try to halt or
slow the process of conferring rights on immigrants in the name of sovereignty and social
integrity, the assumed implication is that we have to theorize these attempts as running
against the sweeping pressure of globalizationqua-openness.
The method of analyzing biopolitics at the border is key to understand the
manifestation of biopolitics through immigration controls. We must abandon
the discourse of the resolution to deconstruct the biopolitical order – any other
action is further delay.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries at King’s
College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of
Sociology. RH]
From this inventory of the kind of surveillance technologies deployed at the border and in
relation to asylum and immigration, and from what has been discussed hitherto, we might be
able to see how discipline and control are being merged together within the realm of
biopolitics through the hybridisation of management techniques and the dispersion of
networks of control. In fact, the biopolitics of borders is precisely where the metaphoric
transition from disciplinary society to control society is complicated insofar as it is intrinsically
entrenched within a domain of complex contestation and dialectical constellations in which
the two modalities of power coexist through the juxtaposition of top-down and bottom-up
mechanisms of discipline and control. This, being manifested in the existence of detention
centres where panoptical practices are inflicted upon those who are ‘imagined’ as ‘potential’
(rather than ‘actual’) risk (or, in fact, as being both) as well as in the technologies of
securitisation which function by means of instilling a sense of self-surveillance and self-control,
constructed as the basis for freedom, legitimacy, right and citizenship (in the case of ID cards
and passports for example). Not for a moment should we suggest that the era of discipline and
confinement has completely ceased to exist, nor should we avoid attending to the myriad of
changes taking place at the heart of contemporary societies. Instead, it is imperative to distil
some fresh understanding from the actualities (and virtualities) of everyday life by abandoning
teleological, dualistic and progressive discourses and venturing into what might be discovered
in the vicinity of ‘strange couplings, chance relations, cogs and levers that aren’t connected,
that don’t work, and yet somehow produce judgements, prisoners, sanctions’ (Foucault, in
Rose, 1999: 276). To this I would add, refugees, detainees, deportees, the exiled and so on, for
such is the system of biopolitics; a system of peculiar assemblages and violent ramifications to
which there can be no neat analysis or simple theorisation.
Aff is key to prevent bare life – rethinking of individual ethics in the context of
the border is key
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 530-33) MM
Indeed, even the very process of naming an Iraqi, Albanian or Kurdish refugee an ‘asylum
seeker’, towards whom the hospitality of the host nation is to be extended, is inevitably violent.
Butler explains that ‘The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated
inculcation of a norm’ (1993, p. 8). Taking account of the performativity of the hegemonic
political discourses can enable us to shift the borders that delineate and establish the
contours of the human within these discourses. This in turn can create a possibility for a new
politics of immigration, a politics that is informed by an ethics of response and responsibility
that goes beyond the set of moral obligations. Looking at excluded, abject, non-human bodies
positioned at the threshold of the legitimate political community, Butler declares: The task is to
refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is
perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of
the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included
in a given regime of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and
unrepresentability, illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative
regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent that which might pose a
fundamental threat to its continuity. (1993, p. 53) Taking a cue from Butler, we might thus
argue that a responsible immigration politics should not be based on the idea of integration and
immersion but rather on the preservation of the outside as ‘the site where discourse meets its
limits’. This does not of course mean that all asylum seekers should be permanently kept on
the threshold of the country or community they want to enter, and that we should naively
celebrate them as an irreducible alterity that resists incorporation. However, it is to suggest
that the biopolitics of devouring the other, of digesting and disseminating him or her across
the body politic, in fact forecloses on the examination of the normative regime that
establishes and legitimates the discourse of national identity. The ‘asylum seeker’ / itself a
product of the regime to which s/he is subsequently opposed / can only function on the outside
of that regime as its limitation and a guarantee of its constitution. (Once the community truly
opens itself up to what it does not know, both its knowledge of alterity and self-knowledge are
placed under scrutiny, a state of events that leads to the inevitable shifting of the boundaries
between the host as the possessor of goods and the newcomer as their ‘seeker’.) The idea of
liberal multiculturalism in which all alterity is welcomed and then quickly incorporated into the
host community risks occluding the violence at the heart of the constitution of this very
community, even if this community defines itself in terms of diversity or pluralism, and not
necessarily national or ethnic unity. The task of refiguring the ‘outside’ as a future horizon,
without attempting to annul and absorb this outside altogether, presents itself as a more
responsible response to the ‘asylum question’. An ethics of bodies that matter It is through
Butler’s engagement with ‘bodies that matter’ that I now want to sketch an ethical response to
the biopolitics of immigration practised by the UK and many other ‘sovereign democracies’. Of
course, Butler’s own argument develops out of the investigation of the ‘heterosexual matrix’
whichlegislates genders through the reiterated acting of accepted gender roles. Nevertheless,
it also enables us to think through the regulatory mechanisms that are involved in
producing/performing legitimate citizenship . Butler suggests that in our investigation of
juridical acts that legislate different forms of political subjectivity we should turn to the notion
of matter, ‘not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to
produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter ’ (1993, p. 9, original
emphasis). She is interested in investigating how the materialization of the norm in bodily
formation produces a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation that, in failing to qualify
as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms (1993, p. 16). But the main thrust of her
investigation is to find out what this contamination means for the ‘universal acts’ of Western
democracies, and for the political actions embarked upon to guarantee the survival of these
acts. And, further, if there is a certain ambivalence already inherent in these acts, can we think
them otherwise? Butler thus formulates the following question: ‘What challenge does that
excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical
rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as ‘‘life’’, lives
worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?’ (1993, p. 16). I want to suggest that
the challenge that the excluded and abjected realm produces to a symbolic hegemony therefore
comes in the form of an ethical injunction, in revealing the originary ethicality of the ‘universal
political acts’ already in place. For these acts - such as the 2002 Nationality, Immigration and
Asylum Act - can only be formulated in response to the other, an other whose being
precedes the political and makes a demand on it . Knocking on the door of Western
democracies, ‘bodies that matter’ are ethical in the originary Levinasian sense; they are already
taken account of, even if they are to be latter found not to matter so much to these sovereign
regimes. Butler’s argument thus poses a blow to the alleged sovereignty of the democratic
subject, whose response to the needs of the ‘other’ has to be properly managed through the
application of utilitarian principles intermixed with a dose of human-rights rhetoric. Though in
Excitable Speech she does not arrive at her questioning of political subjectivity via Levinas but
rather via a parallel reading of Austin and Althusser, to me her account of ‘how the subject
constituted through the address of the Other becomes then a subject capable of addressing
others’ (1997, p. 26) sounds positively Levinasian.9 In Totality and Infinity , Levinas describes this
relationship between self and other in the following way: The alleged scandal of alterity
presupposes the tranquil identity of the same, a freedom sure of itself which is exercised
without scruples, and to whom the foreigner brings only constraint and limitation. This flawless
identity freed from all participation, independent in the I, can nonetheless lose its tranquillity if
the other, rather than countering it by upsurging on the same plane as it, speaks to it, that is,
shows himself in expression, in the face,and comes from on high. Freedom then is inhibited, not
as countered by a resistance, but as arbitrary, guilty, and timid; but in its guilt it rises to
responsibility. . . . The relation with the Other as a relation with his transcendence / the relation
with the Other who puts into question the brutal spontaneity of one’s imminent destiny /
introduces into me what was not in me. (1969, p. 103) Levinas understands this inevitability of
responsibility and ethics as a need to respond to what precedes me and challenges my selfsufficiency and oneness, to what calls on me to justify ‘my place under the sun’. This
realization is crucial for developing our notion of citizenship and political justice . To actively
become a citizen, a host, a member of the public sphere / instead of just passively finding
oneself inhabiting it as a result of an alleged privilege that occludes what it excludes / I need
the other not in a negative sense, as an outside to my own positive identity, but to put me in
question and make me aware of my responsibility. This is the only way in which mature
political participation can take place; otherwise we will only be ‘ running a software’ , as
Derrida describes it, i.e. applying a ready-made computer program to an allegedly predictable
situation in which a need for a decision gives way to a technicized manoeuvre. It is the other
that makes me aware of the idea of infinity in me, an idea that, according to Levinas,
‘establishes ethics’ (1969, p. 204). Through an encounter with the other I realize that the
political subjectivity I inhabit is always temporarily stabilized, that it can be changed, redrafted
or, to use Butler’s term, recited. And it is biopolitics that establishes a certain sense of
normativity through managing and regulating ‘ bare life ’, a life that is subject to this ethical
injunction, to intrusion and wounding, to a call to response and responsibility.
Unconditional hospitality solves— it creates an absolute openness to the Other
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
In contrast, unconditional hospitality is a response to the ethical imperative which precedes the
realm of politics, philosophy and sociality. It is offered to anyone and everyone regard- less of
whether they are TB/HIV negative or not, whether they are skilled migrants or not, whether
they would contribute to the economy or not, whether they would conform to the customs and
values of the host entity or not. This notion of hospitality entails a responsibility that has no
limits, no particularity, and an absolute openness to the Other that goes beyond any
expectation, deter- mination and knowledge. For ‘hospitality is…an experience which proceeds
beyond knowledge toward the other as absolute stranger, as unknown, where I know that I
know nothing of him’ (Derrida 2000, p. 8) – so much so that the subject becomes not a host but
a ‘hostage’ to the Other (Levinas in Derrida 2000, p. 9) with no choice but to be responsible and
hence hospitable. (However, this notion of being hostage to the Other is not to be regarded in
negative terms for it is the alterity of the other and his/her call that shape one’s subjectivity,
incite one to think, to feel (Diprose 2002, p. 134) and to be- come). Thus, and to use Levinas’
(1981, p. 98) allegory, which is probably derived from Nietzsche’s (1997, p. 91) ‘Ye love your
virtue as a mother loveth her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for
her love?’, the ethical relation of self (in our case, this would be the State) to the Other
becomes something akin to the relation of the mother to her fetus; an inevitable and, at times,
excessive responsibility for which nothing is necessarily expected in return.
The concept of “alienation” is dehumanizing and only opening the borders can
solve
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Embracing open borders would send an expressionist message that all people, including
people of color from the developing world, have equal dignity.73 Rather than be classified as
undesirable and dehumanized “aliens” subject to exclusion and, at times, brutal border
enforcement, 74 citizens of other nations would be welcomed as persons worthy of full
membership in America. People of color would be valued as equals under the law in U.S.
society. Unlike current immigration law and its enforcement, such important messages would
tend to dampen— rather than exacerbate—the nativism and racism that often have infected
public discourse on immigration and shaped the treatment of immigrants and certain groups
of citizens in the United States.
Limiting immigration is paradoxical and needs to be interrupted
Ajana 06 (Btihaj. PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Digital.
Western governments are permeated with assumptions vis-à-vis the prevalence of freedom
and democracy. These assumptions seem to be paradoxically and iron- ically giving the right to
some to categorise, criminalise, demonise, detain, expel and exclude, whilst invoking virtues
of fairness and tolerance: ‘We live in a country which places great store on democracy,
tolerance, fair play and freedom of speech… We will set an annual limit to immigration,
including a quota for asylum seekers’ (Howard 2005). This enduring paradox which animates
the political discourse is indeed what reveals the hollowness of these claims (freedom and
democracy), which are, after all, [they’re]mere figures of speech, ornaments hanging on the
politics of exclusion and regimes of domination. Such a paradox demands an interruption of
these assumptions in order to rethink the question of immigration and reconfigure the
notion of otherness that dwells at the heart of political philosophy.
Open Borders would solve the racial inequality being caused by the current
system, and could serve as a stepping stone to other forms of equality
Johnson 2007 Dean of UC Davis School of Law(Kevin R., 2007“Opening the Floodgates;
Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws”)
Border enforcement could focus on the true dangers to U.S. society, rather than the exclusion
of hardworking people simply seeking to better their lives in pursuit of the American Dream.
The immigration laws would thus stand to better protect national security and public safety than
the current ones do. The current system is woefully inadequate at basic tracking of the
noncitizen population. The United States, by ensuring the legal entry of most noncitizens, would
have a much better record than it currently does of who in fact is entering the country and
where they live once here, furthering the important goal of protecting public safety and national
security. Millions of noncitizens would not be living in the shadows of American society,
outside the purview of law enforcement and the protections of the law, as they are today.¶
With immigrants’ fear of removal reduced significantly, exploitation of undocumented
immigrants in the workplace might well decline on its own accord. Employers would not hold
the strong lever of undocumented status over these immigrants, which often allows employers
to dictate the terms of the employment relationship to workers. However, better enforcement
of basic labor and employment law would presumably still be necessary. Governmental
resources could be redirected from¶ ¶ wasteful
border enforcement efforts to enforcing basic workplace protections for all workers. Removing
the stigma of “illegal” immigration status thus would benefit all workers. In no small part, this
would happen because the current dual labor market—one regulated by law and the other that
is not—that exists today would be dismantled, thus creating the opportunity for regulation of
the workplace of all workers.¶ Legal avenues for immigrating to the United States would
replace illegal means of entry. Open borders thus hold the promise of drastically reducing
deaths on the border, an everyday occurrence in contemporary times. They would also
reduce the current racial discrimination that plagues immigration enforcement in the United
States and seeps into all aspects of American social life. Human trafficking would be reduced ,
as would the criminal element engaged in the deadly, exploitative, and downright horrifying
trade in human beings .¶ In essence, open borders would go far to clean up the inequality
and injustice that are perpetrated by the current U.S. immigration laws and their
enforcement.¶
The concept of “alienation” is dehumanizing and only opening the borders can
solve
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Embracing open borders would send an expressionist message that all people, including
people of color from the developing world, have equal dignity.73 Rather than be classified as
undesirable and dehumanized “aliens” subject to exclusion and, at times, brutal border
enforcement, 74 citizens of other nations would be welcomed as persons worthy of full
membership in America. People of color would be valued as equals under the law in U.S.
society. Unlike current immigration law and its enforcement, such important messages would
tend to dampen— rather than exacerbate—the nativism and racism that often have infected
public discourse on immigration and shaped the treatment of immigrants and certain groups
of citizens in the United States.
Deregulation is the only option, current management collapse is inevitable
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
It is entirely possible for the United States to return to a system of more open borders.
Although not perfectly analogous, the massive deregulation of various industries near the end
of the twentieth century demonstrates the potential for moving from a highly regulated body of
public law to a much less regulated system.54 Although the deregulation of immigration
would generate knee-jerk resistance, this model makes perfect sense for the United States.
The micromanagement of migration against the tide of market, political, and social forces, as
U.S. immigration laws currently attempt to do, is doomed to fail. We need look no further
than the current immigration mess in which we find ourselves today to see that.
Mobility is key to ultimate freedom and essential rights of all human beings
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies,
“Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Because immigration enforcement has conventionally been viewed as the sovereign power of a
nation, little attention has been paid to the deep impacts that immigration law and
enforcement have had on immigrants. In the world of immigration, the rights of the nationstate have historically trumped any interests of the individual. Thus, despite its commitment
to individual rights, the United States has expressly denied noncitizens any general rights to
travel into this country. One can envision few personal choices that can have greater
lifealtering impacts than the decision about which country one chooses to live and work in. The
ability to move can obviously have profound impacts on a person’s—and his or her family’s—
entire life. Accordingly, free movement of people can be seen as the ultimate freedom and
the fundamental right of all human beings. 22 The right to migrate between nations could—
and should—be viewed as a basic civil right of the individual. Such a view would be more
consistent with liberal theory than a Bordering on the Immoral | 91 claim that state sovereignty
trumps any and all limits on immigration restrictions. 23
Only by embracing the “other”, neighbors, strangers and enemies alike, will we
overcome the empirical happenings of class hierarchies and war
Ashcroft 2009 ( Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor
of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, Beyond the
Nation: Post-Colonial Hope, The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia)
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
Gilroy’s aim is to see whether multicultural diversity can be combined with an¶ hospitable civic
order (1), whether a convivial acceptance of difference might be¶ achieved in a different kind of
multicultural society than the examples presently¶ available, particularly in Britain. A key
moment in the book comes when he considers¶ Freud’s rejection, in Civilization and its
Discontents, of Christ’s admonition to “love¶ thy neighbour as thyself.” Not all men, Freud
concludes, are worthy of love (72). But¶ Gilroy responds¶ I want to dispute his explicit rejection
of the demand to practice an¶ undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, intimates
and¶ strangers, alike (…) I want to explore ways in which the ordinary¶ cosmopolitanism so
characteristic of postcolonial life might be sustained¶ and even elevated. I would like it to be
used to generate abstract but¶ nonetheless invaluable commitments in the agonistic
development of a¶ multicultural democracy that Freud and the others cannot be expected to¶
have been able to foresee. (80)¶ Like many forms of utopian hope, Gilroy’s utopianism is critical,
relying on “a¶ planetary consciousness” in which the world “becomes not a limitless globe, but
a¶ small, fragile and finite place, one planet among others with strictly limited resources ¶ that
are allocated unequally” (83). On such a planet the injunction to “love thy¶ neighbour as
thyself,” an undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, might¶ become a necessity
rather than a vain hope . This, at least, for Gilroy, is worth exploring.¶ Paradoxically, the ground
on which the possibility of a convivial diaspora rests is the¶ melancholia of a post-imperial
Europe, and of Britain in particular. The imperial¶ melancholia first articulated by Mathew
Arnold in ‘Dover Beach’—a peculiarly¶ Victorian version of the condition “started to yield to [a
post-imperial] melancholia as¶ soon as the natives and savages began to appear and make
demands for recognition in¶ the Empire’s metropolitan core” (99). Consequently, “immigration,
war and national¶ identity began to challenge class hierarchy as the most significant themes
from which¶ the national identity would be assembled” (99). Former colonial subjects were
confident¶ that “their reasonable requests for hospitality would be heard and understood.
They had¶ no idea,” says Gilroy, “that those requests were impossible to fulfil within the
fantastic¶ structures of the melancholic island race” (111).
Through the power of discourse we must break through the ontological
constriction of national borders, only then will we be free
Ashcroft 2009 ( Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the University of NSW, editor
of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and the author of The Empire Writes Back, Beyond the
Nation: Post-Colonial Hope, The Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia)
Australian Studies Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
Yet in cultural terms the nation is perhaps an even more ambiguous phenomenon than it¶ has
been in the past, and this is particularly so in post-colonial theory. The nation-state¶ has been
critiqued in post-colonial analysis largely because the post-independence, postcolonized¶ nation,
that wonderful utopian idea, proved to be a focus of exclusion and¶ division rather than unity;
perpetuating the class divisions of the colonial state rather¶ than liberating national subjects.
However nationalism, and its vision of a liberated¶ nation has still been extremely important to
post-colonial studies because the idea of¶ nation has so clearly focussed the utopian ideals of
anti-colonialism. There is perhaps¶ no greater example of this than India, where independence
was preceded by decades of¶ utopian nationalist thought, yet in Rabindranath Tagore we find
also the earliest and¶ most widely known anti-nationalist. For Tagore, there can be no good
nationalism; it¶ can only be what he calls the “fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship” (2002, 15)—
the¶ exquisite irony being that his songs were used as Bengali, Bangladeshi and Indian¶
Copyright © Bill Ashcroft 2009. This text may be archived¶ and redistributed both in electronic
form and in hard copy,¶ provided that the author and journal are properly cited¶ and no fee is
charged¶13¶ national anthems. So the trajectory of colonial utopianism has been deeply
ambivalent:¶ on the one hand offering the vision of a united national people, and on the other a¶
perhaps even more utopian idea of the spiritual unity of all peoples.¶ The years since 1947,
when India led the way for other colonial states into post-colonial¶ independence, has been
marked by the simultaneous deferral of pre-independence¶ nationalist utopias, and yet a vibrant
and unquenchable utopianism in the various postcolonial¶ literatures. This utopianism has taken
many forms but its most significant postcolonial¶ characteristic has been the operation of
memory. Yet in the decades before and¶ after the turn of the century utopianism has taken a
significant turn—one affected by¶ globalization, with its increasing mobility and diasporic
movement of peoples—that¶ might be cautiously given the term cosmopolitan. Again it is India
that has led the way¶ in its literature, not only because of the proliferation of South Asian
diasporic writing,¶ but also because India itself has thrown the traditional idea of the nation as
imagined¶ community into question.¶ That national ideal of one people, so successfully
championed by Nehru has never been¶ more challenged than it has by India’s size and
complexity. India shows us that the¶ ‘nation’ is not synonymous with the state and despite the
increasing mobility of peoples¶ across borders, the proliferation of diasporas, the increasing
rhetoric of international¶ displacement, India reveals that before national borders have been
crossed, the national¶ subject is already the subject of a transnation. I want to propose the
concept of¶ transnation to extend the post-colonial critique of nation, (or more specifically the¶
linking of nation and state) and to argue with the entrenched idea of diaspora as simply¶ defined
by absence and loss. Such a definition of the diasporic population as¶ fundamentally absent
from the nation fails to recognise the liberating possibilities of¶ mobility. The transnation, on
the other hand, represents the utopian idea that national¶ borders may not in the end need
to be the authoritarian constructors of identity that they¶ have become.¶ The beginning of
the twenty first century reveals a utopianism as powerful as it is¶ different from the
nationalist utopianism that began to grow in the early decades of the¶ twentieth. This
cosmopolitan utopianism reaches beyond the state and considers the¶ liberating potential of
difference and movement. This is, of course, dangerous territory¶ because we have ample
evidence of the melancholic plight of people who must move¶ across borders, must in fact flee
the nation either as economic or political refugees, or as¶ subjects oppressed in some way by
state power. Such people are decidedly unfree.¶ Transnation may be mistaken to rest on a far
too benign view of global movement and¶ may encounter the objection that the idea of freedom
from borders is in fact ignoring the¶ plight into which globalization has thrown people
disadvantaged by class, ethnicity,¶ war, tyranny and all of the many reasons why they may need
to escape. For this reason I¶ treat the term ‘cosmopolitan’ with considerable caution, as a word
complicated by¶ overtones of urbanity and sophistication, a term much more successful as an
adjective¶ than a noun. The term ‘transnation’, while it pivots on a critique of the nation, and
a¶ utopian projection beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless acknowledges¶
that people live in nations and when they move, move within and beyond nations,¶
sometimes without privilege and without hope.¶ The transnation is more than ‘the
international,’ or ‘the transnational,’ which might¶ more properly be conceived as a relation
between states. The concept exposes the¶ distinction between the occupants of the
geographical entity—the historically produced¶ multi-ethnic society whom we might call the
‘nation’ and the political, geographic and¶ administrative structures of that nation that might be
called the ‘state.’ Transnation is¶ the fluid, migrating outside of the state (conceptually and
culturally as well as¶ geographically) that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious
in India¶ where the ‘nation’ is the perpetual scene of translation, but translation is but one¶
example of the movement, the ‘betweenness’ by which the subjects of the transnation¶ are
constituted. It is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and renegotiation, the inbetween¶
space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. Nevertheless, the¶ ‘transnation’ does
not refer to an object in political space. It is a way of talking about¶ subjects in their ordinary
lives, subjects who live in-between the positivities by which¶ subjectivity is normally
constituted.¶ That the transnation is distinct from diaspora can be confirmed by seeing Salman¶
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) as the founding text of a new generation. This¶ generation
was indeed characterised by mobility and hybridity and gained worldwide¶ attention through
Indian literature in English, literature from what might called the¶ ‘third-wave’ diaspora. It was
characterised by a deep distrust of the boundaries of the¶ nation, a distrust embodied in
Saleem’s despair. But Rushdie’s novel had a different,¶ more utopian vision as he explains in
Imaginary Homelands The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told
in¶ a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian¶ talent for non-stop
self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly¶ throws up new stories, why it “teems.”
The form – multitudinous, hinting at¶ the infinite possibilities of the country – is the optimistic
counterweight to¶ Saleem's personal tragedy. (1991, 16)¶ Saleem’s personal tragedy is of course
the tragedy of the post-colonial nation. But it is¶ also the tragedy of the idea of the bordered
nation itself, the very concept of a bounded¶ utopian space within which a diverse people
could come together as one. The saving¶ grace, for Rushdie, is the capacity of a people to
‘teem,’ its irrepressible and exorbitant¶ capacity to transcend the nation that becomes its most
hopeful gesture. This way of¶ describing national concerns deeply rooted in culture and myth
engages the nation as a¶ ‘transnation,’ a complex of mobility and multiplicity that supersedes
both ‘nation’ and¶ ‘state.’¶ What is perhaps most striking about contemporary post-colonial
utopianism is that it¶ captures the spirit of liberation strengthened rather than suppressed by
the massive¶ absurdities of the ‘War on Terror.’ Marxist utopianism was generated paradoxically
by¶ the growth of neo-liberal capitalism, growing stronger and stronger during the latter half¶ of
the Twentieth Century as communist states imploded. But I think this growth can be¶ matched
by the deep vein of postcolonial utopianism that we find in literature, a vein of¶ hope that
becomes more prominent with the growth of transnational and diasporic¶ writing. This is quite
different from that nationalist utopianism that died under the¶ weight of post-independence
reality. This is a global utopianism now entering the realm¶ of critical discourse , even in the
most agonistic of critics.¶ While the utopianism of post-colonial literature has developed
extensively during the¶ Twentieth Century, I want to address examples of this utopian tendency
in post-colonial¶ criticism at the turn of this century. Paul Gilroy’s After Empire (2004) and
Edward¶ Said’s Freud and the non-European (2003) indicate that the element of hope
circulating¶ around the possibility of freedom from nation, (or at least from the ontological¶
constriction of national borders) , and freedom from identity itself, may be gathering¶
strength as a feature of twenty first century literature and criticism. Indeed, the¶ characteristic
these works all share is a utopianism deeply embedded in critique, a¶ tentative hope for a
different world emerging from a clear view of the melancholic state¶ of this one.
Neoliberalism Links
Link—Control
Border control is used to propagate neoliberalism—those deemed without
economic value are managed and excluded by the border
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 156]
It would be mistaken to exaggerate the transnationalism of NEXUS lane enrollees. Theirs¶ would
not appear to be a particularly challenging or worldly cosmopolitanism, but rather¶ what¶
Calhoun (2003: 106¶ e¶ 107)¶ calls a ‘soft cosmopolitanism’ undisturbed by having to leave¶ a
country behind, let alone by intercultural negotiations with communities of difference.¶ ‘‘Aided
by the frequent flyer lounges (and their extensions in ‘international standard hotels’),’’¶ Calhoun
argues that such soft cosmopolitans ‘‘meet others of different backgrounds in spaces¶ that
retain familiarity’’. The familiarity of the NEXUS lane space for its enrollees seems espe-¶
cially convenient and economical. They do not have even have to meet others and can
simply¶ stay in their cars or move unmolested through the airport. Moreover, while the lane
reinstates¶ the fast border-crossing movements once afforded by the PACE lane, it is also
obviously more¶ deeply integrated with the many other familiar features associated with the
fast track lifeworlds¶ of what¶ Adey (in press)¶ usefully describes as today’s ‘‘kinetic elites’’.
Expedited airport screen-¶ ing for upper class frequent fliers, shorter check-in lines, valet
parking, pay as you go highway¶ express lanes, and the multiple privileges and protections for
owners of premier-status credit¶ cards would all appear to share a deep affinity with the sort
of fast lane transnational civil cit-¶ izenship rights provided by NEXUS. At the very same time,
though, it needs noting that all the¶ border biometric developments can also be reconsidered
from a more skeptical position as part¶ and parcel of a more restrictionist regime. Alongside
the NEXUS lane, after all, the U.S. gov-¶ ernment has been simultaneously preparing to send
military drones, so-called unmanned¶ UAVs, to patrol the borders, and in the Pacific Northwest,
where the business boosters¶ once called for border bulldozing, the Pentagon has already
deployed a sensor-laden air-¶ craft, a Blackhawk helicopter and boats that will operate out of a
new command center¶ in Bellingham, Washington (¶ Biesecker, 2004; UPI, 2004¶ ). Moreover, it
might also be noted¶ that NEXUS is itself basically modeled on an older biometrics-based preclearance system¶ called SENTRI that was first developed on the US¶ e¶ Mexico border as part of
the geopolit-¶ ical border hardening regime made famous in the restrictionist terms of
‘‘Operation Block-¶ ade’’ and ‘‘Operation Hold the Line’’ (¶ Ackelson, 2005¶ ). The acronym SENTRI
supposedly¶ stands for ‘Secure Electronic Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection’ and the
program operates in the words of the US Customs agency ‘‘to swiftly accelerate the inspections
of¶ certain low risk, pre-enrolled crossers at ports of entry’’ (¶ U.S. Customs, 2005a,b¶ ).
However,¶ by simultaneously signaling a sentry-like defense of the border, SENTRI also sends a
message of militarized border control which the same Customs agency describes in the follow¶ ing defensive details: ‘‘A combination of electric gates, tire shredders, traffic control lights,¶
fixed iron bollards, and pop-up pneumatic bollards ensure physical control of the border¶
crosser and their vehicles. Using computer generated random compliance checks, and the¶
Inspector’s own initiative, the Federal Inspection agencies have detected only minor viola-¶
tions of customs and immigration laws’’ (¶ U.S. Customs, 2005a,b¶ ). It is this display of bor-¶ der
control through SENTRI that has now been extended north to NEXUS. Before, the¶ northern
border, the so-called longest undefended border in the world, was merely bridged¶ by a PACE
lane advertising the benefits of speedy crossing. But now NEXUS, following the¶ model of
SENTRI, promises to bring the demands of economic facilitation together with¶ a much more
restrictionist regime for those deemed unwanted and undeserving of expedited¶ service. In
other words, just like SENTRI, NEXUS now also seems to perform the double¶ talk of
‘economy’ and ‘security’, thereby sending the message that it is working to increase¶ rather
than undermine homeland securitization. Commentators in American anti-immigration¶ groups
in turn apparently get this message of control and like it.¶ Vaughan (2005)¶ of the¶ Center for
Immigration Studies, for example, has thus recently lauded both SENTRI and¶ NEXUS as the
modernized direction in which U.S. border control should be developed¶ more generally.
‘‘Programs like NEXUS, SENTRI,’’ she says approvingly, ‘‘have been¶ shown to help minimize the
impact of new security measures on lines at the ports of en-¶ try’’. And meanwhile, even the
Canadian authorities who have been most keen to push the¶ economic facilitation side of the
Smart Border developments remain keen to underline the¶ security side on the NEXUS webpage.
Thus after the invitation to ‘‘Cross Often? Make it¶ simple, use NEXUS,’’ the CBSA site goes on to
stress: ‘‘The NEXUS programs enable¶ Canadian and Unites States customs and immigration
authorities to concentrate their efforts¶ on potentially high-risk travelers and goods, thereby
upholding security and protection¶ standards at the border.’’
The political economy fuels the mobility gap, excluding the poor and creating
the global mobility regime
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
The fundamental elements of the mobility regime are analytically distinguished in this article.
For this analysis to take place, the point of departure is that the differential ability to move in
space—and even more so to have access to opportunities for movement—has become a
major stratifying force in the global social hierarchy. The so-called mobility gap covers a wide
continuum of social possibilities, stretching from the differential ability of farmers to deliver
their products to nearby towns, to the differential ability to enter a corporate compound in a
third-world country; from the severely restricted ability of an unemployed inner-city woman to
find work and to shop, to the severely restricted ability of Pakistani citizens to visit family
members in London. The mobility gap, in and of itself, is an expression of the conditions of the
possibilities of movement, such as socioeconomic factors, geographical locations, cultural
imperatives, and political circumstances. However, all of these variables operate in relation to
a trans-national political economy of movement. “ The blatant inequality of access to
mobility ,” writes Bauman, “is not just the expectable, since ‘natural’, effect of income
differentiation, casting the costs of transport beyond the reach of the poor . Differentiation of
mobility chances is one of the few strategies avidly and consistently pursued by the
governments of more affluent areas in their dealings with the population of less affluent
ones” (2002:83). The epistemological, technical, and institutional expression of this political
economy is that which I hereby designate as a global mobility regime. Thought of as a modality
that works at local, regional, and global levels, we may thus begin to theorize the mobility
regime as an important feature of globalization. A series of questions ensue. How does the
mobility regime develop and how is it maintained? What are the social technologies that
facilitate it? What sorts of social imageries sustain it?
Link—Securitization
Global competition and hegemony influence immigration policy, leaving out
considerations for the migrant worker.
Tannock ’09 (Stuart, 9-1-13, “White-collar imperialisms: the H-1B debate in America,” Social
Semiotics 19: 3, 320-1, J.C)
Current calls for expanding the H-1B visa program, then, when made by business dominated
coalitions such as Compete America and others, have come to be linked explicitly with a project
of protecting America’s ‘‘supremacy,’’ ‘‘leadership,’’ ‘‘preeminence,’’ or ‘‘edge’’ over other
nations (AILA 2007; Compete America 2007; National Academies 2005). This is thanks in part to
the increasingly naked language of US imperialism that was unleashed with the attacks of
September 11 (Foster 2005). ‘‘Without more access to H-1Bs,’’ the AILA (2007, 51) insists, ‘‘the
US stands to lose rapidly not only the competitive edge generations of Americans have worked
so hard to achieve, but also its pre-eminence in a variety of scientific and technical fields areas
vital to our prosperity and national security.’’ What astonishes about these arguments is their
utterly unquestioned assumption, first, that America should have the absolute right and ability
‘‘to hire and retain the world’s best talent’’ (Compete America 2007); and second, as seen in
the quotation of President Bush above, that foreigners should be expected to want to help
America address its problems and increase its prosperity rather than those of the countries
elsewhere around the world where their own communities and families live. Former Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is often alleged by anti-war campaigners to have once said: ‘‘it’s
not our fault God put America’s oil under other people’s countries’’ (Galloway 2007). It is this
kind of logic precisely that generates the endlessly repeated statements that highly-skilled
foreign workers should be brought to America’s shores to buttress its position of global
hegemony. The rest of the world’s resources exist in order to service American needs and help
America help itself. Whether these resources be oil and gas or scientific and engineering talent,
the ideology of imperialist self-interest remains essentially unchanged. The anti-H-1B side:
preserving US privilege I grew up in the border town of El Paso, Texas. Occasionally I would
stand on the bridge that spans the Rio Grande River. From this bridge I could watch the illegal
aliens from Juarez, Mexico, with suitcases in hand, dash across the shallow river to enter the
United States . . . . As a young boy I couldn’t understand why the army wasn’t on the border
and ever since that time I was interested in border issues such as immigration . . . . My
education was completed at the University of Texas at El Paso . . . . I earned a Bachelor’s degree
in Electrical Engineering which I used to get a job at Motorola in Arizona . . . . For most of my
career as a software engineer I never imagined that immigration would personally affect my
career that was until I felt the sting of unemployment. As I approached the age of 40 I learned
that foreign nationals that come to the US with H-1B visas were flooding the labor market, and
companies were using these young workers to eliminate older Americans like myself. (From
biography of Rob Sanchez, host of the anti-H-1B web site: www.jobdestruction.info) At first
glance, opposition to the H-1B program in America is based, as Chakravartty (2006b) and others
have observed, on a particularly strident and sweeping, closed and insular, and often overtly
racist form of nationalist sentiment. Lined up against pro- H-1B groups such as Compete
America is an assemblage of labor unions, disaffected worker groups and anti-immigrant
organizations that argue that strict limits should be placed on both temporary and permanent
skilled worker visas, and even that the H-1B program should be eliminated entirely
(Chakravartty 2006b). The argument of these groups is that jobs in America (good jobs,
especially) are ‘‘American jobs’’ that should be preserved for American citizens first before
being given away to¶ undeserving foreigners, whether through offshoring to other countries or
expanded¶ H-1B and green card programs domestically (Jackson 2002; Matloff 2003; Roberts¶
2005). Such views are represented transparently in the names of many of the groups¶ set up to
oppose the H-1B: the National Hire American Citizens Professional Society,¶ the Rescue
American Jobs Foundation, the Organization for the Rights of American¶ Workers, the Coalition
for the Future American Worker, and so on.¶ Despite this apparent nationalist insularity,
however, the politics of anti-H-1B¶ protest, like that of the pro-H-1B side, are global in scope and
spring from a¶ particular moment in the evolution of international political economy. The¶
opposition of these groups to the H-1B visa is based on their anger, dissent and¶ confusion
over the changing terms of how the spoils and privileges of American¶ imperialist and
capitalist power are to be distributed domestically. In testimony¶ before Congress in spring
2006, AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employment¶ executive director Michael Gildea laid
out the basic point of contention:¶ [ The] H-1B was initially designed to address small , ‘spot’
labor shortages of minimum¶ duration. Our affiliated organizations have no problem with
that basic concept. But we¶ vehemently object to how this program has over time contorted
into something¶ completely contrary to its original intent and that now victimizes large
numbers of¶ highly skilled, American professionals . . . . As they used to say in one of this
nation’s¶ greatest technology initiatives, the space program ‘‘Houston, we’ve got a problem.’’¶
And I would suggest it’s a big one. Only this time it’s not those textile, steel, machine¶ tool and
other manufacturing jobs; many of them are long gone. Now it’s the high tech,¶ high end, high
paying jobs that are headed out of town. These are the same jobs we were¶ smugly assured by
free trade advocates the US would retain as our manufacturing base¶ was exported. (Gildea
2006)¶ The vitriol and hyperbole that often accompany opposition to the H-1B visa¶ program
arise because this program symbolically threatens an implicit agreement¶ struck between US
capital and the American middle and working classes during the¶ early phases of neo-liberal
globalization. In return for supporting (or at least¶ consenting to) a neo-liberal project of reform
that would see much high-wage¶ manufacturing work disappear to low-wage destinations
outside America (or to lowwaged¶ immigrants in America), the American middle and working
classes were to¶ inherit the world’s professional, knowledge-economy jobs. America, along
with other¶ rich nations, would become a ‘‘magnet economy,’’ pulling in high-wage, high-skill¶
work from all over the globe (Brown and Lauder 2006). This vision was spelled out¶ most clearly
in former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s (1991) The work of nations.¶ ‘‘In principle,’’ wrote
Reich (1991, 247), ‘‘all of America’s routine production workers¶ could become symbolic analysts
and let their old jobs drift overseas to developing¶ nations.’’ Rather than fight the erosion of the
welfare state, high-wage public-sector¶ and manufacturing employment, and the labor unions
that had helped create these,¶ American workers were to look to the promise of higher
education, high skill and¶ their own innate talent instead. ‘‘American workers are angry,’’ says
economist Steve¶ Pitts, ‘‘because they were told to accept the loss of blue-collar
manufacturing jobs¶ because these jobs will be replaced by better white-collar service jobs .
. . Now those¶ jobs are being lost as well’’ (quoted in Reddy 2004).
Link—Labor Forces
Immigration policy is influenced and fueled by global neoliberalism.
Tannock ’09 (Stuart, 9-1-13, “White-collar imperialisms: the H-1B debate in America,” Social
Semiotics 19: 3, 313-315, J.C)
During the intense debate that raged over whether or not to expand H-1B numbers in the
1990s, arguments focused explicitly on claims of labor shortages in the national economy. The
lack of skilled workers available domestically in the vital IT sector, H-1B proponents claimed,
was not just harmful to IT employers but threatened to slow down overall economic
expansion. Foreign workers had to be brought into the country to perform this essential work.
Opponents of the H-1B program focused on challenging these claims of labor shortage and
insisted that plenty of skilled citizens were available to work, if employers would only give them
a chance, a decent wage and a small amount of on-the-job training (Freeman and Hill 2006;
Watts 2001). As Kamat, Mir, and Mathew (2004, 17) suggest, claims that the H-1B program was
a ‘‘temporary measure, designed to alleviate short-term labour shortages while appropriate
local labour was being trained and developed,’’ provided politically expedient cover at the time
for what was actually a longer-term project of opening up the US high-skill labor market to
global competition. In hindsight, it seems clear that these debates were part of the opening
salvos of the latest stage of neo-liberal reform : in the wake of globalizing capital , trade and
production, business and political elites across the world now seek to liberalize the global
movement of skilled labor, and create a truly global labor market . After a brief cooling-off
period that followed the collapse of the Dot-Com bubble in 20002002, and the September 11
attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001 (in the wake of which, all talk of
immigration matters was put on hold in the United States), concern over the H-1B visa program
heated up once more in 20062007 (see, for example, Thibodeau 2007). In this second round of
the H-1B debate, however, the terms of the argument were subtly shifted. No longer was the
premise simply about opening doors on a throttled national labor market, but rather working to
capture the full benefits of an already open and globalized labor market and higher education
system. To understand this shift, we need to put the H- 1B debate in the context of two
fundamental transformations in national and global political economy that have occurred since
the H-1B was first created in the Immigration Act of 1990. First, there was the dramatic
internationalization of higher education and the high-skill labor market in the United States,
especially in the fields of science and engineering: the proportion of foreign-born PhD recipients
from US universities in science and engineering increased from 23% in 1966 to 39% in 2000
(Freeman 2005); by 2005, the foreign-born were earning over 63% of US engineering PhDs
(Matthews 2007); among science, technology, engineering and mathematics post-doctoral
scholars, the share of temporary residents rose from 37% in 1982 to 59% in 2002 (National
Research Council 2005); the percentage of scientists and engineers with PhDs in the United
States who were foreign-born increased from 24% in 1980 to 37% in 2000 (Wulf 2005). Nearly
60% of the growth in the US science and engineering workforce in the 1990s came from the
foreignborn (Freeman 2005). This internationalization was driven, in part, by a second
fundamental shift over the course of the 1990s: the rise of a global war for talent (Kuptsch and
Fong 2006). Nation-states around the world have increasingly opened their borders to highly
skilled immigrants, and have actively sought to recruit high-level professional and managerial
workers and students from overseas (OECD 2006). This war for talent is driven in large part by
the United States: US think-tanks and ideologues are at the forefront of trumpeting the benefits
of liberalizing the global movement of high-skill labor; and US immigration policy reforms such
as the 1990 creation of the H-1B visa itself have become models for other countries to imitate.
Further, the United States is the world’s number-one talent magnet: with just 5% of the world’s
population, it attracts about one-half of the college-educated migrants who come to the rich
OECD countries (its closest competitor, Canada, pulls in 13% of these immigrants) (Docquier and
Marfouk 2005, 168). To be economically competitive in the global economy, business and
political elites now argue, it is imperative to recruit the world’s most talented individuals,
from wherever they come. Since other nations are also competing for these same workers (as
well as for one’s own set of domestic skilled workers), nations must continually adjust their
immigration, education, economic and social policy to make themselves more welcoming and
appealing to them. The global war for talent puts into play a game of perpetual oneupmanship, in which political and business leaders of all nations insist they have no choice but
to compete (Florida 2005; Shachar 2006; Wooldridge 2006)
Current immigration policy perpetuates exploitation of migrant workers by
business owners.
Tannock ’09 (Stuart, 9-1-13, “White-collar imperialisms: the H-1B debate in America,” Social
Semiotics 19: 3, 313-315, J.C)
This critique is essential, as even the government’s own Accountability Office points to flaws
and loopholes in the H-1B program that allow employers to violate the program’s ostensible
protection of labor standards (Government Accountability Office 2003, 2006). But this critique
of exploitation tends to fall short as an effective analysis and response to the increasingly
globalized high-skill US labor market on two counts. First, the critique is too narrow. The goal of
a globalized labor market for high-skill workers is, indeed, very often quite explicitly about
reaping cost savings that come from reducing wages (Bloomberg News 2007; Winters et al.
2002; World Bank 2003). But it is about far more than just this. The core principle at stake in
global talent war/global meritocracy discourse is the absolute prerogative of employers to
hire whoever they want whenever they want, based solely on business need, fully liberated
from the kinds of public good expectations that have been most operationalized at the nationstate level (e.g. the expectation that employers bear some of the cost of the public education
and vocational training of their workforce, or that they give opportunity to individuals from
disadvantaged social backgrounds, etc.). H-1B visas may often be used at the bottom ends of the
high-skill labor market; but they are used at the upper levels as well (Mir, Mathew, and Mir
2000). Control (or liberation from state and public control), not cost, is the fundamental issue.
The second limitation of the exploitation critique of the H-1B visa program is that it is used
most often by labor commentators in the United States as an excuse to exclude and banish,
rather than organize H-1B workers (Chakravartty 2006b). While the American Federation of
Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO) and other American labor
organizations have come to see the exploitation of low-skilled immigrant workers as a reason
to reach out to these workers and include them in their organizing efforts, this has distinctly
not been the case with high-skilled immigrant workers on H-1B and other work visas (AFL-CIO
2003; Freeman and Hill 2006; Lal 2003). To explain this difference, it is necessary to look at how
the H- 1B debate fits into the articulation of imperialist self-interest on the part of the US state,
capital and labor
The paradigm of suspicion immobilizes immigrants and the impoverished,
viewing them only as a source of cheap labor
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
However, suspect states are often also prime hosts of refugees and of increasing numbers of
displaced groups who are concentrated in refugee camps and shanty towns. Refugees and
internally displaced people are therefore often doubly immobilized , coerced into designated
and stigmatized areas, and located at the very bottom of the social mobility hierarchy of an
already suspect country. The overwhelming majority of refugees and internally displaced
people reside in impoverished countries at the global periphery, as refugees typically flow in
from other impoverished and warstricken suspect countries. Asia hosts half of the world’s
refugees, Africa 22 percent, Europe 21 percent, and 10 percent are located in South and North
America. Among the leading host countries of refugees in the world are Pakistan, Tanzania, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Armenia. Iran was until recently the world’s number
one host of refugees, hosting nearly 2 million Afghan people.10 Moreover, the population of
suspect countries as a whole tends to be located at the lower end of the mobility gap. In
general, its mobility constraints reflect lack of access to the resources required for mobility
(e.g., money, information, and travel documents) and, moreover, this population often serves
as a source of cheap labor, directly and indirectly catering to the needs of multinational
corporations. From this perspective, the hyper-ghettoes of suspect countries look closer, in
terms of Wacquant’s analytic terms, to the ghetto end of the continuum. Typically, most
attention has been given to the increasing difficulties of residents of suspect countries to obtain
immigration permits and political asylum. Yet not less indicative for sorting out the elementary
forms of the mobility regime, when it comes to the effective constitution of stigmatized suspect
countries and stigmatized suspect populations, is the fact that the ability to leave them is
increasingly difficult for nonimmigrants as well. Holding a Turkish or a Russian or a Nigerian
passport does not so much indicate one’s identity as a bearer of rights as much as it marks one
as a potential unwanted immigrant. Accordingly, the mobility regime is increasingly based on
limiting the travel opportunities of such citizens en masse, putting enormous difficulties on
the ability to get ordinary tourist visas, often using basic tactics such as long waits, high
application fees, and a variety of bureaucratic hurdles.11
Neoliberalism Impacts
Impact—Border Issues
Neoliberalism creates inequalities amongst the population—those who are not
economically valuable are deemed worthless
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 156]
For¶ Marshall (1998)¶ ‘social citizenship’ was associated with the expansion of equality rights¶ in
tandem with the development of the welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, and ‘political¶
citizenship’ was associated with the development of the public sphere, voting and other sorts
of¶ political rights from the nineteenth through to the twentieth century. Prior to these
developments, his evolutionist account associated the earliest innovations in British national
citizenship¶ with the growth of the ‘civil citizenship’ made up of such newly codified and legally
protected¶ rights as mobility rights and rights to sell one’s labor that developed in concert with
the¶ establishment of bourgeois property rights in early capitalism. The historical trajectory and
the¶ transferability of Marshall’s narrative to other contexts are questionable, as too is the
adequacy¶ of his triptych of citizenship in light of feminist and postcolonial critiques of the
normative¶ white western man of property that stands at the center of most modern
formulations of liberal¶ citizenship (¶ Fraser & Gordon, 1998; Kofman, 2003; Marston, 1994;
Mehta, 2000¶ ). However, as¶ Marston and Mitchell have argued, Marshall’s attention to how
eighteenth century civil citizen-¶ ship was associated with the liberal repudiation of
interventionist government helps explain¶ how a certain sort of¶ retreat¶ to civil citizenship is
now coincident with the entrenchment of neo-¶ liberal policies (¶ Marston & Mitchell, 2004¶ ).
This is the retreat marked by the erosion of social¶ citizenship through the roll-back of the
welfare state and the rolling out of what¶ Peck (2001,¶ 2004)¶ calls ‘workfare states’. It is also a
retreat characterized by the demise of political citizen-¶ ship through the privatization of the
public sphere, the increasing intrusion of money into pol-¶ itics, and the legal restriction of
political debate to various oxymoronic ‘protest zones’, ‘free¶ speech zones’ and what¶ Mitchell
(2005)¶ , examining the re-imagination of public space in recent¶ US court decisions, critiques as
the privatized bubble spaces of an atomised ‘SUV citizenship’.¶ But as such the retreat has not
been back to a static, nationally fixed form of civil citizenship based on property and mobility
rights merely within the nation-state. SUV citizenship has instead been twinned transnationally
with the development of the frequent flyer ‘Gold clubs’, ‘Platinum elites’, ‘Red Carpet
communities’ and even with what might be dubbed the ‘Gulfstream citizenship’ of today’s
hyper-mobile business class (Adey, in press). Faced with developments like these - including
expedited border-crossing innovations such as NEXUS - we need to consider how neoliberal
government practices, both macro and micro, have been busily rescaling civil citizenship in
transnational ways. At the macro-level of inter-government agreements and policies, neoliberal
governance is creating what the Gramscian theorist Gill (2003: 116e142) calls a ‘market
civilization’. In Gill’s analysis this needs to be conceptualized as a quasi-constitutional process
that is creating through agreements such as NAFTA wholly new rights for the class core of
today’s hegemonic bloc: the transnational business class. This transnational class which
organizes itself through elite gatherings such as the G7, OECD, and annual Davos meetings is,
according to Gill, entrenching for itself all sorts of new oligopolistic privileges while imposing
market discipline on the poor and weak (see also Lapham, 1998). Amongst the privileges with
which Gill is most concerned are the ‘‘privileged rights of citizenship and representation’’ (2003:
132) conferred on corporations through the protections secured by international trade
agreements and the more hidden hands of the financial markets. Yet, alongside this ‘new
constitutionalism’ for capital, Gill also gestures towards developments such as gated
communities in order to point up the more personal implications of neoliberal citizenship for
entrepreneurial individuals.¶ Other¶ theorists who have focused directly on the transnational
business class subjects have in turn¶ fleshed out how this market-mediated remaking of
citizenship relates to personal rights at¶ a more micro level of governmentality (e.g.¶ Mitchell,
2004; Olds & Thrift, 2005; Ong,¶ 1999¶ ). And, in a different way,¶ Sklair’s (2001)¶ work on the
transnational capitalist class of busi-¶ ness elites highlights the seemingly unbounded global
visions of belonging (including rights to¶ move and belong in societies all over the planet as well
as the rights to amass and control be-¶ longings globally) that animate corporate discourse (see
also¶ Sparke, 2003, 2005¶ ). It is precisely¶ this combination of abilities and attitudes associated
with transnational corporate mobility that¶ underpins what I am describing here as the
transnational rescaling of civil citizenship. Through¶ a whole set of governmental practices¶ e¶
from the formal and most obvious acts of remaking na-¶ tional law in accordance with
transnational trade law (¶ Wallach & Woodall, 2004¶ ) to the most¶ informal and often unnoticed
developments in education and popular culture (¶ Hillis, Petit, &¶ Cravey, 2002; Roberts, 2004¶ )¶
e¶ we are witnessing an emergence, albeit an extremely uneven¶ emergence, of a new kind of
transnationally envisioned, transnationally protected and transna-¶ tionally mobile citizensubject. However, the big challenge for scholars¶ e¶ not to mention for¶ transnational business
class entrepreneurs themselves¶ e¶ involves coming to terms with how¶ such transnational
transformations of citizenship are worked out on the ground in the context¶ of all sorts of
countervailing imperatives, including not least of all the sorts of intensified border¶
securitization we have seen in North America in the aftermath of 9/11.
Impact—Discrimination
Smart border programs in combination with neoliberal agendas create a class
discrimination for immigrants
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 151]
In this paper I explore what the development of an expedited border-crossing program called
NEXUS¶ reveals about the changing political geography of citizenship in contemporary North
America.¶ Developed after 9/11 as a high-tech solution to competing demands for both
heightened border security and ongoing cross-border business movement, NEXUS and other socalled Smart Border programs exemplify how a business class civil citizenship has been
extended across transnational space at the very same time as economic liberalization and
national securitization have curtailed citizenship for others. The biopolitical production of this
privileged business class citizenship is explored vis-a`-vis the macroscale entrenchment of
neoliberal policy through NAFTA and the microscale production of entrepreneurial selfhood. By
examining how this transnational privileging of business class rights has happened in an
American context of exclusionary nationalism, the paper also explores the relationship
between neoliberalism and the development of new spaces of exception defined by exclusion
from civil rights. Examples of such exclusion in-¶ clude ‘expedited removal’ and ‘extraordinary
rendition’, two forms of American anti-immigrant control¶ that have been developed in concert
with expedited border-crossing programs. Examining these forms¶ of expedited exclusion and
comparing the carceral cosmopolitanism they produce with the soft cosmopol-¶ itanism of the
NEXUS lane, the paper ends by offering an argument about the relationship between the¶
neoliberal privileging of transnational mobility rights and its exclusionary counterparts.
Neo-liberalistic programs on the border have created clear inequalities amongst
different classes
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 169]
One obvious underside to the transnational citizenship of expedited crossing lanes is the
slowed down border-crossing experience imposed on ordinary travelers who cannot afford to
purchase or do not have the organizational capacity or the desire to acquire membership in the
fast lane. In his analysis of the code-spaces of contemporary airports,Adey (2004: 1376)suggests
in this way that there are also emerging kinetic underclasses moving alongside - but much more
slowly - the fast lane kinetic elites. Such an argument in turn begs questions about the different
speeds allotted to different kinetic underclasses. Coach class delays and secondary processing
may be frustrating for many ordinary travelers today, including many academics, but they are
largely just minor annoyances for the travelling middle-classes. Unless such travelers are
vulnerable to racial coding as supposed ‘security risks’, these club-class passengers still move
with significant speed in the comfy cosmopolitan circuits created by international conference
trips, international tourism and international family get-togethers. For the world’s working
classes and for those subject to ‘security risk’ codification, by contrast, being in the kinetic
underclasses has altogether more oppressive and more unpredictable outcomes - including,
not least of all, much more volatile mixes of movement and immobility. The experience of
immobility in these cases means something entirely different to the petty class resentments that
come with seeing business suits and Lexus cars speed by in NEXUS lanes. Immobility for the
really subaltern underclasses means incarceration and, as Joe Nevins underlines in his
important work on the experiences of working-class Mexican migrants crossing into America,
sometimes death too (Nevins, 2002). It should also be noted that as well as representing ever
more appalling exclusions from the privileges of citizenship and civil rights, those surviving on
this bleak underside of NEXUS lane privilege also sometimes ironically experience very rapid
movement too: rapid movement into detention centers, rapid movement between detention
centers, and, ultimately, rapid transnational movement out of America, sometimes into
incarceration elsewhere. The result is a kind of carceral cosmopolitanism that underlines the
value of arguments by scholars such as Cheah (1998), Clifford (1998) and Robbins (1998) that we
must distinguish between different formse‘discrepant’ forms, as Clifford calls theme of
cosmopolitanism. Two North American examples of such carceral cosmopolitanism stand out as
especially disturbing parallels-cum-contrasts with the soft cosmopolitanism of expedited
crossing lanes. The first called ‘expedited removal’ began in the mid-1990s as an another
outcome e like Section 110e of the new immigration controls of IIRIRA; and the second called
‘extraordinary rendition’ has developed most explicitly in the context of the ‘War on Terror’ as a
way of off-shoring US terror suspects for what one critic has called the ‘‘outsourcing of torture’’
(Mayer, 2005). By considering both of these radical forms of expulsion from citizenship and civil
rights, I want to end this paper by asking how the harsh kinds of oppressed and brutalized
cosmopolitanism they represent actually might relate to the soft cosmopolitanism of the NEXUS
lane.
Impact—Laundry List
Undocumented labor in a neoliberal economy spurs a laundry list of impacts and our
government is literally leaving migrants in an unregulated limbo, either they are full
members but not part of society or they are in the space between unaccepted.
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and discourses
of migrant domestic workers [Charles, “Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of
Citizenship,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
First, Agamben’s depiction of the interstitial is salient to the situation ¶ of refugees and
migrant workers, who are neither fully recognized as¶ members nor completely excluded
as strangers. As William Walters notes,¶ embodying an “in-between space,” the camp
constitutes an “ambiguous,¶ grey zone between the inside and the outside, the social
condition¶ of being neither fully excluded nor fully recognized” that resonates with¶
border-crossing refugees and migrants (2008, 187–88). Moreover, the¶ interstitiality of
irregular migration is immanent to the liberal biopolitical¶ order. Rajaram and GrundyWarr point out, “The refugee or other irregular¶ migrant, the detritus or remainder, is
integral to the sovereign law that¶ encompasses the interiorized humanity” (2004, 35).
They write,¶ The encounter with an excess . . . is both a threat to the regular order¶ and
integral for its continuation. It is a threat to the order because it¶ reminds of the ruses
undertaken to confine human beings to a politicized¶ life within the nation-state. And it
is integral to the continuation of¶ the system of the nation-state because its unruliness
serves to define the¶ norm. . . . [The sovereign law] maintains a ruse of inside/outside
while¶ at the same time creating the ambiguous system of the nation-state that¶
depends on the appropriation of the ostensibly excluded in order to ¶ maintain the
inside. (36; emphasis in original)¶ Building upon Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, the
remainder is integral to sovereign power not only juridically or politically, but also
economically:¶ the exception of undocumented labor is immanent and integral to ¶ the
normalcy of neoliberal economy. Sovereign power simultaneously¶ adopts labor laws
to regulate the market while willfully withdrawing itself ¶ from subcontracted
sweatshops, export processing zones, and the informal¶ economy that hire
undocumented immigrants in order to sustain¶ and reproduce the hypercapitalist
order. Migrant workers are not simply¶ excluded: they are deliberately brought in,
sought after, and tolerated by¶ the capitalist regime to play a critical part as the
disposable and compliant¶ labor of the state operation (thus inside), while their
membership is deliberately¶ left suspended as “undocumented” individuals who have
no official¶ resort to participate politically in the state as citizens (thus outside). Anne¶
McNevin argues that undocumented immigrants are “immanent outsiders”¶ who are
“incorporated into the political community as economic participants ¶ but denied the
status of insiders” (2006, 141). Undocumented¶ labor is left in an exceptional state of
interstitiality and in-between-ness so¶ to be constituted as an immanent and productive
part of neoliberal economy¶ and biopolitical citizenry.
Impact—Biopolitics
Current neoliberal effects to control the border reifies biopollitical control
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 156]
Neoliberalism as a regime of governance is easy enough to describe in the abstract.
Ideologically it is organized around the twin ideas of liberalizing the capitalist market from
state control and refashioning state practices in the idealized image of the free market. At the
macro-scale of government policy these ideas have inspired and informed the promotion and
entrenchment of the now familiar neoliberal approach to governance that includes free trade,
privatization, financial deregulation, monetarism, fiscal austerity, welfare reform, and, the
punitive policing of the poor. At the level of the more micro practices that Foucault's followers
have called governmentality (see Burchell et al 1991), neoliberalism is also commonly
associated with the remaking of state regulation through the market-based mentalities and
techniques associated with audits, performance assessments, benchmarking, risk ratings, and,
at a still more personal level, the educational and cultural cultivation of a new kind of selfpromoting and self-policing entrepreneurial individualism. Whether macro or micro, all these
innovations in governmental policy and practice represent transformed patterns of statemaking and rule. Even in the abstract, therefore, it is clear that, despite the common-sense
cant about 'deregulation' in neoliberal rhetoric, neoliberalism leads in practice to reregulation. 5 However, when such context contingent neoliberal reregulations are examined in
detail, the contradictions and resulting theoretical complications expand exponentially (Sparke,
forthcoming). Examined in historical and geographical context, neoliberalism represents an
extraordinarily messy mix of ideas and practices that have been developed and deployed in
different ways with different names in different places (Larner, 2000; Mitchell, 2004). While the
ideas go back to Smith and Ricardo, their reactivation as neoliberalism is connected to the late
twentieth century rejection of Keynesian liberalism. This rejection had been persistently
demanded through the 1940s, 50s and 60s by critics of state control such as Friederich von
Hayek and Milton Friedman. However, it only came to be implemented as policy in the
aftermath of the economic crises of the 1970s when politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan came to power promising the roll-back of state control over capitalism. At the
time of the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions, however, their national critics tended to talk
not about neoliberalism but rather about a 'New Right', or about 'Thatcherism', 'Reaganism' and
their much touted but generally flouted commitments to 'fiscal conservativism'. Only
retroactively have Thatcher and Reagan been reviewed as revolutionaries of neoliberalism per
se. During the 1970s and 1980s it was instead more commonly critics in the Global South, most
especially in Latin America, who were early to use neoliberalism to critique externally imposed
but internally reproduced market-based governance (Adelman and Centemo, forthcoming). This
is worth remembering because the Latin American experience also reminds us that
neoliberalism frequently had an authoritarian underbelly. This does not mean that neoliberalism
is always and everywhere connected to the sorts of coercive political violence that cast out the
socialists and brought Pinochet and his Chicago trained economists to power in Chile (Valdés,
1995). Nor does it mean that it is all about the eclipse of national citizenship by the structural
adjustment imperatives of transnational finance. However, the Latin American lessons do clearly
suggest that we should approach any examination of neoliberal governance with a sensitivity to
its contradictions, to its subordination of national citizenship, and to the casting out from the
neoliberal nation-state of sundry others deemed unworthy of civil rights (see also Hart,
forthcoming). 6 Alongside the lessons that can be garnered about neoliberalism's contradictions
from studying its uneven innovation and implementation as a macrological mode of governance,
the actual approach taken in what follows to the neoliberalism of the NEXUS program draws just
as much for inspiration on the more micrological approach to neoliberal power relations
developed in the governmentality literature (Burchell et al 1991). In an exception to his normal
focus on the development of government in France, Foucault spent some time in his 1979
Collège de France lectures also examining German and American innovations in liberal
government. Especially in his account of Gary Becker and the Chicago School, Foucault was keen
to chart the totalizing assumptions of neoliberal economic theory and, in particular, its
assumptions about a new homo economicus, an "individual producer-consumer," in Colin
Gordon's gloss, who is "not just an enterprise, but the entrepreneur of himself or herself"
(Gordon, 1991: 44). In Gordon's interpretation this normative model of personhood identified
by Foucault as a symptomatic feature of neoliberalism simultaneously signified a wholesale
transformation of societal belonging too: a transformation from a society of collective
citizenship to a society of radically individuated citizenship, a new market-mediated society
over which state practices rule as what Foucault called "une sorte de tribunal économique
permanent" - a kind of permanent economic tribunal (quoted and translated in Lemke, 2001:
198). As a result, argues Gordon, the transition from liberal Keynesian government to neoliberal
government means that: "[t]he notion of the social body as a collective subject committed to
the reparation of the injuries suffered by its individual members gives […way to a new] role for
the state as a custodian of a collective reality principle, distributing the disciplines of the
competitive world market throughout the interstices of the social body" (Gordon, 1991: 45).
Also following Foucault, other theorists of governmentality such as Thomas Lemke suggest in
this way that "the key feature of neo-liberal rationality is the congruence it endeavours to
achieve between a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor" (Lemke,
2001: 197). Lemke might just as well have said "responsible and moral citizen" because it is
precisely the normative individuality of national citizenship that neoliberal governmental
practices are busily reworking into a new more market-mediated "citizenship regime" of
economic-rational actors (Dobrowolsky and Jenson, 2004; and Jenson and Phillips, 7 1996).
Expanding on Lemke's argument, Wendy Brown underlines that in this way neoliberalism
"normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial actors in every sphere
of life" (Brown, 2003). As Barry Hindess (2002) further points out, these marketization
developments in governmentality therefore have profound consequences for both the
political and the social rights of citizenship we have inherited from struggles of the twentieth
century (cf Fraser, 2003). He argues thus that "political rights (such as they are) may remain but
their scope is restricted as market regulation takes over from direct regulation by state agencies
and the judgement of the market is brought to bear on the conduct of states, while the social
rights of citizenship (where they exist) are pared back as provision through the market replaces
provision directly or indirectly through the state" (Hindess, 2000: 140). Hindess here takes his
categories of social and political citizenship from the 1960s' work of the English sociologist T.H.
Marshall, and, while focusing on how social and political forms of citizenship have been
increasingly restricted and economically recoded in the subsequent years, he does not reflect on
how Marshall's third category of 'civil citizenship' might have changed rather differently. As I
have argued elsewhere (Sparke, 2004b), however, it is useful to reflect further on how the
economic recodings of this third form of citizenship have not only led to its increasing
restriction to entrepreneurial social classes, but also to its rescaling: a territorial rescaling,
most notably, from the scale of nationally-defined and territorially enclosed rights to the scale
of transnationally-defined and territorially open-ended rights.
Biopolitics is the result of neoliberal refashioning at the border
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 157]
Taking my cue from Foucault’s own work on the so-called biopolitical production of self-¶
governing citizen-subjects in modern prisons, clinics, classrooms and so on, my suggestion¶ in
what follows is that we can usefully examine the context contingent transnationalization¶ of
civil citizenship¶ including how it is shaped by countervailing nationalistic forces¶ by fo-¶
cusing on the particular spaces of border management technologies.¶ The jargon of biopolitics
is useful in this respect because it points to what the recoding of citizenship through border
discipline can tell us about the assumptions, attitudes, and abilities associated with the more
general neoliberal refashioning of civil citizenship. Biopolitics for Foucault included both
discourses about the self-governing subject and the actual production of self-governed life
within particular modern spaces. Some of the governmentality literature that supposedly
follows in his footsteps has not always addressed both these aspects of biopolitics. Nikolas
Rose’s depiction of ‘advanced liberalism’, for example, offers such an abstract discursive
account of the self-government of the entrepreneurial subject that the nitty-gritty activities of
biopolitical production under neoliberalism disappear from view. Partly this is because he
associates neoliberalism more with ideology than government practices, and partly this appears
to be because he wants to avoid an epochal account of historical transition from an age of
liberalism to an age of neoliberalism. However, his disembodied account is also ironically
indicative of a structuralism that he disavows. Thus, as Larner cautions, ‘‘without analyses of the
‘messy actualities’ of particular neoliberal projects, those working within this analytic run the
risk of precisely the problem they wish to avoid - that of producing generalized accounts of
historical epochs’’ (Larner, 2000: 14). Here, therefore, I want to explore the messy actualities of
the development of the NEXUS lane as a way of examining in a more grounded way the
convolutions, contradictions and countervailing forces surrounding the neoliberalization of
citizenship in contemporary North America. In underlining the reterritorialization of the
resulting civil citizenship and by therefore highlighting how the ‘new normal’ - as Bhandar
(2004) calls it - of this neoliberalized citizenship is distinctively transnational in scope, I also
want to point towards the parallel transnationalization of the new abnormal too. As a result, I
complement and conclude this study by exploring how NAFTA region neoliberalization also
entails new forms of exceptionalism: new exclusionary exceptions from citizenship that are
based upon older raciological imaginations of nation, but which work through new techniques
of expedited and transnationalized alienation that expel so-called ‘aliens’ as quickly as
business travelers can now buy fast passage across the NAFTA region’s internal borders.
Impact—Otherization
Neo-liberalism on the border categorizes individuals into kinetic elites and
foreigners who are deemed unfit
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 174]
The main argument made in this article about NEXUS concerns the ways in which this little
known expedited border-crossing program and its development are symptomatic of the
neoliberalization of citizenship in today’s North American context. This is a context, as I have
explained, shaped at once by the transnational entrenchment of free market rights and the
increasingly oppressive impact of securitized nationalism. NEXUS lane participants - the people
who ‘cross often’ and want to ‘make it simple’, the people who are prepared to buy flexible
citizenship because ‘the fastlane is where you want to be’ - would seem to represent the
paradigmatic neoliberal citizen-players on the transnational level playing field of free trade,
neoliberal citizens for whom transnational mobility rights are part of the more general
transnational business class privilege that continues to be expanded and entrenched globally
through the ‘new constitutionalism’ of free trade and related laws. As such, the kinetic elites
of the NEXUS lane appear to be able to buy for themselves at least a little of the borderless
world fantasy-life whose most transcendently transnational subjects can rise above it all as
Gulfstream citizens of the world, the world of transnational property rights and mobility rights
seen best through the Enhanced Vision System of a Gulfstream jet. But then we have the kinetic
underclasses of expedited removal and extraordinary rendition whose borderless world is, by
contrast, a world without a constitution, a world which may well extend transnationally via
Gulfstream jets across borders, but only so as to better cast out its dehumanized and rightsdeprived subjects into the spaces of exception that now increasingly seem to form a
transnational gulag of incarceration and outsourced torture. The violence of extraordinary
rendition may seem especially context contingent, in this regard, not a neoliberal or otherwise
economically induced outcome, but a result of an exceptional American ability to combine free
market fundamentalism with an inhuman disregard for foreigners deemed unfit (often because
of orientalist codes) for business. ¶ Consider in this regard what happened when Edward
Markey, a democratic congressman from Massachusetts, introduced legislation to ban
extraordinary rendition in 2005.¶ Republican House speaker Dennis Hastert said the legislation
was going nowhere, and, when¶ Herbert (2005: A 25)¶ , a columnist from the¶ New York Times¶
asked why, he was told: ‘‘The¶ speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that
suspected terrorists should¶ be sent to their home countries’’. Then, when Herbert asked why
they should not be held¶ and prosecuted in the US, Pete Jeffries from the speaker’s office
replied: ‘‘Because U.S. tax-¶ payers should not necessarily be on the hook for their judicial and
incarceration costs’’. This¶ response seems a telling illustration of the white-Americans-first
exceptionalism that has led¶ many in US government to think that creating spaces of
exception to human rights laws is¶ just fine. But it is also, I think, an extraordinarily telling
indictment of the neoliberal logic¶ through which extraordinary rendition has been thought
out and justified by its perpetrators.¶ American taxpayers, Jeffries seemed to be saying, should
not have to pay for government¶ services (whether they be torture or its prevention) when they
are being ‘consumed’ by those¶ who do not pay taxes in America. Also overdetermined by
economic codes, expedited removal¶ seems to reflect a similarly consumerist neoliberal
revisioning of citizenship and security, being¶ imagined by the 1996 legislative promoters of
IIRIRA as part of the same individualized-¶ contractualism that turned welfare into workfare and
recoded American citizenship more gen-¶ erally in the terms of the payments and debts of
private commercial contracts. In other words,¶ while both extraordinary rendition and
expedited removal both clearly need to be understood in¶ terms of the extra-capitalistic
imperatives associated with virulently nationalistic (and thus¶ racist and masculinist)
imperatives, they also appear to reflect some of the same economic¶ hall-marks of a
neoliberalism that, as Foucault once argued, turns citizens into entrepreneurs¶ of their selves.
Thus, while asylum seekers thrown into subcontracted prison space by DHS¶ and carceral
cosmopolitans such as Maher Arar are completely deprived of agency and choice,¶ their plight
needs nonetheless to be understood in relation to the ways in which the normative¶ citizen of
North America has meanwhile been ‘‘re-specified as an active agent both able and¶ obliged to
exercise autonomous choices.’’ (¶ Larner, 2000¶ : 13).
Impact—Securitization
Neoliberal thought is inextricably tied to securitization of the border
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International Studies, Adjunct Professor
of Global Health, Director of the University of Washington's Online Integrated Social Science
Major “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,”
published in an edited form as “A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and the Future of the
Border,” in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 174]
By securitized nationalism I am referring to the cultural political forces that lead to the
imagining, surveilling and policing of the nation state in especially exclusionary but
economically discerning ways. The increasingly market-mediated methods of such
securitization often involve¶ commercial risk management and ‘dataveillance’ strategies, but
with securitized nationalism¶ they are combined with long-standing nationalistic traditions of
imagining the homeland, encod-¶ ing bodies, and¶ in¶ Campbell’s (1998)¶ terms¶ ‘writing security’
through identity-based exclu-¶ sions of people deemed to be untrustworthy aliens. By free
market transnationalism, by contrast, I¶ am referring to distinctively incorporative economic
imperatives that involve increasing transna-¶ tional capitalist interdependencies and the
associated entrenchment of transnational capitalist¶ mobility rights through various forms of
free market re-regulation. Such a regime of free market¶ transnationalism may well be
considered by many readers to be a rough synonym for neoliber-¶ alism. But here I am proposing
a more conjunctural approach to theorising neoliberalism as a con-¶ textually contingent¶
articulation¶ of free market governmental practices¶ with¶ varied and often¶ quite illiberal forms
of social and political rule (see also¶ Sparke, 2004a, in press¶ ). This context¶ contingent definition
of neoliberalism should not be taken to imply that it is a form of rule¶ that is all-inclusive or
simply continuous with the long history and heterogeneity of capitalism¶ itself. The ‘neo’ does
mark something discrete and new historically, including, not least of all,¶ the transnationalism of
today’s liberalized market regimes. While neoliberalism certainly repre-¶ sents a revival of
classical nineteenth century free market liberalism, it is also clearly a new kind¶ of capitalist
liberalization that is distinct insofar as it has been imagined and implemented¶ after¶ and¶ in
opposition to¶ the state-regulated national economies of the twentieth century. It is because¶
such imagination and implementation have been worked out in different ways in different
places¶ that neoliberalism needs to be examined conjuncturally. The ‘Neoliberal Nexus’ referred
to in the¶ title of this paper is therefore meant to indicate this conjunctural approach as well as
underlining¶ how the Nexus program itself can be understood as an example of
neoliberalization.¶ A conjunctural approach, it needs underlining, does not foreclose the
possibility of making¶ more general claims about neoliberalism and its reterritorialization of
social and political life.¶ Thus while explaining the emergence and significance of the Nexus
program as a context con-¶ tingent response to the contradictory imperatives of national
securitization and economic facil-¶ itation, the article still makes a claim that the program
exemplifies broader changes to¶ citizenship¶ most notably, new transnational mobility rights
for some and new exclusions¶ for others¶ under a combination of macroscale neoliberal
governance and microscale neolib-¶ eral governmentality. In order to clarify this argument, I
begin by explaining what I mean by¶ neoliberal governance and governmentality and why border
management can be viewed as¶ a useful window on to the neoliberal remaking of citizenship.
Subsequently, I will chart the¶ contradictory story of the development of the NEXUS program
and consider the ways in which¶ it exemplifies both the inclusions and exclusions of neoliberal
citizenship.
Impact—Exploitation
Neoliberal Nation States exploit and systematically reduce migrants to an
invisible entity that is easily exploitable.
Kasli and Parla 2009[Zeynep and Ayse, “Broken Lines of Il/Legality and the Reproduction of State
Sovereignty: The Impact of Visa Policies on Immigrants to Turkey from Bulgaria,” in Alternatives 34, pg
204]
It has been widely claimed that the acceleration and intensification of globalization, especially
in conjunction with the neoliberal economic restructuring of the last few decades, poses
challenges to nation-states not only through trahnsnational corporations and international
political bodies but also through the transnational ties migrants forge beyond national
borders.1 Nonetheless, as Bauman argues, “there seems¶ to be an intimate kinship, mutual
conditioning and reciprocal reinforcement¶ between the globalization of all aspects of the
economy. and the renewed emphasis on the territorial principle.”2 The elective affinity
between globalization and the territorial principle, or what¶ others have more generally
described as the continuing relevance of the nation-state,3 increasingly renders state borders
and visa policies the sites of an asymmetric relationship between the sovereign state and
immigrants who develop formal and informal strategies to expand spaces for maneuver, the
limits of which are nonetheless still demarcated¶ by the sovereign state.¶ It has also been argued
that the reproduction of state sovereignty often utilizes the temporariness of the legal status
of immigrants.4 According¶ to Calavita’s primarily economic emphasis, the law systematically
reproduces the irregularity of migrants in order to ensure a vulnerable and dispensable
workforce. The sorting of people into categories of otherness no longer occurs on the basis of
cultural or ethnic markers, but rather on their positioning in the global economy.5¶ In a similar
vein, King underlines that “illegality seems to be constructed in an illogical (but perhaps
cynical) way by host societies which seem to be willing to exploit cheap migrant labor (and
even be structurally dependent upon it) yet at the same time to deny the legal and civic
existence of migrants.”6 Balibar, too, points to the reproduction¶ of illegality despite the
rhetoric of immigration control but places the¶ emphasis on how illegality and discourses about
illegality become the¶ raison d’étre of the security apparatus.
Impact—A2: Neolib Good
Immigration policy doesn’t guarantee value to life for migrant workers.
Tannock ’09 (Stuart, 9-1-13, “White-collar imperialisms: the H-1B debate in America,” Social
Semiotics 19: 3, 322, J.C)
‘‘Professional and technical workers in this nation have made enormous personal sacrifices to
gain the education and training necessary to compete for the knowledge jobs in the so called
new American economy,’’says the AFL-CIO’s Michael Gildea (2006): ‘‘They deserve better than
to be victimized by guest worker programs like H- 1B.’’ H-1B opponents’ rhetoric is also infused
with a powerful sense of betrayal and shock that foreign competition and economic misfortune
should be happening to them not just because they are Americans, but because they are
educated Americans. Education was supposed to protect them from the ravages of neo-liberal
globalization; and skilled work was to be the preserve of citizens exclusively. Anti-H-1B activist
Rob Sanchez, in his biographical sketch above, thus recalls seeing immigrants coming into
America throughout his life, without ever imagining that immigration might affect his own
career as a skilled software professional. ‘‘We are America’s best and brightest and we are
being systematically replaced by cheap foreign labor,’’ an online anti-H-1B group protests:
‘‘The jobs that are being replaced are Computer Scientist, Computer Engineers ... Now are these
the type of jobs you would like foreigners to have?’’ (quoted in Chakravartty 2006b, 46).
Appealing as the new knowledge economy model may have been to many in the United States,
it had two fundamental flaws as a just and effective class compromise. First, it was inherently
unstable and doomed to unravel quickly. The US state had long had its own political interests
in bringing the foreign-born to study and work in US universities and high-skill workplaces;
and American capital, as soon as technological, political and social conditions permitted, was as
interested in sourcing high-skill work overseas, or importing high-skill immigrant workers to
the United States, as it had been previously with the low-skill manufacturing sector. Three
decades after the arrival of the knowledge economy had first been broadcast in books such as
Daniel Bell’s (1973) The coming of the post-industrial society, moreover, high-wage, high-skill
(college-educated) work is still a minority of the overall job market in every country on earth,
the United States included. Skill and education, in and of themselves, are simply not effective
guarantors of secure employment, high wages, a high standard of living or a good quality of
life for everyone over the long run (Brown et al. 2006).
A2
A2: Utilitarianism
Utilitarian arguments amoral – the number of eligible people receiving rights is
irrelevant; the recognition of the rights preferred
Pevnick 11 [Ryan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University,
Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, p.
87-88, AJM]
Some may worry that it is pointless to grant a legal right of free movement to people who are
so deeply impoverished. After all, international migration is a costly process and only a very
small proportion of those entitled to the right will be able to claim it. Although I concur with the
empirical claim behind this objection, I deny - for three reasons - that it undermines the case
for the right in question. First, there are many legal rights that are not claimed by most people
to whom they are available, and we do not rypically regard this as reason to abandon the right
in question. Many people do not exercise their right to vote or their right to worship, but we
certainly do not think that this non-exercise of a right undermines the rationale for its existence.
Second, the fact that few people manage to claim the right does not undermine its value for
those who do. Third, to deny qualified individuals the legal right to immigrate makes one
complicit in the violation of the subsistence rights in question. As Thomas Pogge explains, we
"must not avoidably restrict the freedom of some so as to render their access to basic
necessities insecure - especially through official denial or deprivation" (Pogge 2002, 67). Thus,
even if it is true that few of the qualified individuals will be able to claim the right in question,
this fact does not undermine the importance of legally recognizing it.
A2: Politics/Framework
Those advocating open borders are not welcome in political discourse. The
unjust effects of the “other’s” exclusion become apparent
Pevnick 11 [Ryan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University,
Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, p.
79, AJM]
The open borders view occupies a somewhat strange position in debates regarding
immigration. On the one hand, arguments for open borders are rarely heard in popular
political discussion (which typically assumes the state's right to block migration). Even when the
position is advanced in public debate (for example, by The Wall Street journal), it is not seen as a
serious policy option or engaged as anything more than fanciful provocation. Alternatively, it is
no exaggeration to describe open borders as the dominant position among academics writing
about justice and immigration. Indeed, here it is any non-open borders position that is seen as
so much fanciful provocation. One author goes so far as to say that, although many arguments
are employed by those who object to open borders, "there seems little reason to consider
them all in derail, since all are fallacious: they are expressions of racist attitudes or general
hostility to foreigners rather than the product of serious assessment" (Dummett 2001, 67).
Whether or not one is antecedently sympathetic to the position, it is worthwhile to engage
seriously and carefully with the arguments given in favor of open borders. If nothing else, it is
useful to think of open borders as the null hypothesis. Any restrictions that groups of
individuals want to place on the movement of others must be justified with a set of reasons
consistent with the equal status of all. The kinds of reasons one gives for rejecting open
borders shape the types of restrictions (and so the type of immigration policy) that one can
logically accept. For example, if open borders is rejected because of the importance of
maintaining a given national identity (and we will examine arguments of this type in chapter 6),
restrictions will be shaped so as to protect that identity. Other rationales for restricting
immigration vvill set us on the course to very different kinds of immigration policies. Thus, even
if it turns out that the open borders position is [are] mistaken, it is nevertheless important to
carefully consider the strength of the arguments that can be offered in its support.
A2: Immigration Bad Args
Their warrant for militarization links to the criticism – rejection of immigration
severs the origins of the state
Hayter, Migration activist and graduate of Oxford University, 2004 (Theresa, Open
Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) MM
Current nation states are the result of successive waves of immigration, most of which took
place before the twentieth century. Although migrants are currently vilified and subjected to
unprecedented levels of restriction, to deny the validity of migration is to deny part of the
social nature of human beings. But the rate of migration in relation to total population is now
lower than it has been at times in the past. In spite of scaremongering about the supposed
threat of ‘swamping’ by immigrants and refugees, there is in fact little evidence that
migration is increasing significantly , or likely to do so. The numbers about which so much fuss
is made are in reality rather small. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the
imperialist expansion of Europe, the main migratory movements (apart from emigrations from
Europe) have resulted from the requirements for labour of capitalist industry, mines and
plantations. In the conquered territories these were often satisfied by the more or less overt
use of force. In The New Helots Robin Cohen describes a spectrum of labour recruitment which
ranges from total compulsion, as in the slave trade, through situations where people are forced
into wage labour by regimes which deprive them of their land and/or force them to raise money
to pay taxes and where once recruited they are virtually deprived of their liberty, to situations
where the dislocations caused by imperialism and war more or less force people to seek work
and safety abroad. After the Second World War European governments sent agencies to recruit
workers from, for example, southern Europe, North Africa, Turkey and the Caribbean. Especially
in Germany and Switzerland, workers were recruited on contracts which denied them the right
to change employment or to settle and gave them few of the other rights enjoyed by native
workers.
Border control is ineffective and immoral, increase in immigration is inevitable
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
The damage caused by immigration controls would be difficult to justify morally even if the
measures were in fact effective at reducing undocumented immigration. Since immigration
controls are woefully unsuccessful, it is impossible to make any sense of the damage. By most
accounts, enforcement has been a failure . The undocumented immigrant population has
increased despite the unprecedented escalation in border enforcement over the past twenty
years. Border enforcement measures have punished, stigmatized , and, at times, killed
immigrants. But they have not significantly reduced undocumented immigration. Thus, they
have been both ineffective and immoral.
Turn: border enforcement increases likelihood of permanent residencies and
immigration as increased
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
In spite of the high human costs, increased border enforcement has proven to be woefully
ineffective. Its self-defeating nature is demonstrated by its counterintuitive consequence.
Contrary to expectations, migrants who come to the United States under the current regime
are more likely to remain permanently in the country than those who came in the past.
Understandably, undocumented immigrants who have made it to the United States do not
want to risk running the gauntlet of border controls and literally place their lives on the line a
second time.108 As a result, the undocumented immigrant population in the country has
increased from an estimated 5 to 7 million when the various border operations were put into
place in the 1990s to approximately 11 to 12 million today. This bears repeating. The
undocumented population has increased 114 | Bordering on the Immoral despite the
monumental border enforcement initiatives adopted in the past decade, efforts that have cost
millions of dollars and resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. The undocumented
immigrant population has also risen in the face of the unprecedented focus on immigration
enforcement after September 11
A2: Backlash
Backlash args emerge from a worst-case lens because of a lack of concrete
reference points – the EU illustrates the numerous benefits of open borders
Delacroix, former professor of management, & Nikiforov, business
development specialist, 9
[Jacques & Sergey, 9, “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely,” The
Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 107, MM]
The bold open-border solution is not the subject of serious debate because Americans lack
reference points from which to consider even its most predictable implications. In regard to
open borders, the collective American imagination may be dealing mostly in nightmarish
caricatures . Yet a concrete precedent exists in the European Union, which for more than forty
years has been progressively eliminating all internal barriers, including those that pertain to
the free movement of persons. (We emphasize, though, that we do not propose that the
European Union constitutes a general model of behavior for the United States. It should also be
obvious that a study of the union’s experience with internal migrations does not imply
admiration for its bureaucratic proclivities.) Between 1986 and 1992, ten countries of the
European Union, some formerly vengefully nationalistic states, reached a situation in which
practically any citizen of a union country may pull up stakes and go to live anywhere else in
the union.2 The European Union grants citizens of newer members states the same privileges
gradually, after a more or less extensive waiting period, thereafter withholding only the right of
suffrage in national elections. Anecdotal evidence of this policy’s effectiveness is all over the
map of Europe. An English couple—of all people—runs their own cafe´ in deepest France.
Paris apartment house concierges—at all times, a central cultural role in French society— today
normally speak French with a Portuguese accent. Irishmen shoe horses in Seville. Real Italian
restaurants run by real natives of Italy are everywhere.3 This kind of smooth integration is
remarkable given that several of the member countries suffered grievously at the hands of
other member countries within living memory. (In fact, the architects of this success belong to
the very generation that experienced most of this intra-European aggression.) Nothing
approaching such a legacy of hostility exists between the United States and Mexico. If it did,
the resentment would belong on the Mexican side because of the 160-year-old Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo by which Mexico lost half of its territory
The DA enforces unending violence – only a ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ can
dismantle the ideologies that make the upholding of exclusion a possibility
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University, 0
[Walter, 0, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,”
Public Culture, Volume: 12, p. 739-744, MM]
I have shown three stages of cosmopolitan projects of the modern/colonial world system or, if
you prefer, of modernity/coloniality. In the first, cosmopolitanism faced the difficulties of
dealing with pagans, infidels, and barbarians. It was a religious and racial configuration. In the
second, cosmopolitanism faced the difficulties of communities without states and the dangers
of the foreigners that, at that point in time, were the foreigners at the edge of the Europe of
nations. In the third stage, communists replaced pagans and infidels, barbarians and foreigners,
as the difficulties of cosmopolitan society were reassessed. Today the scenario Kant was
observing has changed again with the “dangers” presented by recent African immigration to
Europe and Latin Americans to the United States. Religious exclusion, national exclusion,
ideological exclusion, and ethnic exclusion have several elements in common: first, the
identification of frontiers and exteriority; second, the racial component in the making of the
frontier as colonial difference (linked to religion in the first instance and to nationalism in the
second); and third, the ideological component in the remaking of the imperial difference during
the third historical stage (liberalism versus socialism within the modern/ colonial world).
Ethnicity became a crucial trademark after the end of the Cold War, although its roots had
already been established in connection with religion and nationalism. While there is a temporal
succession that links the three stages and projects them onto the current post–Cold War
globalization, they are each constitutive of the modern/colonial world and cohabit today, as
Kosovo clearly bears witness to. Furthermore, the three stages that I am reconstituting
historically but that are the “ground” of the present, are successive and complementary
moments in the struggle for the survival and hegemony of the North Atlantic or, if you wish, the
reconstituted face of the Western world. I suspect that it is possible now to talk more
specifically about a fourth stage, perhaps a postmodern/postcolonial moment, of the
modern/colonial world, which I have been announcing in the previous paragraph and in which
current discussions on cosmopolitanism are taking place—a stage that Immanuel Wallerstein
(1999) described as the “end of the world as we know it.” It also may be possible now to
have a “cosmopolitan manifesto” to deal with the “world risk society” (Beck 1999).6 The
erasure of the imperial difference that sustained the Cold War and the current process of its
relocation in China brings us back to a situation closer to the one faced by Vitoria: imagining
conviviality across religious and racial divides. Global coloniality is drawing a new scenario.
Capitalism is no longer concentrating in the Mediterranean (as in Vitoria’s time) or in the Europe
of nations and the North Atlantic (as in Kant’s time) when liberalism went together with
Christian Protestantism and skin color began to replace blood and religion in the reconfiguration
of the colonial difference. At that time, capital, labor control, and whiteness became the new
paradigm under which the colonial difference was redefined. In the second half of the twentieth
century but more so after the end of the Cold War, capitalism is crossing the former colonial
difference with the Orient and relocating it as imperial difference with China— thereby entering
territories in which Christianity, liberalism, and whiteness are alien categories. Perhaps Samuel
Huntington (1996) had a similar scenario in mind when he proposed that in the future, wars
would be motivated by the clash of civilizations rather than by economic reasons. Which means
that when capitalism crosses the colonial difference, it brings civilizations into conflicts of a
different order. In any event, relevant to my argument is the fact that while capitalism expands,
and the rage for accumulation daily escapes further beyond control (for instance, the weakening
of nation-states or the irrational exuberance of the market), racial and religious conflicts emerge
as new impediments to the possibility of cosmopolitan societies. The new situation we are
facing in the fourth stage is that cosmopolitanism (and democracy) can no longer be
articulated from one point of view, within a single logic, a mono-logic (if benevolent)
discourse from the political right or left. Vitoria, Kant, the ideologues of interdependence, the
champions of development, and the neoliberal managers believing, or saying, that technology
will lift poverty left little room for those on the other side of the colonial difference. And,
obviously, managed cosmopolitanism could (and more likely will) remain as a benevolent form
of control. In the New World order, how can critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism be thought
out without falling into the traps of cultural relativism (and the reproduction of the colonial
difference) as pointed out by An-Na’im? I have been suggesting, and now will move to justify,
that cultural relativism should be dissolved into colonial difference and that the colonial
difference should be identified as the location for the critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism that
confronts managerial global designs of ideologues and executives of the network society.
Instead of cosmopolitanism managed from above (that is, global designs), I am proposing
cosmopolitanism, critical and dialogic, emerging from the various spatial and historical
locations of the colonial difference (Mignolo 2000). In this vein, I interpret the claim made by
An-Na’im. Replacing cultural differences with the colonial difference helps change the terms,
and not only the content, of the conversation: Culture is the term that in the eighteenth century
and in the Western secular world replaced religion in a new discourse of colonial expansion
(Dirks 1992). The notion of cultural relativism transformed coloniality of power into a semantic
problem. If we accept that actions, objects, beliefs, and so on are culture-relative, we hide the
coloniality of power from which different cultures came into being in the first place. The
problem, then, is not to accommodate cosmopolitanism to cultural relativism, but to dissolve
cultural relativism and to focus on the coloniality of power and the colonial difference produced,
reproduced, and maintained by global designs. Critical cosmopolitanism and new democratic
projects imply negotiating the coloniality of power and the colonial difference in a world
controlled by global capitalism (Redrado 2000). Rights of man or human rights, of course, would
have to be negotiated across gender lines (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1997; Beijing Declaration
[1995] 1997), but also across the coloniality of power that structured and still structures the
modern/colonial world around the racially grounded colonial difference. Human rights can no
longer be accepted as having a content that Vitoria, Kant, and the United Nations discovered
and possessed. Such expressions, as well as democracy and cosmopolitanism, shall be conceived
as connectors in the struggle to overcome coloniality of power from the perspective of the
colonial difference, rather than as full-fledged words with specific Western content. By
connectors I do not mean empty signifiers that preserve the terms as the property of European
Enlightenment while they promote benevolent inclusion of the Other or making room for the
multicultural. The Zapatistas have used the word democracy, although it has different meaning
for them than it has for the Mexican government. Democracy for the Zapatistas is not
conceptualized in terms of European political philosophy but in terms of Maya social
organization based on reciprocity, communal (instead of individual) values, the value of wisdom
rather than epistemology, and so forth. The Mexican government doesn’t possess the correct
interpretation of democracy, under which the Other will be included. But, for that matter,
neither do the Zapatistas have the right interpretation. However, the Zapatistas have no choice
but to use the word that political hegemony imposed, although using the word doesn’t mean
bending to its mono-logic interpretation. Once democracy is singled out by the Zapatistas, it
becomes a connector through which liberal concepts of democracy and indigenous concepts
of reciprocity and community social organization for the common good must come to terms.
Border thinking is what I am naming the political and ethical move from the Zapatistas’
perspective, by displacing the concept of democracy. Border thinking is not a possibility, at
this point, from the perspective of the Mexican government , although it is a need from
subaltern positions . In this line of argument, a new abstract universal (such as Vitoria’s, or
Kant’s, which replaced Vitoria’s, or the ideologies of transnationalism, which replaced Kant’s
abstract universal) is no longer either possible or desirable. The abstract universal is what
hegemonic perspectives provide, be they neoliberal or neo-Marxist. The perspective from the
colonial difference (illustrated in the dilemma formulated by An-Na’im and further developed
with the example of the Zapatistas) instead opens the possibility of imagining border thinking
as the necessary condition for a future critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism. Such a critical and
dialogic cosmopolitanism itself leads toward “diversality,” instead of toward a new universality
grounded (again) “on the potential of democratic politicization as the true European legacy from
ancient Greece onward” (Zˇ izˇek 1998: 1009). A new universalism recasting the democratic
potential of the European legacy is not necessarily a solution to the vicious circle between
(neo)liberal globalization and “regressive forms of fundamentalist hatred” ( ˇ Ziˇzek 1998: 1009).
It is hard to imagine that the entire planet would endorse the democratic potential of “the
European legacy from ancient Greece onward.” The entire planet could, in fact, endorse a
democratic, just, and cosmopolitan project as far as democracy and justice are detached from
their “fundamental” European heritage, from Greece onward, and they are taken as connectors
around which critical cosmopolitanism would be articulated. Epistemic diversality shall be the
ground for political and ethical cosmopolitan projects. In other words, diversity as a universal
project (that is, diversality) shall be the aim instead of longing for a new abstract universal and
rehearsing a new universality grounded in the “true” Greek or Enlightenment legacy. Diversality
as the horizon of critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism presupposes border thinking or border
epistemology grounded on the critique of all possible fundamentalism (Western and nonWestern, national and religious, neoliberal and neosocialist) and on the faith in accumulation at
any cost that sustains capitalist organizations of the economy (Mignolo 2000). Since diversality
(or diversity as a universal project) emerges from the experience of coloniality of power and the
colonial difference, it cannot be reduced to a new form of cultural relativism but should be
thought out as new forms of projecting and imagining, ethically and politically, from subaltern
perspectives. As Manuel Castells (1997: 109) puts it, the Zapatistas, American militia, and Aum
Shinrikyo are all social movements that act politically against globalization and against the state.
My preference for the Zapatistas and not for the other two is an ethical rather than a political
choice. Diversality as a universal project, then, shall be simultaneously ethical, political, and
philosophical. It cannot be identified, either, with oppositional violence beyond the European
Union and the United States. And of course, by definition, it cannot be located in the hegemonic
global designs that have been the target of critical reflections in this essay. As John Rawls would
word it in his explorations on the “law (instead of the right) of peoples,” diversality as a
universal project shall be identified with “the honest non-liberal people” (Rawls 1999: 90, see
also 89– 128). But also with “the honest non-Western people or people of color” that Rawls,
following Kant, doesn’t have in his horizon. Critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism as a
regulative principle demands yielding generously (“convivially” said Vitoria; “friendly” said
Kant) toward diversity as a universal and cosmopolitan project in which everyone participates
instead of “being participated.” Such a regulative principle shall replace and displace the
abstract universal cosmopolitan ideals (Christian, liberal, socialist, neoliberal) that had
helped (and continue to help ) to hold together the modern/colonial world system and to
preserve the managerial role of the North Atlantic. And here is when the local histories and
global designs come into the picture. While cosmopolitanism was thought out and projected
from particular local histories (that became the local history of the modern world system)
positioned to devise and enact global designs, other local histories in the planet had to deal with
those global designs that were, at the same time, abstract universals (Christian, liberal, or
socialist). For that reason, cosmopolitanism today has to become border thinking, critical and
dialogic, from the perspective of those local histories that had to deal all along with global
designs. Diversality should be the relentless practice of critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism
rather than a blueprint of a future and ideal society projected from a single point of view (that
of the abstract universal) that will return us (again!) to the Greek paradigm and to European
legacies (Zˇ izˇek 1998).
They make oppression worse – it’s a question of relative abuse – their form
upholds immigration-control programs that make violence inevitable and more
explosive
Archuleta, Professor and Pre-Law Advisor of English at Pennsylvania State
University, 5
[Elizabeth, 5, “Securing Our Nation's Roads and Borders or Re-circling the Wagons?
Leslie Marmon Silko's Destabilization of "Borders",” Wicazo Sa Review, Volume: 20, p. 127-130,
MM]
In its militaristic response to the perceived threat that Mexican immigrants pose, the United
States that Silko learned about as a child no longer differs in certain respects from communist
countries and militarized borders such as those in North Korea, Cuba, and the former East
Berlin and Soviet Union. In effect, immigrants have replaced communists as the threat that
warrants the same kind of military strategies used during wartime . Timothy J. Dunn’s The
Militarization of the U.S.– Mexico Border, 1978–1992 documents how border policies and
practices have replicated the Pentagon’s doctrine of “low- intensity conflict.” One element of
low- intensity conflict used domestically has included the use of police, paramilitary forces, and
military forces working together to combat the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs entering the
country. These military strategies, meant to establish social control over specific civilian
populations, were originally created for use in third world countries that presumably
threatened U.S. national security.57 Dunn notes that the Clinton administration introduced the
strategies domestically under the guise of securing and regaining control of the border. Under
the second Bush administration, the strategy of low intensity conflict has only intensified. For
instance, the military has aided the border patrol in constructing a seven- mile wall of
corrugated steel between Tijuana and San Diego, the first of several such walls that could be
said to resemble the old Soviet Union’s metaphorical Iron Curtain or East Germany’s Berlin
Wall. In “The Border Patrol State,” Silko has redefined Manifest Destiny so that it reflects the
notion of containment symbolized by the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall rather than the idea of
expansion or westward movement typically associated with the phrase. According to Silko’s new
definition, “Manifest Destiny may lack its old grandeur of theft and blood,” but “ ‘lock the door’
is what it means now, with racism a trump card to be played again and again” by both political
parties.58 Thus, the walls of corrugated steel and bright lights positioned along the border
become security devices designed to alleviate white fears of contamination by an “alien”
population who might bring a “foreign” culture , language, or belief system to the United
States. To be sure, many white Americans, especially those living near the border, believe that
an army of Mexican “illegals” and “criminals” has already begun their “conquest” of America,
and based on this threat, private citizens have responded, increasing the panopticon technique
of subjection. The government’s racial profiling of “aliens” reinforces and strengthens Nativist
sentiment and encourages private citizens to perceive peoples south of the border as well as
those who resemble them as posing a threat to the United States. Exploiting this fear are antiimmigration groups such as American Border Patrol, Ranch Rescue, Voice of Citizens Together,
and Civil Homeland Defense, groups that the Anti- Defamation League and the Southern Poverty
Law Center have identified as hate groups. These groups have won support by heightening
concerns about crime, drug smuggling, violence, and a Mexican takeover of the United States.
They have also exploited the intense emotions surrounding September 11 by asserting that their
work is a response to President Bush’s call for all citizens to help fight terrorism. They have
purposely confused drug and immigration enforcement policy with efforts to fight terrorism in
their quest to combat the movement of people across the border. Caught up in a wave of terror
increased by the presence of vigilante groups are indigenous groups who live along the border
or who regularly cross the border to participate in ceremonies or to visit family members.59
Vigilante groups have revised legalistic interpretations of drug and immigration laws, declaring
that these laws sanction their efforts to protect ranchers’ and homeowners’ property. In March
2003, Chris Simcox, founder of Civil Homeland Defense, issued a proclamation to Arizona’s
Governor Napolitano and Tucson’s Border Patrol announcing his intent to begin patrolling the
border with armed citizens. In this public call to arms, he declared, “we have the legal right and
moral obligation [to form a militia] as per our Arizona State Constitution and Federal
Constitution and our respect for American citizens.”60 Allegedly, his militia is meant to prevent
drug dealers and criminals from terrorizing ranchers and homeowners.61 According to Simcox,
they have already assisted ranchers near the border to secure their property from what he
refers to as “hordes of criminal trespassers” that have damaged or destroyed property.62 With
the help of the Internet, Simcox spreads his message on “news” venues such as Glenn Spenser’s
American Patrol Report or the USA Daily, where he presents readers with chilling headlines such
as “Illegal Aliens Violently Attacking American Citizens: Anarchy and Lawlessness Rule U.S.–
Mexican Border.” In this particular article, he describes what he perceives as “an all out
invasion” by illegals: Friday night the roads were bustling with Border Patrol vehicles driving
everywhere in an attempt to keep up with the hundreds that were moving up the San Pedro
river basin; the trend continued for three straight days and nights. All weekend helicopters were
buzzing in the air locating group after group of illegal intruders. USA Daily’s editor appended to
Simcox’s story information that appears even more ominous: “There have been increasing
reports of Mexican military involvement in illegal alien and drug smuggling as well as threats and
bounties placed on the life [sic] American citizens.” Racial dynamics have already conditioned
relations along the border, and extremist groups such as Simcox’s only exacerbate tensions by
exploiting paranoia over illegal immigration in order to gain publicity and increase support for
their organizations. What is even more surprising is that fringe groups are not alone in
cautioning the United States about an impending takeover by Mexico. This same sentiment is
expressed in a novel written by President Reagan’s former secretary of defense, Caspar
Weinberger.63 Weinberger’s 1996 futuristic novel, The Next War, coauthored with Hoover
Institution scholar Peter Schweizer, creates an exaggerated and chilling account of border
problems. In order to increase support for more military spending, the authors build on the
American population’s fear of a “Mexican invasion” by creating a hypothetical conflict between
the United States and Mexico along with North Korea, China, Iran, Russia, and Japan. In the
setting involving Mexico, that country’s economy dissolves and the resulting unrest spills over
into the United States in the form of mass migrations. In order to check the flow of illegal
immigration, which is linked with Mexican drug cartels, corruption, and terrorist attacks against
San Diego and Houston, the United States invades Mexico. Weinberger does not explore the
outcome of his fictional invasion; his goal is to caution the government about the United States’
military readiness and the viability of its defense strategies. Like Silko’s collection of essays, the
publication of Weinberger’s novel falls on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
United States–Mexico war. Whether he intended for the dates to coincide is unclear, but it is
apparent that his fictional invasion of Mexico expresses the reality of the border and the
ongoing consequences of Manifest Destiny. In other words, the United States created the
border in violence and has maintained and regulated it through violence. This new face of
Manifest Destiny encourages racism at the borders as media representations of a “brown
invasion” convince white Americans that “conquest” must be resisted to avoid the unlawful
encroachment of “aliens.” The narrative of Manifest Destiny once mandated the spread of
democracy; now it appears that the United States wants to contain the material benefits of
democracy for “real Americans” living within the United States geopolitical boundaries.
Opening borders is necessary to stop border violence and increase civil liberties
Dalmia 2013 [Shikha, Senior analyst at Reason Foundation, “Nation of
Immigrants”, Reason.com, July 2013,
http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/13/nation-of-immigrants. NG]
Every country has its mythology. America’s is that we are a “nation of immigrants.” The Statue
of Liberty, the country’s most iconic monument, stands tall in New York Harbor, welcoming
“your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” If the United States had
been true to these ideals, its history would have been a simple tale of openness and acceptance.
The real story is far more complex.¶ For the first half of its existence, America had virtually
open borders. That stopped in the late 19th century, when the first major restrictions were
introduced to stem the tide of incoming Asians. The country then slammed its doors shut
around 1925 after anti-immigration animus, which had always bubbled beneath the surface,
boiled over in the form of quotas based on national origins, among other things. For the first
time, federal bureaucrats inserted themselves between willing American employers and willing
foreign workers, placing strict limits on both the total number of immigrants and the number
from each country. ¶ Ever since then, every time the country has opened its door to one set of
immigrants, it has rebuffed another. The upshot is a mishmash of contradictory laws that can’t
keep up with the desires of individuals or the needs of the American economy.¶ Since the
1960s, immigration laws in theory have favored family reunification and labor-force
augmentation. In practice, naturalized Americans have to endure up to a two-decade wait
before they can bring even certain blood relatives into the country. High-tech employers can’t
meet even half their need for foreign workers, who also have to wait decades to gain permanent
residency. ¶ Yet the tech sector has it easy compared to the agricultural, hospitality, and
construction industries. Their demand for foreign laborers is even greater, but the work visas
available are both fewer and less usable. And contrary to popular belief, there is no “line” for
poor or low-skilled foreign workers seeking to gain permanent residency.¶ All of this has helped
create a massive unauthorized population whose fate is polarizing the country. In short,
virtually every aspect of the U.S. immigration system is broken. It is out of sync with American
ideals and American needs. ¶ We have a choice between raising the barricades further and
ejecting people already here or moving toward a more open system that allows more human
and labor-market freedom. If we go the first route, the price will be paid not just by poor
foreigners who are literally dying to make a better living but also by the economy. Civil liberties
will be degraded, along with our sense of humanity. ¶ According to a recent study by the
National Foundation for American Policy, immigrant deaths at the border rose by 27 percent in
2012 to nearly 500—a result of the crackdown on border towns that has pushed Latin
American risk takers ever further out to the dangerous and inhospitable desert. As reason
contributor Malia Politzer has noted, between 1997 and 2007 the U.S.–Mexico border was
about 10 times deadlier to immigrants than the Berlin Wall was to East Berliners in its entire
28-year existence.¶ It is impossible to get a grip on the full economic costs of restrictionism. How
does one calculate, for example, the businesses that never form because labor is too expensive?
Still, the Texas comptroller estimated in 2006 that although low-skilled unauthorized workers
cost the state treasury $504 million more than they paid in taxes in 2005, without them the
state’s economy would have shrunk by 2.1 percent, or $17.7 billion. ¶ But the biggest toll
restrictionism takes is on the civil liberties of Americans. You cannot track every movement and
activity of every immigrant without imposing similar restrictions on natives who benefit from
these immigrants. Abandoning its commitment to welcoming immigrants enshrined in the
Statue of Liberty will cost Americans dearly.
Increase in violence is tied to debate about immigration, the plan ends the
debate
The Leadership Conference 2009 ["The State of Hate: Escalating Hate Violence
Against Immigrants." The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
2009. <http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/escalatingviolence.html>. NG]
The increase in violence against Hispanics correlates closely with the increasingly heated
debate over Comprehensive Immigration Reform and an escalation in the level of antiimmigrant vitriol on radio, television, and the Internet. While reasonable people can and will
disagree about the parameters of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, in some instances, the
commentary about immigration reform has not been reasonable; it has been inflammatory.
Warned an April 2009 assessment from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), "in some cases, anti-Immigration or strident proenforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn
violent." This toxic environment, in which hateful rhetoric targets immigrants while the number
of hate crimes against Hispanics and others perceived to be immigrants steadily increases, has
caused a heightened sense of fear in communities around the country. Some groups opposing
immigration reform, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center
for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA, have portrayed immigrants as responsible for
numerous societal ills, often using stereotypes and outright bigotry. While these groups, and
other similar organizations, have strived to position themselves as legitimate, mainstream
advocates against illegal immigration in America, a closer look at the public record reveals that
some of these organizations have disturbing links to or relationships with extremists in the antiImmigration movement. These seemingly "legitimate" advocates against illegal immigration
are frequently quoted in the mainstream media, have been called to testify before Congress,
and often hold meetings with lawmakers and other public figures. This is one of the most
disturbing developments of the past few years: the legitimization and mainstreaming of
virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric that veers dangerously close to — and too often crosses the
line beyond civil discourse over contentious immigration policy issues.
A2: Borders are Important
Borders are nothing more than lines influenced by public perception and the
corresponding idea that the government is influenced by the public; they can be
changed and modified to match social perception
Johnson 2007 Dean of UC Davis School of Law(Kevin R., 2007“Opening the Floodgates;
Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws”)
At bottom, borders are what we as a country say they are; they mean what we say they mean.
“Borders are not inherently significant, they are
significant because we attach meaning to them. We can change the significance of borders
without changing their location by changing what they signify — what comes along with
them.”18 The same is true for many sorts of political boundaries within the United States, such
as those defining states, municipalities, and congressional districts, which are all subject to
change. Although the reliance on geography makes the task of constructing borders between
nations easier in certain respects, the meaning attached to borders is socially defined and,
consequently, continuously in flux and under stress. The globalization of the world economy,
rapid technological change, and changing conceptions of nation-states have all contributed to a
decline in the practical importance of physical borders between nations. Information, culture,
goods, and services regularly flow across the borders between nations. Although globalization
indeed has its critics,20 many observers consider the decline in the significance of borders to
be a positive development .
A2: Mexico Says No
The economic, social, and political implications of the plan draws in the
Mexican government’s interest
Johnson 07 (Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Law, and Mabie-Apallas
Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis.
“Opening the Floodgates”, pg. 195, BW)
From 2001 to the present, the governments of Mexico and the United States have had ongoing
discussions about migration, a major issue of interest to the two governments.126 For the
Mexican government, ending human rights abuses and ensuring the continued flows of
remittances from migrants in the United States to Mexico127 make U.S. immigration law
relevant to its own national interests. Neither are served by border enforcement-only
reforms. For well over a decade, however, U.S. lawmakers have failed to enact little more than
laws that increase border enforcement. A much-needed reconceptualization of the meaning
and nature of the U.S.-Mexico border stands to benefit both nations.128 An immigration
scheme consistent with the economic, political, and social needs of the two nations, as has
been outlined here, could be constructed. A more realistic legal regime would remedy the
problems that plague immigration enforcement today and avoid repetitions of the mistakes of
the past.
A2: Terrorism
Wont increase Terrorism- Multiple reasons
Open Borders 2012 ( no name, 3/1/12, Open Borders: The case, “Terrorism”,
http://openborders.info/terrorism/, 7/12/13, TZ)
here are several lines of counter-argument, some of which are provided below:¶ The problems
of terrorism are greatly exaggerated: For instance, John Mueller has argued (here, here, and in
his book Overblown) that terrorist threats are greatly exaggerated by politicians, pundits, and
the media for various reasons, and that overreacting to such threats can be counterproductive and endanger safety in other ways.¶ Tourist visas are a lot easier to get anyway:
People interested in carrying out terrorist attacks have a wide range of options available other
than immigrating. In particular, they can obtain tourist visas, which are generally a lot easier
to get. The US issues about 4 million B1/B2 (business/pleasure visit visas, which allow visit
durations of a few months) compared to about 100,000 H1B visas every year. Moreover, since
B1/B2 visas are often multiple entry visas, the actual number of tourist visitors to the US in a
given year is in the tens of millions. David Friedman makes this point in the blog post
Immigration and Terrorism.¶ The absence of legal migration channels is responsible for large
scale illegal immigration, which diverts law enforcement resources to combating it: This
includes large scale illegal immigration along the southern US-Mexico border. By allowing
more legal migration flows, security agencies could focus on genuine terrorist threats rather
than trying to keep out peaceful workers. Note that despite the large scale illegal immigration,
there have been almost no instances of terrorists smuggling themselves across the southern
border of the United States. All terrorist attacks in the US carried out by foreigners have been
carried out by legal immigrants, tourists, or people on non-immigrant visas, including some who
overstayed their visas. For more, see terrorism and illegal immigration in the United States.
Nonetheless, an insecure border is responsible for other problems such as drug trafficking, and
reducing the pressure to immigrate illegally can reduce the resources that need to be spent on
border control.¶ There are cheaper and more sustainable methods to tackle the problem of
terrorism: This fits in with the general principle of keyhole solutions. The methods may include
(depending on your diagnosis of the problems of terrorism):¶ Better intelligence networks that
could detect and foil terrorist plots more effectively. As pointed out above, security agencies
could focus more on genuine terrorist threats if greater legal migration channels reduced the
security threats associated with illegal immigration.¶ Intellectuals and thought leaders could
counter radical ideologies in the realm of ideas and seek to win hearts and minds against such
ideologies. Interestingly, the free movement of people between countries could lead to more
effective spreading of these counter-ideologies to people in the countries that are large-scale
sources of terrorists.¶ Those who believe that terrorism is influenced by the poor political and
economic systems in certain countries could seek ways to improve those political and economic
systems. Interestingly, freer movement of people can help in these regards, through its direct
effect on world GDP and ending poverty, and its indirect effects on immigrant-sending
countries.¶ Those who think that such problems are exacerbated by aggressive foreign policy
could seek changes to such policy.¶ The upshot is that whatever your diagnosis of the causes of
terrorism, there are probably ways of tackling these causes that more directly address the
global problem than immigration restrictions.¶ If all else fails, there may be a case for
maintaining current immigration restrictions on people from ethnic/religious backgrounds that
are highly correlated with terrorism: For instance, for those who believe that Islamic
immigration to the United States poses a unique threat, this may be a reason to maintain
present restrictions on immigration from Islamic countries and self-identified Muslims from
other countries. But it’s not a reason to restrict immigration of individuals from other countries.
True, any immigrant from any country could succumb to the lure of radical Islam, but so could
native born Americans, like John Walker Lindh and Adam Gadahn.
The act of targeting terror will only perpetuate the otherization of immigrants –
It supplies U.S. policy with the headlines it needs to terrorize and subjugate the
helpless
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 11, BW)
The history of immigration law in the United States is driven by shifting rationales for
alienage: The “1996 laws,” which have greatly expanded “illegality” and local enforcement of
immigration law, were passed in the immediate wake of the Oklahoma City bombing prior to
the arrest of Timothy McVeigh. That the fourfold expansion of deportation was set in motion
by a Congress seized by the false assumption that Arab nationals had committed the thenlargest terrorist act on U.S. soil is a testament to the historical arbitrariness of the legislative
production of illegality. This sovereign power over the noncitizen is enshrined in the Plenary
Power doctrine. First invoked in 1882 to secure the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act from
racial violence into law, places Congress as sovereign over the alien homo sacer. Following
9/11, this power abrogated the right to equal protection by assuring that nationals from
predominantly Muslim countries could be targeted by Special Registration and the Absconder
Apprehension Initiative. Such policies will likely remain impervious to legal challenge until and
unless the Plenary Power Doctrine is revised (Mehta 2003). So long as violations of immigration
law are eventually found, non-citizens can be essentially detained at will. In the first two years
after the attacks of 9/11, as thousands of noncitizens “linked to terrorism” were detained
under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the imperative of “counter-terrorism” was used with
naked opportunism as a means to legitimize secrecy and opacity to democratic scrutiny. But the
logic of exception was soon to be made permanent.
Potential National Security threats can be regulated through narrow
investigation and remains constant with human rights priorities
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Even with the deregulation of immigration, the concept of self-defense and the need to
protect the public order could justify certain types of narrow restrictions on migration that
are consistent with liberal theory. The use of criminal background checks and evidence of past
criminal activity such as reports from reliable intelligence agencies could allow the U.S.
government to attempt to ensure that the nation did not admit migrants who endanger the
public safety. Databases that provide reliable intelligence about noncitizens who represent
colorable threats to the national security could assist in helping to screen for public-safety
risks. Focused background checks looking for true dangers to national security and public
safety could improve the accuracy of security checks and could ensure that safety and
security were the true focus of screening of persons seeking to enter the United States. The
safety-related focus of individual inquiries, however, would be much narrower than is the case
under current law. The law should presume that all immigrants are admissible to the United
States unless a strong justification for exclusion based on a narrowly tailored set of criteria
designed to protect national security and public safety is established. Narrow exclusions
would prevent overbroad enforcement, which is arguably one of the deepest flaws in the
modern U.S. immigration laws. Exclusions based on safety risks posed by individual
immigrants, rather than blanket exclusions based on group membership and alleged group
propensities, make the most policy sense and are the most consistent with liberal theory and
the nation’s commitment to individual rights
Opening the borders will allow the US to focus more of its efforts on the war on
terror and shift away from policing the impossibility that is the border
Johnson 07 (Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Law, and Mabie-Apallas
Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis.
“Opening the Floodgates”, pg. 205, BW)
However, open borders are fully consistent with efforts to prevent terrorism. More liberal
migration would allow the government to devote its undivided attention to the true dangers
to national security and public safety. Rather than trying to keep most noncitizens out of the
country, the government could focus on terrorists, dangerous criminals, drugs, and other
contraband in enforcing the borders. Valuable resources would no longer be wasted on fruitless
efforts to shut the border, and these funds could go instead to identifying and eliminating these
threats. Enforcement efforts could move beyond the morass of exclusion grounds, caps, ceilings,
and many other complexities that have made enforcement of the Immigration and Nationality
Act unwieldy, inefficient, and unfair. Historically, U.S. immigration law has been overbroad in
attacking the perceived evil of the day, whether it be terrorists, racial minorities, the poor,
political dissidents, gays and lesbians, or the disabled. An effective “war on terror” should
attempt to exclude from admission true dangers to national security and public safety, rather
than simply trying to seal the borders, which has proven to be virtually impossible. As seen in
other areas of law enforcement, more calculated immigration law enforcement has a greater
likelihood of rooting out unlawful conduct than scattershot efforts that infringe on the civil
rights of many people.
A2: Econ
Link turn – influx of immigrants fuels economic growth - solves right-wing
extremists who act based on economic downturn
Delacroix, former professor of management, & Nikiforov, business
development specialist, 9
[Jacques & Sergey, 9, “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely,” The
Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 114-116, MM]
Commentators generally assume that future immigration from Mexico must be of the same
kind as the current immigration. This assumption ignores the possibility that illegality itself
influences the self-selection of immigrants to the United States. Accordingly, the mention of an
open border, de facto or de jure, evokes the specter of ever-growing numbers of very poor,
semiliterate, non-English-speaking immigrants almost exclusively of rural origin. This scenario is
naturally objectionable on both economic and cultural grounds. First, such a population tends
everywhere to consume a disproportionate share of social services. Second, the poor and
uneducated— who may be illiterate even in their mother tongue—may be more difficult to
assimilate than middle-class immigrants. Both objections need be taken seriously, but the
assumption of unchanged quality of immigration does not stand up well to examination.
Illegality itself must dissuade potential middle-class immigrants disproportionately. Middleclass people are much the same everywhere. They tend to lack the skills, the stamina, and the
inclination to trudge through the desert to elude the Border Patrol at real risk to their lives. If
moving to the United States becomes legal for Mexicans, the character of Mexican
immigration ought to change immediately toward more skilled and better-educated people.
More Skilled Immigrants: Unemployment in Mexico is typically low, rather lower than it is in
the United States (and, incidentally, lower than it was in the poor countries that joined the
European Community and the European Union ). By and large, Mexicans move to the United
States less for jobs than for better jobs. Their labor resources are better employed in the
advanced U.S. economy than in the underdeveloped, institutionally crippled Mexican economy.
Accordingly, their labor is better rewarded here than there because it is more productive here.
This general idea should hold as well for skilled and well-educated potential immigrants as it
does for the unskilled and the poorly educated. Removing legal obstacles to immigration
should encourage better-educated and more-skilled immigrants to enter the United States.
Such higher-quality immigrants would earn more than do current Mexican immigrants, both
legal and illegal. Because workers’ wages signal their economic contribution to the overall
economy, this improved quality of Mexican immigration should improve U.S. prosperity in
general, at least in the long run. The short-term effects of an increase in immigration on U.S.
unemployment remain an obstacle to opening the southern border. A Possible Influx of
Entrepreneurs and Capital Opening the southern border would also increase the number of
entrepreneurs migrating here. In Mexico, the distorted market conditions, overregulation,
corrupt government practices, and the existence of large politically supported monopolies
restrict the scope of entrepreneurial activity. Mexican entrepreneurs and potential
entrepreneurs, who are usually avid students of American life, tend to be aware of the contrast
between their own situation and that prevailing in the United States. The history of immigration
to the United States suggests that culturally different groups of immigrants tend to contribute
different kinds of enterprises. Thus, political correctness notwithstanding, it is not foolhardy to
suppose that the influx of Italian immigrants before World War I improved considerably the
restaurant scene across the United States . Likewise, current Indian immigrants , coming
originally as well-educated hired hands, have contributed greatly to the abundance of hi-tech
engineering start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. As strange as it may appear at first
glance, some in this new breed of immigrants would also bring fresh capital. One of the
constants of underdevelopment is not so much a lack of capital as the underemployment of
the existing capital. The complex reasons behind this state of affairs are beyond this article
(Dekle 2004), yet it should be obvious that as soon as bureaucratic and economically flashfrozen India began modestly to liberalize its economy, Indian capital appeared seemingly out of
nowhere, as if by magic. (The source of this magic may be as simple as young middle-class Indian
women deciding to carry a little less gold hanging from their ears in order to invest in the stock
market.) Although Mexico is now liberalizing its economy and might endeavor to do so more
swiftly if it had an open border to its north, such an opening would initially probably coincide
with an influx of capital into the United States. Such capital would be carried by hitherto
frustrated Mexican entrepreneurs ready and willing to make their own specific contributions
to the U.S. economy as generations of immigrants from other countries did in earlier times.
Illegal Immigrants” contribute to Social Security, and are vital to the economy
Román 08 (Ediberto, Professor of Law, Florida International University, 9/20/2008, “THE ALIEN
INVASION?” Houston Law Review 45:3, pg. 858
Moore also concluded that overall, immigrants are huge net contributors to the Social Security
and Medicare programs, and immigrant entrepreneurs are a major source of new jobs and
vitality in the American economy.î122 Moore ended his testimony with the following
observation:¶ It is in America’s economic self-interest and in the interests of immigrants
themselves that we keep the golden gates open to newcomers from every region of the world.
The net gains to U.S. workers and retirees are in the trillions of dollars. Given the coming
retirement of some 75 million baby boomers, we need the young and energetic immigrants
now more than ever before . . . .123¶ In fact, economic analysts as well as domestic business
community mainstays have long advocated for less restrictive immigration polices.124 As a
leading immigration scholar recently observed, ìThe U.S. immigration laws must be
fundamentally revised to make them and their enforcement more consistent with the economic
needs of the nation.î125 One writer recently noted:¶ In defiance of economic logic, U.S.
lawmakers formulate immigration policies to regulate the entry of foreign workers into the
country that are largely unrelated to the economic policies they formulate to regulate
international commerce.¶ ....¶ . . . Perpetuating the status quo by pouring ever larger amounts of
money into the enforcement of immigration policies that are in conflict with economic reality
will do nothing to address the underlying problem.126¶ Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft,
repeatedly complains about strict immigration policiesí impact on the ability for businesses to
hire skilled workers.127 In terms of other sectors of the economy, an American Farm Bureau
Federation study notes that ìif agricultureís access to migrant labor were cut off, as much as $5ñ
9 billion in annual production of . . . commodities . . . would be lost in the short term. Over the
longer term, this annual loss would increase to $6.5ñ12 billion as the shock worked its way
through the sector.î128 Preeminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith effectively responded
to those who have advocated for closed borders and mass deportation of our undocumented
workers:¶ Were all the illegals in the United States suddenly to return home, the effect on the
American economy would . . . be little less than disastrous. A large amount of useful, if often
tedious, work...would go unperformed. Fruits and vegetables in Florida, Texas, and California
would go unharvested. Food prices would rise spectacularly. Mexicans wish to come to the
United States; they are wanted; they add visibly to our well-being. . . . Without them, the
American economy would suffer . . . .129
“Immigrants” are net positive in terms of government spending and taxes
Román 08 (Ediberto, Professor of Law, Florida International University, 9/20/2008, “THE ALIEN
INVASION?” Houston Law Review 45:3, pg. 858
In terms of the second major basis for the recent attacks on immigrationóthe alleged
deleterious effects on the U.S. economy–the NRC Report similarly refutes the modern
xenophobes’ assertions. In fact, the report notes several of immigration’s significant positive
impacts on the federal fiscal picture. For instance, the NRC Report states:¶ [A] net positive fiscal
impact with immigrants and their concurrent descendents paying nearly $51 billion [in 1994ñ
1995 dollars] more in taxes than they generate in costs. . . . Particularly important were
transfers from immigrants and their descendants of about $28 billion to the rest of the nation
through the Social Security system (OASDHI), reflecting the young age distribution of this
group.109¶ The NRC Report observes that ì[i]n per capita terms, immigrants . . . contributed
about $700 more in payroll taxes than they received in OASDHI benefits each year, whereas
the balance of the population just broke even.î110 ìFor the remainder of the federal budget,
immigrants . . . [were found to pay] $500 or $600 more in taxes than they cost in benefits, and in
total they had a positive federal fiscal impact of about $1,260 [per person], exceeding their net
cost at the state and local levels.î111 With respect to overall economic impact, the NRC Report
concludes:¶ Our calculations indicate that definition of the study population is critical to the
outcome. If limited to immigrants themselves, the overall fiscal impact is $1,400 (taxes paid less
costs generated) per immigrant. If limited to immigrants plus their U.S.-born children under the
age of 20, corresponding to the immigrant household formulation, the average fiscal impact is
about $600 per immigrant (or $400 per immigrant and young child). If extended to all
descendants of living immigrants, the average fiscal impact is $1,000 expressed per immigrant,
or $600 expressed per immigrant and descendants. Therefore, the most widely used method
based on the immigrant household is the only one that returns a negative value.112¶ Therefore,
not unlike the conclusions reached with respect to assertions of mass invasions that can
literally change the makeup of this country,113 the NRC Report similarly discredits the
allegations concerning the tales of woe regarding immigration’s negative fiscal and economic
impact on the national economy.114
The need for working immigrants outweighs any desire to enforce borders
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Free migration among the NAFTA nations would be in keeping with¶ certain existing political,
economic, and social realities. Labor integration¶ between the United States and Mexico is
occurring. It has been fueled¶ from the bottom up. Market forces have driven U.S. employers
and¶ Mexican workers in this direction for years. Governments and laws,¶ however, have been
left by the wayside. Law has been a minor hindrance¶ to immigrants and employers but has
not been an effective deterrent¶ to unlawful conduct. Efforts to bar the employment of
undocumented¶ workers have been largely ineffective. Employer sanctions have¶ not been
vigorously enforced and in recent years have been enforced¶ The Economic Benefits of Liberal
Migration of Labor Across Borders | 165¶ with even less enthusiasm than before. Certain
industries in the United¶ States, such as agriculture and construction and many service
industries,¶ rely on the type of low-wage labor provided by immigrants. Unlike other¶
industries, which have increasingly moved operations overseas to exploit¶ low-wage labor,
jobs in these industries cannot be exported. Lowwage¶ immigrant labor, therefore, remains
essential to the U.S. economy.
Immigrants are a key role in sustaining America’s economy and demand is rising
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Today, undocumented Mexican workers are critical to the economic viability of many
businesses. Agriculture, hotels and restaurants, construction, and the domestic-service
industry depend on these workers. Growers have relied upon generations of migrant labor to
pick the nation’s crops and keep produce prices down. Hotels and restaurants rely on
immigrant labor to provide a ready and available labor force and to ensure profitability. With
the number of two-wage-earner families having increased greatly in the past few decades,
U.S. middle-class families demand domestic-service workers in abundance. That demand
continues to increase because of the increasing participation of U.S. women citizens in the
labor force.
Opening the borders would fuel US economy and create more orderly migration
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
More liberal immigration admissions would help ameliorate the rampant discrimination that
the immigration laws aid and abet. The consequences of such a system need not generate
fear. Open borders might ultimately have consequences similar to those brought by the
increased migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the
twentieth century. In the era of Jim Crow, interstate migration helped fuel economic growth
and provided economic and other opportunities to subordinated African Americans. Similarly,
freer movement of workers from the developing world would create economic opportunities
and ensure orderly migration and the maintenance of a more fair and just set of immigration
laws.
Open borders would appeal to growing globalization
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
The arguments for facilitating the migration of highly skilled immigrant¶ workers to the United
States have become increasingly powerful in¶ light of the globalization of the international
economy. In the midst of¶ globalizing markets in capital and goods, adherents of closed borders¶
must justify the exclusion of labor from a system of increasingly permeable¶ borders. Economic
arguments generally favor easy migration between nations¶ and the ready mobility of labor to
its most productive use. The labor¶ market benefits of immigrant workers to the United States
are undeniable.¶
Key industries to the economy rely heavily on employing immigrants
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Large employers in certain industries often rely heavily on undocumented¶ immigrants.
Recently, several high-profile companies have had¶ their hiring practices exposed. The poultry
giant Tyson Foods faced¶ a criminal indictment, and was later acquitted, for participating in a¶
scheme to traffic immigrant workers. Its employment of undocumented¶ workers, however,
could not seriously be disputed.11 Wal-Mart repeatedly makes the news for its employment of
undocumented immigrants.12¶ Entire industries, such as agriculture, meat and poultry
processing, construction, and the hotel and restaurant sector, have come to rely¶ heavily on
undocumented labor to remain competitive. This dependence¶ on undocumented labor has
led to vigorous resistance to federal enforcement¶ efforts. For example, when the federal
government began an¶ operation to enforce the laws barring the employment of
undocumented¶ immigrants in meat-packing plants in Nebraska in 1999, state and local¶
politicians protested because of the impacts on the state economy.13 An¶ American Farm
Bureau Federation study concluded that, “if agriculture’s¶ access to migrant labor were cut off,
as much as $5–9 billion in¶ annual production of . . . commodities . . . would be lost in the
short¶ term. Over the longer term, this annual loss would increase to $6.5–12¶ billion as the
shock worked its way through the sector.”14¶ Without undocumented workers, businesses in
some industries would¶ be forced to close. Such a collapse would drag down the U.S. economy.¶
As the preeminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith stated,¶ Were all the illegals in the United
States suddenly to return home, the¶ effect on the United States economy would . . . be little
less than disastrous .¶ . . . A large amount of useful, if often tedious, work . . . would¶ go
unperformed. Fruits and vegetables in Florida, Texas, and California¶ would go unharvested.
Food prices would rise spectacularly. Mexicans¶ wish to come to the United States; they are
wanted; they add visibly¶ to our well-being. . . . Without them, the American economy
would¶ suffer. 15
Win win for immigrant and economy relationships
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Of course, employers are not the only economic actors to benefit¶ from immigrants. Upon
migrating to the United States, immigrants often¶ see tangible economic benefits in the form of
increased wages. Indeed,¶ economic opportunity is unquestionably one of the primary
motivators¶ behind many migrants’ difficult decision to leave their homeland and¶ come to this
country. Not surprisingly, the immigrants most likely to migrate¶ to the United States come from
the developing world, where wages¶ and economic opportunities are much less than those in
this country.¶ Many, perhaps most, immigrants come to this country for jobs that¶ pay more
than those in their homeland. Earnings that are low by U.S.¶ standards represent real
improvements over what many migrants would¶ be able to earn at home. Working conditions,
while substandard by¶ American lights, may well be worth the wage gains to the migrant ¶
worker from the developing world. Indeed, they may be comparable to,¶ or perhaps better
than, those available in the migrant’s homeland.¶ But, there are other economic gains from
undocumented immigrants.¶ Undocumented immigrants living in this country are not just
workers.¶ They also are consumers who purchase goods and services. As the undocumented¶
immigrant population has grown in this country, so has its¶ purchasing power, and thus its
importance to economic activity at the¶ national, state, and local levels. Not surprisingly,
businesses, seeing the¶ future, have responded aggressively to this new, and growing, market.
Undocumented Immigrants contribute billions in taxes for nothing in return
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Despite not having a Social Security number, undocumented immigrants¶ can and do pay
federal taxes by securing a Taxpayer Identification¶ Number. Hundreds of thousands of
undocumented immigrants¶ work under assumed names and false Social Security numbers.
Undocumented¶ immigrants thus help keep the financially strapped Social Security¶ system
afloat to the tune of billions of dollars. They contribute to¶ the system without ever collecting
benefits .71 Thus, while many antiimmigrant¶ activists howl at the unfairness of allowing
immigrants, particularly¶ the undocumented, to utilize public resources in the form of¶ benefits,
in actuality the current system, which denies immigrants access¶ to many benefits, is patently
unfair to noncitizens. The fact that undocumented¶ immigrants pay taxes and contribute to the
Social Security system¶ militates in favor of granting them access to certain benefits. The¶ fact
that they are ineligible for most social benefit programs means that,¶ under the current system,
it is the government, and not the undocumented¶ worker, which gains handsomely.
Majority of undocumented immigrants pay taxes with no benefits in return
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
The public is generally unaware that many undocumented immigrants¶ pay federal, state, and
local taxes, a fact militating in favor of their receiving¶ certain public benefits. “[E]ach year
undocumented immigrants¶ The Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor Across Borders
| 151¶ add billions of dollars in sales, excise, property, income and payroll¶ taxes, including
Social Security, Medicare and unemployment taxes, to¶ federal, state and local coffers.
Hundreds of thousands of undocumented¶ immigrants go out of their way to file annual federal
and state¶ income tax returns.”70 Undocumented immigrants are often counseled¶ to pay taxes
in order to improve their chances of regularizing their immigration¶ status at a later date.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of onehalf¶ of all undocumented immigrants pay federal taxes.
Nonetheless, ineligible¶ for major public benefit programs, undocumented immigrants¶ see few
direct benefits from their tax payments.
A2: Wages
Wage impacts are small and benefits outweigh
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Any wage impacts due to immigration, according to economic studies,¶ are relatively
small .53 Moreover, immigrants may contribute to overall¶ gains to the economy, which
ultimately translates into an overall increase¶ in average wages for all workers .54 The labor
added by migrants¶ may add to the overall economic growth of the nation. As the economy¶
grows, benefits are realized by the entire nation. In the end, the benefits¶ provided by
immigrant workers appear to outweigh the costs associated¶ with downward pressures on
wages.
Opening borders enhances the living standards for everyone
Lehman 1995 [Thomas, Adjunct Professor of Economics and Western
Civilization, "Coming to America: The Benefits of Open Immigration."
Foundation for Economic Education. 1 Dec. 1995.
<http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/coming-to-america-the-benefits-ofopen-immigration>. NG]
Many Americans argue that free immigration would destroy “working class” Americans’ ability
to earn a living. They claim that allowing free and open borders to any and all immigrants would
put decent, hard-working Americans out of work. Perhaps what these Americans really fear,
however, is that someone will emerge from the “immigrant class” who would be willing to work
for less than they while producing equal or greater output.¶ The present immigration policy of
the United States amounts to nothing less than a tariff or barrier to entry on the commodity of
labor, and harms American consumers in the same manner as tariffs and trade barriers on other
capital or consumer goods.¶ A policy of open immigration would indeed force unskilled American
laborers to compete for their jobs at lower wages. However, far from being an evil, this is a
desirable outcome, one which should form the basis for a new immigration policy. By inviting
competition into the American labor markets, artificially inflated labor costs could be
eliminated and a greater level of labor efficiency could be achieved. As the cost of labor (itself
a cost of production) decreased, entrepreneurs and producers could produce more efficiently,
enabling them to offer products and services at lower prices as they compete for consumers’
dollars. Lower prices in turn increase the purchasing power of the American consumer, and
thus enhance living standards for everyone. This is happening even now as some small business
owners use “illegal” immigrant labor to lower their operating costs and thus lower consumer
prices: “. . . small-business executives do agree that some of their competitors who knowingly or
unknowingly hire illegal immigrants use the cheap labor to undercut prices of business owners
who play by the rules.”[1]¶ This is good for both consumers and the economy at large. As
immigration makes the American labor market more competitive, costs of production are
reduced and prices decline. In the long run, even the domestic laborer who is forced to lower
his wage demands is not any worse off, since what he loses in terms of lower nominal wages
he may well regain in terms of lower prices on the goods and services he purchases as a
consumer. Meanwhile, everyone else benefits, and no one is privileged at the coerced
expense of anyone else.
A2: Welfare is Costly
Immigrants don’t and cant leach off welfare and other public benefits
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Furthermore, few immigrants aim to consume public benefits. Many¶ immigrants would never
even consider attempting to access any public¶ benefits program. They fear that receipt of any
benefit could result in¶ their deportation from the country. Provisions in the immigration laws¶
give credence to this fear. The word is out in immigrant communities¶ about the risk associated
with receipt of public benefits.¶ In evaluating immigrant benefit consumption, it is important to
note¶ that immigrants are not even eligible for the most costly federal public¶ benefits
programs. In 1996, Congress enacted welfare reform that made¶ both lawful and
undocumented immigrants ineligible for Temporary Assistance¶ to Needy Families and Food
Stamps, two major federal public¶ welfare programs.69 Previously, lawful immigrants had been
eligible for¶ such benefits. Although many have criticized welfare reform, it nonetheless¶
remains clear that immigrants who are ineligible for such benefits¶ cannot bankrupt the public
benefits system. Importantly, undocumented¶ immigrants have never been eligible for the
major—and most costly—¶ public benefits programs.
Immigrants have little effect on welfare
Lehman 1995 [Thomas, Adjunct Professor of Economics and Western
Civilization, "Coming to America: The Benefits of Open Immigration."
Foundation for Economic Education. 1 Dec. 1995.
<http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/coming-to-america-the-benefits-ofopen-immigration>. NG]
Another argument used in favor of immigration controls concerns the American welfare system
and its potential abuse by immigrants who migrate into America merely to feed at the public
trough of social services. The claim is made that the welfare system, not potential economic
freedom, is the lure which draws immigrants into the American economy. Immigrants—
unproductive, slothful, and indigent—constitute a dead-weight loss on the American economy,
and further increase the tax burden on productive Americans. Therefore, we must police our
borders and keep out the undesirables.¶ This argument is statistically and theoretically flawed.
Contrary to prevailing public opinion, current immigrants do not “abuse” the public welfare
system, even in the areas where immigration (legal or illegal) is most concentrated. In fact,
immigrants have little effect on the current system of taxation and wealth redistribution. As
Julian Simon relates:¶ Study after study shows that small proportions of illegals use
government services: free medical, 5 percent; unemployment insurance 4; food stamps, 1;
welfare payments, 1; child schooling, 4. Illegals are afraid of being caught if they apply for
welfare. Practically none receive social security, the costliest service of all, but 77 percent pay
social security taxes, and 73 percent have federal taxes withheld. . . . During the first five years
in the United States, the average immigrant family receives $1404 (in 1975 dollars) in welfare
compared to $2279 received by a native family.[3]¶ Some may disagree with these statistics.
Others would no doubt argue that if immigration controls were eliminated and borders
completely unpoliced, a massive number of immigrants would enter the United States and
overload the welfare system, causing taxes and the national debt to skyrocket. Certainly this is a
possibility. But, even if we grant this argument the benefit of the doubt and concede that
unrestricted immigrants would indeed flood the welfare system, the answer to the problem
lies not in closing off the borders or “beefing up” border security. The answer lies in
eliminating the American welfare state, and prohibiting anyone, native or immigrant, from
living at the coerced expense of another.
A2: Undocumented Immigration Bad
Undocumented immigration is inevitable, attempts to police it are futile
Johnson 07 (Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Law, and Mabie-Apallas
Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis.
“Opening the Floodgates”, pg. 169, BW)
We as a nation must recognize that, under current U.S. immigration law, undocumented
immigration is a fact of modern social life. Many otherwise law-abiding citizens who hold
positions of prestige and authority employ undocumented immigrants in their homes. They
often have undocumented immigrants care for their children, clean the house, and work in their
yards. In 2004, former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik withdrew as President
Bush’s nominee to be the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the federal
agency now primarily entrusted with enforcing the immigration laws, because he had failed to
pay taxes for a domestic-service worker who may have been undocumented. Kerik is not the
first nominee to a highlevel cabinet position to suffer that fate. Conservative pundit Linda
Chavez withdrew as President Bush’s first nominee for Secretary of Labor because she had
previously employed an undocumented immigrant. Nor is this simply a problem for Republican
Presidents. Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird, President Bill Clinton’s first two nominees for the
position of Attorney General, the highest law enforcement office in the United States,
experienced the same fate. The presence of undocumented immigrants in the United States is a
plain reality that needs to be addressed. Open borders would provide a pragmatic, long-term
solution to this nation’s undocumented-immigrant and related immigration problems. Freeing
up migration through a liberal admissions policy would recognize that the enforcement of closed
borders cannot stifle the strong, perhaps irresistible, economic, social, and political pressures
that fuel today’s international migration. Border controls, as currently configured in the United
States, simply waste billions of dollars and result in thousands of deaths. They have not
ended, and cannot end, unlawful immigration.
A2: Devalues Citizenship
The argument that citizenship would be devalued is a misconception and
promotes supremacy over other individuals
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Some might argue that an open-borders regime would “devalue” citizenship in the United
States.108 The use of the term “devaluation” in this context is misleading. All of a nation’s
residents should be treated fairly. The rights and privileges of citizens need not be diminished
to increase the rights of immigrants. Any effort to maintain legal distinction to avoid
“devaluation” of citizenship would require continued disparities in rights and maintenance of
the status quo. Adopting a similar logic, whites could have argued that desegregation in the
1950s and 1960s “devalued” their whiteness.
A2: Causes Overpopulation
No flood of immigrants – takes out their perception links
Delacroix, former professor of management, & Nikiforov, business
development specialist, 9
[Jacques & Sergey, 9, “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely,” The
Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 109-110, MM]
The image of a massive , continuing, one-way exodus of Mexicans flooding the United States
in all circumstances is probably unrealistic because it is a simple projection of what is going
on under current conditions of legally restricted immigration . In all likelihood, legalizing
immigration from Mexico would alter the movement of persons in more complex ways.
Discussions of open or more-open borders nearly always assume a one-way migration of one
kind of population. They presume that, given a chance, some unknown but probably large
fraction of the poorer segments Mexico’s population would move permanently to the United
States. They also implicitly assume no movement of population from the United States into
Mexico. Both assumptions are probably wrong on several grounds. First, on the whole,
Mexicans do not want to live in the United States. Although real, don’t-look-back immigrants
(such as ourselves) exist, people who leave their countries usually do so in search of a better
standard of living. Most simply want to earn more money. In many cases, they wish they could
have their cake and eat it too: obtaining superior earnings in a foreign country, but spending
them at home , where relatives live, grandmothers can be drafted as baby-sitters, and the
customs and especially the language are well understood. For Mexicans, home also happens to
be where their money goes further. Finally, without a doubt, some Mexican immigrants would
rather raise their children in Mexico for moral and personal reasons. A rich American literature
of personal experience suggests that immigrants usually find their adaptation to a new land
excruciatingly painful as well as extremely difficult (McCourt 1996). The United States, far
from the heaven that the native born often imagine it to be, is for many immigrants a kind of
purgatory they hope will eventually lead to salvation in their home country. Furthermore,
numerous immigrants of all origins spend their adult lifetime in a state of minimally functional
adaptation. A surprisingly high number master only a pidgin form of the local language. They can
say “a quart of antifreeze” but not “Believe me, if I had known my daughter would turn out this
way, I would have brought her up differently.” In consequence, individuals who are well
educated and sometimes appreciably cultured in their country of origin operate during their
entire adult lifetime at the self-expressive level of a six-year-old. Or they take refuge in the
exiguous, mindnumbing, limiting social space of their own ghettos, which are always
psychologically much impoverished versions of their home societies. The considerable efforts
that Mexican immigrants’ own philanthropic organizations exert to make their hometowns
more livable attest indirectly to the emotional undesirability of emigration (Hendricks 2008).
Such endeavors are not specific to Mexican emigrants. The French daily Le Figaro tells a similar
story about illegal Egyptian immigrants to France (Salau¨n 2008).
The fear of overpopulation is hyped
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Moreover, despite persistent claims that the nation has reached its¶ “carrying capacity,” it is
far from self-evident that the United States is¶ overpopulated or that the country is even
approaching its population¶ limit. Although it is true that certain urban areas of the country
have¶ relatively high population densities, that density fails to approximate¶ that found in
certain cities and regions of the world. Moreover, many regions¶ of the United States are not
densely populated at all . In fact, some¶ states, such as Iowa, have actively sought to attract
immigrant workers¶ in recent years. Today, many immigrants settle in the South and Midwest,¶
where there is room to build and expand, a need for labor, and relatively¶ inexpensive housing.
Continued migration into less populous regions¶ of the United States minimizes the risk of
overpopulation in the¶ major cities.¶ Even California, most closely associated with the
metropolises of Los¶ Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, has thinly populated areas. In¶
addition to its Mexican colonias, the Central Valley has seen the emergence¶ of many diverse
communities over the past twenty years. Today,¶ Sikh Indians, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese,
Russians, and many other¶ groups make up a significant portion of the area’s population.
Besides¶ The Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor Across Borders | 159¶ adding much
richness to the region, immigrants have contributed to a¶ booming, robust economy that
today includes manufacturing, technology,¶ and other industries in addition to its worldrenowned agricultural¶ sector of state and local economies.
There will be no overload, thousands of immigrants deport annually by will
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Many of the immigrants removed are long-term residents of the United States. Some of the
deportations are based on convictions for relatively minor crimes, such as, in certain
circumstances, driving under the influence. To make matters worse, the statistics fail to
account for the hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens who depart voluntarily each year.
Many, many more immigrants avoid a formal hearing and deportation order by agreeing to
depart than are formally removed from the country. If voluntary removals did not occur at
these rates, the immigration system in the United States would become overburdened and
soon shut down. Thus, removal statistics represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes
to Mexican citizens adversely affected by the U.S. immigration laws.
A2: Ecosystem Impact
Recent compromise was reached to build a fence spanning from The Gulf of
Mexico to the Pacific, acting now is key to prevent environmental hazards
The Gazette 6/20 2013 “Harkin opposes compromise calling for more border fences”
http://thegazette.com/2013/06/20/harkin-opposes-compromise-calling-for-more-borderfences/
It’s not just the cost of maintaining a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border that keeps Sen.
Tom Harkin from supporting a compromise that has improved prospects for immigration
reform.¶ “This idea of building a fence from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean is just a
bad idea,” Harkin told reporters after key senators announced a compromise had been reached
that called for building 700 miles of fence and doubling the number of federal agents
patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border.¶ “Quite frankly, this idea that somehow we’re going to build
a fence all along our border with Mexico doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It doesn’t look good
for us as Americans.Ӧ Harkin voted to table an amendment by Sen. John Cornyn to increase the
number of Border Patrol agents by 5,000 Thursday.¶ The new deal worked out by Republican
Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee, and John Hoeven of North Dakota, would require the
construction of 700 miles of border fencing and provide money for aerial drones, according to
reports. It is believed the deal would increase support among Republicans for immigration
reform.¶ The Iowa Democrat supports building fences where they make sense. However, he
said, fencing is costly to build, damages the environment, disrupts animal migrations routes
and requires continuous upkeep .¶ Among the alternatives are drones, which, he said, are
relatively cheap to operate and can cover long distances, as well as other technology.¶ He also
called for negotiating agreements with the Mexican government to do some patrolling.¶ “We
need to hold them responsible for the protection of the border,” Harkin said. “They should have
responsibilities in that area.Ӧ In addition to building 700 miles of fence, the compromise would
double the number of Border Patrol agents to more than 40,000, adding about $40 billion in
cost to the immigration reform.
Continued border fencing along Mexico results in fragmented ecosystems
FLESCH and CLINTON 2010 (W. EPPS/ D. AARON, School of Natural Resources, University of
Arizona, 325 Biological Sciences East, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and
Management, “Potential Effects of the United States-Mexico Border¶ Fence on Wildlife”
Conservation Biology
Volume 24, No. 1) Blackwell Publishing Limited 2010
Animal movements are an important determinant of distribution, abundance, extinction, and
colonization dynamics, and gene flow (Colbert et al. 2001; Hanski &¶ Gaggiotti 2004). In highly
fragmented environments,¶ animal movements among resource patches may be¶ of greater
consequence to population persistence than¶ the demographic potential of the patches
themselves¶ (Lande 1987). Landscape connectivity is the degree to¶ which an environment
facilitates movement among resource patches (Taylor et al. 1993) and is a function¶ of
landscape structure and organisms’ ability to perceive and respond to it (Tishendorf & Fahrig
2000). Because species’ distributions shift due to climate change¶ (Parmesan 2006), landscape
connectivity may be essential for persistence (Malcolm et al. 2006), especially¶ near range
margins where the size, quality, and proximity of resource patches often decline (Holt et al.¶
2005). Although human activity has degraded connectivity in many landscapes, forecasting
effects on populations is complex because movement is difficult to¶ study.¶ Along international
boundaries, increasing concerns¶ over national security complicate¶ conserving landscape
connectivity. Transboundary development, including fences, roadways, lighting, vegetation¶
clearing, and increased human activity, threatens to alter¶ connectivity at large scales in over 20
nations. In Asia,¶ for example, a security fence recently built along the disputed India–Pakistan
border may have already affected¶ wildlife movements (Pahalwan 2006). In North America¶ a
1125-km security fence along more than one-third of¶ the U.S.–Mexico border (U.S. Public Law
109–367) is under construction. Although fence structures vary, most¶ segments are≥4 m tall,
have vertical gaps 5–10 cm wide,¶ and are associated with vegetation clearings and roads¶ ≥25
m wide. Other sections consist of vehicle barriers¶ often coupled with barbed-wire fences (Fig.
1). Mitigating¶ the effects of these structures on wildlife requires information on movement
behavior and landscape structures¶ that foster connectivity.¶ The international boundary
between the states of Arizona in the United States and Sonora in Mexico traverses a¶ diverse
region. Spanning over 600 km and a 10-fold gradient in annual rainfall, this region extends from
coniferous¶ forests near the northern Sierra Madre Occidental to vast¶ deserts of the Colorado
River Valley. In contrast to other¶ regions along the U.S.–Mexico border, most areas directly¶
north of Sonora are federally managed, often according¶ to explicit conservation mandates, and
in combination¶ with reserves in Sonora form one of the largest networks¶ of protected areas in
North America (Felger & Broyles¶ 2007). Transboundary connectivity is especially relevant¶ to
conservation in this region because several major biogeographic provinces converge and
produce the range¶ limits of many Neotropical and Nearctic taxa (Turner et al.¶ 1995; Escalante
et al. 2004). Moreover, broad elevation¶ and moisture gradients produce fragmented
distributions¶ of many populations (Hoffmeister 1986; Flesch 2008)¶ that presumably are linked
by dispersal. Despite the biological significance of this region , virtually the entire¶ Arizona–
Sonora border has been fenced or is proposed¶ for fencing.
Interaction is Key, fragmentation results in loss of that ecosystem
Diaz 2005 (S Díaz, D Tilman, J Fargione, FS Chapin, R Dirzo, T Kitzberger, B Gemmill, M Zobel, M
Vilá, C Mitchell, A Wilby, Gretchen C. Daily, M Galetti, WF Laurance, J Pretty, Rosamond L.
Naylor, A Power, D Harvell “Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Current State and Trends”,
Biodiversity Regulation of Ecosystem Services, Chapter 11) Island Press, Washington, DC
Many ecosystem processes and the services they provide depend¶ on obligate or facultative
interactions among species. Direct interactions between plants and fungi, plants and animals,
and indirect¶ interactions involving more than two species are essential for ecosystem
processes such as transfer of pollen and many seeds, transfer¶ of plant biomass production to
decomposers or herbivores, construction of habitat complexity, or the spread or suppression
of¶ plant, animal and human pathogens. Because of this, interactions¶ between different
trophic levels are among the most important¶ processes by which biodiversity regulates the
provision of ecosystem services, as illustrated in Figure 11.1 (see also Chapin et al.¶ 2000a).
Although experimental evidence is growing (e.g. van der¶ Putten et al. 2001; Haddad et al. 2001),
most of the examples¶ come from the dramatic community and ecosystem effects of the¶
introduction or removal of only one or a small number of species.¶ There is clearly still
insufficient information to determine whether¶ there are general principles that describe how
biotic linkages between different trophic levels and indirect interactions affect various
ecosystem processes. Nevertheless, the available studies¶ suggest that the integrity of these
interactions is important for¶ maintaining ecosystem processes and that threats to them via
habitat destruction and fragmentation (see Box 11.1) are likely to result in losses of
ecosystem service
Loss of a local ecosystem results in a domino effect of biodiversity loss
Diaz 2005 (S Díaz, D Tilman, J Fargione, FS Chapin, R Dirzo, T Kitzberger, B Gemmill, M Zobel, M
Vilá, C Mitchell, A Wilby, Gretchen C. Daily, M Galetti, WF Laurance, J Pretty, Rosamond L.
Naylor, A Power, D Harvell “Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Current State and Trends”,
Biodiversity Regulation of Ecosystem Services, Chapter 11) Island Press, Washington, DC
Species composition is often more important than the number of species¶ in affecting ecosystem
processes (high certainty). Thus, conserving or restoring the composition of communities,
rather than simply maximizing species¶ numbers, is critical to maintaining ecosystem services.
Changes in species¶ composition can occur directly by species introductions or removals, or
indirectly by altered resource supply due to abiotic drivers (such as climate) or¶ human drivers
(such as irrigation, eutrophication, or pesticides).¶ Although a reduction in the number of
species may initially have small¶ effects, even minor losses may reduce the capacity of
ecosystems for¶ adjustment to changing environments (medium certainty). Therefore, a¶ large
number of resident species, including those that are rare, may act as ‘‘insurance’’ that
buffers ecosystem processes in the face of changes in the¶ physical and biological
environment (such as changes in precipitation, temperature, or pathogens).
Specialist species already in low numbers will be effected drastically by new
fences
FLESCH and CLINTON 2010 (W. EPPS/ D. AARON, School of Natural Resources, University of
Arizona, 325 Biological Sciences East, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and
Management, “Potential Effects of the United States-Mexico Border¶ Fence on Wildlife”
Conservation Biology
Volume 24, No. 1) Blackwell Publishing Limited 2010
Results of our case studies suggest other species may¶ be significantly affected by security
infrastructure in¶ the Arizona–Sonora borderlands if they are terrestrial¶ and large enough to
be physically excluded by security¶ infrastructure (cannot pass through a 5- to 10-cm gap),¶
deterred by vegetation openings, or fly at heights <4 m¶ during dispersal. Furthermore,
although bighorn sheep¶ and many other species in discontinuous habitat patches¶ can
disperse across nonbreeding habitat, those species¶ are most likely to experience loss of
connectivity at¶ larger scales when linkages incorporating transboundary movements are
disrupted (e.g., Fig 4b). For instance,¶ desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) also occupy disjunct
rocky habitat separated by valleys and make interpopulation movements approximately once
per generation (Edwards et al. 2004); those characteristics could¶ increase vulnerability to
disruption by border fencing.¶ Among nonmigratory birds, ground dwellers such as Wild¶ Turkey
(Meliagris gallopavo) and quail (Phasianidae)¶ may not readily cross fences unless gap widths
facilitate movement (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, bats such as endangered lesser-long nosed bat
(Leptonycteris curasoae)¶ and migratory birds likely will fly over fences.¶ Among wide-ranging
mammals, persistence and recovery of other species present in low numbers such as¶ jaguar
and Sonoran pronghorn may depend on transboundary movements (Krausman et al. 2005;
McCain &¶ Childs 2008). Persistence of black bears (Ursus americanus) in northern Sonora and
Texas may depend, respectively, on movements from Arizona (Varas 2007) and¶ northern
Coahuila (Onorato et al. 2004). Population-level¶ consequences for species that are more
widespread and¶ abundant such as pumas (Puma concolor) and mule deer¶ (Odocoileus
hemionus) are likely to be less severe. Detailed information on distribution, movement
behavior,¶ and the effects of interpopulation connectivity on local persistence are required to
fully assess the potential¶ effects of transboundary development on wildlife and to¶ develop
effective mitigation strategies.
Government actions inherently take in no account of the environment, this
fence would be the end of those ecosystems
Bigham 2007 (Roy, Pollution Engineering, “Abuse of Power”) BNP Media March, 2007
Politicians are often accused of abusing their power . Rarely¶ do we see such a display of it
than what was recently reported by the news about our Homeland Security Secretary.¶ A
recent news item from the Associated Press caught this¶ editor's eye and resulted in a stunned
moment of silence to let¶ the information settle in. Homeland Security Secretary Michael¶
Chertoff announced he was waiving all environmental rules¶ in order to clear the way to
construct a fence. The result of his¶ action circumvents the Endangered Species Act, the
Federal Water¶ Pollution Control Act and the National Environmental Policy Act ,¶ to name a
few.¶ The engineering proposal involves 37 miles of traditional and¶ virtual fencing along the
U.S. and Mexico border in Southwestern¶ Arizona. It includes radar and other infrastructure,
lighting, all weather and drag roads. The project is anticipated to cost nearly¶ $64 million.¶
According to Homeland Security spokesperson Russell Knocke,¶ Chertoff voided "environmental
requirements and other legalities¶ that have impeded the department's ability to construct
fencing¶ and deploy detection technology on the range." Apparently, our¶ government has
indeed authorized a single entity to ignore our¶ environmental rules and regulations at a
single person's whim.¶ Chertoff needs no approval in such regards and no public comments are
allowed
A2: Crime
Crimes committed by immigrants are statistically skewed – They are more lawabiding than America’s own citizens
Smith 11 (Robert, “Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life under the U.S.
Deportation Regime”, pg. 20, BW)
Even though statistically migrants commit less crimes than citizens, the 1996 laws helped
produce millions of “criminal aliens” by creating new crimes out of civil immigration
violations. Of the criminal statutes used in DHS immigration prosecutions in FY 2004, over 80%
consisted of one of two of these crimes: “entry of alien at improper time or place,” (47%)
“Reentry of deported alien” (34%) (TRAC 2005). In the years after 9/11, the imperative of
finding and arresting criminal aliens was the principal governmental priority that propelled the
64% rise in detentions between FY 2005 and FY 2009. Budget appropriation bills stipulated that
the Department of Homeland Security “shall prioritize the identification and removal of aliens
convicted of a crime by the severity of that crime” (U.S. Congress 2009). In ICE’s yearly budget
request, the Secretary would start his or her speech thanking the members of Congress and in
the next paragraph invoke the need to protect the American people from criminal aliens.
Unfortunately for ICE’s stated mission, the 200% rise in funding in FY 2005–FY 2009 did not lead
to a commensurate increase in the detention of criminal aliens. There was only a 12% rise in
criminal aliens in that period, but the number of detainees who have never been convicted of
a crime increased 99%, from 139,583 to 273,408. Even more troubling, in FY 2009, 76% of noncriminal arrests were made by the programs whose primary purpose was to target criminal
aliens (TRAC 2010).
Criminal Stereo types are hyped
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
However, despite popular stereotypes about the criminal alien, there¶ is no evidence that the
crime rate among immigrants in the United States¶ is any higher than that among the general
population. As Peter Schuck¶ stated in a comprehensive review of the data a few years ago,
Although the systematic data on point are somewhat dated, legal immigrants¶ do not appear to
commit any more crime than demographically¶ similar Americans; they may even commit less ,
and that crime may be¶ less serious. Nor does today’s immigrant crime appear to be worse
than¶ in earlier eras. The immigrants who flooded American cities around the¶ turn of the
century (the ancestors of many of today’s Americans) were¶ also excoriated as congenitally
vicious and usually crime-prone, not¶ only by the public opinion of the day, but also by the
Dillingham Commission,¶ which Congress established to report on the need for immigration¶
restrictions. The evidence suggests that those claims were false then,¶ and similar claims
appear to be false now.85¶
Framework
Plan Key to Education
Our counter-interpretation is good for topic-specific education: We must think
through the biopolitical nature of global mobility controls in order to come to
terms with our instrumentalized relationship to life.
Salter 2006 [Mark, “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International
Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,” Alternatives 31, pp. 167-189]
There are three directions for further research and analysis: the corporeal turn in global mobility
studies, the global mobility regime as biopolitical management of international populations, and
the confessionary complex. Corporeal Turn The field of migration studies has been hamstrung
by two dominant approaches: microstudies of migration networks, and macrostudies of pushpull factors. This article argues for the consideration of a different kind of micropolitics of
power, that of the border itself. We must investigate the legal state of exception at the border
and the ways that these exceptions are instantiated in laws and policies. The interface of the
body and the body politic is hotly contested, and scholars need to take seriously the question of
admission and exclusion to the political community at its border, not solely from an
immigration/refugee rights perspective but from a wider view of the global mobility regime and
human rights. This corporealism must also take into account the management of international
populations through biopolitics in creating, classifying, and policing specific kinds of
international bodies, and the way in which political technologies of individuals such as
passports, visas, and frontier control educate mobile subjectivities in kinds of obedience and
auto-confession. We must ask: How does the global mobility regime foster conditions under
which we reorganize ourselves into international bodies and characterize those bodies as
national or stateless, laboring or leisured, healthy or diseased, and safe or pathological?
Managing Mobility This is aided by understanding the visa as part of a global biopolitical
system. In the loose visa regime, we see the control of population through the self-confession
of our status as national, working, healthy, and safe bodies through application procedures.
We need to unpack the way in which visa systems erase the middle ground previously occupied
by gastarbeiter programs and shunt economic migrants into the category of asylum seekers, a
category that does little to acknowledge the material basis of well-founded fears of economic
persecution. Some of this work has been done by human rights–based advocacy groups like
Statewatch and Amnesty International, but we also need to conduct close ethnographies of the
bureaucracies responsible for the management of these decisions. In particular, I see two
dangers in this corporal/confessional regime. The issue of consent is erased on both
technological and governmental levels. First, the body comes to testify or confess for the
subject without the consent or even perhaps knowledge of the subject. Leaving aside the
sociological issue of the ways in which body politics are constructed through stereotypes, there
is an issue of data being collected, analyzed, and assigned to a particular body without any kind
of check or balance. Second, the dynamics of these data flows are not transparent. Once this
corporeal information is added to our governmental profile, we have little way of tracking its
progress through private and official channels. As David Lyon and Elia Zureik have argued
elsewhere, the burden of surveillance falls disproportionately on the poor and marginal.78 We
must be vigilant of the expansion of state policing powers, especially at the borders where the
operation of state power is both naked and hidden from view.
Epistemological critique produces new ways of understanding our complicity in
systems of biopolitical domination
Hamann 2009 [Trent, “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics,” in Foucault Studies 6]
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that would
subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti-tude” that can be
traced historically as the constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith
Butler points out in her article “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”,39 critique is an
attitude, distinct from judgment, pre-cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning
approach to the rules and ra-tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular
form of gover-nance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has
al-ways relied upon certain relations to truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-ing
knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective technique comprising general rules,
particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, inter-views, etc. And
while critique has at times played a role within the art of government itself, as we’ve seen in the
case of both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made possible what Foucault calls “the art
of not being governed, or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost” (WC,
45). Critique is neither a form of ab-stract theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright
rejection or condemnation of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and agonistic
engagement, re-engagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have
led one to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault
suggests that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of
acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of be-longing and
presents itself as a task. Its task amounts to a “historical investigation into the events that
have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are
doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE, 125). But how can we distinguish the kinds of resistance
Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to ”do your own thing” or ”be all you can be”
that stream forth in every direction from political campaigns to commercial advertising? How is
it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does not simply lend
technical sup-port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can distinguish
criti-cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-fornian
cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in
discovering one’s ”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic” forms of rebellion served
up for daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand we might also be careful not to
dismiss forms of self-fashioning as ”merely” aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book
Foucault and the Art of Ethics, Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the
modern conception of art as a singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social,
political, and ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a
house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary writes: Foucault is less interested in the critical
power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas-tic’ power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no
special advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy unnecessarily
restricts our possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault aware of the specif-ic
nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it. What O’Leary rightly identifies here
is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of exis-tence that specifically stands in a critical but
immanent relation to the ways in which our individuality is given to us in advance through
ordered practices and forms of knowledge that determine the truth about us. The issue is not a
matter of how we might distinguish “authentic” forms of resistance (whatever that might
mean) from “merely” aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether or not the
practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the manner in which our freedom—how we
think, act, and speak—has been governed in ways that are limiting and into-lerable. In short,
critical resistance offers possibilities for an experience of de-subjectification. Specifically in
relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this would involve resisting, avoiding,
countering or opposing not only the ways in which we’ve been encouraged to be little more
than self-interested subjects of ra-tional choice (to the exclusion of other ways of being and
often at the expense of those “irresponsible” others who have “chosen” not to amass adequate
amounts of human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments, institutions,
communities, work places, and forms of political engagement have been reshaped in order to
foster the production of Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of work can be found
in many locations, from the international anti-globalization movement to local community
organizing.
Limits Impact Turn
The ethical creation of self comes before their political prescriptions -- it
determines our relationship to biopolitical decisions regarding which lives and
lifestyles are and are not allowed to subsist politically—their framework
arguments just recreate this violence
Gabardi 2001 [Wayne, Negotiating Postmodernism pp. 77-79]
Based on his research into ancient Greek ethics, Foucault identified four interrelated modes of ethical
practice that formed the basis of both a framework of ethical analysis and a model of freedom.
They were ethical substance, a mode of subjectivation, ethical work, and telos.5° Ethical substance
refers to that aspect or part of an individual’s behavior that is determined to be the main focus or
“the prime material of his (or her) moral conduct.” The mode of subjectivation is the form with which the different
parts or aspects of one’s self are arranged. It is the model that fashions or molds one’s self into a distinctive style of existence.
Foucault’s own mode of subjectivation fused aesthetics and politics into a model of creative resistance, making one’s life into a
work of art formed out of social and political struggle. Ethical work involves the means, the methods, and the
techniques by which we change ourselves into an ethical subject. Telos involves committing oneself
to a certain mode of being and striving to consciously place one’s everyday actions within a pattern
of conduct. Taken together, these ethical practices inform a conception of self- hood in which a
person takes an active role in shaping his or her identity, rather than conforming to existing
external standards and systems of power/knowledge. The self is an assemblage of practices rather than
an innate entity. While both disciplined bodies and active ethical subjects are forged within the same
power environments, the active reflexive self appropriates practices of conduct from
power/knowledge formations without being dependent on their disciplinary codes. Foucault based
this activity principally on an aesthetic model because it was his conviction that art is the most potent
medium of radical reflexivity and resistance. Art is a potentially explosive transformative force. By
linking it to the pursuit of an ethical life, Foucault was able to stabilize and channel its energy into a
relationship where “self-care” and “responsibility for the other” inform and enhance the aesthetic
drive. The interview “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (1984) illuminates how in his final work
Foucault was reweaving ethics, aesthetics, and politics by making connections between power, resistance, self-care, liberty, and
caring for others. He states that freedom is the ontological condition and the basis of ethics.5’ He defines
ethics as a practice, a way of life, an “ethos,” rather than as a theory or a codified set of rules.52 He makes clear that self-care
“implies complex relations with others” and that “this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others.”” He states that
power means “relationships of power:’ that resistance and freedom are implicit in power
relations, and that “domination” is different from power. It is a situation in which “the relations of
power are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and the margin of liberty is
extremely limited?’54 Foucault further concludes that the relationship between philosophy and
politics is fundamental and that philosophy is charged with the duty of “challenging all
phenomena of domination at whatever level or under whatever form they present themselves’55 This
leads me to conclude that Foucault’s idea of freedom as ethical agency involves choosing a life
“style” and then integrating specific techniques of self-formation within an environment of power
formations. The power context of life stylization further requires the cultivation of self-discipline
and agonistic struggle to both resist disciplinary power matrices and carve out a space for selfempowerment and creative choice. In other words, freedom entails a movement from resistance to
ethics to political action. Resistance, the most primal expression of freedom, involves the revolt of
the body against the normalizing effects of disciplinary biopower. This critical resistance, largely
reactive and defensive, is channeled into an affirmative ethical project concerned with self-care.
The rejection of an imposed identity and a set of norms becomes the impetus for fashioning one’s
own ethical code and conduct. The ethical agent becomes a political actor in joining struggles that
seek to alter power relations so that one can more freely live one’s life. The battle is joined at the
local and microlevels by countering norms with norms and techniques with techniques. I further
conclude that if, as I have argued, ours is a time of cultural postmodernization, of global-local flows
of postmodern goods services, and identities, of greater aesthetic-reflexive individuation, and of the
pervasive effects of information and mass media in our Lives, then quality of life and lifestyle
issues should take (and have taken) on a greater importance in our daily social interactions,
economic decisions, ethical considerations, and political concerns. Understood in this way,
Foucault’s idea of freedom as an aesthetic-ethical-political practice of lifestyle determination
takes on greater significance. It is both a product of our late modern/postmodern transition and a
new mode of being and normative guide in negotiating this condition.
State Inclusion Bad—Violence
Inclusion of the state supports ‘liberatory’ border politics while also dooming
them to corruption – leads to more violence
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 529-30) MM
Indeed, Blunkett’s prophetic vision for Britain as a ‘safe haven’ depends on a number of
exclusions firmly in place. First, the Home Secretary affirms that this new vision will only work
if we are ‘secure within our sense of belonging and identity’. Significantly, Butler makes it clear
that ‘This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed thus requires a simultaneous
production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘‘subjects’’, but who form the
constitutive outside to the domain of the subject’ (1993, p. 3). At best a utopian fantasy of
homeliness , at worst a conscious foreclosure of ethics of openness to the alterity of the other
- an alterity that always poses a challenge to our own security and self-knowledge - Blunkett’s
politics of migration therefore seems premised on a logical impossibility .7 It is a hospitality
that is in fact based on the originary closure, on foreseeing the foreign threat and trying to avert
it. This is the moment when the classical heritage gives way to bizarre miscegenation. BlunkettTiresias stops instructing Creon to actually become Creon: a protector of the public sphere
whose law both produces and excludes the unlawful, those without the integrity and belonging
shared by the members of the polis . For it is this when he goes on to announce: ‘We have
fundamental moral obligations which we will always honour’, only to counterbalance this
claim with the following reservation: ‘At the same time, those coming into our country have
duties that they need to understand and which facilitate their acceptance and integration’. His
paradoxical immigration policy of ‘squaring the circle’ is also described as ‘ a ‘‘two-way street’’
requiring commitment and action from the host community, asylum seekers and long-term
migrants alike’ . It is perhaps not surprising (which does not mean it is intentional on Blunkett’s
part) that a linguistic paradox is used when outlining our moral obligations and their duties,
since the asylum seekers’ position ‘before the law’ itself entails a paradox: even though they are
outside it, they are supposedly subject to its power. Constituted as threshold political beings,
migrants and ‘asylum seekers’ are defined precisely through their liminal status that places
them on the outskirts of the community. Then how can they be expected to ‘have duties’
imposed on them by the host community and manifest commitment to these duties if this very
community needs a prior definition of itself, a definition that confirms identity and belonging in
relation, or even opposition, to what might threaten it? We also need to consider how the
political status of asylum seekers and migrants is actually established. Who legislates the duties
that they will be expected to follow? What is the source of the moral obligation that will help
Britons ‘manage’ the asylum issue? Agamben explains that ‘The sovereign decides not the licit
and the illicit but the originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law’ (1998, p. 26).8 To
what extent, then, is the sovereign entitled to impose the law on those whose identity he
defines as being situated ‘before’ the law, both in the spatial and temporal sense? In particular,
given that Iraqis constitute the majority of all asylum seekers in the UK, is this conditional
openness in the context of the ‘Gulf War II’, not a certain blind spot in the rhetoric and politics
of the sovereign government that does not see a connection between the Iraqi refugees from
their own country, whose lives are threatened by Western bombs, and the Iraqi asylum seekers
trying to come into Britain? This form of politics, with its underlying moral obligations, seems
to be based on a certain occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence , where ‘the
sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which
violence passes over into law and law passes into violence’ (Agamben 1998, p. 32).
State-focused policies cause violence—and their limits arguments reify the
impacts of border thinking
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science Btihaj.
"Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3 (2006): 259-273. Print.)
The fact that technology is an aspect of immanentist biopolitics, is in itself an attestation to how
the political has faded into a state of technicism (Coward 1999, p. 18) – a depoliticisation of
society in the Agambenian sense – in which governments’ policies and debates are merely
technical discussions on the type of mechanisms to be deployed in order to protect borders,
filter movements, eliminate infiltrations, and ultimately, sustain sovereignty by means of
measurement and exclusion. Biopolitics, nowadays, is too pervasive, too subtle that borders
are no longer constituted around the ‘physical’ but actualised in the taken-for-granted
institutional-organisational-administrative processes; in the density and ubiquity of information
networks. This perpetual actualisation of borders or what we may refer to as ‘infinite
bordering’ is enacted into our very ousia, creating far-reaching implications on ‘bodies that do
not matter’, bodies of those left to float in the Strait of Gibraltar, bodies of those left to die on
the US–Mexican border, bodies of those who are, at this very moment, being raped, tortured
and humiliated. Borders are becoming the epitome of Western hypocrisy: on the one hand,
they embody visions of Western progress, civilisation and technological advancements. On the
other hand, they are turning into mass graves, a monolithic disposal of dispensable bodies and
unnecessary existences. This is the dialectical reality of borders!
State Inclusion Bad—Guts Solvency
Usage of the state prophesizes ‘forward-looking’ political solutions as a veil to
conceal top-down solutions that doom solvency
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at the University of
London, 2004 (Joanna, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the biopolitics of immigration,”
Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 527-28) MM
The politics of blindness: In his own reading of Antigone in the context of hospitality towards the
alien and the foreign, Jacques Derrida justifies referring to classical figures in the context of
contemporary political matters by arguing that these ‘urgent contemporary matters’ ‘do not
only bring the classical structures into the present. They interest us and we take a look at them
at the points where they seem, as though of themselves, to deconstruct these inheritances or
the prevailing interpretations of these inheritances’ (2000, p. 139). Derrida does not of course
suggest abandoning these classical structures altogether once they have been placed ‘in
deconstruction’, but rather thinking them differently, or allowing them to reveal, ‘as though of
themselves’, certain ambiguities inherent in them, ambiguities that will in turn allow us to
interpret and enact our current democratic laws in a new way. To give an example of such an
enactment of the Greek democratic tradition in our twenty-first century polis, I want to look at
another borderline character in Sophocles’s Antigone (2000): the figure of Tiresias. The blind
prophet Tiresias seems to have returned to the British state in the figure of UK Home
Secretary, David Blunkett, proponent of the new immigration regime and author of the White
Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain’ (February
2002), a document that paved the way for the subsequent Nationality, Immigration and Asylum
Act. What is it that links Tiresias with Blunkett, apart from their physical blindness? In
Sophocles’ play, Tiresias appears before Creon to warn him that Thebes is on the ‘edge of
peril’ and that Creon should ‘listen to the voice of reason’ and withdraw his prohibition
against the burial of Antigone’s brother, Polynices. On hearing Creon’s refusal to open the city
gates, Tiresias accuses Creon of suffering from ‘the disease of wealth’ and predicts the
impending wrath of gods that will descend upon Creon and his family. The figure of Tiresias as a
blind seer on the border of the polis is particularly relevant for me in the context of current
legislation regarding asylum and immigration in Western democracies. However, one might
perhaps say that it is too facile a gesture to ‘equate’ a modern Western politician with an
ancient prophet of doom and gloom on the basis of their shared ‘disability’, or even that it is
inappropriate to draw attention to Blunkett’s actual blindness. Aware of such possible
reservations, I am nevertheless prepared to risk accusations of impropriety and pursue the
Tiresian (dis)inheritance, and its accompanying blind spots, in the discourse on immigration and
asylum as developed in the UK government’s White Paper, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’.5
‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’ opens with a foreword, which has been authored and signed by
the Home Secretary himself. Blunkett adopts here a somewhat paternalistic, sermon-like tone
to explain to the British public that ‘There is nothing more controversial, and yet more
natural, than men and women from across the world seeking a better life for themselves and
their families’.6 In his apparent attempt to win over ‘the British public’, he establishes a
sequence of (il)logical equivalences (e.g. between a ‘natural’ desire for migration and a ‘natural’
feeling of apprehension felt by those whose territory the migrants enter) that are supposed to
embrace and convey how ‘the nation’ feels about the issue of immigration. In a tone
reminiscent of the Greek prophet, Blunkett speaks about the need to offer ‘a safe haven’ to
‘those arriving on our often wet and windy shores’. Just as Tiresias takes it upon himself to
point out that Creon speaks unwisely, the Home Secretary addresses and unravels the
anxieties of all those self-appointed guardians of the national shores (from editors of tabloid
newspapers to ‘my home is my castle’ John Bulls) who want to turn Britain into a fortress.
Blunkett’s discussion of the problems connected with migration and asylum is supposed to
rebuke accusations that Britain is out of line with other European nations in the way in which it
deals with illegal immigration and asylum seekers, and that ‘people coming through the Channel
Tunnel, or crossing in container lorries, constitutes an invasion’. Blunkett’s Foreword is thus
aimed ‘against false perception’, which he attempts to overcome with ‘clarity’ and reason.
Blunkett lays out his argument carefully, indicating errors in the public perception and
correcting them with his own argument. But it is not only the correction of errors that interests
the Home Secretary. Blunkett’s primary aim is the development of an immigration and asylum
policy that ‘looks forward’. As if repeating the instruction given to Creon by Triesias, Blunkett
warns the people not to act unwisely; he explains carefully that migration brings significant
benefits and that it can advance the prosperity of the nation, provided it is properly managed.
This last reservation makes Blunkett a thrifty prophet, resorting to the discourse of economics
and management to explain his vision. As we know from Foucault, the biopolitics of modern
democracies works precisely through ‘the administration of bodies and the calculated
management of life’ (1984, p. 140). As if to illustrate this, it is by means of proposing ‘rational
controlled routes’ of immigration (rather than ‘the international ‘‘free for all’’, the so called
‘‘asylum shopping’’ throughout Europe, and the ‘‘it is not our problem’’ attitude which is too
often displayed’) that Blunkett hopes to promote his policy. However, the calculated
rationality of his outlook seems permanently threatened by the irrational - coming not only
from the opponents of his policy but also from the author of the White Paper himself. After
laying out his proposal for a ‘rational’ and ‘controlled’ economic migration and asylum system,
Blunkett adds: ‘It is possible to square the circle’. At this instant the voice of reason founders,
and immigration policy reveals that it is only a very rough sketch, one that allows the
draughtsman to resort to illicit geometrical moves in order to complete the picture.
Border Thinking Causes Policy Failure
The paradigm of suspicion has high influence on policymaking
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005 “Without Borders?
Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime,” Sociological Theory 23.2
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2678c41fae19b%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
Beyond studies, reports, and cover stories that shape public discourse in this direction, the
conflation of the perceived threats of terror, crime, and immigration into a unitary paradigm
of suspicion now routinely guides policy making , institution building, and regulation. Thus, for
example, the 1998 Cairo summit of the Interpol launched a joint international policy for
handling crime, immigration, and terrorism, and the United States explicitly designed its
USVISIT program—regulating nonimmigrant entry to the United States—to identify travelers
who violate immigration controls, have criminal records, or belong to groups listed as terrorist
organizations. Once we identify a conflated paradigm of suspicion that brings together the
perceived threats of terrorism, crime, and immigration, we may appreciate the strong
sociological affinity between metal detectors in American public schools and airport X-ray
machines, between passports burnt with the sociobiological profile of their bearers and Interpol
records of tissues and retinas, or between armed guards in restaurants, guarded gated
communities, and the strengthening of immigration and border police. In all these instances,
although located in different spatial settings, and although often formally established to address
different types of social threats, a paradigm of suspicion is an overarching framework that
sets these diverse practices in motion . In the next two sections, I therefore introduce some of
the elementary forms that constitute some of the physical features of the emerging mobility
regime.
Orienting Away from the State Key
Analysis of biopolitics cannot succeed from a state-oriented approach
Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and
Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]
According to Dean, it is through an analytics of government that the specific technologies,
practices and rationalities of liberal government, and its implication in a regime of bio-politics,
can be investigated. For Dean:
An analytics is a type of study concerned with the analysis of the specific conditions under
which particular entities emerge, exist and change. It is thus distinguished from most
theoretical approaches in that it seeks to attend to, rather than efface, the singularity of ways
of governing and conducting ourselves. Thus it does not treat particular practices of
government as instances of ideal types and concepts. Neither does it regard them as effects of
a law-like necessity or treat them as manifestations of a fundamental contradiction. An
analytics of government examines the conditions under which regimes of practices come into
being, are maintained and are transformed. … These regimes also include, moreover, the
different ways in which these institutional practices can be thought, made into objects of
knowledge, and made subject to problematizations (pp. 20-21). Thus, an analytics of
government in the Foucauldian mode, is genealogical; it examines the historicity and
contingency of both liberal regimes of practices, and the modes of subjectification to which
they give rise, even as it eschews any metaphysics, philosophy of history, or philosophical
anthropology. Moreover, such an analytics of government also acknowledges the enormous
significance of political power beyond the state in the liberal regimes of modern democracy.
From the perspective of governmentality, with its arts and regimes encompassing, as Rose
points out, “a multitude of programmes, strategies, tactics, devices, calculations, negotiations,
intrigues, persuasions and seductions aimed at the conduct of individuals, groups,
populations-and indeed oneself”(p. 5), the state is no longer the sole, or necessarily primary,
power container. Indeed, for Rose: From this perspective, the question of the state that was so
central to earlier investigations of political power is relocated. The state now appears simply as
one element-whose function is historically specific and contextually variable-in multiple circuits
of power, connecting a diversity of authorities and forces, within a whole variety of complex
assemblages (p. 5). Thus, governmentality studies, which investigate power relations at the
molecular as well as at the molar level, cannot limit themselves to an analysis of the state. The
web of power relations in modern democracies requires an analytics of government that is, as
Dean claims, pluralistic; that acknowledges the existence of “a plurality of regimes of practices
in a given territory, each composed from a multiplicity of in principle unlimited and
heterogeneous elements bound together by a variety of relations and capable of
polymorphous connections with one another” (p.27). Such an analytics, will investigate the
distribution of power between state and civil society, public and private, juridical and social,
coercive and non-coercive, disciplinary and normalizing. And according to Dean, the point of
departure for such “an analytics of government is the identification and examination of
specific situations in which the activity of governing comes to be called into question, the
moments and the situations in which government becomes a problem” (p. 27).
Examinations must separate themselves from sovereignty—including the state
makes understanding modern power relations impossible
Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan & Alan, “Michel Foucault: Crises and
Problemizations”, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]
What Foucault does insist upon in “Society Must Be Defended” is that if we want to analyze
modern power relations, we need to extricate ourselves from the theory of sovereignty. This
is the meaning of his claim that in political theory we have still not cut off the head of the
king. In the place of the theory of sovereignty as a basis for political theory, Foucault enjoins
us to investigate the microphysics of power: “... let me say that rather than orienting our
research into power toward the juridical edifice of sovereignty, State apparatuses, and the
ideologies that accompany them, I think we should orient our analyses of power toward
material operations, forms of subjugation [assujeissement], and the connections among and
the uses made of the local systems of subjugation on the one hand, and apparatuses of
knowledge on the other” (p. 34).6 and the uses made of the local systems of subjugation on
the one hand, and apparatuses of knowledge on the other” (p. 34).6
A2: Cede the Political
The affirmative is a-political because they are only a re-arrangement of the
technical virtuoso of modern calculative managerialism; critique makes a new
relationship to the political possible which spurs new kinds of actions.
Grayson 2007 [“Human Security as Power/Knowledge: The Biopolitics of a Definitional
Debate,” at SGIR Turin Conference, http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Grayson-graysonsgir.pdf]
While the argument thus far has been critical of the biopolitics of human security, it does bear
noting that the myriad forms of human misery and suffering to which human security
ostensibly wishes to respond do demand forms of action and engagement. However,
responses should not be conceptualised from positions that deny the power-relations that
make them possible; to do so is the very epitome of irresponsibility. Conversely, to completely
disengage from practical action will accomplish very little to reduce levels of suffering. Inaction,
a political stasis of paralysis in which we should refuse to act in order to disconnect from the
biopolitical matrix can also be unacceptable. The invocation of a binary distinction to guide
resistance does nothing to address the power-relations constitutive of the current political
situation; letting die is, after all, a form of biopolitical management. Rather, the key ethical
problematique to which biopolitics cogently speaks is that the question is not necessarily one of
action or inaction, but rather how to remain cognizant of how forms of action and/or inaction
advocated by human security definitions produce and maintain a system of global
governmentality aimed at maximizing economies of biopower? It is this ethical problematique
which finds a resonance in William Connolly’s investigation of the politics of suffering and the
responsibility to (re)act. He argues that the most difficult cases require not an ethics of help for
the helpless but a political ethos of critical engagement between interdependent, contending
constituencies implicated in asymmetrical structures of power. Indeed, some ways of acting
upon obligations to the deserving poor or victims of natural disaster provide moral cover for
the refusal to cultivate an ethics of engagement with constituencies in more ambiguous,
disturbing, competitive positions. (Connolly 1999, 129) What this speaks to is the disciplinary
power of ‘clear’ policy prescriptions engendered by the human security debate to foreclose
the possibility of assistance in instances where to do so makes us feel uncomfortable or
threatens what is perceived as the correct way of living. Thus, Connolly’s argument provides a
new purchase on how it becomes possible ignore suffering or even institutionalise it as a part
of broader biopolitical strategy. Moreover, it is also essential to keep cognizant of how the
inherently subjective forms of interpretation within the human security debate are presented
as being beyond their own subjectivity. Rather, under the cloak of cosmological realism, they
are presented as objective methods of ascertaining truth, a truth that may be universal or
particular—depending on the definition being advanced—yet always unmediated. However, as
David Campbell (2005) has argued, positions which appeal to realisms are themselves ‘ontopolitical’. Thus, the broad, narrow, and via media accounts of human security that vie for
exalted status of the best understanding of the concept contain ‘fundamental presumptions that
establish the possibilities within which…[an] assessment of actuality is presented (Campbell
2005, 128). It is the certainty that can be achieved in avoiding onto-political consideration that
becomes so attractive within the human security debate. Avoiding onto-politics makes it
possible for a definition to prove its worth through a careful analysis of facts backed by the
legitimizing function of its method. The goal is of course to produce clear policy prescriptions
which are taken on board by the policy community. Within this formulation of (bio)politics,
there is no need to reconsider, no need to agonize over decisions, no need to be held
accountable for the power-knowledge that is produced, and no need to question the regime
of truth that legitimizes them; ‘facts’ simply cannot be denied. Tragically, the absolute absence
of critical thinking demanded by the abdication of onto-political reflection produces the
conditions within which gross irresponsibility and unaccountability can flourish. Unless we
reject the imperative of producing decidable decisions, Campbell notes via Derrida that we
become the co-authors of an emaciated spectrum of policy possibility that is devoid of ethics,
the political, and responsibility; the replacement is ‘a program, a technology, and its
irresponsible application’ (Campbell 2005, 132). Therefore, the fiction that a decision can be
sufficient, that a decision can definitively resolve the potentially irresolvable while remaining
outside of onto-politics, is the most significant political act that is both constitutive of, and
produced by, the biopolitical rationalities at the heart of the human security debate (Campbell
2005, 131). For human security to represent a marked transformation in how security is
conceptualised and a sign of progress in the field of security studies, the discursive formation
that sets its limits and the incitement to discourse which shapes its debates must
acknowledge that ‘no decision is sufficient, so we will have to make many and…see a constant
oscillation and mobility between different positions’ (Campbell 2005, 131). The imposition of
modes of being and becoming in the form of biopolitical rationalities that are pervasive within
the human security discourse— including both ‘human’ and ‘security’— must be subject to
critique (Connolly 1999). Given the conceptual, professional, and cultural obstacles faced by
security analysts in extricating themselves from these modes of thinking, the call is not a simple
one.
Topicality
We Meet
Immigration is economic engagement.
Milner and Tingley, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton
University, Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University, 11
(Helen V and Dustin, October 3, 2011, Princeton University, “The Economic and Political
Influences on Different Dimensions of United States Immigration Policy,” pages 4-5,
http://www.princeton.edu/~hmilner/working%20papers/The%20Economic%20and%20Political
%20Influences%20on%20Different%20Dimensions%20of%20United%20States%20Immigration%
20Policy.pdf Accessed 7-10-13, RH)
Our overall contributions to the literature are threefold. First, we highlight how widely the
substantive content of legislation that is called “immigration policy” varies and thus point out
the risk of obscuring important differences across policies if the analysis does not disaggregate
the legislation. We show that different factors affect attitudes toward different policy
dimensions. Hence we help adjudicate the important debate over economic versus ideological
factors as influences on immigration policy. Second, we provide a critical test of public finance
theory in the legislative setting. Hence as in the trade literature, which has examined both public
opinion and legislative voting, our extension of public finance arguments helps provide a more
complete picture of democratic representation by extending earlier public opinion work to the
legislature. Third, this paper contributes to a larger research tradition that seeks to explain
preferences of both citizens and their elected representatives toward different types of
international economic engagement, such as immigration, trade and foreign aid (Espenshade
and Hempstead, 1996; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2006; Hiscox, 2006; Huber and Espenshade,
1997; Milner and Tingley, 2011; Scheve and Slaughter, 2001b).
We’re Reasonable - Immigration is associated with economic engagement
Craft, US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel, 8
(Joseph A, October 31, 2008, Naval War College, “SHAPING THE FUTURE: SECURITY
COOPERATION TO SHAPE CHINESE
DIPLOMACY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC,” page 27, http://www.dtic.mil/cgibin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA494286, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
Department of the Army, Stability Operations, 1-11. The National Security Strategy seeks to
“promote freedom, justice, and human dignity…to promote effective democracies, and to
extend prosperity through free trade and wise developmental policies.” Chinese diplomatic
engagement that includes bribes and political tampering, and Chinese economic engagement
that creates dependency on Chinese labor and resources for sustainment undermine state
institutional legitimacy. Also, though not PRC sponsored, other illegal activities associated with
Chinese economic engagement, such as illegal immigration, illegal trade, and human trafficking,
have contributed to instability and human rights violations.
Immigration is included as economic engagement.
Pietsch and Aarons, Australian National University School of Politics and
International Relations Senior Lecturer, La Trobe University School of Social
Sciences Associate Lecturer, 12
(Juliet and Haydn, “Australia: Identity, Fear and Governance in the 21st Century,” “Australian
Engagement with Asia: Towards closer political, economic and cultural ties,”
http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Australia%3A+Identity%2C+Fear+and+Governa
nce+in+the+21st+Century/10171/ch03.html#toc_marker-7, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
A second reason explaining the influence of Australia’s political engagement with Asia on levels
of cultural and economic engagement can be found in Australia’s immigration patterns. As new
groups of immigrants arrive in Australia, they bring their cultural heritage with them. Some of
this cultural heritage is shared with the Australian-born population through business,
entertainment and sporting opportunities. Over time, a growing proportion of the Australianborn population and migrant communities absorbs hybrid Asian–Australian cultural practices as
part of their own identity and lifestyle. A third and final reason that demonstrates the influence
of politics on cultural and economic engagement is the growth of business relationships. As the
government encourages international trade through a number of policy instruments, this opens
the way for new business opportunities and industry partnerships between Australia and Asia.
Economic Engagement includes immigration and integration.
Doetsch et. al, Head of Mayer Brown Latin America/Caribbean practice, 6
(Douglas, Clare Muñana, President of management consulting firm Ancora Associates and
Alejandro Silva, Chairman, Evans Food Group, 2006, Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, A Shared
Future: The Economic Engagement of Greater Chicago and Its Mexican Community, page 16,
http://www.idpl.org/images/publicationsPDFs/DeLeon_ChicagoCouncilFull_2006.pdf, Accessed
7-12-13, RH)
The Mexican American Task Force has focused on the aspect of integration of the region’s
largest immigrant group that is most crucial both to the immigrants’ and to the region’s longterm growth and prosperity, the economic engagement of Mexican immigrants and their
children.
EE includes opening up space for immigration
Li, researcher at the Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang Normal University,
China, 2010 [Pengtao, “The Myth and Reality of Chinese Investors: A Case Study of Chinese
Investment in Zambia’s Copper Industry” China in Africa Project Paper 62
http://www.eisourcebook.org/cms/June%202013/Myth%20&%20Reality%20of%20Chinese%20I
nvestors,%20Zambian%20Copper%20Case%20Study.pdf, MM]
Language barriers and cultural differences, and the misunderstandings arising from these
factors, should not be underestimated. These factors will affect Zambian perceptions of Chinese
investors and workers, and the relations between Chinese expatriates and Zambian
communities. With increasing economic engagement between the two countries, the Chinese
migrant population in Zambia has increased from more than 3 000 in 1990s to nearly 20 000 in
2010.14 Most are ‘new migrants’, yet some have been in Zambia for more than ten years. These
migrants can be divided into three groups.
Examining immigration is key to economic engagement
Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2013
[Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 5/6/13, “Immigration and Migration”
http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/Files/Studies_Publications/TaskForcesandStudies/Immigratio
n_and_Migration.aspx, Accessed 7/12/13- JM]
Over the past several years, The Chicago Council has convened multiple task forces to examine
migration and immigration issues affecting the United States and many countries around the
world. Resulting reports offer recommendations for instituting effective immigration policies
and for working to ensure the civic, political, and economic engagement of various immigrant
communities.
Aff Education Good
Our conceptualization of the border has deviated our ideology away from that
of acceptance – Open debates and critical thinking are key
Johnson 07 (Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Law, and Mabie-Apallas
Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Davis.
“Opening the Floodgates”, pg. 205, BW)
The fundamental problem with current U.S. immigration law is that it is founded on the idea
that it is permissible, desirable, and necessary to restrict immigration into the United States. A
border is viewed as a barrier to entry, rather than as a port of entry. Unfortunately,
policymakers and the public accept without question the idea that the United States can restrict
immigration and assume that every nation-state must restrict immigration. Consistent with this
underlying assumption, most recent immigration reform proposals move in the direction of
closing the borders rather than attempting to make the migration of people into this country
fairer, more efficient, and humane. To reform U.S. immigration laws, the nation must
reconceptualize the importance and meaning of the international border. More open
migration policies deserve fuller analysis and public debate. Attempts to seal the border
through augmented border enforcement have failed time and time again. The nation needs a
dramatic new approach. With increasing frequency, observers have voiced support for the
liberal admission of immigrants or at least a regime with narrower immigration restrictions.
These arguments are well worth considering.
Economic K of T
Migrants are the true form of economic engagement - Denial of free
immigration engenders violence in the name of ‘nation-building’ and makes
their impacts inevitable – only recognition of migrants as the true form of
‘economic refugee’ combats imperialism
Hayter, Migration activist and graduate of Oxford University, 2004 (Theresa, Open
Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) MM
People trying to cross frontiers in search of work are branded ‘illegal immigrants’, persecuted
and vilified. Sometimes they are simply called ‘illegals’, as if a human being could be
categorised as an illegal human being. The term of abuse most frequently used against
refugees themselves is that they are in reality ‘economic refugees’ rather than political ones
and therefore ‘bogus’, ‘abusing the system’. There is no such thing as the free movement of
labour internationally. This lack of freedom of movement may be one of the reasons why vast
international inequalities of wealth persist and are growing. The wealth of Europe and other
industrialised countries was built, from the sixteenth century onwards, through the exploitation
of the natural resources and peoples of the rest of the world. Europeans used the labour of
conquered peoples to produce raw materials and primary products for consumption in
Europe, and they destroyed the industries of the more advanced civilisations they
encountered in their imperial expansion. They then embarked on their own industrialisation
and they protected their new industries through quotas, tariffs and prohibitions. Once they
had established their dominance, they advocated free trade. The methods they used, and use,
to prise open markets and secure raw materials throughout the world range from military force
to the more obfuscated pressures of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Since
the 1980s the major powers have embarked on an orgy of ‘liberalisation’. They demand and
have to a great extent achieved the removal of controls not only on imports and exports of
goods, but also on capital flows (especially outflows) and investment. According to the
economic theories used to justify these policies, economic liberalisation is supposed to lead to
greater welfare for all. In reality it has led to polarisation and crisis, as is the normal
observable reality of markets. Although some countries, especially in East Asia, grew fast in the
last 20 years, others have become poorer. The gap between them and the richer countries is
growing wider. Integration into the world market, together with continuing high levels of
inequality and exploitation, have caused some enterprising people to attempt to migrate in
search of work, as market economics would predict. But the logic of economic liberalisation has
not been applied to the movement of people. According to this logic, economic liberalisation
should of course include the free movement of labour as well as of goods and capital, and this in
turn, according to market theory, should lead to an equalisation of wage levels internationally.
This might or, more likely, might not turn out to be the case in reality, just as within countries
inequalities persist and often grow in the so-called ‘free market’ (as a result, free marketeers
would say, of ‘market imperfections’). But it is likely that polarisation is aggravated by the
denial of people’s right to move around the world in search of employment and a better life.
The aim of immigration controls is to ensure that there is no such possibility . They are a
market imperfection of an extreme variety, and one more demonstration that the so-called free
market does not in reality exist. Samir Amin, the celebrated Marxist economist, argued in a
lecture at Wolfson College in Oxford on 23 February 1999 that it is no mere chance that
‘globalisation’ has not resulted in the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America ‘catching up’:
Borders Negative Core
Topicality
Immigration is FX
The aff is FX at best – Immigration results in EE
Newendorp, Lecturer at Harvard University, 2008 [Nicole DeJong, “Uneasy Reunions:
Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong” Stanford University Press,
MM]
The blurring of social, cultural, and political boundaries created through these actual cases of
movement back and forth over border areas, and through the creation of "new" and
"different" kinds of borders both through the formation of supranational regional areas, such as
the European Union and NAFTA, and the "reunification" of Hong Kong with the PRC, can
certainly be unsettling for citizens and residents of these areas. These changes also have the
potential to be exciting for immigrants (and sometimes for citizens), whose subjectivities may
be altered through new possibilities of social, political, and economic engagement
engendered by this movement . For many mainland wives who immigrated to Hong Kong, the
potential to experience a new lifestyle in "modern," "cosmopolitan" Hong Kong, where children
could be educated in English, where wives would have the right to cross freely back and forth
over the I long Kong/ mainland border, and where they could imagine travel to places beyond
Hong Kong, created the desire to stay in I long Kong despite the hardships they experienced
there. May, one of the immigrant wives whose experiences figure prominently throughout this
book, told me: The longer I live in Hong Kong, the more I understand it. But the place I like is
where I was born (fillgei thursai goelouh). But that's not to say that I long Kong is bad. That is, to
be a woman and marry a man—wherever he is am' to follow him—whether it's in Hong Kong or
someplace else ... to follow your husband to the place he was born. Is that good or bad? It
depends on the person. I'm not in a hurry to go back to the mainland.
More ev of FX
Ibrahim, Contributor to DIASPEACE, 2010 [Mohamed Hassan, “Somaliland’s Investment
in Peace: Analysing the Diaspora’s Economic Engagement in Peace Building, DIASPEACE
Working Paper 4, August 2010, MM]
From a local perspective, the economic engagements of the diaspora have had a positive impact
on the local inhabitants’ outlook to the future. They have helped to restore a sense of
confidence and self-esteem and granted them hope. A legislative member of the House of
Representatives said, describing how such involvements provided aspiration to local
communities: “It is a sign for the locals, when they see people [diasporas] coming from a
country that is peaceful, stable and has more opportunities investing here [post-conflict place] it
gives hope. As they say to themselves, these guys know something we don’t know, so it provides
them aspiration.”87 More specifically, the diaspora’s economic engagement has been a driving
engine behind the economic recovery of the country, especially due to the limited aid
Somaliland receives from the international community. In the words of one researcher,
“diaspora investment first and foremost has been responsible for economic engagement and
job placement. They are behind all the existing small investments in the country that create
employment opportunities for many people.”88
Economic Engagement is a direct effect of immigration changes.
Suroor, Journalist for The Hindu Newspaper, 10
(Hasan, August 22, 2010, The Hindu, “Threat to relocate jobs over Britain's immigration cap,”
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/threat-to-relocate-jobs-over-britainsimmigration-cap/article588076.ece, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
They pointed to Union Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma's recent remarks that
the proposed immigration curbs could “hurt” economic engagement between the two
countries.
Immigration leads to increased Economic Engagement
Easson, Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and of the
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, 13
(Michael, February 9, 2013, The Australian, “Skilled migration is the key to a thriving and
cohesive economy,” http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/skilledmigration-is-the-key-to-a-thriving-and-cohesive-economy/story-e6frgd0x-1226573810800,
Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
Australia's skilled migration program is also a key part of Australia in the Asian Century. In 201112, seven of the top 10 permanent migration source countries were Asian; India became our
largest source of permanent migrants for the first time. This immigration trend is deepening our
economic engagement with the fastest growing region in the world.
Framework
A2: State Inclusion Bad
Detaching domestic policy from its assumptions foregoes the plight of millions
who experience nonstop suffering
Jarvis, Associate Professor of IR at the University of British Columbia, 0
[Darryl S. L., International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, p. 128-129, MM]
More is the pity that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate should so occupy us at a
time of great global turmoil. That it does and continues to do so reflect our lack of judicious
criteria for evaluating theory and, more importantly, the lack of attachment theorists have to
the real world. Certainly it is right and proper that we ponder the depths of our theoretical
imaginations, engage in epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of
our knowledge. But to support that this is the only task of international theory, let alone the
most important one, smacks of intellectual elitism and displays a certain contempt for
those who search for guidance in their daily struggle as actors in international politics. What
does Ashley’s project, his deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight against positivism say to the
truly marginalized, oppressed, and destitute? How does it help solve the plight of the poor,
the displaced refugees, the casualties of war, or the émigrés of death squads? Does it in any
way speak to those whose actions and thoughts comprise the policy and practice of
international relations? On all these questions one must answer no . This is not to say, of
course, that all theory should be judged by its technical rationality and problem-solving capacity
as Ashley forcefully argues. But to support that problem-solving technical theory is not
necessary—or in some way bad—is a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of
solving some of the nightmarish realities that millions confront daily. As Holsti argues, we need
ask of these theorists and their theories the ultimate question, “So what?” To what purpose do
they deconstruct, problematize, destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist and
rationalist approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or enhance the
human condition? In what sense can this “debate toward [a] bottomless pit of epistemology
and metaphysics” be judged pertinent, relevant, helpful, or cogent to anyone other than those
foolish enough to be scholastically excited by abstract and recondite debate. Contrary to
Ashley’s assertions, then, a poststructural approach fails to empower the marginalized and , in
fact, abandons them. Rather than analyze the political economy of power, wealth,
oppression, production, or international relations and render and intelligible understanding of
these processes, Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent by delivering an
obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley wishes to chastise structural realism for its
abstractness and detachment, he must be prepared also to face similar criticism, especially
when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real life plight of those who struggle at
marginal places.
Solvency
Open Borders Fail
Opening the border for inclusion only masks other forms of exclusion- making
immigrants even more hesitant to cross the border
Motomura 07
(Hiroshi, Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, 2007, “Americans in Waiting: The Lost
Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States”, pg 13)
This entire inquiry reflects my hope that national citizenship in the United States can be a
viable context for a sense of belonging and for participation in civic, political, social, and
economic life that is inclusive and respectful of all individuals. There are certainly other
models of belonging, including transnational models that reflect a sense of belonging to more
than one nation, and postnational models that think beyond national citizenship entirely. But
the apparent inclusiveness of these other approaches to belonging can mask other modes of
exclusion. If national citizenship matters less, ties of religion, race, class, and other groupings
that are less cosmopolitan or democratic than national citizenship will matter even more than
they do already. The result may be a world without national walls but also a world of a
“thousand petty fortresses,” as political philosopher Michael Walzer once put it.10 Making
national citizenship into an inclusive vehicle is not easy. It requires a welcome of immigrants—
crystallized in the idea of Americans in waiting—that has faded from law and policy in the
United States. Although this idea has weakened and is in danger of weakening further, it should
be restored to prominent influence because it captures this basic truth: a sensible we/they line
must reflect the understanding that many of them will become part of us. This understanding
was the conceptual engine for integrating generations of immigrants—mostly those from
Europe. With much of this understanding gone, we should not be surprised if more recent
waves of immigrants, especially immigrants of color, seem more reluctant to cross the
we/they line into American society. Recovering the lost story of immigrants as Americans in
waiting is thus crucial not only to giving immigrants their due, but also to recovering the vision
of our national future that is reflected in the phrase “a nation of immigrants”— that America is
made up of immigrants, but still one nation.
Open Borders do not solve for either economic equality, worker oppression or
Democratic representation
Johnson 2007 Dean of UC Davis School of Law(Kevin R., 2007“Opening the Floodgates;
Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Laws”)
An open-borders solution is, of course, not the silver bullet that would instantly cure all of the
nation’s woes. Far from it. Inequalities in the modern U.S. capitalist system will persist. The
receding of the immigration laws will allow greater labor mobility and free the labor market to
operate more efficiently in response to market forces than the current system of immigration
controls does. Efficient markets, however, rarely operate without perpetuating or increasing
economic inequality. Other tools would be needed to address the endemic problems of
economic inequality in American social life.¶ Several proposals in this book, however, are
designed to help ameliorate the problems of economic inequality exacerbated by open borders.
Wealth redistribution policies that transfer benefits from those economic actors who gain from
easy labor mobility to the poorest citizens of the United States constitute one possibility. Those,
such as lower-skilled workers, who benefit little—or perhaps lose ground—because of the
immigration of workers should receive transfer payments or tax reductions funded by taxes paid
by the beneficiaries of free labor migration, primarily businesses and employers.¶ In addition,
the federal government, which collects the lion’s share of¶












A Call for Truly Comprehensive Immigration
Reform | 43¶ tax revenues paid by noncitizens, should provide adequate resources to state and
local governments that today provide services, such as emergency services and a public
education, to immigrants. To a limited extent, states have aggressively—at times successfully—
pressed the federal government on an ad hoc basis for financial assistance to defray the costs of
immigration and immigrants. To help cover those costs, resources could be redirected by the
federal government to states with large immigrant populations. This would reduce the fiscal
pressures at the state and local levels, which often fuel resentment and anti-immigration
sentiment.¶ Last but not least, the federal government must do much more to ensure that
wage and labor protections are enforced for all workers in the United States. Currently, the
law completely fails to regulate the secondary labor market, in which immigrants are exploited
and lack wage and labor protections. The existence of the unregulated secondary market
undercuts the efforts of labor in the primary market, in which employers tend to comply with
the law, to improve its treatment by employers.¶ On a related note, open borders as advocated
in this book would do nothing to solve the dilemmas of democracy American style. That
project, of course, deserves the nation’s attention. As the presidential elections of 2000 and
2004 show, much work remains to be done in the United States to ensure that all U.S. citizens
enjoy a truly democratic election process that does not disenfranchise a large percentage of
the greater community. With millions of noncitizen residents barred from voting, the United
States already has serious problems with ensuring true democracy for all residents. A similar
problem continues to afflict many minority citizens. One possibility to improve the
responsiveness of government to immigrants, which is beyond the scope of this book and would
surely provoke controversy, might be to extend the franchise to noncitizen residents of the
United States.86¶ The United States finds itself at a historical crossroads. Immigration is on the
front pages of newspapers across the country. Restrictionist messages fill talk show radio and
the national news. Immigration deserves the nation’s attention. But it warrants sober analysis,
not sound bites designed to rile base instincts and insult and alienate members of the national
community. A real effort must be made to address the most fundamental problem with U.S.
immigration law: that our laws are dramatically out of synch with the social, economic, and
political reality of immigration in the modern world.¶
Borders Good—Liberty
Borders create competition between governments that is key to maintaining
individual liberty
Morriss 2004 [Andrew, Chairholder in Law and Professor of Business at the
University of Alabama, “Borders and Liberty”, Foundation for Economic
Education, The Freedman, Vol 54 No 7, http://www.fee.org/publications/thefreeman/article.asp?aid=4646]
Borders play a critical role in our lives. Some of the borders that matter to us are ones we
establish ourselves: this is my house and property; that is your house and property. By choosing
what is mine and using the legal system to mark it off from what is yours, I create a border.
While not quite as invulnerable as suggested by the maxim “A man’s home is his castle,” my
property gives me a firm border against you. Borders come from property rights and are
essential to a free society.¶ At the macro level we have political borders—unrelated to
property rights, more permeable than personal-level borders, but just as important to
ensuring liberty. When I drive from my home to my office, I cross the borders of multiple
political subdivisions of the state of Ohio, moving from Columbia Township to Cleveland, from
Lorain County to Cuyahoga County. Those borders are invisible but important. Cleveland
confiscates 2 percent of my salary because my work lies within its borders (Ohio cities can levy
local income taxes). Columbia Township taxes my home. Columbia does not tax my income, and
so income I earn at home is worth 2 percent more to me than wages at work. Cleveland cannot
tax my home, freeing me from the concern that people I cannot vote for could tax property as
well as income. (Of course I also worry about people I can vote for taxing my income and assets,
but at least there is a theoretical possibility of throwing the rascals out when I vote.)¶ These
borders are all permeable: I do not need to show identification to pass across any of them and
do not need to justify my purpose in moving among the various cities and towns along my drive
to and from work.¶ Other macro-level borders are less permeable. When I walk across the U.S.Mexican border near my parents’ home in Yuma, Arizona, in one direction I must satisfy
Mexican authorities that my purpose is legitimate. In the other, I must satisfy U.S. authorities
that my return is legitimate. In both directions, people with guns are standing by, ready to keep
me out should I fail to satisfy them about the legitimacy of my purpose. Only the Americans with
guns seem worried about who is entering the United States. They look at my identification, ask
what I was doing in Mexico, and, sometimes, have dogs sniff my vehicle and belongings.¶ In
many respects, these macro-level borders are wonderful things. Lorain and Cuyahoga counties
in Ohio must compete for my family’s residence. Choosing to live where we do is related to the
taxes charged by the communities where we might have lived. Investors make similar choices.¶
The choices by families about where to live and invest their money influence communities’
public policies. Choosing bad policies produces an exodus; choosing good policies leads to
immigration of both capital and people. For example, Cleveland is trying to reverse its postWorld War II decline in population by offering to exempt new construction from real-estate
taxes for 15 years. Such competition isn’t perfect, of course, and only operates on the margin.
Desirable locations such as New York City will be able to impose higher taxes than less-desirable
locations such as Cleveland. Nonetheless, the competition offered on local taxation policy and
other regulatory issues is important in restraining governments from infringing liberty.¶ Macro
borders with competition enhance liberty. At the state and local level the only way politicians
can prevent such competition is by eliminating borders. In Cleveland, “regional leaders” are
pushing consolidation of local governments into one big entity as the solution to the exodus of
population and investment to lower-tax jurisdictions. Fortunately, politicians’ self-interest also
cuts against consolidation since it would mean fewer positions for them.¶
The Mexican border is specifically key to individual liberty
Morriss 2004 [Andrew, Chairholder in Law and Professor of Business at the
University of Alabama, “Borders and Liberty”, Foundation for Economic
Education, The Freedman, Vol 54 No 7, http://www.fee.org/publications/thefreeman/article.asp?aid=4646]
National borders are also important sources of liberty. The Mexican border, for example,
offers a choice between a drug-regulatory regime that requires a doctor’s prescription for
most pharmaceuticals and one that does not. The streams of visitors to towns such as
Algodones, Baja California, are not merely seeking lower prices. Some are seeking medicines
unapproved in the United States; others are looking for medications for which they have no U.S.
prescription, whether for recreational (such as Viagra) or medical (antibiotics) use. Mexico does
not offer the pro-plaintiff tort doctrines of U.S. product-liability law, has lower barriers to entry
for pharmacists, and a wide-open market for pharmaceuticals that includes openly advertised
price competition. U.S. residents near the Mexican border thus have a choice of regulatory
regimes for their medicine that those of us who live farther away do not. Border-region
residents can buy medicines either with the U.S. bundle of qualities, restrictions, and rights, or
the Mexican bundle. From the level of traffic of elderly visitors I’ve seen at the border crossing,
it appears the Mexican bundle is more attractive for many.¶ Borders are thus friends of liberty
in two important ways. First, without borders we would not have the competition among
jurisdictions that restricts attempts to abridge liberty. The impact of borders goes beyond
those who live near them. Pharmacists try to prevent the free sale of prescription drugs, but
they would be much more successful if Mexico did not offer an alternative for at least some
consumers. It is the margin that matters, and so free availability of pharmaceuticals in Mexico
benefits even those of us who live in Ohio.¶ Jurisdictions thus compete to attract people and
capital. This competition motivates governments to act to preserve liberty. Famously, for
example, states compete for corporations, with Delaware the current market leader. Delaware
corporate law offers companies the combination of a mostly voluntary set of default rules and
an expert decision-making body (the Court of Chancery). As a result, many corporations, large
and small, choose to incorporate in Delaware, making it their legal residence. (Their actual
headquarters need not be physically located there.) Corporations get a body of libertyenhancing rules; Delaware gets tax revenue and employment in the corporate services and legal
fields.¶ That state’s position is no accident. At the beginning of the twentieth century, New
Jersey was the market leader in corporate law. When New Jersey’s legislature made ill-advised
changes to its corporations statute that reduced shareholder value, Delaware seized the
opportunity and offered essentially the older version of New Jersey’s law. Within a few years,
the vast majority of New Jersey corporations became Delaware corporations.¶ The second way
that borders further liberty is that they allow diversity in law and other community norms,
letting each individual find the setting that most resembles the type of society he or she
desires. Everyone in Ohio need not agree on how to organize town activities: I can live in a
township with few taxes and few services, and my more left-wing colleagues at the university
who prefer a more interventionist society can live in Cleveland Heights, a suburb with an
aggressive central-planning mentality and high taxes.
Borders Good—Identity
Turn – rejection of fences-as-borders is unethical – separation of communities is
a necessary precondition for human identity
Williams, professor of IR at the University of Durham, 3
[John, 7-1-3, Geopolitics, “Territorial Borders, International Ethics and Geography: Do Good
Fences Still Make Good Neighbours?,” p. 37-40, Academic Search Complete, MM]
Defending the Ethics of Territorial Borders- The foregoing discussion leads us to two issues to
discuss in relation to developing a partial and limited defence of the ethics of territorial borders.
The ontological strength of territorial borders leads to questions about the ethical component of
the depth of practice that supports this. Here, the article wishes to point to evidence that
borders of some sort, including territorial borders, are deeply rooted in ethics. The second
ethical issue that arises relates to the defence of a neo-classical constructivist mode of enquiry
into international relations. This is an ethically consequentialist account that looks at the
desirable elements of practice that flow from the more fundamental ethical role of borders.
Turning to the first of these tasks, it is implausible to assert that institutions as enduring as
territorial borders-as-fences inextricably linked to the sovereign state have endured for so
long and are so entrenched unless borders are in some way representative of a need for
division in human ethical life. There is evidence in both the material already surveyed and
from elsewhere in normative and ethical accounts of division, distinction and differentiation to
support the idea that the ontological strength of territorial borders in international relations
can be connected to a deep-rooted need for division in human ethical life. In relation to the
material at the heart of this paper, territorial borders are synonymous with division.
'Boundaries, by definition, constitute lines of separation or contact.... The point of contact or
separation usually creates an "us" and an "Other" identity.' 62 In their idealised essentialism
they divide tones of sovereign control: they divide inside from outside: they divide foreign
from domestic: they divide our identities as citizens; they divide national communities: they
divide those to whom we owe primary allegiance from those who come second (if anywhere) in
moral calculation: they divide us from them. The endurance of borders and boundaries in
human society, whether they be territorial borders or otherwise, implies that borders and the
need to create an 'us' and an 'other' are very powerfully entrenched in human relations and our
ability to identify and understand ourselves. The critique of reified sovereign territoriality in
political geography does not lead to the abandonment of territorial borders. Instead they are
reinterpreted as features of hegemony, for Agnew and Corbridge, of power for Tuathail and of
identity for Newman, requiring the re-territorialisation, rather than the de-territorialisation, of
social life under conditions of globalisation. The anthropological work of Dorman and Wilson
points to the need for boundary distinctions between social groups and the vital role that
these play in the maintenance and development of identity ." Frances Harbour's survey of
universal ethical propositions, also drawing on anthropological work, suggests a necessary
division in human ethical life. By extension, the power-riddled, historically conditioned,
accident prone and even arbitrary, careless or plain misguided creation of territorial borders
does have deep roots. Borders, including territorial borders, may be inescapable in
international politics not just for reasons of power, but for reasons of right, too. Recalling
Hutching's injunction not to separate these into essentially incommensurable categories of
thought we can argue that the weight of evidence about the ubiquity of borders points to
their being a necessary part of human life, and a basic category of ethical thought about that
life. Philosophical weight can also be brought to bear in defence of a view of borders and
boundaries as being pan of the human condition through the work of Hannah Arendt. She
famously argued that 'we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the
same as anyone else who lived, lives or will live..." The unique, distinctive individual finds their
self-understanding through interaction with fellow human beings with whom they share
community and in spaces where they can meet as equals. This equality importantly includes an
equality of community membership granting them a set of shared ideas, experiences and values,
rather than some sort of de-contextualised equality such as that experienced behind a Rawlsian
veil of ignorance." Arendt's account emphasises the requirement for communities to retain
their distinctiveness from one another , including through the use of borders and boundaries.
[Human] dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle,
in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while
its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial
entities.' In simple terms, borders can be seen as either being prior to and creative of difference,
or that difference is prior to and creative of borders. This stark juxtaposition of opposites is
resolved in favour of the latter option by the arguments that borders are social phenomena and
that the human condition is characterised by an essential diversity of human beings and the
necessary relationship between distinctive individuals and their communities. The durability
and depth of sedimentation of territorial borders as fences suggest that division, and division
on a territorial basis, speaks to a deep-seated need of human identity and also in human
ethics. We need to have reasons for granting a privileged position to some that is not available
to others, perhaps in the form of recognising rights and duties of special beneficence, and
accepting that proximity, both geographical and emotional, and location upon one side of the
line on the map or the other, does make a difference.' Territorial division in the form of states is
an important, but certainly not the only, aspect of this. The endurance of the territorial
border-as-fence as the primary mechanism for division in international politics cannot ,
though, be treated as prima facie ethically irrelevant or straightforwardly contingent.
However, its position as a social phenomenon also means that the creation and re-creation of
the border-as-fence has to be held up to constant ethical questioning and critique. The
arguments of tradition, culture and precedent as to who is to count and who is not, who is to
be a citizen and who is not, what the role of territory ought to be and how it should be delimited
cannot be taken for granted." As the normative theorists insist, a part of ethical analysis and
enquiry is to constantly question dominant ethical arguments. This may be crucial in exploring
the current location of territorial borders and the enunciation of the role that they play, but
such a critique may not be able to land an ethical knock-out blow upon a feature of human
ethical thought and life that seems to be highly durable. Location and role may change, but that
borders will have locations and play roles, and that these should he critically explored, may be
a fixture. A cosmopolitan international ethic thus needs to engage with the desirability of
division as well as to promote inclusiveness. There is a need for cosmopolitan ethics to go
further than identifying the consequences of territorial borders that are the frequent target of
normative critique. Repression, religious intolerance, discrimination, ethnic cleansing and so on
have become inextricably associated with the territorial state. The consequences of the
existence of territorial borders can indeed be extreme and morally repugnant. However,
whether such effects are an inevitable and essential result of the existence of territorial
borders seems far less certain . We may argue that the role of territorial borders to divide in
international politics is potentially ethically justifiable. Such justification needs to be rooted
in elements of existing practice and values that are generally regarded as legitimate and serving
important purposes in shaping the way the world ought to be. If we accept the view of
normative theory outlined earlier then we can see that the social creation and recreation of
ethics includes, via mechanisms like territorial borders, a view of division and distinction that is
ethically valued. An appreciation of the constructed and dynamic nature of territorial borders
holds out the prospect of being able to detach these aspects from the more violent practices
that have also accumulated around territorial borders. This, of course, is easier said than done.
Diversity threatens the survival of the national American identity
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
But the most important factor driving the rise of these groups is that, although the United
States has always been a multiracial country, many whites view it as having been created by
and for Christian whites. Beginning in 1965, when racial immigration quotas were abolished,
large numbers of immigrants—particularly Latinos—entered the country at the same time
that birth rates for native-born whites were falling precipitously. As darker skinned immigrants
arrived in places that had only rarely seen such newcomers, many whites reacted with fear and
anger. This has been greatly exacerbated by the U.S. Census Bureau's prediction that whites will
lose their absolute majority in the United States in 2042; the news in 2000 that California had
lost its white majority had already fueled these fears. As other states follow suit in coming years,
more whites may well resort to extremism. For white supremacists, this coming date spells
impending doom, a fact that many white supremacist ideologues have harped upon relentlessly.
Jared Taylor, editor of the racist American Renaissance magazine, offers what is probably the
most cogent critique of mainstream, ‘politically correct’ views—a critique that seems to have
found great sympathy. ‘Some think that it's virtuous of the United States, after having been
founded and built by Europeans, according to European institutions, to reinvent itself or
transform itself into a non-white country with a Third World population’, Taylor told an
interviewer for The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Immigration (Swain,
2002). ‘I think that's a kind of cultural and racial suicide…We’re all now more or less obliged to
say, “Oh! Diversity is a wonderful thing for the country”, whereas, practically every example
of tension, bloodletting, civil unrest around the world is due precisely to the kind of thing
we’re importing—diversity’ (Swain, 2002). These factors have created a situation ripe for
organizers of the radical right. Already, in the wake of Obama's elections, groups ranging from
the white nationalist Stormfront to the neo-Confederate League of the South, were claiming to
have experienced dramatically increased interest (Scheer, 2008).
A2: Borders Unethical
No ethical barriers to immigration control – stabilization for the future is key
FAIR, national, nonprofit, public-interest membership organization, 9
[9-9, Federation for American Immigration Reform, “The United States Is Already Overpopulated,”
http://www.fairus.org/issue/the-united-states-is-already-overpopulated, accessed 7-9-13, MM]
The predominant role of immigration in causing U.S. population growth means that Congress
can effectively stabilize the population through a change in immigration policy.
Unsustainable growth stems from two policy decisions in Washington — the increase in
immigration quotas to record levels since 1965 and the ineffective enforcement of laws
designed to deter illegal immigration. The U.S. accepts far more legal immigrants as a percent
of our population than do the nations of Europe. As a result, the U.S. population is booming at
about one percent per year, while Western Europe has reached stability. Recognizing that
immigration was the dominant contributor to U.S. population growth, President Clinton’s
Council on Sustainable Development acknowledged in 1996 that, “ reducing current
immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward sustainability in the United States .”
Since then, immigration has reached never before seen levels and the U.S. population has grown
by a 42 million. A change in U.S. immigration policy would not mean turning our back on
cultural and ethnic diversity, but the number of immigrants coming to the U.S. each year must
be reduced in order to achieve population stability. Each year nearly 300,000 people emigrate
from the U.S. and become permanent residents in other countries. By bringing immigration and
emigration into balance the nation can honor its immigrant heritage while stabilizing its
population.37 There is no ethical or practical barrier to population stabilization .38 The only
barrier is a lack of political will.
Removing BordersEnergy Consumption
Immigration increases energy consumption – 40 years of data proves.
Martin, Federation for American Immigration Reform Director of Special
Projects, 9
(Jack, June 2009, “Immigration, Energy and the Enviornment,” page 2-5,
http://www.fairus.org/site/DocServer/energy_enviro.pdf?docID=2941, Accessed 7-9-13, RH)
Between 1974 and 2007 total immigrant admissions were 27 million persons. Thus direct legal
immigration accounted for 31.5 percent of the U.S. population increase during this period.The
share of population growth attributable to immigration is still higher when illegal immigration
and the children born to the immigrants after their arrival are included. The close correlation
between increased U.S. energy consumption and increased population is further illustrated by
the data in Table 3, which presents a breakdown of energy consumption by consuming sector.
The table shows that per capita energy consumption in the residential sector remained
virtually unchanged over the 1973–2007 period. Thus the entire 44.7 percent increase in
residential energy use was entirely a factor of population growth. By contrast, in the industrial
sector energy consumption was virtually unchanged between 1973 and 2007 while per capital
consumption actually declined about 30 percent. Several factors were responsible for this
decline. In response to the increase in energy prices that commenced in 1974, U.S. industry
installed more energy efficient production equipment. Secondly, some historically energyintensive industries such as steel and basic materials have moved offshore. Finally, the decrease
in per capita consumption in this sector reflects a basic structural change that has occurred in
the U.S. economy. Today, a greater percentage of GDP is derived from service “industries” such
as banking, financial services, medical services, travel services, etc. Most of the energy used in
these service industries appears in the commercial energy category in Table 3. Indeed, when per
capita energy consumption data in the commercial and industrial sectors are added together,
the total has still declined by about 16 percent while total energy consumption in these two
sectors increased from 42.2 quads to 50.9 quads (21%). Thus, once again, this 8.7 quad
increase may be attributable entirely to population growth. In the transportation sector, there
was a 9 quad increase in energy consumption between 1974 and 2007. However, in this sector,
there was also a 9.1 percent increase in per capita energy consumption, a fact which likely
relates to more cars per capita, increased purchase of less economical vehicles such as sport
utility vehicles [SUVs] and Humvees, as well as the extended use of older, less fuel-efficient
cars by population segments with limited means. Per capita motor gasoline consumption in the
U.S. was little changed between 1974 and 2005, i.e., a seven percent increase despite major
improvements in the fuel efficiency of new vehicles.3 However, total gasoline consumption
increased over the same period by 53 percent. The driving factor behind gasoline consumption
is vehicle-miles, which in turn is driven by population growth. Total vehicle-miles for passenger
cars, motorcycles, light trucks and SUVs rose approximately 113 percent between 1974 and
2000. The fact that the growth in vehicles-miles was more than 3 times as fast as the population
increase should not be surprising. In the first place, as the population of an urban region grows,
the urbanized area increases in size, and the residential areas are almost always on the
periphery of the urban region. Therefore commute distances are increased. Secondly,
population growth has caused property values near some urban centers to rise dramatically.
People with modest incomes who have been priced out of the housing market in these urban
centers have been buying homes in small towns that, in some cases, are located considerable
distances from their places of employment. Finally, it should be noted that the fastest growing
component of transportation energy has been jet fuel. Between 1974 and 2000, jet fuel
consumption increased from 1.60 quads to 3.587 quads and per capita consumption rose from
56 gal. in 1974 to 94 gal. in 2000.6 This increase in per capita consumption was responsible for
about 1.5 quads of the 2.0 quad increase in jet fuel consumption between 1974 and 2000.
Looking at the total usage, population growth is again indicated as a primary factor in the
overall 34.1 percent increase in energy consumption over this same period because overall
usage per capita decreased by 6.3 percent.
Biopower Answers
A2: Biopower Bad
Biopower does not make massacres vital—a specific form of violent sovereignty
is also required.
Ojakangas, 05 - PhD in Social Science and Academy research fellow @ the Helsinki Collegium
for Advanced Studies @ University of Helsinki – 2005 (Mika, “The Impossible Dialogue on
Biopower: Foucault and Agamben,” May 2005, Foucault Studies, No. 2, http://www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)
Admittedly, in the era of biopolitics, as Foucault writes, even “massacres have become vital.”
This is not the case, however, because violence is hidden in the foundation of biopolitics, as
Agamben believes. Although the twentieth century thanatopolitics is the “reverse of
biopolitics”, it should not be understood, according to Foucault, as “the effect, the result, or
the logical consequence” of biopolitical rationality. Rather, it should be understood, as he
suggests, as an outcome of the “demonic combination” of the sovereign power and biopower,
of “the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game” or as I would like to put it, of patria
potestas (father’s unconditional power of life and death over his son) and cura maternal
(mother’s unconditional duty to take care of her children). Although massacres can be carried
out in the name of care, they do not follow from the logic of biopower for which death is the
“object of taboo”. They follow from the logic of sovereign power, which legitimates killing by
whatever arguments it chooses, be it God, Nature, or life.
Biopower does not cause racism or massacres—it is only when it is in the
context of a violent or racist government that it is dangerous.
Ojakangas, 05 - PhD in Social Science and Academy research fellow @ the Helsinki Collegium
for Advanced Studies @ University of Helsinki – 2005 (Mika, “The Impossible Dialogue on
Biopower: Foucault and Agamben,” May 2005, Foucault Studies, No. 2, http://wltstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)
It is the logic of racism, according to Foucault, that makes killing acceptable in modern
biopolitical societies. This is not to say, however, that biopolitical societies are
necessarily more racist than other societies. It is to say that in the era of biopolitics,
only racism, because it is a determination immanent to life, can “justify the murderous
function of the State”.89 However, racism can only justify killing – killing that does not
follow from the logic of biopower but from the logic of the sovereign power. Racism
is, in other words, the only way the sovereign power, the right to kill, can be
maintained in biopolitical societies: “Racism is bound up with workings of a State that is
obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise
its sovereign power.”90 Racism is, in other words, a discourse – “quite compatible”91
with biopolitics – through which biopower can be most smoothly transformed into the
form of sovereign power. Such transformation, however, changes everything. A biopolitical
society that wishes to “exercise the old sovereign right to kill”, even in the name of
race, ceases to be a mere biopolitical society, practicing merely biopolitics. It becomes a
“demonic combination” of sovereign power and biopower, exercising sovereign means for
biopolitical ends. In its most monstrous form, it becomes the Third Reich. For this
reason, I cannot subscribe to Agamben’s thesis, according to which biopolitics is
absolutized in the Third Reich.93 To be sure, the Third Reich used biopolitical means – it
was a state in which “insurance and reassurance were universal”94 – and aimed for
biopolitical ends in order to improve the living conditions of the German people -- but so
did many other nations in the 1930s. What distinguishes the Third Reich from those
other nations is the fact that, alongside its biopolitical apparatus, it erected a massive
machinery of death. It became a society that “unleashed murderous power, or in other
words, the old sovereign right to take life” throughout the “entire social body”, as
Foucault puts it.95 It is not, therefore, biopolitics that was absolutized in the Third
Reich – as a matter of fact, biopolitical measures in the Nazi Germany were, although
harsh, relatively modest in scale compared to some present day welfare states – but
rather the sovereign power: “This power to kill, which ran through the entire social
body of Nazi society, was first manifested when the power to take life, the power of life
and death, was granted not only to the State but to a whole series of individuals, to a
considerable number of people (such as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone
in the Nazi State had the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only
because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing away with the
people next door, or having them done away with.96” The only thing that the Third
Reich actually absolutizes is, in other words, the sovereignty of power and therefore,
the nakedness of bare life – at least if sovereignty is defined in the Agambenian
manner: “The sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially
homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as
sovereigns.”97
Biopower is inevitable
Wright 08 (Nathan, Fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy, “Camp as Paradigm:
Bio-Politics and State Racism in Foucault and Agamben”, 2008
http://ccjournal.cgu.edu/past_issues/nathan_wright.html) TYBG
Perhaps the one failure of Foucault’s that, unresolved, rings as most ominous is his failure to
further examine the problem of bio-political state racism that he first raises in his lecture series,
Society Must Be Defended. At the end of the last lecture, Foucault suggests that bio-power is
here to stay as a fixture of modernity. Perhaps given its focus on the preservation of the
population of the nation it which it is practiced, bio-power itself is something that Foucault
accepts as here to stay. Yet his analysis of bio-politics and bio-power leads inevitably to statesanctioned racism, be the government democratic, socialist, or fascist. As a result, he ends the
lecture series with the question, “How can one both make a bio-power function and exercise
the rights of war, the rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist?
That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem.” It was a problem to which he
never returned. However, in the space opened by Foucault’s failure to solve the problem of
state racism and to “elaborate a unitary theory of power” (Agamben 1998, 5) steps Agamben in
an attempt to complete an analysis of Foucauldian bio-politics and to, while not solve the
problem of state racism, at least give direction for further inquiry and hope of a politics that
escapes the problem of this racism.
Biopower is strategically reversible—it can become a tool of resistance and
empowerment
Campbell, 98 (David, professor of international politics at the University of Newcastle,
“Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,” pg. 204-205) TYBG
The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of power and freedom can
be specified in more detail by thinking in terms of the predominance of the “bio-power”
discussed above. In this sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western
nations have been increasingly directed toward modes of being and forms of life — such that
sexual conduct has become an object of concern, individual health has been figured as a domain
of discipline, and the family has been transformed into an instrument of government— the
ongoing agonism between those practices and the freedom they seek to contain means that
individuals have articulated a series of counterdemands drawn from those new fields of
concern. For example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual
orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter into formal
marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and insurance benefits granted to their
straight counterparts. These claims are a consequence of the permanent provocation of power
and freedom in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the “strategic reversibility” of power
relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be made into focal points for resistances,
then the “history of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ is interwoven with the history of
dissenting ‘counterconducts.”’39 Indeed, the emergence of the state as the major articulation
of “the political” has involved an unceasing agonism between those in office and those they
rule. State intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the result of
which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon the state. In particular, “the
core of what we now call ‘citizenship’ consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and
ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of
war.” In more recent times, constituencies associated with women’s, youth, ecological, and
peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on society. These resistances are
evidence that the break with the discursive/nondiscursive dichotomy central to the logic of
interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional terms) not only
theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted. Indeed, expanding the interpretive
imagination so as to enlarge the categories through which we understand the constitution of
“the political” has been a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policy’s concern
for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are manifest political
implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith Butler concluded: “The deconstruction
of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms
through which identity is articulated.”
Democracy Checks
Democracy checks radicalization of biopolitics—empirically proven.
Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the University of CaliforniaDavis, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about "Modernity"”,
in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004) pgs. 18-19) TYBG
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the fact that Foucault's
ideas have "fundamentally directed attention away from institutionally centered conceptions
of government and the state ... and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power and
its 'microphysics.'"48 The "broader, deeper, and less visible ideological consensus" on
"technocratic reason and the ethical unboundedness of science" was the focus of his interest.49
But the "power-producing effects in Foucault's 'microphysical' sense" (Eley) of the construction
of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of "an entire institutional apparatus and system of
practice" (Jean Quataert), simply do not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of
Nazism was a product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a particular
modern political structure, one that could realize the disastrous potential of those ideas. What
was critical was not the expansion of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which
occurred everywhere in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those
instruments and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on them. In
National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian conception of social management
focused on the power and ubiquity of the volkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has
historically been constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is a point
to which I will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was decisive was actually politics at
the level of the state. A comparative framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states
passed compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s. Indeed, individual states in the United
States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not proceed to the next steps adopted
by National Socialism, mass sterilization, mass "eugenic" abortion and murder of the
"defective." Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But neither
the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and political principles permitted
such poli? cies actually being enacted. Nor did the scale of forcible sterilization in other
countries match that of the Nazi program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were
not horrible; but in a democratic political context they did not develop the dynamic of
constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies.
Democracy checks biopolitical coercion and violence.
Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the University of California-Davis, “
Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about "Modernity"”, in
Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004), pg 32.)
Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare structure were open to
the idea that "stubborn" cases might be legitimate tar-gets for sterilization; the right to health
could easily be redefined as primarily a duty to be healthy, for example. But the difference
between a strategy of social management built on the rights of the citizen and a system of
racial policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a semantic one; such
differences had very profound political implications, and established quite different
constraints. The rights-based strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and
coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its targets and of armies of
volunteers, it was too embedded in a democratic institutional structure and civil society, it
lacked powerful legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure was
too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
Democracy checks biopolitical violence
Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the University of CaliforniaDavis, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about "Modernity"”,
in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004) pg. 35) TYBG
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the
practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the
"disciplinary society" and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they
share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist state, but
also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad
perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because it
obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of
regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also substantively quite
different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere developed the fateful,
radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the
psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management to mass murder. Again,
there is always the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive policies. In those
cases in which the regime of rights does not successfully produce "health," such a system can
and historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political
and policy potentials and constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different
from those of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable,
and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with
authoritarian or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime
of democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits
on coercive policies, and to have generated a "logic" or imperative of increasing liberalization.
Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think
this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and welfare
reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany.90
Liberal government solves—biopower must be combined with a concept of
racial sovereignty to cause their impacts
Dean 04 (Mitchell, professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle, “Four Theses on
the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004,
http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf) TYBG
Second Thesis: It is not merely the succession or addition of the modern powers over life to
the ancient right of death but their very combination within modern states that is of
significance. How these powers are combined accounts for whether they are malign or benign.
According to this view, it is not the moment that life became a political object in the eighteenth
century that defined the disturbing features of modern states. Rather, the different ways in
which bio-politics is combined with sovereign power decide their character. Certain passages
from Foucaultʼs lectures and from the History of Sexuality can be interpreted in this way. In a
passage from the latter, Foucault shows that the genocidal character of National Socialism did
not simply arise from its extension of bio-power.16 Nazism was concerned with the total
administration of the life, of the family, of marriage, procreation, education and with the
intensification of disciplinary micro-powers. But it articulated this with another set of features
concerned with “the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood,” of fatherland, and of the triumph
of the race. In other words, if we are to understand how the most dramatic forces of life and
death were unleashed in the twentieth century, we have to understand how bio-power was
articulated with elements of sovereignty and its symbolics. Pace Bauman, it is not simply the
development of instrumental rationality in the form of modern bio-power, or a bureaucratic
power applied to life that makes the Holocaust possible. It is the system of linkages, re-codings
and re-inscriptions of sovereign notions of fatherland, territory, and blood within the new biopolitical discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene that makes the unthinkable thinkable. The
fact that all modern states must articulate elements of sovereignty with bio-politics
Contretemps 5, December 2004 21 also allows for a virtuous combination. The virtue of liberal
and democratic forms of government is that they deploy two instruments to check the
unfettered imperatives of bio-power, one drawn from political economy and the other from
sovereignty itself.17 Liberalism seeks to review the imperative to govern too much by pointing
to the quasinatural processes of the market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are
external to government. To govern economically means to govern through economic and other
social processes external to government and also to govern in an efficient, cost-effective way.
Liberalism also invokes the freedom and rights of a new subject—the sovereign individual. By
ʻgoverning through freedomʼ and in relation to freedom, advanced liberal democracies are able
to differentiate their bio-politics from that of modern totalitarian states and older police
states.
Biopower Good
Biopower good—it doesn’t create bare life; instead it produces “extra-life.”
Ojakangas 5 (Mika, Doctorate in Social Science, Impossible Dialogue on Biopower, Foucault
Studies)
Moreover, life as the object and the subject of bio‐power given that life is everywhere, it
becomes everywhere is in no way bare, but is as the synthetic notion of life implies, the
multiplicity of the forms of life, from the nutritive life to the intellectual life, from the biological
levels of life to the political existence of man.43 Instead of bare life, the life of bio‐power is a
plenitude of life, as Foucault puts it.44 Agamben is certainly right in saying that the production
of bare life is, and has been since Aristotle, a main strategy of the sovereign power to establish
itself to the same degree that sovereignty has been the main fiction of juridico‐institutional
thinking from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt. The sovereign power is, indeed, based on bare life
because it is capable of confronting life merely when stripped off and isolated from all forms
of life, when the entire existence of a man is reduced to a bare life and exposed to an
unconditional threat of death. Life is undoubtedly sacred for the sovereign power in the sense
that Agamben defines it. It can be taken away without a homicide being committed. In the
case of bio‐power, however, this does not hold true. In order to function properly, bio‐power
cannot reduce life to the level of bare life, because bare life is life that can only be taken away
or allowed to persist which also makes understandable the vast critique of sovereignty in the era
of bio‐power. Bio‐power needs a notion of life that corresponds to its aims. What then is the
aim of bio‐power? Its aim is not to produce bare life but, as Foucault emphasizes, to “multiply
life”,45 to produce “extra‐life.”46 Bio‐power needs, in other words, a notion of life which
enables it to accomplish this task. The modern synthetic notion of life endows it with such a
notion. It enables bio‐power to “invest life through and through”, to “optimize forces,
aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.”
It could be argued, of course, that instead of bare life (zoe) the form of life (bios) functions as
the foundation of bio‐power. However, there is no room either for a bios in the modern bio‐
political order because every bios has always been, as Agamben emphasizes, the result of the
exclusion of zoe from the political realm. The modern bio‐political order does not exclude
anything – not even in the form of “inclusive exclusion”. As a matter of fact, in the era of bio‐
politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe. It has already moved into the site that
Agamben suggests as the remedy of the political pathologies of modernity, that is to say, into
the site where politics is freed from every ban and “a form of life is wholly exhausted in bare
life.”48 At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben gives this life the name “form‐of‐life”, signifying
“always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power”, understood as
potentiality (potenza).49 According to Agamben, there would be no power that could have any
hold over men’s existence if life were understood as a “form‐of‐life”. However, it is precisely
this life, life as untamed power and potentiality, that bio‐power invests and optimizes. If bio‐
power multiplies and optimizes life, it does so, above all, by multiplying and optimizing
potentialities of life, by fostering and generating “forms‐of‐life”.50
Turn - Biopolitics are not totalitarian – it strengthens democracy and prevents
the impacts they describe. And, the type of power present in democracy is
wholly distinct from the type of power responsible for their impacts
Ross, Berkeley history professor, 2004
(Edward, “Central European History,” AD:7-8-9March, p. 35-36) PMK
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical discourse and the
practices of the welfare state in our own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the
“disciplinary society” and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and
they share that genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist
state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very
broad perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and misleading, because
it obfuscates the profoundly different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two
kinds of regimes. Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also
substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it has nowhere
developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that characterized National Socialism (or for
that matter Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic population
management to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive
regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not
successfully produce “health,” such a system can —and historically does— create
compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there are political and policy potentials and
constraints in such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of National
Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require, enable, and incite a degree of
self-direction and participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian or
totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of democratic
citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on
coercive policies, and to have generated a “logic” or imperative of increasing liberalization.
Despite limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive change, I
think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative and
welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. Of course it is not yet clear whether
this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems. Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized
by sufficient degrees of autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient
numbers of people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of a
strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be analyzed as a condition of
“liberty,” just as much as they are productive of constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At
the very least, totalitarianism cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of
biopolitics, the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is not at all at
odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian) theory. Democratic welfare states are
regimes of power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian states;
these systems are not “opposites,” in the sense that they are two alternative ways of
organizing the same thing. But they are two very different ways of organizing it. The
concept “power” should not be read as a universal staring night of oppression,
manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social orders are grey, are
essentially or effectively “the same.” Power is a set of social relations, in which individuals
and groups have varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And discourse is,
as Foucault argued, “tactically polyvalent.” Discursive elements (like the various elements
of biopolitics) can be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different strategies
(like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state); they cannot be assigned to one place
in a structure, but rather circulate.
Biopolitics creates a better life- benefits outweigh the costs
Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the University of CaliforniaDavis, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about "Modernity"”,
in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004)) TYBG
It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more relentlessly negative
than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were constantly
triumphing over the democratic opposition. But at least there was an opposition; and in the long
run, time was on the side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of
modernization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus.1 And that
consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing, one that partakes in crucial
ways of the essential quality of National Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive,
technocratic, top-down, constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of— or at
least discussed in any detail — as creating possibilities for people, as expanding the range of
their choices, as empowering them, or indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of
course, at the most simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of
modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life tangibly better is somehow
deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20
percent; or, in other words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By
1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing power was not significantly
higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.2 The expansion of infant health programs — an
enormously ambitious, bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering
project — had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to write a history of
biopolitical modernity that ruled out an appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and
astonishing this achievement — and any number of others like it — really was. There was a
reason for the “Machbarkeitswahn” of the early twentieth century: many marvelous things were
in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is not really accurate to call it a “ Wahn” (delusion,
craziness) at all; nor is it accurate to focus only on the “inevitable” frustration of “delusions” of
power. Even in the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great satisfaction
on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish.
Biopolitics creates strong government through citizen benefits- key to
democracy and freedom
Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the University of CaliforniaDavis, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about "Modernity"”,
in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004)) TYBG
Nor should we stop at a reexamination of knowledge and technology. It might make sense, too,
to reexamine the process of institution-building, the elaboration of the practices and institutions
of biopolitics. No doubt the creation of public and private social welfare institutions created
instruments for the study, manipulation, or control of individuals and groups. But it also
generated opportunities for self-organization and participation by social groups of all kinds.
1
2
See for example Usborne, The Politics and Grossmann, Reforming Sex.
MB. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750—1970 (New York, 1975), 130. By 1969 it had fallen to 2.3 percent (132).
Grossmann s birth control movement was but one instance of the explosive growth of the
universe of associational life in the field of biopolitics, which itself was only one small part of a
much broader development: the self-creation of a new, urban industrial social order, the
creation of a self-government of society through myriad nongovernmental organizations. In
these organizations, citizens were acting to shape their own lives in ways that were often
fundamentally important as part of lived experience — of the “life world.” Of course there was
nothing inherently democratic about these organizations or their social functions — many were
authoritarian in structure, many cultivated a tendentially elitist culture of expertise, and some
pursued exclusionary and discriminatory agendas. Nevertheless, they institutionalized pluralism,
solicited participation, enforced public debate, and effectively sabotaged simple authoritarian
government. Again, National Socialist totalitarianism was in part a response precisely to the
failure of political, social, and cultural elites to contain and control this proliferation of voices,
interests, and influence groups.3 Private organizations, further, were not the only ones that
helped to build habits and structures of participation. The German state deliberately recruited
citizens and nongovernmental organizations to help it formulate and implement welfare policy.
It had to, for no state could possibly mobilize the resources necessary for such a gigantic task.
And of course often the policy initiative came from the other direction — from private
organizations engaged in elaborating biopolitical discourses of various kinds, and working to
mobilize the authority and resources of the state to achieve the ends they defined for
themselves. That was an intended consequence of the creation of a democratic republic. As S.
N. Eisenstadt wrote in 2000, an important part of the project of modernity was “a very strong
emphasis on the autonomous participation of members of society in the constitution of the
social and political order.”4 Again, the massive, state- orchestrated mobilization of the German
population in the Nazi period or in the German Democratic Republic (not least in welfare
organizations) should remind us that such mobilization is not necessarily democratic in nature;
this is a point made amply for the Weimar period too by, for example, Peter Fritzsche.5 But
obviously, it could be, and in fact, before 1933 and after 1949 in the Federal Republic of
Germany, very often was. One answer might be to argue — as Michael Schwartz and Peter
Fritzsche have suggested — that regimes that arise for reasons having little to do with this
aspect of modernity “choose” their biopolitics to suit their needs and principles. Victoria de
Grazia, for example, has suggested that differing class coalitions determine regime forms, and
that regime forms determine the “shape” of biopolitics.6 This is obviously not the approach that
has predominated in the literature on Germany, however, which has explored in great depth the
positive contribution that modern biopolitics made to the construction of National Socialism.
This approach may well exaggerate the importance of biopolitics; but, in purely heuristic terms,
it has been extremely fruitful. I want to suggest that it might be equally fruitful to stand it on its
head, so to speak. One could easily conclude from this literature that modern biopolitics “fits”
primarily authoritarian, totalitarian, technocratic, or otherwise undemocratic regimes, and that
democracy has prevailed in Europe in the teeth of the development of technocratic biopolitics.
Again, however, the history of twentieth-century Germany, including the five decades after
World War II, suggests that this is a fundamentally implausible idea. A more productive
conclusion might be that we need to begin to work out the extent and nature of the positive
3
See Stanley Suval, Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, 1985) and Margaret Anderson, Practicing Democracy: Elections and Political
Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). There is a good discussion of these issues in Geoff Eley, “The Social Construction.”
4
Eisenstadt, “Multiple,” 5. For an even more positive assessment of “Western modernity,” see Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public
Culture 14 (2002): esp. 92, 99, 103.
5
See Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?,” 638; also his Germans and Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New
York, 1990).
6
See Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (Berkeley, 1992), 3.
contribution biopolitics has made to the construction also of democratic regimes. Why was
Europe’s twentieth century, in addition to being the age of biopolitics and totalitarianism, also
the age of biopolitics and democracy? How should we theorize this relationship? I would like to
offer five propositions as food for thought. First, again, the concept of the essential legitimacy
and social value of individual needs, and hence the imperative of individual rights as the
political mechanism for getting them met, has historically been a cornerstone of some
strategies of social management. To borrow a phrase from Detlev Peukert, this does not mean
that democracy was the “absolutely inevitable” outcome of the development of biopolitics; but
it does mean that it was “one among other possible outcomes of the crisis of modern
civilization.”7 Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit between cultures of expertise,
or “scientism,” and democracy. Of course, “scientism” subverted the real, historical ideological
underpinnings of authoritarian polities in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense
replaced them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask “why”; and in a democratic
system there is therefore a bias toward pragmatic, “objective” or naturalized answers — since
values are often regarded as matters of opinion, with which any citizen has a right to differ.
Scientific “fact” is democracy’s substitute for revealed truth, expertise its substitute for
authority. The age of democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy; there is a
deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of historical coincidence.
Third, the vulnerability of explicitly moral values in democratic societies creates a problem of
legitimation. Of course there are moral values that all democratic societies must in some degree
uphold (individual autonomy and freedom, human dignity, fairness, the rule of law), and those
values are part of their strength. But as people’s states, democratic social and political orders
are also implicitly and often explicitly expected to do something positive and tangible to
enhance the well-being of their citizens. One of those things, of course, is simply to provide a
rising standard of living; and the visible and astonishing success of that project has been crucial
to all Western democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of health;
and here again, the democratic welfare state has “delivered the goods” in concrete,
measurable, and extraordinary ways. In this sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to
insist on considering the fact that modern biopolitics has “worked” phenomenally well.
7
Peukert, “Genesis,” 242,236.
Focus on Biopolitics Kills V2L
The kritik creates a distinction between biological and political life that destroys
value to life
Fassin, 10 - Social Science Prof at Princeton (Didier, “Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach
to the Politics of Life” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,
and Development, Fall, Vol 1 No 1, Project Muse)//dm
Conclusion Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept in his last interview,
not only shifts lines that are too often hardened between biological and political lives: it
opens an ethical space for reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often
taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus unveiled the way in which
individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by powers, the market, or the
state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era. However, through
indiscriminate extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its analytical sharpness
and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary reduction of life to the opposition
between nature and history, bare life and qualified life, when systematically applied from
philosophical inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the complexity
and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On the other hand, the normative
prejudices which underlie the evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when
generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up by depriving social agents
of legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for
ethical attention. In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main
founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in their work, which was often
more complex, if even sometimes more obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in
the humanities and social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to fragments from
South African lives that I have described and analyzed in more detail elsewhere, suggest the
necessity of complicating the dualistic models that oppose biological and political lives.
Certainly, powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as if human beings could be
reduced to “mere life,” but democratic forces, including from within the structure of power,
tend to produce alternative strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves,
even under conditions of domination, [End Page 93] manage subtle tactics that transform their
physical life into a political instrument or a moral resource or an affective expression. But let
us go one step further: ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what human
beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives permanently question what it is to
be human. “The blurring between what is human and what is not human shades into the
blurring over what is life and what is not life,” writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein
and Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of life “not only
obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but also emphasizes form at the
expense of life.”22 It should be the incessant effort of social scientists to return to this inquiry
about life in its multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.
Migration DA
Immigration destroys the environment and causes urban sprawl - population
stabilization lessens future and proximate causes of environmental destruction
Beck, immigration and urban sprawl expert, B.A. in journalism, 6
[Roy, 6, the Social Contract Press, “Mass Immigration: Resources and Sprawl,”
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/booklets/common-sense-mass-immigration/immigrationresources-sprawl.html, accessed 7-10-13, MM]
In every traffic-choked, infrastructure-stressed, park-congested, school-overcrowded
community of the land, Americans live with the same fear: that their quality of life will forever
deteriorate under an inevitable, never-ending population explosion. Woods, brooks, and fields
at the edge of town that once helped soothe their souls have been cleared, scraped, paved,
and built on. Every ride or hike through countryside near the new urban edges is like a walk
through a hospital ward for the terminally ill - the days of these nearby open spaces are
numbered. U.S. population grows by 3 million a year. That, according to federal data, is roughly
half the cause of the destruction of 2.2 million acres of natural habitat and farmland each year.
But the relentless deterioration is not inevitable - government has the power to correct this.
With native-born Americans adopting a slightly-below-replacement-level fertility since 1972, the
only cause of long-term U.S. population growth is immigration and the high fertility of
immigrants. For three decades the federal government has increasingly sabotaged the
American people's dreams for environmental quality by snowballing total immigration over
traditional numbers by 400-700%. Lest anybody misunderstand, the immigrants themselves
are not to blame . Rather, the responsibility for environmental damage rests with the officials
who have set and allowed the unprecedented immigration levels. Some supporters of high
population growth contend that immigrants can't cause sprawl because they are so poor and
huddle in crowded urban tenements. Federal data, however, show that the majority of
immigrants live in the suburbs. Many construct housing in the rural strip around the suburbs.
Many more buy existing suburban houses from American natives who would not otherwise
have the money to construct their houses on the rural edge. The children of immigrants flee
the urban core cities at exactly the same rate as the children of natives. For many reasons,
massive immigration drives massive destruction of natural habitat . America at the first Earth
Day in 1970 was filled with 203 million people and now has grown by 100-plus 90 million. The
Census Bureau projects that current immigration policies will drive our population to 420 million
by 2050, nearly three times the 1950 number. We can stop that from happening and allow for a
decent quality of life for America's future human, animal, and plant inhabitants.
Environment collapse causes extinction
Diner 94 (Major David N.; Instructor, Administrative and Civil Law Division, The Judge Advocate
General's School, United States Army) "The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who's
Endangering Whom?" 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161l/n)
Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species,
filling narrow ecological niches. These ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse
systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike
a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist
collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks
down as a whole." 79 By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified
many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The
spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States
are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically,
each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects, could
cause total ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk
of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80
mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
Immigration Causes Environment Collapse
Unmitigated population growth leads to resource exhaustion and accesses
every ecological impact – reductions are key
FAIR, national, nonprofit, public-interest membership organization, 9
[9-9, Federation for American Immigration Reform, “The United States Is Already Overpopulated,”
http://www.fairus.org/issue/the-united-states-is-already-overpopulated, accessed 7-9-13, MM]
The United States is already overpopulated in the sense that we are consuming our national
ecological resources at an unsustainable rate. Our growing dependence on foreign energy
supplies is a prime example. We now depend on foreign imports for 28.8 percent of our energy
consumption: two-thirds of our petroleum products and about one-sixth of our natural gas
consumption.1 Because of the abundance of our nation's resources, we have long been
careless about our level of consumption, but it is the precipitous rise in the U.S. population
over the last four decades that has resulted in our outstripping of our national resources. We
are living beyond our means and are doing so increasingly as our population expands. This is
a serious problem with major implications for future generations. This imbalance cannot be
remedied without curbing both population growth and consumption as well as increasing
productivity. We must become more sensitive to the issue of consumption of finite, nonrenewable resources and to the limits of renewable resources. Reining in population growth
requires immigration reduction, and that objective should be at the top of the agenda for
policy makers because it is the most immediate and the most amenable to change through
public policy. In 1972, the Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American
Future recommended population stabilization, concluding: “The health of our country does not
depend on [population growth], nor does the vitality of business nor the welfare of the average
person.” The Commission’s recommendation was based on the 1970 Census finding that the
population had reached more than 203 million residents. Since 1970, the U.S. population has
added more than 100 million residents, about a 50 percent growth in fewer than 40 years. As
the root cause of land and resource shortages, ecological degradation and urban congestion,
sustained and growing overpopulation is jeopardizing the natural inheritance we leave for
future generations. The United States has a national environmental policy but no national
population policy. As a result, environmental policy decisions are made in a vacuum. By
determining the long-term ecological carrying capacity of the United States, Congress would be
able to make informed decisions regarding the impact of U.S. population change on
achievement of long-term environmental objectives. This report does not attempt to quantify
the carrying capacity of the United States; it simply explains how current population growth is
damaging the U.S. environment and lowering the average American’s quality of life. A local
example of what should be undertaken at the federal level has been launched in Albemarle
County, Va. (Charlottesville) where Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP) is
promoting a population limit for the county. Its focus is to, “use ‘smart growth’ tools to
manage development in the short term, but simultaneously insist that local governments
identify an optimal sustainable population size to cap growth in the community, and use this
“right size” as a basis for municipal planning decisions.”2 An obvious drawback to dealing with
overpopulation at the local level is that the possibility for dealing with the issue of immigration
— which ASAP acknowledges accounts for 85 percent of national population growth — is very
limited.
Turn – their call for continual growth is a Ponzi scheme, which necessarily
collapses into decreased standards of living for citizens
FAIR, national, nonprofit, public-interest membership organization, 9
[9-9, Federation for American Immigration Reform, “The United States Is Already Overpopulated,”
http://www.fairus.org/issue/the-united-states-is-already-overpopulated, accessed 7-9-13, MM]
The argument that population growth is essential for economic growth employs the logic of a
Ponzi scheme. It works only if there is endless population growth. Common sense tells us that
there are limits to sustainable population growth just as there is a limit to the land area of our
country. The U.S. population is now 307 million residents with an annual average growth rate of
0.975 percent.21 Slightly less than one percent per year seems like a small level of growth, but
in fact it is a high level of growth for a population as large as ours. As of July 4, 2009 the U.S. was
officially 233 years old, so let’s project what another 233 years of the current rate of
population growth would produce. Today’s population (307 million) increased by the current
annual growth rate (1.00975) 233 times equals a population of 2,944,205,941 — just shy of
three billion people and nearly ten times our current population — and it would not stop there.
We must rethink the assumption that continued population growth is necessary for
economic growth . Our economic competitors in Europe and Japan have proved that
assumption is false. True increases in per capita wellbeing depend on productivity growth
based on technological or organizational innovation, not population growth. At the same time,
a growing population reduces the natural resources and land available per person and decreases
the nation’s biodiversity, while increasing pollution, traffic congestion, and sprawl. A few
economic elites do benefit from overpopulation by skimming a percentage off the labor of an
ever-increasing workforce. But, the population growth Ponzi scheme will fall apart - like all
Ponzi schemes — because it cannot be indefinitely sustained. The land simply cannot support a
continually increasing population — and it is already facing the threat of collapse because the
country is already in ecological deficit.
Unmitigated chain migration puts the US on a path to destruction – accesses
resources and quality of life
Hull, president of CAPS and PhD in behavioral science, 6
[Diana, 6, Californians for Population Stabilization, “Mass Immigration: Illegal vs. Legal Entry and
Chain Migration,” p. 5, BeePDF, MM]
Mass immigration makes U.S, cities and their surrounding areas unacceptably crowded,
canceling the deliberate decision of U.S. citizens to limit their numbers by having fewer
children. A nation's people have a right to choose the size of their national family, but
allowing three million or more immigrants to settle here every year removes the majority of
Americans from the decision-making loop. From 2000 to 2005, 86% of U.S. population growth
was the result of immigration and births to immigrants and there will be about 500 million
people in the United States by mid-century. Without securing the border and limiting legal
immigration to about 200,000 a year, we are on a path to a billion Americans by 2100. Illegal
immigrants are self-selected. We don't know their true identity, whether they are able bodied
or sick, schooled in any language or skill, or have a history of crime or violence. Yet once in the
interior of the country, they are rarely apprehended and often remain in the U.S. for a
lifetime. Their presence lures others from their family and community, so every illegal alien
establishes a base camp for others. Yet almost every major city in the U. S. accommodates
their presence and police rarely ascertain their immigration status. Between 12 and 20 million
illegal aliens live among us. Legal immigrants add another one million people every year. There
are many routes to legal residency. Most applicants gain entry under the family reunification
provisions of the immigration law. This is known as "chain migration." Chain migration allows
relatives to immigrate, not only a spouse, minor children, and parents, but also siblings and
adult children who can bring in their spouses who can sponsor their siblings, parents, and
relatives, ad infinitum. Together chain immigration and illegal entry have essentially replaced
the right of the majority citizen-stakeholders to set national immigration levels . But even
more serious is the ratcheting up of our numbers. This propels the exponential population
growth curve with steep and dangerous momentum. Inevitably, the nation will become even
more seriously over-populated, natural resources will dwindle, and the quality of life will
erode. The size, composition, and distribution of the United States population is a national issue
of the highest urgency. Our citizens must act, or our country and environment will pay a
terrible price.
Econ DA
1NC—Econ
Immigration causes unstable population growth, downward pressure on wage
levels, and a loss of billions.
Stoll 1997 [David, anthropologist and writer, March 1997 “In Focus: The Immigration Debate”
Volume 2, Number 31, http://www.theodora.com/debate.html, Accessed 7/10/13- JM]
Among the factors affecting these different assessments are a rising sense of economic and
social insecurity in many U.S. communities, dependence of many economic sectors on
immigrant labor (from childcare to agribusiness), an increasingly interconnected global economy
characterized by the relatively free flow of capital and trade, and rising crime and drug
trafficking in border states. Current immigration policy is failing on numerous accounts. Stricter
border controls have proved unable to stem illegal immigration flows, leading instead to rising
human rights abuses and victimization of border-crossers. Immigration clearly contributes to a
downward pressure on wage levels and to decreased job availability in certain economic
sectors. Many refugees fleeing repressive governments and violent political situations find
themselves rejected by Washington. Economists tend to agree that immigration is a net benefit
to the U.S. economy. Immigrants fill jobs that U.S. citizens often reject, help the U.S. economy
maintain competitiveness in the global economy, and stimulate job creation in depressed
neighborhoods. But net benefits for the economy can conceal serious losses for vulnerable
sectors of the U.S. population. It is no secret that many employers ranging from suburbanites to
small contractors to major corporations would rather hire foreigners who often work harder for
less pay than U.S. citizens. As such, immigration has long been a contentious labor issue. The
infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was, among other things, a reaction to the importation
of indentured laborers, who were paid far less than other workers. The immigration debates of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries anticipated contemporary alliances between selfinterested capitalists and open-door idealists on the one side, and nativists and protectionists on
the other. One consequence of the Great Wave from 1880 to 1924 (with immigration averaging
more than a half million annually) was that northern manufacturers relied on imported southern
and eastern Europeans rather than hiring southern blacks. Long employed in the agricultural
sector, immigrants since the 1970s have become a major presence in other industries that
have reorganized to take advantage of cheap labor and undermine union wage scales. A
prominent example is the meatpacking industry, which has replaced U.S. workers with Mexicans
and Southeast Asians at far lower pay. The chronic oversupply of labor from south of the
border has kept farm wages low and obstructed successful labor organizing. The low-wage
economy of border towns like El Paso is also partially explained by heavy immigration flows. El
Paso, which has grown rapidly in macro terms, is for the most part a low-wage, labor-intensive
treadmill with high unemployment, earnings a third lower than the national average, and twice
the national poverty rate. Low-skill workers, particularly recent immigrants and blacks, are
among the most common casualties of this process. But they are not the only ones. The 1990
expansion slots for high-skill immigrants have contributed to rising levels of unemployment in
the U.S. for engineers, computer programmers, and Ph.Ds in technical fields. Immigration also
has implications for U.S. population growth, environmental protection, and the demand for
new infrastructure. In the 1970s the U.S. population was approaching stability at less than 250
million around the year 2030. Currently, immigration (including new arrivals and their children)
accounts for an increase of about 1.5 million more people a year, which represents more than
half of total U.S. population growth. At current levels of immigration, the U.S. population will
approach 400 million by the year 2050. If immigration is reduced to half the current level, the
U.S. population would still approach 350 million by that year. Given the voracity with which
U.S. residents consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources, the accelerated
growth of this population is far more troubling than that of third world residents, who
consume so much less. Immigration's fiscal costs and contributions are hotly debated. Rice
University economist Donald Huddle argues that, in 1994, legal and illegal immigration drained
$51 billion more in social welfare and job displacement costs than immigrants paid in taxes.
But according to the Urban Institute, immigrants contribute $25-30 billion more in taxes than
they receive in services. Clearly immigrants are stressing the social infrastructure in some
states. But cutting them off from hospital care, schooling, and assistance creates conditions of
destitution that are even more costly to address apart from the ethical issues such action poses.
Economic collapse causes nuclear war
Harris and Burrows, PhD European History at Cambridge and NIC’s Long Range
Analysis Unit, 9 (Mathew, PhD European History at Cambridge, counselor in the National
Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer, member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting
the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis”
http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf, 6-31-13)
Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely
to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible
permutations of outcomes, each with ample Revisiting the Future opportunity for unintended
consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive
than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated,
the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies
and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of
multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to
think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For
that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be
even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would
be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and
nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international
agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and
youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025,
however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s
most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a
combination of descendants of long established groups_inheriting organizational structures,
command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated
attacks_and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become selfradicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an
economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of
U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of
nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the
region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional
weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of
stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War
would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict
and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation
and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established.
The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance
capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent
difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack
of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and
uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense,
potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict that the world continues to
experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and
there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive
countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this
could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy
resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of
their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications.
Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization
efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal
stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding
targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions,
rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational
cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the
Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly
difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.
Immigration Kills Econ
Allowing the border to open will cut economic progress while exponentially
increasing growth rate – poverty is widespread
Ayon ’09 (David R., Senior Research Associate at Loyola Marymount University, James A. Baker
III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, March 27, “Developing the US-Mexico Border
Region for a Prosperous and Secure Relationship: The Impact of Mexican Migration and Border
Proximity on Local Communites”, accessed 7-12-2013, AR)
This very preliminary and partial sketch of the migration-related demographics of border
communities already suggest a number of policy concerns that bear on the region’s migratory
relationship and socioeconomic integration with Mexico. The still-prominent role of agriculture in the
region’s economy alone is suggestive of a low-wage, seasonal labor force that is comprised of cross-border migrants and U.S.
residents. However, the
great restructuring of migrant labor in the service and sales sectors has not
closed the “border wage penalty.” The 2008 Federal Reserve study found that border migrants earn 16 percent less
than migrants in the interior of the United States. In the words of the authors, “the border wage penalty appears to
be largely related to the nature of border labor supply”—apparently in a manner that cuts
across economic sectors. It is not only the border crossers who pay the “border wage penalty.” U.S. communities along the
Mexican border are among the poorest in the country. Indeed, if we exclude San Diego, the per capita income of the other 23
counties in 2003 was below that of all 50 states. To quote the school districts’ study, “Residents of La Frontera tend to be young,
immigrant, and poorly educated.” As the 2001 Federal Reserve study of Texas border cities put it, “High
population growth
is the source of the seeming paradox between a booming job market and continued
stagnation of income … Legal and illegal immigration and a high birth rate make it difficult to
raise incomes in these six cities, despite what—at least from a labor market perspective—
looks like solid economic progress.”
Immigrants are not needed – they take unemployed US workers’ jobs
Camarota and Jensenius, Director of Research for the Center for Immigration
Studies, demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies, 9
(Steven and Karen, Center for Immigration Studies, December 2009, “A Huge Pool of Potential
Workers: Unemployment, Underemployment, and Non-Work Among Native-Born Americans,”
page 3 http://www.cis.org/UnemploymentAmongNativeWorkers) RH
The fact that unemployment and the U-6 measure look so bad for less-educated and young
workers is not proof that immigration has caused this situation. The severity of the current
recession clearly is part of the problem. But unemployment, underemployment, and declining
rates of labor force participation were a problem for less-educated natives long before this
recession began. What we can say from the data is that those types of workers most in
competition with immigrants face the most dire labor market situation. This is consistent with
the possibility that immigration has harmed their job prospects. The other conclusion that we
can draw from this data is that there is no shortage of less-educated workers in the country. If
the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to
return to their home countries, we would seem to have an adequate supply of lesseducated
natives to replace these workers. Additionally, the United States could alter its immigration
policy in response to the recession. The number of natives unsatisfied with their employment
status (represented by U-6) raises the question of why new foreign workers are needed. In
2008, an average of 112,000 new foreign workers were authorized each month to work in the
United States. This includes new adult permanent residents (green card holders) and long-term
temporary visas for guest workers and others authorized to work. It does not include several
hundred thousand illegal immigrants who are already in the country when they change their
status and are therefore technically not new arrivals. However, they too could be counted as
new work authorizations.
Immigrants are detrimental to the economy – they ruin our welfare system and
have little to contribute.
Malanga, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 6
(Steven, Summer 2006, “How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy City
Journal,http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigrants_economy.html, RH)
But the tale of Librado Velasquez helps show why supporters are wrong about today’s
immigration, as many Americans sense and so much research has demonstrated. America does
not have a vast labor shortage that requires waves of low-wage immigrants to alleviate; in
fact, unemployment among unskilled workers is high—about 30 percent. Moreover, many of
the unskilled, uneducated workers now journeying here labor, like Velasquez, in shrinking
industries, where they force out native workers, and many others work in industries where
the availability of cheap workers has led businesses to suspend investment in new
technologies that would make them less labor-intensive. Yet while these workers add little to
our economy, they come at great cost, because they are not economic abstractions but human
beings, with their own culture and ideas—often at odds with our own. Increasing numbers of
them arrive with little education and none of the skills necessary to succeed in a modern
economy. Many may wind up stuck on our lowest economic rungs, where they will rely on
something that immigrants of other generations didn’t have: a vast U.S. welfare and socialservices apparatus that has enormously amplified the cost of immigration. Just as welfare
reform and other policies are helping to shrink America’s underclass by weaning people off
such social programs, we are importing a new, foreign-born underclass. As famed free-market
economist Milton Friedman puts it: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and
a welfare state.” Immigration can only pay off again for America if we reshape our policy,
organizing it around what’s good for the economy by welcoming workers we truly need and
excluding those who, because they have so little to offer, are likely to cost us more than they
contribute, and who will struggle for years to find their place here.
Immigrants compete for jobs and push out US born workers.
Malanga, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 6
(Steven, Summer 2006, “How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy City
Journal,http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigrants_economy.html, RH)
The flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from countries with poor, ill-educated
populations, has yielded a mismatch between today’s immigrants and the American economy
and has left many workers poorly positioned to succeed for the long term. Unlike the
immigrants of 100 years ago, whose skills reflected or surpassed those of the native workforce
at the time, many of today’s arrivals, particularly the more than half who now come from
Central and South America, are farmworkers in their home countries who come here with little
education or even basic training in blue-collar occupations like carpentry or machinery. (A
century ago, farmworkers made up 35 percent of the U.S. labor force, compared with the under
2 percent who produce a surplus of food today.) Nearly two-thirds of Mexican immigrants, for
instance, are high school dropouts, and most wind up doing either unskilled factory work or
small-scale construction projects, or they work in service industries, where they compete for
entry-level jobs against one another, against the adult children of other immigrants, and
against native-born high school dropouts. Of the 15 industries employing the greatest
percentage of foreign-born workers, half are low-wage service industries, including gardening,
domestic household work, car washes, shoe repair, and janitorial work. To take one stark
example: whereas 100 years ago, immigrants were half as likely as native-born workers to be
employed in household service, today immigrants account for 27 percent of all domestic
workers in the United States.
Although open-borders advocates say that these workers are simply taking jobs Americans
don’t want, studies show that the immigrants drive down wages of native-born workers and
squeeze them out of certain industries. Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz,
for instance, estimate that low-wage immigration cuts the wages for the average native-born
high school dropout by some 8 percent, or more than $1,200 a year. Other economists find
that the new workers also push down wages significantly for immigrants already here and
native-born Hispanics.
Consequently, as the waves of immigration continue, the sheer number of those competing for
low-skilled service jobs makes economic progress difficult. A study of the impact of
immigration on New York City’s restaurant business, for instance, found that 60 percent of
immigrant workers do not receive regular raises, while 70 percent had never been promoted.
One Mexican dishwasher aptly captured the downward pressure that all these arriving
workers put on wages by telling the study’s authors about his frustrating search for a 50-cent
raise after working for $6.50 an hour: “I visited a few restaurants asking for $7 an hour, but
they only offered me $5.50 or $6,” he said. “I had to beg [for a job].”
Similarly, immigration is also pushing some native-born workers out of jobs, as Kenyon College
economists showed in the California nail-salon workforce. Over a 16-year period starting in the
late 1980s, some 35,600 mostly Vietnamese immigrant women flooded into the industry, a mass
migration that equaled the total number of jobs in the industry before the immigrants arrived.
Though the new workers created a labor surplus that led to lower prices, new services, and
somewhat more demand, the economists estimate that as a result, 10,000 native-born
workers either left the industry or never bothered entering it.
Increasing Immigration will simply cause the creation of a new underclass –
wages will plummet and empirical examples prove.
Malanga, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 6
(Steven, Summer 2006, “How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy City
Journal,http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigrants_economy.html, RH)
Given these realities, several of the major immigration reforms now under consideration
simply don’t make economic sense—especially the guest-worker program favored by President
Bush and the U.S. Senate. Careful economic research tells us that there is no significant
shortfall of workers in essential American industries, desperately needing supplement from a
massive guest-worker program. Those few industries now relying on cheap labor must focus
more quickly on mechanization where possible. Meanwhile, the cost of paying legal workers
already here a bit more to entice them to do such low-wage work as is needed will have a
minimal impact on our economy.
The potential woes of a guest-worker program, moreover, far overshadow any economic
benefit, given what we know about the long, troubled history of temporary-worker programs in
developed countries. They have never stemmed illegal immigration, and the guest workers
inevitably become permanent residents, competing with the native-born and forcing down
wages. Our last guest-worker program with Mexico, begun during World War II to boost
wartime manpower, grew larger in the postwar era, because employers who liked the cheap
labor lobbied hard to keep it. By the mid-1950s, the number of guest workers reached seven
times the annual limit during the war itself, while illegal immigration doubled, as the availability
of cheap labor prompted employers to search for ever more of it rather than invest in
mechanization or other productivity gains.
The economic and cultural consequences of guest-worker programs have been devastating in
Europe, and we risk similar problems. When post–World War II Germany permitted its
manufacturers to import workers from Turkey to man the assembly lines, industry’s
investment in productivity declined relative to such countries as Japan, which lacked ready
access to cheap labor. When Germany finally ended the guest-worker program once it became
economically unviable, most of the guest workers stayed on, having attained permanentresident status. Since then, the descendants of these workers have been chronically
underemployed and now have a crime rate double that of German youth.
France has suffered similar consequences. In the post–World War II boom, when French
unemployment was under 2 percent, the country imported an industrial labor force from its
colonies; by the time France’s industrial jobs began evaporating in the 1980s, these guest
workers and their children numbered in the millions, and most had made little economic
progress. They now inhabit the vast housing projects, or cités, that ring Paris—and that have
recently been the scene of chronic rioting. Like Germany, France thought it was importing a
labor force, but it wound up introducing a new underclass.
“Importing labor is far more complicated than importing other factors of production, such as
commodities,” write University of California at Davis prof Philip Martin, an expert on guestworker programs, and Michael Teitelbaum, a former member of the U.S. Commission on
Immigration Reform. “Migration involves human beings, with their own beliefs, politics,
cultures, languages, loves, hates, histories, and families.”
A2: Immigrants Create Growth
Immigrant labor results in little to no savings – disadvantages outweigh costs
Malanga, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 6
(Steven, Summer 2006, “How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy City
Journal,http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigrants_economy.html, RH)
In many American industries, waves of low-wage workers have also retarded investments that
might lead to modernization and efficiency. Farming, which employs a million immigrant
laborers in California alone, is the prime case in point. Faced with a labor shortage in the early
1960s, when President Kennedy ended a 22-year-old guest-worker program that allowed
45,000 Mexican farmhands to cross over the border and harvest 2.2 million tons of California
tomatoes for processed foods, farmers complained but swiftly automated, adopting a
mechanical tomato-picking technology created more than a decade earlier. Today, just 5,000
better-paid workers—one-ninth the original workforce—harvest 12 million tons of tomatoes
using the machines.
The savings prompted by low-wage migrants may even be minimal in crops not easily
mechanized. Agricultural economists Wallace Huffman and Alan McCunn of Iowa State
University have estimated that without illegal workers, the retail cost of fresh produce would
increase only about 3 percent in the summer-fall season and less than 2 percent in the winterspring season, because labor represents only a tiny percent of the retail price of produce and
because without migrant workers, America would probably import more foreign fruits and
vegetables. “The question is whether we want to import more produce from abroad, or more
workers from abroad to pick our produce,” Huffman remarks.
For American farmers, the answer has been to keep importing workers—which has now made
the farmers more vulnerable to foreign competition, since even minimum-wage immigrant
workers can’t compete with produce picked on farms in China, Chile, or Turkey and shipped
here cheaply. A flood of low-priced Turkish raisins several years ago produced a glut in the
United States that sharply drove down prices and knocked some farms out of business, shrinking
total acreage in California devoted to the crop by one-fifth, or some 50,000 acres. The farms
that survived are now moving to mechanize swiftly, realizing that no amount of cheap
immigrant labor will make them competitive.
Backlash DA
1NC—Backlash
Immigration legislation fuels armed, right-wing extremist groups.
Miller 09 (Greg, reporter for the Washington Post and former reporter for the LA Times and
winner of the Overseas Press Award, Los Angeles Times, “Right-wing extremists seen as a
threat”, April 16, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/16/nation/na-rightwingextremists16)
The department routinely issues intelligence warnings to state and local authorities, a role it was assigned in response to criticism
that the federal government had failed to do so in the months preceding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Describing right-wing groups'
the report said extremist organizations were "harnessing this historical
election as a recruitment tool."¶ It cited two cases before the election where potential threats against Obama were
disrupted by law enforcement.¶ The assessment also listed economic factors -- including increases in
real estate foreclosures and unemployment -- as creating a "fertile recruiting environment"
for right-wing groups.¶ And it describes evidence compiled by local law enforcement agencies that extremist
groups are stockpiling weapons out of concern that Congress and the Obama administration might enact legislation
requiring the registration of all firearms.¶ The report also said a push for new immigration legislation that
would grant residency or citizenship to people who entered the country illegally could fuel
anger among groups fearing competition for jobs.
animosity toward Obama,
Preserving nationalism is key to prevent imminent race wars
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
Unlike the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi organizations, the ideology of most nativist extremist
groups is not explicitly racist. But there are exceptions. Nine of the groups identified by the
SPLC as nativist extremist are also listed as racist hate groups. That is because they disparage
all Latinos on a racial basis, regardless of immigration status, or because they plainly endorse
white nationalism, sometimes predicting impending race war. While only a few nativist
extremist groups deal in such unvarnished white supremacist ideology, most of them are
playing a role similar to that of traditional hate groups in the raging national immigration
debate: they are interjecting racist conspiracy theories, disseminating false and defamatory
statistics about ‘criminal’ immigrants and the problems they create, blaming and targeting
Latino immigrants as individuals, and promoting direct intimidation, mean-spirited
harassment and even murder. Their rhetoric is shot through with paranoid conspiracy theories
of invasions, and is frequently warlike. ‘An army of illegal aliens, including criminals, drug
smugglers, and terrorists, is invading our country’, the Indiana Federation for Immigration
Reform and Enforcement declared. ‘America is being destroyed by a modern version of Genghis
Khan's army’, according to the Emigration Party of Nevada, whose leader, Donald Pauly, has
called for the Department of Homeland Security to station ‘sniper teams’ on the border and
also suggested that all Mexican women should be forced to undergo sterilization after having
their first child (Buchanan and Holthouse, 2007).
Causes Backlash
Radical anti-immigration groups have soared in number and have been driven
by non-white immigration.
Potok 10 (Mark, senior fellow of Southern Poverty Law Center and EIC of Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center’s
Intelligence Report, “Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism”, Spring 2010 Issue Number: 137,
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/spring/rage-on-the-right)
The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based
populist anger at political, demographic and
economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the
nation.¶ Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neoNazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some
136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations
that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring
back after years out of the limelight.¶ The
anger seething across the American political landscape — over
racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy, the bailouts of bankers and other elites,
and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist" — goes
beyond the radical right. The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be
considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism.¶ “We are
in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States
history,” Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a
series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry,
resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government
programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage."¶ Sixty-one percent
of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Just a quarter think the
government can be trusted. And the anti-tax tea party movement is viewed in much more positive terms than either the Democratic
or Republican parties, the poll found.¶ The
signs of growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men
have come to Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the "tree of liberty" needs to be "watered" with "the blood
of tyrants." The Conservative Political Action Conference held this February was co-sponsored by
groups like the John Birch Society, which believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and
Oath Keepers, a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the government
has secret plans to declare martial law and intern patriotic Americans in concentration camps.
Politicians pandering to the antigovernment right in 37 states have introduced "Tenth Amendment Resolutions," based on the
constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states. And,
at the "A Well
Regulated Militia" website, a recent discussion of how to build "clandestine safe houses" to
stay clear of the federal government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and
Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses.
The number of hate groups in America
has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008 and driven largely by an angry backlash
against non-white immigration and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to
power of an African American president.¶ According to the latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), these
groups rose again slightly in 2009 — from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year — despite the demise of a key neo-Nazi group. The American
National Socialist Workers Party, which had 35 chapters in 28 states, imploded shortly after the October 2008 arrest of founder Bill
White for making threats against his enemies.¶ At the same time, the number of what the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist"
groups — organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or harass suspected
immigrants — jumped from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 last year. Virtually all of these vigilante groups have appeared since the spring
of 2005.
Endorsing multiculturalism and assimilation of local cultures will result in white
backlash and racial violence
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
None of the factors discussed here are likely to wane in the coming years. Immigrants—legal or
otherwise—will very probably continue to flow into the United States, and whites will
eventually lose their majority. Another challenge relates, of course, to economic globalization,
particularly the transfer of many industrial jobs abroad and the spread of neo-liberal
approaches to economic problems. Globalization has contributed to the loss of some national
sovereignty, with its attendant spread of multiculturalism and multiracialism, and pressures
on local cultures to assimilate into a kind of Western world culture. A backlash from some
whites is to be expected, with its chances enhanced by the election of Barack Obama. These
factors are now compounded by the large numbers of Americans who increasingly find they
are facing hard economic times. It is not clear precisely how such economic developments will
affect the growth of the radical right, although it seems certain that any correlation is not a
simple one—people who lose their jobs do not rush out to join radical groups without further
ado. What seems more likely is that difficult economic times, particularly when they affect
people not accustomed to seeing their prospects shrinking, give the radical right an opening. It
is at such moments that the sometimes convoluted explanations of the world offered by radical
ideologues get more of a hearing than they otherwise would have. And to some, the only
possible defense against this homogenizing juggernaut is what is seen as the ‘organic’
nation—a nation that is based on race, a community of blood.
Invasion of immigrant workers on domestic workers creates controversy, there
will be no harmony
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
There is some evidence that low-wage immigrant workers in the¶ United States, who immigrate
to this country in substantial numbers,¶ have palpable effects on the wage scale of the lowestpaid workers in¶ the United States. Because these immigrants are willing to work for¶ lower
wages than are domestic workers, employers may offer to pay¶ less. Unskilled U.S. citizens in
urban, high-immigration areas are the¶ most directly affected. One much-cited 2005 study by
the Harvard economists¶ George Borjas and Lawrence Katz attributed wage reductions¶ for lowskilled workers to undocumented immigration from Mexico.42¶ Other empirical studies, however,
undermine this claim.43 In fact, growing¶ wage disparities may be attributable to factors other
than undocumented¶ immigration, such as globalization and decreasing unionization¶ of workers
in the United States.44¶ Even if the overall effects of immigration on unskilled citizens are
relatively¶ small, the impacts on discrete parts of the labor force are tangible¶ and help
generate tension between citizens and immigrants.45 Unquestionably,¶ immigration has
transformed—and continues to transform—¶ certain labor markets. Over the past few decades,
jobs in the¶ poultry and beef industries in the Midwest and the Southeast and the¶ janitorial
industry in Los Angeles have increasingly been filled by immigrants.¶ In some circumstances, jobs
that were held predominantly by¶ African Americans have come to be taken for the most part by
Latina/o¶ immigrants.46 These shifts have sparked tension and controversy.
Opening the border fails—causes backlash
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Impediments to a regional arrangement do, of course, exist. The political¶ unpopularity of
immigration in the United States is one. Demographic¶ differences are another. Racial,
socioeconomic, and cultural differences¶ among the populations of the NAFTA partners
arguably exceed¶ those of the original EU members. In addition, the staying power of¶ antiMexican sentiment in the United States should not be underestimated.¶ It has a lengthy history
and is enduring. Fear of a mass migration¶ of poor culturally and racially different people will
likely generate considerable¶ controversy for the foreseeable future and even greater fears¶
about the national identity than currently exist.
Economic issues and increasing immigration is likely to lead to violence
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
A perfect storm is brewing. An economic meltdown, high rates of non-white immigration,
rapid demographic change and now the election of America's first African American president
are fueling widespread rage on America's radical right (and, to a lesser extent, in parts of the
political mainstream). These developments are likely to lead to growth in the number of hate
groups, higher levels of hate-motivated violence, and continuing domestic terrorism,
presenting significant challenges for law enforcement professionals in the near future. And if
antigovernment sentiment continues to grow in the wake of these political trends, law
enforcement officials may well find themselves personally targeted, so a full understanding of
these movements, from both the perspective of protecting the public and officer safety, is
imperative. Some leaders of the organized radical right, reacting to the campaign and ultimate
election of Barack Obama, have openly suggested that more violence is on the way. Thom
Robb, an Arkansas Klan leader, described in November 2008 the ‘race war’ he sees developing
‘between our people, who I see as the rightful owners and leaders of this great country, and
their people, the blacks’ (Robb, 2008). This rage has already resulted in two alleged violent
plots, including one in which a pair of neo-Nazi skinheads in Tennessee were arrested just 2
weeks before the 2008 elections. They were accused of planning to murder black school
children, shoot and behead other African Americans, and assassinate Obama, then still only a
candidate.
Multiculturalism threatens Americans both economically and culturally –
insecurity results in the formation of hate groups
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
A remarkable thing occurred while America's Patriot movement rose and fell. Even as this very
public phenomenon captured the attention of law enforcement, citizens and the press alike,
hate groups—Klan, neo-Nazi and other organizations whose primary ideology is based on racial
or other forms of explicit group hatred—rose steadily. White nationalists, now describing
themselves as separatists rather than supremacists, offered a racial analysis of the world that
won increasing acceptance among extremists. By 2007, the latest figure available, the SPLC was
tracking 888 hate groups, the largest number since the organization began monitoring
extremism in the early 1980s.2 The number of hate groups has ballooned since 2000, when 602
groups were counted, a rise of more than 45%. It is now the hate movement, which stands to
be boosted by the added fuel of the economic malaise and the election of the first black
president, which presents the most direct challenge for law enforcement. Worryingly, the
movement's increasingly revolutionary nature and extreme antigovernment positions—after
Obama's election, for example, David Duke said in a radio interview, ‘that government is not our
government’—mean that certain sectors of the radical right have now adopted the most
dangerous aspects of the Patriot movement.3 This was emphasized by the two alleged plots by
white supremacists to assassinate Obama that were busted up during the months running up to
the November election, one in Denver, CO, and the other by skinheads from Tennessee and
Arkansas. Current trends favour further growth in the number of hate groups. These trends
[which] include the power of new communications technologies, the use of white power music
to recruit youth, the falling proportion of whites in the U.S. population and rising Latino
immigration. Hate groups see the government as not merely failing to address these problems,
but as actually being secretly run by Jews and other nefarious types who are bent on
encouraging these developments. At the same time, sharp economic pressures have borne
down on young white workers, the middle class, farmers and workers in heavy industry—
pressures that are now increasing. Finally, globalization and other rapid social and economic
changes—accompanied by the rise of a new, multicultural orthodoxy—have ignited an angry
reaction among many who feel that they are losing their identity.
Backlash Causes War
Both physical and psychological hate violence will only escalate
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
Even as anti-immigrant vitriol and propaganda has increased in recent years, hate violence has
risen against perceived ‘illegal aliens’. Between 2003 and 2007, the latest year for which FBI
national hate crime statistics are available, anti-Latino hate crimes rose a total 40%. Those
numbers likely understate the problem, because undocumented immigrants, fearing
deportation, are highly unlikely to report attacks to the authorities (Potok, 2008a). The SPLC also
documented several particularly egregious examples of physical and psychological violence
directed at Latinos between 2004 and 2007 (Mock, 2007). The perpetrators ranged from racist
skinheads to rogue border patrol agents to otherwise everyday citizens who took it upon
themselves to repel an ‘invader’, terrorize a ‘criminal alien’, or exterminate a ‘cockroach’. In
one particularly notorious case that occurred in January 2007, four heavily armed men wearing
military-style berets and camouflage fatigues ambushed a pickup truck carrying 12
undocumented immigrants in a farm field near Eloy, AZ. The assailants shot and killed the
driver and wounded one of the passengers. Survivors described the shooters as three white
men and one Latino who spoke little Spanish. The ambush stood out because it lacked any
characteristics of typical borderland violence committed by bandits or rival smugglers. No one
was robbed in the Eloy ambush, no drugs were found in the truck and no one was kidnapped
(rival immigrant smugglers, or ‘coyotes’, frequently steal one another's human cargo). Also, the
fact that three of the men were white was exceedingly unusual rare for coyotes or border
bandits. The incident remains under investigation. Symbolic of the increasingly violent rhetoric
coming from nativist extremists, some applauded the attack. For example, Jeff Schwilk, the
founder of the San Diego Minutemen, openly celebrated the murders. ‘In America, we call
incidents like that “cleansing the gene pool”’, Schwilk declared in an email (Buchanan and
Holthouse, 2007). Public forums hosted by various nativist extremist groups were rife with
support for the killers. ‘I really hope it IS pissed off Americans who are taking justice into their
own hands, doing what the Border Patrol and the National Guard ARE NOT ALLOWED to do’, a
member of the California-based hate group Save Our State wrote on the group's forum in early
2007. ‘Go vigilantes! Where can I send a check?’ (Buchanan and Holthouse, 2007).
Backlash Turns Solvency
Protective measures are taken by nativist movements to ensure border security
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern Poverty Law Center,
Southern Poverty Law Center, “USA: Hate Groups, Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise” Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
Many whites have come to see the federal government, along with the nation's business elites,
as specifically responsible for the failure to curb non-white immigration. On the radical right, the
government often is seen as plotting to destroy the white race. Now, the white supremacist
movement has been joined in its anger over America's immigration policy by a new nativist
movement that seemingly came out of nowhere in the last few years. Starting with a meeting
held in 2001 in Sierra Vista, AZ, which brought together several anti-immigrant hate groups to
laud a border rancher known for detaining suspected immigrants at gunpoint, the organized
anti-immigrant movement has exploded (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2001a). By 2007, the
SPLC had identified 144 ‘nativist extremist’ groups active across 39 states (Southern Poverty Law
Center, 2007). Most of these organizations—nearly 100 of them—had appeared since April
2006. The groups identified as ‘nativist extremist’ target people, rather than policy. That is,
they do not limit themselves to advocating, even in forceful terms, for stricter border security,
tighter population control, or tougher enforcement of laws against hiring illegal immigrants.
Instead, they go after the immigrants themselves, using tactics including armed vigilante
border patrols; conspicuous surveillance of apartments and houses occupied by Mexicans and
Central Americans; publicizing photos and home addresses of ‘suspected illegal aliens’ and
harassment and intimidation of Latino immigrants at day-labour sites and migrant-worker
camps. Because their tactics frequently cross the line into illegal harassment and even violence,
these groups sometimes represent another challenge for law enforcement. Though most heavily
concentrated in Arizona, California and Texas, nativist extremist groups are active in all regions
of the United States. Many of the groups in non-border states are local chapters of either the
Minuteman Civil Defense Corps or the Minuteman Project, which comprised 57 of the 144
nativist extremist groups listed by the SPLC. These separate, competing nationwide
organizations both emerged from the original month-long Minuteman ‘civilian border patrol’
operation held in Cochise County, AZ, in April 2005. Minuteman chapters raise money for their
parent organizations and muster volunteers for vigilante border actions. Many also hold
protest actions or conduct ‘surveillance ops’ at day-labor sites in their home cities. In states
where it's allowed by law, their members openly carry firearms. The Minuteman Civil Defense
Corps and Minuteman Project have also spawned a slew of imitators and splinter groups that
have no official affiliation with either national Minuteman organization. These rogue outfits
include the Antelope Valley Minutemen, whose leader, Frank Jorge, has written on his
website: ‘We have a right, and an obligation, to defend our country, our homes, and our
families not only from this invasion, but also from the very Government that is precipitating this
treasonous act’ (Buchanan and Holthouse, 2007).
No Solvency—tearing down the border would cause anti-immigration groups to
just recreate borders
ADL 2006 (May 23, Anti-Defamation League “Extremists Declare 'Open Season'
on Immigrants: Hispanics Target of Incitement and Violence,”
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/immigration_extremists.htm?Multi_pag
e_sections=sHeading_1)
Anti-immigration border vigilante groups have also organized anti-immigrant events around
the country this spring. The largest border vigilante group, the Minuteman Project, held a
reprise in April of their 2005 vigilante border patrols along the Arizona- Mexico border, and
followed up with a caravan that staged anti-immigration events across the country. One
Minuteman event in Birmingham, Alabama, was organized by Mike Vanderboegh, a former
militia leader. At the rally, an attendee distributed copies of Olaf Childress's racist and antiSemitic newspaper, First Freedom. Other anti-immigration groups held rallies from Arizona to
Minnesota. Anti-immigration groups have also turned to publicity stunts. The Minutemen, for
example, declared on May 9 that they would start building their own "border security fence"
on private property along the border with Mexico, unless the federal government itself
deployed the military or erected such fencing. The Minutemen claimed that they had received
nearly $200,000 in donations to build such a fence. Other border vigilante groups have already
begun or announced similar projects.
Anti Immigration Groups Rising
Right-wing, anti-immigration groups are rising—laundry list.
Miller 09 (Greg, reporter for the Washington Post and former reporter for the LA Times and winner of the Overseas Press Award,
Los Angeles Times, “Right-wing extremists seen as a threat”, April 16, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/16/nation/narightwing-extremists16)
The economic downturn and the election of the nation's first black president are contributing
to a resurgence of right-wing extremist groups, which had been on the wane since the Oklahoma City bombing in
1995, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment distributed to state and local authorities last week.¶ The report, produced by the
Department of Homeland Security, has triggered a backlash among conservatives because it also raised the specter that disgruntled
veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might "boost the capabilities of extremists . . . to carry out violence."¶ The
assessment noted that domestic security officials had seen no evidence that such groups were planning attacks in the U.S.¶ But it is
the first high-level U.S. intelligence report to call attention to an array of recent domestic developments as potential harbingers of
terrorist violence.¶ Among
other factors cited in the report were increased prospects for gun
control and immigration legislation under President Obama, as well as resentment over the rising
economic influence of countries such as China, India and Russia.¶ But the assessment focuses most of its
attention on animosity toward Obama and anxiety over the recession.¶ "The economic downturn and the election of the first
African American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and recruitment," the report warns in the first of a
the document describes an economic and political climate that has
"similarities to the 1990s, when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession,
series of findings.¶ Overall,
criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers."¶ The
unclassified report was not released publicly but was distributed among law enforcement agencies across the country before it
surfaced online this week.¶
Terrorism DA
1NC—Terrorism
Allowing our borders to be opened will lead to loss of all American freedoms
and nuclear terrorism
Schlafly 1 (Phyllis, J.D., Oct, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, The Threat of Terrorism Is From Illegal
Aliens, http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2001/oct01/psroct01.shtml) TYBG
At the same time, Americans have some soul-searching to do about our security. Why were our
FBI and CIA caught so completely by surprise? Why have they been spending their resources
chasing after a few people who were no harm to society, such as one loner on a mountaintop at
Ruby Ridge and a pathetic religious group in Waco, while the plotting foreign terrorists crossed
our borders and lived in our country illegally, took their flight training in Florida, and repeatedly
boarded our planes?¶ The terrorists are foreigners, most or all of whom should not have been
allowed to live in our country. As FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted, at least some of the
hijackers were "out of status," i.e., they had no proper immigration documents. It should be
repeated over and over again: The terrorism threat is from illegal aliens who are allowed to
live in our midst -- and this is a failure of our immigration laws and our immigration officials.¶
The criminals who were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, of the murders in
front of the CIA headquarters in 1993, and who were involved in a 1998 plot to bomb New
York's subway system were Middle East aliens who should not have been in the United States.
They were either granted a visa that should never have been issued or had overstayed a visa and
should have been expelled. The 1996 Khobar Towers bombings, the 1998 attacks on the U.S.
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen were all carried
out by radical Middle East groups.¶ Since easy access into the United States has been
repeatedly exploited by aliens bent on terrorism, it should have been no surprise that it was
used by the World Trade Center/Pentagon hijackers.¶ The policy of opening our borders to
anyone who wants to sneak into our country illegally -- or to remain illegally after entering
legally -- must be exposed and terminated. This is the most important security precaution our
government must take.¶ The flood of illegal aliens coming across our southern border from
Mexico is well known. The opportunity for illegals to come across our vast northern border is
not as well known, but offers easy opportunities for illegals bent on criminal acts. Canada has a
no-questions-asked immigration policy, and many border crossings between the United States
and Canada are unmanned.¶ The third wide-open door for illegals is the issuing of visas by 3,700
U.S. consular officers around the world. Our State Department has a laissez faire policy on
issuing visas and approves 80% of the 8 million visa applications every year. The State
Department manual used by consular officials states that "mere membership" in a recognized
terrorist group, or even "advocacy of terrorism," does not automatically disqualify a person
from entering the United States.¶ Congress passed a law ordering the immigration service to
track foreign visitors and students and match their entry into this country with the expiration
date of their visas. Congress also ordered the immigration service to create a database of
foreign students that would be accessible to law enforcement. These requirements are not due
to go into effect until 2003!¶ Visa visitors -- whether tourist, student or worker -- should be
tracked on a federal database that flags the names when their exit dates come around.¶ It is
inexcusable that visa applicants aren't screened more carefully, and that aliens aren't expelled
when their visa expires. Immigration officials don't even know how many people are in the
United States on visas or how many are so-called "overstays," but it's clearly a substantial factor
in illegal immigration.¶ Many new airport security measures are now making airline travel longer
and more difficult. The question should be asked how any of these measures, if they had been in
place, would have prevented the 9/11 hijackings.¶ We want security measures that will put
criminals at risk, not harass law-abiding citizens. The chance of U.S. citizens hijacking a plane
on a suicide mission is infinitely smaller than the chance of foreign enemies doing the same.
Why are all passengers interrogated about their luggage rather than about their citizenship? ¶
It's time to rethink the rule that an airplane be a gun-free zone. If the foreign masterminds
behind this attack had thought that the crew or passengers were armed, they might not have
invested so much in this type of terrorism. The courageous actions of passengers against the
hijackers on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania apparently prevented the plane from
reaching its target where many more people would have been killed. Self-help is essential in an
emergency when no law enforcement officials are available.¶ While we worry about hijacked
planes today, we may soon worry about hijacked foreign missile silos. Terrorists who would
commit the unspeakable crimes of 9/11 would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons.
Terrorist retaliation causes nuclear war – draws in Russia and China
Ayson 2010(Robert, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic
Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington, July, “After a Terrorist Nuclear
Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7,
Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country
attacked in the first place, would not necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds
imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be
regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here
with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or
more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst
terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside
considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it
must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even
thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful
nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors themselves. But these
two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic interstate nuclear
exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack,
and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a
massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them.
In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during
the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as
raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties.
These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear
proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem. t may require a considerable amount of imagination to
depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a
massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the
United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be
brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most
obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible
to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten
them as well. Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how
might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the
act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow
denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a
particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May
et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area
in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth
of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials
used and, most important … some indication of where the nuclear material came from.”41
Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials
refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all) suspicion
would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United
Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be
left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues, and
possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high
stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a
backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time
when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and
political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring
would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited
armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance
in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse
might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period
of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing
resist the pressures that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible
perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washington’s early response to a terrorist nuclear
attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided)
confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the
immediate aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to
place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such
a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just
possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use
force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt
such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still
meet with a devastating response.
Open Borders Causes Nuclear Terrorism
Opening the US Borders increases Terrorism
Murdock, Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, 2013 (
Deroy, 6/1/13 The Union Leader, “ U.S. – Mexican border welcomes terrorists,
http://www.unionleader.com/article/20130502/OPINION02/130509896 , 7/12/13, TZ)
There are at least 7,518 reasons to get the U.S.-Mexican border under control. That equals the
number of aliens apprehended in fiscal year 2011 from the four nations that federal officials
label "state sponsors of terrorism" plus 10 "countries of interest." Since January 2010, those
flying into the United States via these 14 nations face enhanced screening. As the
Transportation Security Administration announced at the time: "Effective aviation security must
begin beyond our borders." U.S. national security merits at least that much vigilance on our
borders.¶ The roaring immigration-reform debate largely addresses Hispanic aliens who illegally
cross the border. Far more worrisome, however, are the thousands who break into the United
States from countries "where we have concerns, particularly about al-Qaida affiliates," a top
State Department official told CNN.¶ These include Cubans, Iranians, Sudanese and Syrians,
whose governments are federally designated "state sponsors of terrorism." As Customs and
Border Protection's "2011 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics" reports, 198 Sudanese were
nabbed while penetrating the USA. Between fiscal years 2002 and 2011, such arrests totaled
1,207. (These figures cover all U.S. borders, although 96.3 percent of detainees crossed from
Mexico.) Like other immigrants, most Sudanese seek better lives here. But some may be
vectors for the same militant Islam that tore Sudan in two - literally.¶ In FY 2011, 108 Syrians
were stopped; over the previous 10 years, 1,353 were. Syria supports Hezbollah, and Bashar alAssad's unstable regime reportedly has attacked its domestic opponents with chemical
weapons.¶ Among Iranians, 276 were caught in FY 2011, while 2,310 were captured over the
previous 10 years. Iran also backs Hezbollah, hates "The Great Satan" - its name for the United
States - and craves atomic weapons.¶ The other 10 "countries of interest" are Algeria, Iraq,
Lebanon, Libya, Yemen and:¶ . Afghanistan, the Taliban's stronghold and current theater of
America's longest war. (Afghans halted in FY 2011: 106; prior 10 years: 681.)¶ . Nigeria. The land
of underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab suffers under Sharia law in its northern
provinces. (Respective data: 591 and 4,525.)¶ . Pakistan, hideaway of the Pakistani Taliban and
the late Osama bin Laden (525 and 10,682).¶ . Saudi Arabia, generous benefactor of radical
imams and militant mosques worldwide; birthplace of 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers (123 and
986).¶ . Somalia. Home of Indian Ocean pirates and al-Qaida's al-Shabaab franchise. In October
1993, Islamic terrorists there shot down two Black Hawk helicopters, killed 18 U.S. soldiers and
dragged several of their bodies through Mogadishu's streets (323 and 1,524).¶ The House
Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight last November published "A Line in the Sand:
Countering Crime, Violence, and Terror at the Southwest Border." This study offers chilling
portraits of some who consider the southern border America's welcome mat.¶ . On Jan. 11,
2011, U.S. agents discovered Said Jaziri in a car trunk trying to enter near San Diego. Jaziri
traveled from his native Tunisia to Tijuana, he said, and paid smugglers $5,000 to sneak him
across the border. France previously convicted and deported him for assaulting a Muslim
whom he considered insufficiently devout. In 2006, Jaziri advocated killing Danish cartoonist
Kurt Westergaard for creating what Jaziri called sacrilegious drawings of the Prophet
Mohammed.¶ . Somalia's Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane told authorities in 2011 that he earned
up to $75,000 per day smuggling East Africans into America. His clients included three alShabaab terrorists. As the House paper states: "Dhakane cautioned that each of these
individuals is ready to die for their cause. ..."¶ . On June 4, 2010, Anthony Joseph Tracy was
convicted of conspiring to slip aliens into America. Tracy told federal investigators that Cuban
diplomats used his travel agency in Kenya to transfer 272 Somalis to Havana. They proceeded to
Belize, through Mexico, and then trespassed into the USA. Tracy claims he refused to assist alShabaab. But officials discovered an email in which he casually wrote: "...i helped a lot of
Somalis and most are good but there are some who are bad and i leave them to ALLAH..."¶
Remember: These anecdotes and statistics involve individuals whom authorities intercepted. No
details exist about aliens who successfully infiltrated America.
Allowing illegal aliens in our country makes the U.S. a police state and risks a
second 9/11
Schlafly 1 (Phyllis, J.D., Oct, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, The Threat of Terrorism Is From Illegal
Aliens, http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2001/oct01/psroct01.shtml) TYBG
It's important for Americans to understand that the 9/11 hijackings are a problem of the U.S.
government allowing illegal aliens to roam freely in our country and of promiscuously issuing
visas without proper certifications. It's also a problem of our government failing to enforce
current immigration and visa laws, and failing to deport illegal aliens including those who
overstay their visas. At least 16 of the 19 hijackers fit in one or more of these categories.¶ For
more than two weeks prior to 9/11, the FBI had been trying to find one of the hijackers whom
the CIA had spotted meeting with a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole. But all the FBI had
to go on was his visa application, which listed his address as "Marriott, New York City" (where
there are ten Marriott hotels and he never went to any of them).¶ The U.S. law that requires an
alien's border crossing document to include a machine-readable biometric identifier (such as a
fingerprint or handprint), and requires that the identifier match the appropriate biometric
characteristic of the alien, has never gone into effect.¶ We are not going to tolerate a system
that treats U.S. citizens and aliens the same. All aliens are not terrorists, but nearly all
terrorists are aliens. We do not want to live in a police state, where every American is treated
like a terrorist, drug trafficker, money launderer, illegal alien, or common criminal.¶ Larry
Ellison, the head of Oracle Corp., the leading database software company, has offered to donate
the tools for creating machine-readable ID cards that contain digitized thumbprints and
photographs. Ellison's proposal would open up vast new markets for Oracle to promote privacyinvading database software, at the expense of law-abiding citizens.¶ We should have a
computerized database of all aliens entering the United States, whether they are tourists,
students, or workers, and a tracking system that flags the file when a visa time expires. Aliens
should be required to carry smart ID cards that contain biometric identifiers, the terms of their
visas, and a record of their border crossings and travels within our country, similar to the rubber
stamps used in all passports.¶ Airports should be equipped with the machines to swipe the smart
card every time an alien boards a plane. Dumb questions like "Has your luggage been under
your control since you packed it?" should be replaced with useful questions like "Are you a U.S.
citizen?".¶ The National Commission on Terrorism reported last year: "The United States is, de
facto, a country of open borders." It will do a lot more for the safety of Americans to close
those open borders than imposing oppressive regulations on the travel of law-abiding citizens.
We should expel all illegal aliens, especially from the Middle East, and place a moratorium on
legal immigration and the issuing of visas, until the terrorism threat is resolved.
Immigration from mexico would cause terrorism, criminal activity, human
trafficking, and increased gang violence
Taylor 10 (Dr. Jameson, policy researcher at Mississippi Center for public policy, “ Illegal
Immigration: Drugs, Gangs and Crime” http://www.jwpcivitasinstitute.org/media/publicationarchive/perspective/illegal-immigration-drugs-gangs-and-crime) TYBG
Paramilitary groups trading fire with U.S. agents. Kidnappings and murders of U.S. citizens.
Members of al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations infiltrating the border on a
routine basis. We are not talking about Iraq – but Texas. One of the clearest indicators the
United States has lost control of its southwest border is the ease with which thousands of tons
of drugs and millions of illegal aliens are crossing the U.S. border on an annual basis. This open
borders policy has opened the door to more than just cheap labor. The presence of millions of
undocumented persons in our country has provided a perfect cover for various forms of
criminal activity, ranging from drug trafficking to prostitution to identity theft. ¶ Federal
investigators believe that as much as 2.2 million kilograms of cocaine and 11.6 kilograms of
marijuana were smuggled into the United States via the Mexican border in 2005.1 With the
decline of the Medellin and Cali cartels of Columbia, two Mexican drug cartels – the Sinaloa
cartel and the Gulf cartel – are battling over the billion-dollar drug trade between Mexico and
the United States. These cartels also have ties to U.S. gangs that serve as distribution networks
in the interior United States. A 2006 study by the House Committee on Homeland Security
warns that the Mexican cartels have essentially wrested control of the border from both the
U.S. and Mexican governments:¶ The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that the
Mexican drug syndicates operating today along our Nation’s Southwest border are far more
sophisticated and dangerous than any of the other organized criminal groups in America’s law
enforcement history. Indeed, these powerful drug cartels, and the human smuggling networks
and gangs they leverage, have immense control over the routes into the United States and
continue to pose formidable challenges to our efforts to secure the Southwest border. … The
cartels operate along the border with military grade weapons, technology and intelligence and
their own respective paramilitary enforcers. … This new breed of cartel is not only more violent,
powerful and well financed, it is also deeply engaged in intelligence collection on both sides of
the border.2¶ Here in North Carolina, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports “a
significant increase in drug-trafficking activity.” Explains the DEA: “The majority of the increased
drug-trafficking activity is due to an unprecedented influx of foreign nationals into the state” –
in particular “Spanish-speaking, specifically Mexican, nationals.” A 2003 report by the National
Drug Intelligence Center corroborates the DEA’s findings:¶ Mexican criminal groups in
southwestern states and Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in Mexico routinely use
Mexican illegal immigrants in North Carolina as couriers to transport cocaine, marijuana,
methamphetamine and, to a lesser extent, heroin into and through the state. These criminal
groups exploit a growing Mexican population in North Carolina to facilitate their illicit activities.
Law enforcement authorities in North Carolina, principally in the western and southern areas of
the state, indicate that Mexican criminal groups are also increasing their involvement in retail
drug distribution.3¶ Needless to say, the majority of illegal immigrants are not directly involved
in the drug trade. Nevertheless, the DEA has determined that “their presence allows Mexican
traffickers to effectively conceal their activities within immigrant communities.”4 Johnston
County Sheriff Steve Bizzell (R) estimates that 80 percent to 85 percent of the drug trade in his
county is conducted by Hispanics.5 In 2002, the Wake County Sheriff’s Office similarly reported
that although Hispanics comprised only 5.4 percent of the population, they accounted for 46
percent of drug-trafficking arrests.6¶ As indicated above, transnational gangs, such as Surenos-
13 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), are responsible for much of the low-level drug trade in North
Carolina. Over the past several years, North Carolina has experienced a disturbing surge in gang
activity. Between 1999 and 2004, Wake County saw a 5,743.3 percent increase in gang
membership. During the same period, the city of Durham saw a 333.3 percent increase.7 ¶ A
2005 report by the Governor’s Crime Commission estimated that 22.2 percent of all gang
members in North Carolina are Hispanic (with ethnicity unknown for another 19.4 percent).8 By
contrast, Hispanics accounted for only 7 percent of total state population in 2004.¶ Nationally,
Hispanics are thought to comprise 49 percent of total gang membership. A majority of these
gang members are illegal immigrants. Notes Duplin County Sheriff Blake Wallace (D), “There is
an increasing gang activity problem, particularly with MS-13 and studies have shown that the
majority of those gang members are illegal aliens.”9 Among these studies is a report published
by the Governor’s Crime Commission which posits that 66 percent of Hispanic/Latino gang
members are illegal aliens.10 In the case of MS-13, one of the most violent and powerful gangs
in North Carolina, federal authorities estimate that “approximately 90 percent of U.S. MS-13
members are foreign-born illegal aliens and depend upon the Texas-Mexico border smuggling
corridor to support their criminal operations.”11 As Forsyth County District Attorney Tom Keith
(R) puts it, “You cannot say ‘drugs’ without saying ‘gangs’ without saying ‘illegal aliens.’”12¶ In
addition to the drug trade, the Mexican cartels are becoming increasingly involved in human
trafficking (i.e., prostitution) and human smuggling. According to Dr. Deborah SchurmanKauflin of the Violent Crimes Institute, “Mexico is the number one source for young female sex
slaves in North America.” Each year thousands of women and children – with 12-year-olds in
top demand – are smuggled across the border and sent to brothels across the United States.
Such brothels, notes Schurman-Kauflin, “can take the form of homes, apartments, spas,
massage parlors, and hotels … even middle class neighborhoods can be at risk.”13¶
War DA
1NC—Conflict
Borders are necessary to prevent conflict—power sharing leads to more war
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international affairs at the George
Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil Wars." The
SAIS Review of International Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013. JMR)
The conventional wisdom among scholars and policymakers opposes solving ethnic conflicts by
drawing new borders and creating new states. This view, however, is flawed because the process of
fighting civil wars imbues the belligerents with a deep sense of mistrust that makes sharing
power after the conflict difficult. This is especially true in ethnic civil wars, in which negotiated
power-sharing agreements run a high risk of failing and leading to renewed warfare. In light of
these problems, this article argues that partition should be considered as an option for ending
severe ethnic conflicts. The article shows how failure to adopt partition in Kosovo has left that province
in a semi-permanent state of limbo that only increases the majority Albanian population's desire for
independence. The only route to long-term stability in the region-and an exit for international
forces-is through partition. Moreover, the article suggests that the United States should recognize and
prepare for the coming partition of Iraq rather than pursuing the futile endeavor of implementing powersharing among Iraq's Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis. The conventional wisdom regarding borders in
political science and the policy community is that we already have plenty and do not need any
more. Scholars and policymakers alike tend to oppose the creation of new states, especially as a means
to end civil conflict. They argue that secession and partition generate more problems than they solve and
lead to new conflicts. The preferred solutions to these conflicts take the existing borders as given
and concentrate on fostering negotiated settlements that arrange power internally through
such mechanisms as power-sharing, regional autonomy, or federalism. As Ted Robert Gurr has
written, "threats to divide a country should be managed by the devolution of state power and . . .
communal fighting about access to the state's power and resources should be restrained by recognizing
group rights and sharing power."1 Other researchers agree, maintaining that the key factor in sustaining
negotiated settlements to ethnic conflicts is the degree to which the agreement institutionalizes powersharing or regional autonomy.2
Recently, however, scholars have begun to challenge this single-state-solution orthodoxy,
arguing instead that dividing states and creating new borders may be a way to promote peace
after ethnic civil wars. One view, represented by Chaim Kaufmann, stresses that ethnic civil wars cannot
end until contending groups are separated into homogeneous ethnic enclaves. When groups are
intermingled, each side has an incentive to attack and cleanse the other. Once separation is
achieved, these incentives disappear. With the necessary condition for peace in place, political
arrangements become secondary. Unless ethnic separation occurs, Kaufmann argues, all other
solutions are fruitless because ethnic intermingling is what fuels conflict.
Borders Prevent War
Separation of ethnic groups reduces conflict
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international affairs at the George
Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil Wars." The
SAIS Review of International Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013. JMR)
In this article, I argue that partition-defined as separation of contending ethnic groups and the
creation of independent states-should be considered as an alternative to power-sharing and
regional autonomy as a means to end civil wars. Partition does not require groups to disarm
and make themselves vulnerable to devastating betrayal. Nor do formerly warring groups
have to cooperate and share power in joint institutions. Partition also satisfies nationalist
desires for statehood and fills the need for security. In cases of severe ethnic conflict, when
perceptions of the adversary's malign intentions are so entrenched as to impede any agreement
based on a single-state solution, partition is the preferred solution.
In the remainder of this paper, I will elaborate further on this argument and apply it to the case
of Kosovo, demonstrating why autonomy for Kosovo within Serbia is impossible. Following an
evaluation of the various options being considered for Kosovo's independence, I will argue for a
partition of Kosovo along the Ibar River accompanied by the return of the Serbian population to
Serbia. Finally, I argue that like it or not, partition is probably in Iraq's future.
Third party intervention and negotiated settlements won’t solve—borders are
necessary
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international affairs at the George
Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil
Wars." The SAIS Review of International Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013.
JMR)
Scholars have offered two solutions to the dilemmas and dangers of negotiated settlements.
First, some argue that the more institutionalized the agreement is, the more it will allay the
former belligerents' security fears and increase their ability to safeguard their interests. These
optimists maintain that negotiated settlements, by creating institutions to share power in the
central government or devolve power to sub-state regions, increase the likelihood of success
by allowing groups to govern themselves and prevent others from implementing measures
harmful to their interests. Examples of power-sharing institutions in the central government
include reserving executive posts and government ministries for members of different groups,
joint decision-making, proportional representation, and a minority veto. Institutions that
devolve power include regional autonomy agreements or federalism. By working together in
common institutions, groups may moderate their views of their former adversary's intentions
and even come to trust each other.10 ¶ Second, intervention by a third party is thought to be
an effective way to reduce security fears and facilitate agreement implementation. If the key
problems are that both sides fear betrayal and there is no mechanism to enforce the
agreement, interposing a third party into the situation can resolve these issues by increasing the
likelihood that the parties will keep their promises and mitigating the costs to the other if one of
them does not. Providing troops on the ground during the early phases of implementation is
critical for stability, security, and protection when groups are disarming and institutions are
taking shape.11 ¶ Unfortunately, neither power-sharing institutions nor third-party
intervention provide more than a temporary band-aid for the critical underlying problems,
which are uncertainty about the adversary's intentions and inability to commit to the
agreement. For several reasons, negotiated settlements are likely to fail even when they
include provisions for institutions and third-party enforcement. Because an intervener's
presence is likely to be temporary, former belligerents are reluctant to disarm and integrate
their military forces with those of their past enemy. Once the third party leaves, the parties
again have to rely on each other's promises to abide by the agreement. Fear of future betrayalfed by experiences of past malign intentions-prompts groups to keep their guns, which
increases the likelihood of a return to war. ¶ In high-conflict or post-conflict environments,
elections tend to resemble ethnic censuses. Out-group conflict increases in-group solidarity, and
those who advocate compromise with former enemies are easily branded as traitors betraying
the group's interests. In the aftermath of civil wars, people tend to support nationalist parties
and politicians who promise to protect the group's interests. Post-war elections are likely to
bring hard-line leaders to power who are reluctant to trust the other side and make the
compromises necessary to implement the agreement. ¶ As a result, political institutions that
require trust and accommodation are likely to be gridlocked. When these institutions break
down, third parties may step in to govern in their stead, but this is only a stop-gap solution
because it renders these institutions even less likely to work when the outside party leaves. ¶
Furthermore, if the war was characterized by ethnic cleansing, agreements that call for expelled
minorities to return to their former homes may lead to further violence. The now-dominant
majority group may destroy or inhabit the homes of those who were expelled. Minorities often
face hostility, discrimination, and difficulty finding employment. When the third party leaves
and no longer can provide protection, they may be forced out again. ¶ Finally, recent research on
cease-fires in interstate wars has found a striking correlation between third-party intervention
and increased risk of another war in the future. The logic is that "agreements that specify terms
that do not correspond well with the expected military outcome of renewed fighting" are more
likely to fail than those in which the terms reflect the outcome on the battlefield or the
consequences that renewed fighting would bring. Third-party intervention often short-circuits a
war before a clear battlefield outcome has emerged, and thus "considerable uncertainty
remains regarding the consequences of continuing the war."12 This uncertainty undermines
agreements because one or both sides may believe that it could achieve a better outcome by
fighting. Third-party intervention also increases the likelihood of a mismatch between the
agreement's terms and the probable outcome of the war. This is because outside parties tend to
intervene to prevent one side from decisively defeating another and to restore the status quo
ante. Agreements like these are particularly unlikely to last when the third party withdraws
because the side that was winning in the previous round of fighting believes that it can achieve a
better outcome by returning to war. Once the agreement's enforcer departs, the stronger side
has an incentive to attack to revise the terms of settlement. Similarly, single-state-solutions
imposed by third-party intervention when one or more of the parties prefers independence run
an increased risk of failure because they go against the preferences of the groups involved.
Borders can only lead to peace—they take away incentive for war
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international affairs at the George
Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil
Wars." The SAIS Review of International Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013.
JMR)
The poor record of negotiated settlements in ethnic civil wars that leave borders intact,
whether or not they are facilitated by third-party intervention, suggests that a new approach
might be necessary: one based on partition rather than power-sharing. In this model, third
parties would intervene not to turn back the clock to the pre-war situation, but to inflict a
decisive defeat on one side or the other. This would reduce the likelihood that the defeated
party would think it could gain anything by resorting to war in the future. In those cases where
a third party intervenes on behalf of ethnic rebels, military victory will result in partition.
Partition can only lead to peace, however, if it is accompanied by ethnic separation.
Interveners should work to make sure that the states are as ethnically homogeneous as
possible so as to reduce the likelihood of future cleansing, rebellions by the remnant minority
for union with its brethren in the other state, or war to rescue "trapped" minorities. Finally,
both sides should be militarily capable of defending themselves, and the borders between
them should be made as defensible as possible to discourage aggression, either by following
natural terrain features or by building demilitarized zones or other barriers.
Opening the border also brings in spillover violence that originates in Mexico
Washington Post ’11 (Clint McDonald, March 31, “Dangers on the US-Mexico Border”, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-0331/opinions/35207272_1_border-patrol-agents-border-security-spillover-violence, accessed 7-12-13, AR)
There is a storm brewing along our border with Mexico, and our nation is relegating responsibility for quelling that storm to some of
our poorest communities. In a visit to El Paso last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed that there has been
no “spillover” violence from Mexico into the United States. Regardless of the veracity, her point is irrelevant.¶ It
is not
spillover violence but spillover effects of hostilities in Mexico that pose the real threat to the
United States.¶ Spillover effects are the direct results of Mexican violence that influence U.S.
citizens living in communities along the border. For example, Mexican gangs fighting to control
territory around the frontier village of El Porvenir, in Chihuahua, have threatened for almost a year to kill its
residents. To escape the violence, nearly the entire village eventually relocated to Texas border
communities — without, of course, being screened or processed. The results include schoolchildren
fearing for their safety as their Mexican schoolmates talk of violence and murder, school
buses “tailed” by armed private security guards and criminals relocating to the United States
with their families and conducting their operations from this country. The single greatest
spillover effect: U.S. citizens living in fear.¶ While border security is undeniably a federal responsibility, spillover
effects are principally dealt with by local jurisdictions — and along the U.S.-Mexico border, this is mostly sheriff’s offices operating in
large, sparsely populated county areas supported by small tax bases.¶ Border counties are among the poorest in the United States
and can barely afford to hire and equip sufficient, qualified law enforcement personnel to meet citizens’ needs. ¶
Integration will result in increased tensions and inevitable conflict—Kosovo
proves
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international affairs at the George
Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil
Wars." The SAIS Review of International Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013.
JMR)
The case of Kosovo is even more interesting. The United States and its NATO allies intervened
in 1999 to stop Slobodan Milosevic's expulsion of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, but never
supported the Albanians' claim to sovereignty over Kosovo. UN Resolution 1244 called for
Kosovo to remain an autonomous province within Serbia and Montenegro. The United
Nations has maintained this fiction while governing Kosovo since the war, engaging in so-
called "kick-the-can diplomacy," putting off the difficult decisions to the future.13 Rather than
calming the situation, this delaying tactic has raised the ire of the Kosovar Albanians, who see
their treasured goal of independence slipping away. "We are here, suffocated with UNMIK
[the UN Mission in Kosovo] over our heads, and Serbia over our necks," protested one
Albanian. "UNMIK is now six years here without a deadline. We want a deadline. To become
independent from a stronger place you need action, not process."14 Veton Surroi, the Albanian
publisher who now serves in Kosovo's parliament agrees: "The focus has been on buying time,
and that's the only focus there has been."15 Even UNMIK officials concur with this assessment:
"One of the profound problems bedeviling the international community," one bureaucrat noted,
"is that it has not yet defined the goal of what we're working toward here."16 In short, the UN
strategy of keeping Kosovo in a "deep winter," its refusal to endorse the objective of
independence for Kosovo, and the delay in opening negotiations on the future of the province
have caused the Albanians to become increasingly frustrated and led to outbursts of anti-Serb
violence, such as the riots of March 2004 that killed 19 people.17 ¶ Kosovo is plagued by the
problems that typically undermine single state solutions after ethnic wars. Given the
province's uncertain political future, both Albanians and Serbs have incentives to remain
armed. In June 2003, the United Nations Development Program estimated that there were
approximately 333,000 to 460,000 privately held small arms in Kosovo, of which only 20,000
were legally owned.18 UN-sponsored gun collection drives bring in few weapons; one threemonth campaign that ended on Oct. 1, 2003, netted just 155 guns.19 ¶ Trepidation over Kosovo's
future status makes both ethnic communities reluctant to part with their weapons. According to
a report by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, "Faced with an uncertain future and
constant wondering about whether conflict will ensue once again, people may want to keep
weapons to provide protection and security if the situation once again becomes
precarious."20 Comments by both Serbs and Albanians confirm this motivation. According to an
Albanian tour guide in Drenica, for example, "Nobody knows if another war is going to happen
or not. If they don't give us independence, that might mean that the Serbian forces will be
allowed to come back-and most people here don't want to be caught empty-handed when
that happens." Serbs, for their part, believe that self-help is the only way to safeguard
themselves from vengeful Albanians. As one Serb from Gracanica commented, "We believe that
none of the security forces operating in Kosovo at the moment are able to fully protect the
Serbs, so we have to look out for ourselves."21
Lack of borders results in the marginalization of minority groups—Iraq proves
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international affairs at the George
Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict? Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil
Wars." The SAIS Review of International Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013.
JMR)
Despite international attempts to encourage power-sharing and federalism as a means to
preserve a united Iraq, a partition of the country into three states-a Kurdish state in the
northeast, a Shi'ite state in the south, and a Sunni state in the northwest-is probably
unavoidable for the same reasons it is unavoidable in Kosovo. The history of violence and
repression has made it hard for Iraq's ethnic groups to trust each other. The Kurds suffered
such brutality that they insist on maintaining their own armed forces and prefer an
independent Kurdish state to remaining part of a united Iraq. The Sunni Arabs-the dominant
and privileged group under Saddam Hussein's regime-have suffered a major status reversal and
are now marginalized. The Sunni-based insurgency that has raged since Saddam's downfall in
2003 signals not only many Sunnis' attachment to and reverence for Saddam, but also their
mistrust and suspicion of Iraq's Shi'ites and Kurds. The 2005 constitution was negotiated mostly
without Sunni input and over their vehement objections. Unsurprisingly, Sunnis voted
overwhelmingly against the document. Last-minute promises by Shi'a and Kurdish leaders that
would allow the constitution to be renegotiated following new parliamentary elections are
small consolation to Sunnis, who will always compose a small minority of the country's
elected representatives and thus will wield little power. The constitution's federal provisions
represent Shi'ite leaders' recognition that the Kurds insist on near total autonomy-and thus that
the Shi'ites should form their own federal bloc as well. Given the powerful centrifugal forces at
play, this process will lead to the eventual partition of Iraq. Rather than continue to promote
power-sharing institutions that are ineffective or insist on the maintenance of a single Iraqi
state in the face of mounting evidence that three states are going to emerge, the United
States and other international actors should begin preparing the ground for partition. Three
issues will be of primary importance. First, the United States needs to work with Iraq's neighbors
to ensure they will not interfere or seek to exert undue influence over the successor states. The
United States should work to reconcile Turkey to a Kurdish state, extract promises from Iraqi
Kurds not to foment or encourage Kurdish nationalism in other countries, and warn Iran that it
must allow Iraq's Shi'ites to determine their own future. The next task will be determining the
new borders of the three states. It is beyond the scope of this essay to propose what those
borders should be. However, the Shi'ite state probably would comprise the nine southern
provinces plus the southern part of Diyala province. The Sunnis likely would receive Anbar,
Salahuddin, Ninevah province west of the Tigris, and the western parts of Ta'mim and Diyala.
Kurdistan would probably consist of Dohuk, Erbil, Suleimaniyah, Ninevah east of the Tigris
(including Mosul), and the eastern third of Ta'mim (including Kirkuk). Finally, there is the
question of Baghdad, home to large numbers of all three groups. Options for Baghdad include
making it an international zone or an area of joint control among the groups, or giving each
state sovereignty over the areas where its people live. ¶ These tasks will not be easy, but they
acknowledge the reality that, as Peter Galbraith has put it, "The fundamental problem of Iraq is
an absence of Iraqis."31 The Kurds unanimously prefer independence, the Sunni Arabs fear
oppression in a state dominated by their former victims, and the Shi'ites-although preferring a
single Iraq that they would control-will accept a truncated state rich in natural resources and
free of a Sunni insurgency. Civil wars generate intense mistrust, fear, and hatred that make the
future maintenance of multiethnic societies via negotiated settlements and power-sharing
institutions difficult. Iraq, like Bosnia and Kosovo, is no exception. After six years in Kosovo, the
United States and the United Nations finally have realized that partition cannot be avoided.
One hopes it will not take that long for a similar realization to dawn on them in Iraq.
DA Links
Politics
Despite some sympathy, border enforcement remains extremely popular to all
parties
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Conservatives generally find themselves deeply split on the issue of¶ immigration. Some staunch
members of the Republican Party, including¶ President George W. Bush, generally favor liberal
admission policies, or¶ at least more liberal policies than the ones currently in place. Economic¶
conservatives see gains from immigration and inexpensive labor. In stark¶ contrast, another
wing of the Republican Party is deeply concerned with¶ the alleged cultural impacts of
immigration. This faction aggressively¶ plays on populist fear about cultural changes blamed on
immigrants and¶ demands restrictionist policies and tougher border enforcement. Today,¶ this
arm of the Republican Party, represented most prominently by Congressman¶ Tom Tancredo
and the conservative icon Pat Buchanan, often¶ exercises great influence over the direction of
immigration law and policy¶ by tapping into broad-based fears of economically and otherwise
insecure¶ U.S. citizens. Poor, working, and middle-income people worry¶ about the changes
wrought by immigration and are not likely to sympathize¶ with the desire of big business for
cheap labor.¶ On the other hand, Democrats also find themselves divided on immigration.¶
Economically, they are concerned with immigration’s downward¶ pressure on the wage scale
and its impact on a long-time base of¶ Democratic support, labor unions. Although change has
come in recent¶ years, organized labor, often supportive of the basic Democratic agenda,¶ has
historically supported restrictionist immigration laws and policies.¶ Many liberals, however,
desire the humane treatment of immigrants and¶ often push for pro-immigration and proimmigrant laws and policies.¶ There, however, is some common ground. Many Democrats and
Republicans¶ often agree that increased border enforcement is necessary.¶ Like tough-oncrime stances, this has proved time and time again to be a¶ politically popular position. This is
even true for those sympathetic to¶ 138 | The Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor
Across Borders¶ the plight of immigrants. In addition, influenced by public fears of being¶
overrun by floods of immigrants, politicians of both parties often support¶ limits on legal
immigration and heavy border enforcement.
State Spending
Opening the borders would drown states in fiscal debt
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
Immigration has had especially significant fiscal impacts on states in¶ which large numbers of
immigrants live. The state and local governments¶ in high-immigration states must bear
substantial costs. Consumption¶ of emergency health services alone can have substantial
impacts¶ on state and local governments.73 The state of Arizona, for example,¶ pays more than
$90 million each year to provide emergency services to¶ undocumented immigrants. The state
is required to provides such services¶ by federal law but receives only about $650,000 from
the federal¶ government to help cover the services , a fraction of its their costs.74 A¶ public
education, which is generally paid for by state and local governments,¶ is also costly, even if it
turns out to be a good economic investment¶ for the nation. The costs of providing law
enforcement protections¶ to immigrants also can be formidable.
Job Loss
Increase of migrants leads to less jobs.
Sanchez 09 (Rob, “Timeout! The case for a moratorium on legal immigration,” The Social
Contract Press, Volume:20, MCJC)
One of the most obvious ways to stop job erosion in the U.S. is to stop illegal immigration and
to put severe limits on employment based visas. Beware of politicians that ask us to accept the
Faustian bargain of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Their claim is fallacious that CIR will
solve the illegal immigration problem, but only if we expand guest worker visa programs. The
following statement by Sen. McCain is not unique as many variations of it have been repeated
throughout the years by political elitists who care more about increasing the supply of cheap
labor than preserving the viability of the American middle class:
I believe we can pursue the security programs and at the same time set up a system where
people can come here and work on a temporary basis. I think we can set up a program where
amnesty is extended to a certain number of people who are eligible and at the same time make
sure that we have some control over people who come in and out of this country.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), news conference, 2003
We must be careful not to be fooled by the Morton’s Fork (false choice) offered by McCain
and other promoters of CIR, who ask us to accept more immigration by increasing the number
of employment based worker visas and by giving amnesty to illegal aliens — in trade for a
promise of more border enforcement. It’s not a fair deal because American workers lose jobs
any time there are increases in immigration — it really doesn’t matter if the increase is due to
legal or illegal immigration. The only thing that matters is how much our total population is
allowed to grow by flooding the labor market with more immigrants. Increased immigration
means the supply of workers goes up, demand goes down, labor arbitration forces wages to
go down, and job opportunities for Americans dwindle. It’s a lose-lose deal for American wage
earners.
There are two very obvious means to improve the employment situation in the United States:
first we must stop illegal immigration, and second most of our employment based visa
programs should either be severely restricted or abolished. Until both of these happen all
proposals for Comprehensive Immigration Reform should be rejected — especially if they
allow any type of amnesty or the expansion of guest worker visa programs. If unemployment
ever reaches zero, and we are sure our borders are secure, then it might make sense to have a
public dialogue about the merits of liberalizing the immigration system.
K Args
Cap—Root Cause
Capitalism is the root problem of economic inequality, not immigration
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o
Studies, “Opening the Floodgates”, New York University Publication)
An inextricably related economic fear is that easy migration increases¶ 144 | The Economic
Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor Across Borders¶ wealth inequality. This line of reasoning,
which finds some support empirically,¶ sees cheap labor allowing business to reap greater
profits, accumulate¶ more wealth, and gain at the expense of labor. As the old adage¶ goes, the
rich get richer, the poor get poorer. This, however, may well be¶ an enduring characteristic of
capitalism and a market economy, rather¶ than the result of immigration and liberal
admissions policies. Even if¶ such fears were real, it may not be possible through border
enforcement¶ measures to halt highly motivated immigrants from entering the United¶ States.
Other policies are necessary to address wealth distribution concerns.