K Updates
Heg Bad K Mechanics
Heg Bad – Top Level Defense
Hegemonic stability theory is wrong and racist
Lutz (professor of anthropology at Brown University and the Watson Institute for International Studies) 9
(Catherine, The Bases of Empire p. 29)
The reasons given for stationing U.S. forces overseas, though, cannot simply be called wrong.
While the weight of evidence just briefly reviewed suggests that they are, the pursuit of the
immense project of circling the globe with soldiers and equipment is fueled as much by mythic
structures as by reason and rationality. It then becomes difficult to distinguish one from the
other. While such myths may be invalidated by rational argumentation, their explanatory power
often remains powerfully intact. Support for foreign military bases hinges first on the idea that
war is often necessary and ultimately inevitable. It is widely believed that humans are naturally
violent and that war can be a glorious and good venture. Racism adds the notion that the
modern and not coincidentally white nations have the responsibility, intelligence, religious
ethic, and right to control more primitive (and more chaotically violent) others through violence
if necessary. These racial ideas made it possible for people in the United States and Europe to
support colonial exterminationist wars in the nineteenth century, but to find wars between industrialized or civilized states increasingly unthinkable during the late nineteenth century (despite
what went on to happen in the twentieth). They also underpin the assumption that Gusterson
(1999) has labeled “nuclear orientalism,” which holds that only the United States and European
powers can truly be trusted with nuclear weapons. Such beliefs provide important foundation
stones for support of the U.S. basing system.16
That implicates all knowledge production and is a moral side constraint
Albert Memmi, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Paris, 1999 (Racism,
Published by the University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0816631654, p. 163-165)
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission,
probably never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without
surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism; one must not even
let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to
augment the bestial part in us and in other people, which is to diminish what is human. To
accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is
to accept the persistence of the dark [end page 163] history in which we still largely live. It is to
agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an
outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the
condition of the dominated; that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition.
The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the
prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to
rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one's moral conduct only emerges
from a choice; one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its
foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct
oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order, for which racism is the
very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a
legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other, and his or her
subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little
religious language, racism is "the truly capital sin."22 It is not an accident that almost all of
humanity's spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It
is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity
in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things
considered, we have an interest in [end page 164] banishing injustice, because injustice
engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if
one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever
sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society
contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with
respect so that they treat you with respect. "Recall," says the Bible, "that you were once a
stranger in Egypt," which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a
stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday. It is an ethical and a practical
appeal--indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is
the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice
commands the political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this
contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot.
If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are
irresistible.
Heg Bad – Racism Ext.
The aff’s hegemony args transform those who oppose it into racially inferior others
– these claims are rooted in an orientalist model of knowledge production.
Kaplan 3
(Amy, “Violent belongings and the question of empire today presidential address to the American studies
Association” American Quarterly, vol. 56, no.1, march 2004, muse)
Another dominant narrative about empire today, told by liberal interventionists, is that of the "reluctant imperialist." 10
In this version, the United States never sought an empire and may even be constitutionally unsuited to rule one, but it had
the burden thrust upon it by the fall of earlier empires and the failures of modern states, which abuse the human rights of
their own people and spawn terrorism. The United States is the only power in the world with the capacity and the moral
authority to act as military policeman and economic manager to bring order to the world. Benevolence and self-interest
merge in this narrative; backed by unparalleled force, the United States can save the people of the world from their own
anarchy, their descent into an [End Page 4] uncivilized state. As Robert Kaplan writes—not reluctantly at all—in
"Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World": "The purpose of power is not power itself; it is a
fundamentally liberal purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world. Those characteristics
include basic political stability, the idea of liberty, pragmatically conceived; respect for property; economic freedom; and
representative government, culturally understood. At this moment in time it is American power, and American power
only, that can serve as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of liberal civil society." 11 This narrative
does imagine limits to empire, yet primarily in the selfish refusal of U.S. citizens to sacrifice and shoulder the burden for
others, as though sacrifices have not already been imposed on them by the state. The temporal dimension of this
narrative entails the aborted effort of other nations and peoples to enter modernity, and its view of the future projects the
end of empire only when the world is remade in our image. This is also a narrative about race. The images of an
unruly world, of anarchy and chaos, of failed modernity, recycle stereotypes of racial inferiority from
earlier colonial discourses about races who are incapable of governing themselves, Kipling's
"lesser breeds without the law," or Roosevelt's "loosening ties of civilized society," in his corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine. In his much-noted article in the New York Times Magazine entitled "The American Empire," Michael
Ignatieff appended the subtitle "The Burden" but insisted that "America's empire is not like empires of times past, built
on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden." 12 Denial and exceptionalism are apparently alive and well. In
American studies we need to go beyond simply exposing the racism of empire and examine the
dynamics by which Arabs and the religion of Islam are becoming racialized through the interplay of
templates of U.S. racial codes and colonial Orientalism. These narratives of the origins of the current
empire—that is, the neoconservative and the liberal interventionist—have much in common. They take American
exceptionalism to new heights: its paradoxical claim to uniqueness and universality at the same time. They
share a teleological narrative of inevitability, that America is the apotheosis of history, the
embodiment of universal values of human rights, liberalism, and democracy, the "indispensable nation," in Madeleine
Albright's words. In this logic, the United States claims the authority to "make sovereign judgments on what is right and
what is wrong" for everyone [End Page 5] else and "to exempt itself with an absolutely clear conscience from all the
rules that it proclaims and applies to others." 13 Absolutely protective of its own sovereignty, it upholds a doctrine of
limited sovereignty for others and thus deems the entire world a potential site of intervention. Universalism thus
can be made manifest only through the threat and use of violence.
Heg Bad – Structural Violence Module
Hegemonic competition makes global structural violence inevitable
Lutz (Research Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies and Professor of
Anthropology at Brown University) 9
(Catherine, US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific, The Asia-Pacific
Journal, Vol. 12-3-09, March 16, 2009. http://old.japanfocus.org/-Catherine_Lutz/3086)
Much about our current world is unparalleled: holes in the ozone layer, the commercial patenting
of life forms, degrading poverty on a massive scale, and, more hopefully, the rise of concepts of
global citizenship and universal human rights. Less visible but equally unprecedented is the
global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military, and the ambition with which
it is being deployed around the world. These bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose
worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth
several times over. Their presence is meant to signal, and at times demonstrate, that the US is
able and willing to attempt to control events in other regions militarily. The start of a new
administration in Washington, and the possibility that world economic depression will give rise
to new tensions and challenges, provides an important occasion to review the global structures of
American power.Officially, over 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in
909 military facilities in 46 countries and territories. There, the US military owns or rents
795,000 acres of land, and 26,000 buildings and structures valued at $146 billion. These official
numbers are quite misleading as to the scale of US overseas military basing, however, excluding
as they do the massive buildup of new bases and troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well
as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other
places. $2 billion in military construction money has been expended in only three years of the
Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Just one facility in Iraq, Balad Air Base, houses 30,000 troops and
10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles with an additional 12 square mile
“security perimeter.”Deployed from those battle zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the quiet
corners of Curacao, Korea, and England, the US military domain consists of sprawling Army
bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges, and berthed aircraft carriers.
While the bases are literally barracks and weapons depots and staging areas for war making and
ship repair facilities and golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils
of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural
(mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution. The
environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous and, despite Pentagon
claims that the bases simply provide security to the regions they are in, most of the world’s
people feel anything but reassured by this global reach. Some communities pay the highest
price: their farm land taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel
in their water supply, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic
regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the
bases. Global opposition to U.S. basing has been widespread and growing, however, and this
essay provides an overview of both the worldwide network of U.S. military bases and the
vigorous campaigns to hold the U.S. accountable for that damage and to reorient their countries’
security policies in other, more human, and truly secure directions.
And that’s the root cause of global violence
Davis (Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Hawaii) 11
(Sasha, The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection,
resistance and the quest for operational unilateralism, Political Geography xxx (2011))
In this analysis of the shifting US military base network I have endeavored to examine the
impacts and resistances going on in these “towns and villages” so as to better understand the
US military’s global network. As geographers have long been aware, acting at the global or
local scale is not an either/or choice: acting in the world at any scale has ramifications at a
variety of scales. Increasingly, local anti-militarization groups have recognized this and have
started to more formally engage in activism at a variety of other scales including the global. At
the global conference against military bases in 2007 activists put forward the view that the
global imperial present is held together by violences committed in (colonized) place. That
violence may be wielded globally, but it is produced at local sites. Furthermore, its operation
relies on particular sites being legitimately seen as landscapes of emptiness or sacrifice. So
when people resist these interpretations of place and claim them as places of life it not only
makes everyday life more tolerable but also has repercussions at other scales. The military has
currently been able to use its ability to spatially shif t its activities to maintain its domination.
Activists, however, are attempting to incorporate a global vision into their movements so that
local victories do not become someone else’s loss; rather they become the beginning of the
empire’s unraveling.
This is the largest proximal cause of genocide and interstate war
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @
UPenn) 4
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg.
19-22)
This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses
everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of
hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly
African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s
South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British
Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In
these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and
allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned
incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and
Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and
adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly
embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our
approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence.
Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of
everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More
important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly
humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual
pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus,
in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars
and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the
normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing
homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The
violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the
socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill,
maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we
are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of
the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide
itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and
alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps
in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of
our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in
overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we
might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize
ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative
behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction
sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of
California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution
for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small
wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino
youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York
City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view,
but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are
those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s
partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of
misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence
hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender
relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to
reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence
of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of
“peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and
peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely
ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the
extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the
family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization
border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known
as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state
violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with
the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied
“strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of
domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as
a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less
politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military,
postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based
opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based
primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man,
the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United
States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when
incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a
society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it
is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise goodenough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic,
permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in
genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps
more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include,
therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization,
pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward
others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a
reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of
emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31).
Heg Bad – War
We control the probability of all wars – US militarism is the key internal link to all
conflicts
Marsella (Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii; paper delivered on the occasion of
receiving the Lifetime Contribution Award by the International Academy for Intercultural
Research) 11
(Anthony J., United States of America: “A culture of war”, International Journal of Intercultural
Relations 35 (2011) 714–728)
In a world that is in desperate need for global cooperation and harmony at the risk of nuclear
annihilation, the continued efforts by the United States to pursue the hegemony of empire must
be questioned, as must its sources and means. 2.2. A militarized “empire” The term
“empire,” with all of its unfortunate denotations and connotations, is now widely applied to
describe the U.S., and perhaps, like other empires that have come before, the U.S. awaits a
similar fate of decline and collapse, a historical footnote that joins it with other nations and
civilizations that lost sight of the tragic consequences of the very course they were pursuing.
There is no reason to believe that the USA will be able to escape the inevitable collapse similar
to others. Chalmers Johnson (2004), writing in his volume, “The sorrows of empire:
Militarism, secrecy, and the end of the republic,” traces the rise of the American empire and
predicts its imminent demise. In describing the evolution of empire in the USA, Johnson (2004)
writes: Our militarized empire is a physical reality with a distinct way of life but it is also a
network of economic and political interests tied in a thousand different ways to American
corporations, universities, and communities but kept separate from what passes for everyday
life back in what has recently come to be known as ‘the homeland.’ And yet, even that sense of
separation is disappearing – for the changing nature of empire is changing society as well. For
example, slowly the Department of Defense is obscuring and displacing the Department of
State as the primary agency for making and administering foreign policy. We now station
innumerably more uniformed military officers than civilian diplomats, aid workers, or
environmental specialists in foreign countries. Our garrisons send a daily message that the
United States prefers to deal with nations through the use of or threat of force rather than
negotiations, commerce, or cultural interactions and through military-to-military, not civilianto-civilian relations (Johnson, 2004, p. 5). In contrast to old views of “empire” as an
imperialistic occupation of nations (e.g., Great Britain, France, Spain), the United States is an
“empire of bases” (Gusterson, 2009; Johnson, 2008). Gusterson (2009) states we are an “empire”
of foreign military bases that number in excess of 1000 bases in more than 130 countries that
serve the purposes of “empire:” The old way of doing colonialism, practiced by the Europeans,
was to take over entire countries and administer them. But this was clumsy. The United States
has pioneered a leaner approach to global empire. . . Its “empire of bases” gives the United
States global reach, but the shape of this empire, insofar as it tilts toward Europe, is a bloated
and anachronistic holdover from the Cold War. Many of these bases are a luxury the United
States can no longer afford at a time of record budget deficits. Moreover, U.S. foreign bases
have a double edge: they project American power across the globe, but they also inflame U.S.
foreign relations, generating resentment against the prostitution, environmental damage, petty
crime, and everyday ethnocentrism that are their inevitable corollaries (Gusterson, 2009, p. 3).
2.3. Is the USA addicted to war? Addiction is the term generally used to refer to compulsive
reliance on drugs or other substances or activities (i.e., exercise, computer games) to the point
of loss of control. In the case of the United States, there is ample evidence to conclude that it is
addicted to violence and war. That these actions have now become an almost reflexive response
used to resolve any national or international tension. A number of writers have argued that the
U.S. culture has evolved to the point that its citizens have been socialized to believe that there
will never be end to war and to learn to tolerate this state of affairs; that U.S. citizens are
seduced by war (e.g., Bacevich, 2005; Bromwich, 2010; Jamail & Coppola, 2009). Bromwich
(2010) writes: “We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising
for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been
considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war
itself an aberration, and ‘wars’ in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger
generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war –and no
end of wars” (Bromwich, 2010, p. 1). Jamail and Coppola (200 9, p. 1) state: “The process of
brainwashing and desensitization by the military begins affecting children in the US from a
very early age. It is not insignificant that little boys wear camouflage and run around playing
with toy guns whenever they get an opportunity.” Bacevich (2005), concludes that the U.S. is
now seduced by the militarism, a glorification and celebration of all things martial including
history, music, celebrations, uniforms, guns, and the very idea that military might itself insures
power: Bacevich writes: Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism,
manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the
truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.
To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation’s
strength and well being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of
(or nostalgia for) military ideals.” (Bacevich, 2005, p. 2).
Heg Bad – Speed Module
Makes a global military policy based on the drive for speed inevitable
Davis (Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Hawaii) 11
(Sasha, The US military base network and contemporary colonialism: Power projection,
resistance and the quest for operational unilateralism, Political Geography xxx (2011))
Where, though, are these places? As mentioned in the previous section, many US bases and
training areas have been removed from strategic locations from the Philippines to Puerto Rico
while protests, political upheaval and foreign court rulings currently threatened the status of
bases in locations from Kyrgyzstan to Diego Garcia. Furthermore, the US military is concerned
that even in places where its bases are fairly secure their freedom to operate could be hampered
by restrictions on training and host nation sensitivities to the types of deployments made from,
or through, their territories. Lincoln Bloomfield, former US Assistant Secretary of State for
Political Military Affairs, put it this way: Senior DoD officials emphasized the “usability” of
American forces stationed abroad, referring to political constraints that host countries might
place on them in a crisis. .Governments take an appropriate interest in how their territory is used
and accord special political significance to any scenario in which another country’s forces
launch combat operations directly from their territory. There is an implied complicity on the
part of the host nation in the military objectives of the forces’ mission. Host
governmentsddemocracies above alldcan be expected to require prior consent.Host countries
that would impose nettlesome constraints on the out-of-country deployability of U.S. forces
should not expect to be significant hubs in the new American defense posture (2006, p. 56, 61).
In short, the military is reacting to constraints put on their operations by searching for base sites
that not only give global coverage, but also give the ability for operational unilateralism. In
contrast to political unilateralism, a doctrine under the George W. Bush administration of
waging war without the political agreement of the UN or significant allies, operational
unilateralism is the ability of the military to strike quickly without any need for consultation
with anyone e even the government of the territory from which they are launching the strike.
The 2004 Global Posture Review explained this concept this way: An important facet of our
global posture is our system of legal arrangements with allies and partners. With some countries
we will need new legal arrangements, and with others we may need to update existing
arrangements. While mindful of sovereignty and country-specific concerns, legal arrangements
that enable our global posture should maximize our ability to: Conduct training in host nations;
deploy U.S. forces wherever and whenever they are needed; and support deployed forces
around the world. (p.15, emphasis added). This position is a logical consequence of the way US
planners have seen the world in the last decade. Threats are not just everywhere, but happen at
any time. Forward military units must not only be globally deployable, but also able to be used
rapidly. It is argued that in the contemporary security environment of rapid terrorist attacks and
“ticking bombs” consultation with allies (not to mention the US congress) is a passé timeconsuming nicety that does not fit in with the speed at which lethal military force needs to be
deployed (Hannah, 2006).
That makes escalation and nuclear war inevitable
Luke and Tuathail 2k
(Tim, Gearoid, Thinking Space, pg. 368-9)
More provocative is a second consequence Virilio extrapolates from global nuclear deterrence as
pure war: the disappearance of politics. As global nuclear war machines have elaborated an
increasingly technolog- ical and machinic system of mutual deterrence, the space-time of politics
has been radically reduced and compressed. As nuclear war becomes an increasingly electronic
decision, there has been a loss in the duration of politics. Politics is reduced to the instance of
launch code authentication in an era of attack on alert deterrence (1991 a, 129-30). The time for
debate and diplomacy, reflection and rethinking disappears (1983, 58). Like Baudrillard,
Virilio speaks of this as a condition of ‘trans-politics’ though he strongly states that he considers
such a situation totally negative. ‘It’s the contamination of traditional political thought by
military thought, period! ... It’s not post-politics, it’s not the end of politics, it is its contamination. It’s completely negative. Trans-politics means no more politics at all’ (1983, 144).
Similarly, war becomes a transbellicose game as nuclear operations ‘have also gradually taken
on the aspect of large-scale electronic games, a Kriegspiel requiring whole territories over which
the various procedures and materials of modern war are reconstituted’ (1989: 86).
Heg Bad – A2: Key to Stability
The need for global bases is manufactured by irrational threat perceptions
Lutz (Research Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies and Professor of
Anthropology at Brown University) 9
(Catherine, US Bases and Empire: Global Perspectives on the Asia Pacific, The Asia-Pacific
Journal, Vol. 12-3-09, March 16, 2009. http://old.japanfocus.org/-Catherine_Lutz/3086)
Alongside their military and economic functions, bases have symbolic and psychological
dimensions. They are highly visible expressions of a nation’s will to status and power. Strategic
elites have built bases as a visible sign of the nation’s standing, much as they have constructed
monuments and battleships. So, too, contemporary US politicians and the public have treated the
number of their bases as indicators of the nation’s hyperstatus and hyperpower. More darkly,
overseas military bases can also be seen as symptoms of irrational or untethered fears,
even paranoia, as they are built with the long-term goal of taming a world perceived to be
out of control. Empires frequently misperceive the world as rife with threats and themselves as
objects of violent hostility from others. Militaries’ interest in organizational survival has also
contributed to the amplification of this fear and imperial basing structures as the solution as they
“sell themselves” to their populace by exaggerating threats, underestimating the costs of basing
and war itself, as well as understating the obstacles facing preemption and belligerence (Van
Evera 2001).
Heg Bad – A2: Things Getting Better
Wrong about violence declining claims
Fry (professor of anthropology at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, and adjunct research
scientist in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona) 12
(Douglas, Peace in Our Time, Bookforum Dec/Jan 2012,
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/018_04/8575)
Distinctions like this might seem semantic to general readers, but enormous consequences
actually attend on the way we choose to tell the story of how violence figures into human
history. If we focus only on physical violence and recent times, as Pinker does, it’s a fairly
straightforward tale: Violence has decreased, and progress will continue to build toward more
peaceful solutions to human conflict.
But if we follow the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung in adopting a wider perspective on
violence, then we can readily apprehend that structural violence exists at very high levels in the
twenty-first century. This brand of violence extends beyond the formal organization of war
making; it stems from unjust political and economic social structures that inflict pain and
suffering through extreme poverty, malnutrition, the lack of safe drinking water, the degradation
of the planet’s biosphere, the gross inequities in wealth within and among countries, and lack of
access to health care, educational opportunities, and social security. Structural violence translates
into untold human misery, suffering, and shortened life spans. To adopt Pinker’s focus on
physical forms of violence to the exclusion of structural violence of epic proportions is to miss
the big picture.
Nor should Pinker’s book lull us into a sense of complacency that the world is becoming a safer
place, when global challenges such as climate change and nuclear proliferation continue to
threaten every person on earth. We endorse a foreshortened, and ultimately damaging, view of
the question if we fail to understand that the problem area of violence must also include global
problems that endanger the lives of everybody. For millennia, our ancestors survived only
through cooperation and sharing. The twenty-first century world, with its threats of oceanic
pollution, biodiversity loss, and global warming, absolutely requires cooperative solutions to
shared problems—of the same sort that had been worked out in our ancestral hunter-gatherer
past. If Pinker had not swept that past from the pages of his book, he might have discovered a
new angel or two.
And wars can escalate
Marsella (Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii; paper delivered on the occasion of
receiving the Lifetime Contribution Award by the International Academy for Intercultural
Research) 11
(Anthony J., United States of America: “A culture of war”, International Journal of Intercultural
Relations 35 (2011) 714–728)
The proliferation of wars and violent conflicts in the last and present centuries poses a great
threat to human survival and well being. The wars of these centuries, often framed as “low
intensity” and “high intensity,” are leaving a tragic legacy of human, social, and environmental
destruction that are pointing to an apocalyptic end. From the international wars led by the
United States in Iraq (Persian Gulf War), Afghanistan, and Pakistan, pitting modern
technological impersonal forces of drones, airstrikes, artillery, and heavily armed soldiers
against insurgents, rebels, and foreign fighters relying on suicide bombers, guerilla tactics, and
IEDs (i.e., improvised explosive devices), to the scores of wars and conflicts within nations
pitting governments against rebellious citizens motivated by many and diverse causes (e.g.,
overthrow, separatist states, economic livelihoods, and criminal cartels), widespread death,
destruction, and suffering have become commonplace. Indeed, one can only wonder if the
constant presence of war is somehow resulting in habituation among people around the world. It
seems to be the normal course. Table 1 lists some of the wars fought in the 20th century. The
20th century that has been termed the bloodiest in human history because of the number of
people killed and injured, and the destruction that occurred to cities and lands across the world.
Even a quick reading of Table 1 reveals the frequent pursuit of “genocide,” a particular form of
aggression designed to eliminate an entire group or population of people. The almost
unimaginable brutality of “genocide” serves as a reminder of the power of the human impulse
to direct hate and anger of enormous proportion toward a specific group of people deemed an
enemy. Chirot and McCauley (2006) note that once the process of killing associated with
genocide is started, it easily escalates into the question of “Why not kill them all?” Enduring
examples include the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews and others considered expendable,
the Stalinist intentional starvation of 8,000,000 Ukranians (Holodor), and the Tutsi and Hutu
groups’ massacres of almost a million tribes people, most killed by hand with machetes. And
here, it must be asked whether the U.S.’s actions in Afghanistan constitute anything less than
genocide of the Afghan people, under the political guise of killing “Taliban” insurgents? What
can be said of any effort to remove a specific or targeted population of people from the earth
using every means possible? Genocide by any other name is still genocide.
Just shifted domain of conflicts
Gray (old British badass, formerly School Professor of European Thought at the London School
of Economics) 11
(John , Delusions of peace, 21st September 2011 — Issue 187,
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/)
A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and
endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense
violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the
region? Or was a subtle and refined civilisation wrecked by world war and the aftermath of
decades of neo-colonial conflict—as Norman Lewis intimated would happen in his prophetic
account of his travels in the region, A Dragon Apparent (1951)? It is true that the second world
war was followed by over 40 years of peace in North America and Europe—even if for the
eastern half of the continent it was a peace that rested on Soviet conquest. But there was no
peace between the powers that had emerged as rivals from the global conflict.
In much the same way that rich societies exported their pollution to developing countries, the
societies of the highly-developed world exported their conflicts. They were at war with one
another the entire time—not only in Indo-China but in other parts of Asia, the Middle East,
Africa and Latin America. The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counterinsurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the
Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the
Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the
Soviet-Afghan war—these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers
pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War
removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the
Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts.
Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are
minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning. The real story, for him, is the outbreak of peace
in advanced societies, a shift that augurs an unprecedented transformation in human affairs.
Democracy was the principle driver of violence
Gray (old British badass, formerly School Professor of European Thought at the London School
of Economics) 11
(John , Delusions of peace, 21st September 2011 — Issue 187,
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review)
This is a troubling truth for humanists, including Pinker. It can be avoided only by pointing to
some kind of ongoing evolution in humans, and Pinker is now ready to entertain “the possibility
that in recent history Homo Sapiens has literally evolved to become less violent in the
biologist’s technical sense of a change in our genome.” He concludes that there is very little
evidence that this is so, but the fact that he takes the possibility seriously is telling. Social
violence is coeval with the human species. This is not because humans have always been driven
by an inbuilt instinct of aggression. Some of the impulses we inherit from our evolutionary past
may incline us to conflict, but others— “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln
called them—incline us to peaceful cooperation. In order to show that conflicts between the two
will in future increasingly be settled in favour of peace, Pinker needs to be able to identify some
very powerful trends. He does his best, but the changes to which he points—the spread of
democracy and the increase of wealth, for example—are more problematic than he realises. The
formation of democratic nation-states was one of the principal drivers of violence of the last
century, involving ethnic cleansing in inter-war Europe, post-colonial states and the postcommunist Balkans. Steadily-growing prosperity may act as a kind of tranquilliser, but there is
no reason to think the increase of wealth can go on indefinitely—and when it falters violence
will surely return. In quite different ways, attacks on minorities and immigrants by neo-fascists
in Europe, the popular demonstrations against austerity in Greece and the English riots of the
past summer show the disruptive and dangerous impact of sudden economic slowdown on social
peace. All the trends that supposedly lie behind the Long Peace are contingent and reversible.
Militarism Impact – Environment/GW
US militarism will destroys the biosphere even if every other problem were dealt
with
Kim Scipes, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University North Central in
Westville, Indiana, 2009, http://countercurrents.org/scipes291209.htm
As a US military veteran—USMC, 1969-73, who turned around while on active duty—I have
been incredibly frustrated at the impotence of the anti-war movement in the United States to stop
the wars in particularly Iraq, Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan. I am, obviously, not alone.
Many other people—veterans, as well as many more civilians—also share this frustration. Barry
Sanders’ new book, The Green Zone, takes a different angle than any I’ve seen before, and I
believe it’s an approach I believe we all need to consider: Sanders focuses on the environmental
costs of militarism, particularly those from the US military. Sanders recognizes the incredible
threat by greenhouse gases to the worlds’ peoples well-being and, in fact, to our very survival.
[Percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million (ppm)
before the industrial revolution started in 1750 to where the latest readings are 392 ppm—should
it reach 450, the accompanying temperature rise would lead to uncontrollable melting of the
tundra across Russia and Canada, and the release of untold amounts of methane: methane has 20
times greater impact on the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. James Hansen of NASA believes
we must go below 350 ppm to prevent serious environmental damage worldwide—KS.] Sanders
also knows the environment is not just threatened by greenhouse gasses, but recognizes pollution
of the water, air and soil as joining with greenhouse gases to imperil us all. Yet he makes an
incredibly important point, trying to put things into perspective and to focus our attention: “…
here’s the awful truth: even if every person, every automobile, and every factory suddenly
emitted zero emissions, the Earth would still be headed head first and at full speed toward total
disaster for one major reason. The [US] military—that voracious vampire—produces enough
greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in
the most immanent danger of extinction” (p, 22). To put it plain language, that social institution
that is said to protect Americans is, in fact, hastening our very extermination along with all the
other people of the planet. Sanders addresses the military’s affects on the environment in many
ways. He starts off with trying to figure out how much (fossil) fuel the military uses, with their
resulting greenhouse emissions there from. Despite diligent efforts, he cannot find out specific
numbers, so he is forced to estimate. After carefully working through different categories, he
comes to what he calls a conservative estimate of 1 million barrels of oil a day, which translates
to almost 20 million gallons each and every day! He puts this number into international
perspective: “If that indeed turns out to be the case, the United States military would then rank in
fuel consumption with countries like Iran, Indonesia and Spain. It is truly an astonishing
accomplishment, especially when one considers … that the military has only about 1.5 million
troops on active duty, and Iran has a population of 66 million, Indonesia a whopping 235
million” (54) The cost, incidentally, is also quite high. He quotes a US Army General as
estimating that the cost of this fuel averages $300 a gallon! (55) Yet, how does this contribute to
global warming? He reports that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that
“each gallon of gasoline produces 19.4 pounds of CO 2” (carbon dioxide). If his estimate of 1
million barrels of oil a day is correct, he writes, “then the combined armed forces sends into the
atmosphere about 400 million pounds of greenhouse gases a day, or 200,000 tons. That totals
146 billion pounds a year—or 73 million tons of carbon a year” (67-68). And that’s just
regarding fuel use. Sanders further discusses the military’s impact on the environment. He talks
about the impact of exploding bombs, cluster bombs, napalm, cannon rounds, depleted uranium,
etc. He points out that the US military estimates they need about 1.5 billion rounds for their M16 rifles a year. He talks about the impact of US military bases around the world, including in
the Philippines and Puerto Rico. To me, the most sickening chapter was the one on depleted
uranium or DU. He explains, “Depleted uranium is essentially U-238, the isotope after the
fissionable isotope, U-235, has been extracted from uranium ore.” DU has a half-life of 4.7
billion years. He continues: “… a good deal of the country of Iraq, both its deserts and cities,
hums with radioactivity. For since 1991, the US has been manufacturing ‘just about all [of its]
bullets, tank shells, missiles, dumb bombs, smart bombs, and 500- and 2000-pound bombs, and
everything else engineered to help our side in the war of Us against Them, [with] depleted
uranium in it. Lots of depleted uranium. A single cruise missile, which weighs 3,000 pounds,
carries within its casing 800 pounds of depleted uranium.’ Recall that the Air Force dropped 800
of these bombs in just the first two days of the war. The math: 800 bombs multiplied by 800
pounds of depleted uranium equal 640,000 pounds, or 320 tons of radioactive waste dumped on
that country in just the first two days of devastation” (83). The impact is devastating. When DU
hits something, it ignites, reaching temperatures between 3,000-5,000 degrees Celsius (5,4329,032 degrees F). It goes through metal like a hot knife through butter, making it a superb
military weapon. But is also releases radiation upon impact, poisoning all around it. Its tiny
particles can be inhaled—people don’t have to touch irradiated materials. Thus, Iraqis are being
poisoned by simply breathing the air! And, once inhaled, DU hardens, turning into insoluble
pellets than cannot be excreted. DU poisoning is a literal death sentence. It not only kills,
however, but it can damage human DNA—it’s the gift that keeps on giving, to generations and
generations. Yet, radiation is an equal opportunity destroyer: it also poisons those in occupying
armies. Evidence from the Gulf War I (“Desert Storm”) shows the impact on American troops.
Sanders quotes Arthur Bernklau, who has extensively studied the problem: “Of the 580,400
soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are now dead. By the year 2000, there were 325,000
on permanent medical disability. More than a decade later, more than half (56 percent) who
served in Gulf War I have permanent medical problems.” Bernklau then points out that the
disability rate for soldiers in Vietnam was 10 percent (87). Yet the impact is not just on Iraqis, or
the soldiers who fought there. Sanders points out that, according to the London Sunday Times,
radiation sensors in Britain reported a four-fold increase in airborne uranium just a few days
after George W. Bush launched the March 19, 2003 attack on Iraq. That sounds bad enough, that
the uranium can travel the approximately 2500 miles from Baghdad to London. But what
Sanders does not note is that global weather does not travel east to west: it travels west to east. In
other words, this uranium had to cross North America to get from Iraq to Britain! There is much
more detailed information included in this small, highly accessible book. AK Press deserves our
respect and support for publishing such a worthy volume: and this is one we each should
purchase and urge others to do so as well. The biggest strength of this book is Sanders’ clarity:
this man is, if you will permit, “on target.” He sees the problem being not just the illegal and
immoral wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. He sees the US military as being an essential part of the
US Empire, along with the major multinational corporations. He sees the military as an
institution as a threat to global environmental survival. He recognizes that politicians won’t
address the problem; they are too incorporated in the US Empire. It says it is up to us,
individually and collectively, in the US (primarily) and together with people around the world.
Basically, his argument is this: the US military can continue to launch wars and continue killing
people (including Americans) around the world, or we can end war, and devote resources to the
well-being of people in this country and others around the world. The choice is our’s. But we
also need to realize that if we let the US military continue on its path of continual war with its
on-going quest for global domination, it will destroy all the humans, animals and vegetation on
the planet. Your move, good people.
United Nations
The UN and multilateral humanitarian intervention is a smokescreen for US
colonialism and makes genocide worse
Forte (Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University) 10
(Maximilian C., What is “New” About the “New Imperialism”? Posted on January 31,
2010by Maximilian Forte “Humanitarian Intervention”,
http://newimperialism.wordpress.com/blog/)
Without needing to argue that this is pure novelty, as opposed to the most recent strategy, we
find the following in Henry Heller’s The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History,
1945-2005 (Monthly Review Press, 2006):
“Throughout the course of this step-by-step dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the United States
had presided, acting in a careful, multilateral fashion under the umbrella of NATO and the
United Nations. Its direct military intervention in Kosovo was justified in the name of so-called
humanitarian war. The Clinton administration continued and expanded on the multilateral
successes of the previous Bush administration. The latter had overseen the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the organization of an unprecedented broad political and military coalition against
Iraq in the first post-Cold War conflict. The Yugoslav campaigns were conducted in a similar
manner under the aegis of an increasingly fashionable humanitarian interventionism [emphasis
added]. The new unipolar world dominated by the United States was to be apparently based on
international cooperation and humanitarian principles.” (p. 311)
The key elements of this post-Cold War strategy — and the time period of which we are
speaking is itself one of the distinctions to be made in terms of a “new” imperialism, new in
this sense meaning after the Cold War — are: the invocation of humanitarianism, an expanded
role for NATO, and the use of multilateralism as a cover for a unipolar, American global
domination. With reference to the latter point, Noam Chomsky inHegemony or Survival:
America’s Quest for Global Dominance (Henry Holt and Company, 2003) quotes former Reagan
State Department official Francis Fukuyama who wrote in 1992: “[the UN is] perfectly
serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism and indeed may be the primary
mechanism through which that unilateralism will be exercised in the future” (p. 29).
Humanitarian Intervention
Their call for humanitarianism hides that a long history of US intervention is the cause
of these problems
Lawston and Murillo (Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at California State University San
Marcos; Prof @ University of San Diego) 9
(Jodie Michelle Lawston and Ruben R. Murillo, The discursive figuration of U.S. supremacy in narratives
sympathetic to undocumented immigrants, Social Justice, 36.2 (Summer 2009): p38(16))
Such stories engender sympathetic feelings for immigrants, especially for children, in the reader.
Faced with the shocking violence these children endure, the reader wants to "rescue them" or
allow them to remain in the country. The focus on the travails and tribulations of undocumented
children compels the reader to believe that conditions in the country of origin must be so bad
that immigrants are willing to risk their lives and endure tortuous journeys to establish a "better
life." In this way, the narrative naturalizes the United States as inherently superior to the
immigrants' home countries without historicizing the direct involvement of the United States in
creating oppressive social and economic conditions in Central America.
Mexico serves as a melodramatic villain in Enrique's Journey, just as it does in 30 Days and
Under the Same Moon. Readers learn how hostile and discriminatory some Mexicans are toward
immigrants from Central America. This tends to placate the guilt and anxiety that many liberals
feel over U.S. immigration policy and enforcement. The imperative to engage in charitable acts
for the "less fortunate" is also an important part of the story. One of the book's most compelling
chapters describes how residents in a small town in Vera Cruz throw bundles of food, clothing,
and supplies to migrants riding the freight trains. Nazario's description of those generous people
contrasts sharply with the hostile discrimination seen in Chiapas. She writes: Enrique expects the
worst. Riding trains through the state of Chiapas has taught him that any upraised hand might
hurl a stone. But here in the states of Oaxaca and Vera Cruz, he discovers that people are
friendly. They wave hello and shout to signal if hostile police are lying in wait for them in an
upcoming town (2006: 103). The altruism in Oaxaca and Vera Cruz breathes hope into a
formerly bleak situation. Residents here tell Nazario (2006: 105), "If I have one tortilla, I give
half away," "I know God will bring me more," "I don't like to feel that I have eaten and they
haven't," and "It feels good to give something that they need so badly." These passages resonate
poignantly with the sense of charity in the U.S. national imagination and they perhaps account
for why Nazario's narrative won the Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller. Charitable acts by
these poor Mexicans move the typical American reader to offer a "helping hand" to
undocumented immigrants and to "rescue" some of these children. But acts of charity do not
make up for a legacy of conquest, neocolonialism, and U.S. interventionism; instead, like a
shell game they distract groups and individuals from the causes of poverty. Charity
Discourse: Raising Historical Amnesia
It could be argued that Under the Same Moon and Enrique's Journey strive to contest the lawand-order discourses that frame much of the U.S. immigration debate. Public opinion is shaped
to perceive undocumented immigrants as "criminals" who have willfully violated U.S. law by
entering "illegally." Dramatized exaggerations of undocumented immigration heighten the sense
of transgression and threat. As Escobar (2008: 62) points out, "images of Mexican migrants
'flooding' the U.S.-Mexico border saturate the media, constructing a crisis of 'invasion.'" In
response, immigration laws such as IRCA and IIRAIRA are passed and border "security,"
policing, and detention are increased. Heightened vitriol characterizes public and media
discourse, with nonwhite immigrants--especially Latinos--portrayed as "lazy" and "violent"
"drains on society." Sympathetic works such as Enrique's Journey and Under the Same Moon
may offer a humanizing alternative to law-and-order discourses, but they do not historicize or
contextualize the U.S. role in creating and maintaining migration. They depict the United States
as a more desirable place to live than the immigrants' countries of origin and assume that the
affluence, prosperity, and modern conveniences that underwrite U.S. national identity are
irresistibly enticing. The message communicated is that these immigrants would not be willing
to risk rape, assault, robbery, arrest, and detention to reach the United States if it were not
superior to the places from which they were trying to flee.
The long history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America created the dramatic disparity
between immigrants' home countries and the United States. The litany includes invasions of
Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama, financial, tactical, and political support of
repressive military regimes and dictatorships, as well as economic exploitation of Latin
America's natural resources and labor force. Robert Kahn (1996) draws our attention to the
Central American wars of the 1980s. The Reagan administration supported corrupt, repressive
regimes in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala because these governments
professed opposition to communism. Prolonged, bloody wars victimized Central Americans, as
did repressive governments supported by the United States. By 1989, the violence in Central
America had claimed the lives of a quarter of a million people, most of whom were killed by
their own governments or by paramilitary groups trained and supplied by the United States. The
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of Justice--under pressure from
Washington--categorically denied the asylum petitions of thousands of war refugees and
detained them until they were deported, often to their deaths (Ibid.).
The root cause of the conflicts they want to intervene in is colonialism but intervention
leads to worse structural violence and is a smokescreen for imperialism
Castles 3
(Stephen, Towards a Sociology of Forced Migration and Social Transformation, Sociology, Vol. 77, no. 1,
pp. 13-34, 2003)
The context of this trend was the inability to achieve economic and social development and the
failure to build legitimate and stable states in large areas of the South. What Mary Caldor calls
‘the new wars’ are usually internal wars connected with identity struggles, ethnic divisions,
problems of state formation and competition for economic assets. But they are simultaneously
transnational as they involve diaspora populations, foreign volunteers and mercenaries, and
international intervention forces. They also draw in international journalists, UN aid
organizations, NGOs, and regional organizations. The means of warfare have also changed. The
protagonists are not large standing armies but irregular forces. The aim is not control of territory,
but political control of the population. Mass population expulsion is often a strategic goal, which
is why the new wars have led to such an upsurge in forced migration (Kaldor 2001). Ninety per
cent of those killed are civilians. Both government forces and insurgents use exemplary violence
including torture and sexual assault as means of control. Many politicians and media
commentators saw the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda etc. as the
resurgence of ‘age-old hatreds’. It is more accurate to see such practices as systemic elements of
a thoroughly modern new form of warfare (Summerfield 1999). Northern economic interests
(such as the trade in oil, diamonds, coltan or small arms) play an important part in starting or
prolonging local wars. At a broader level, trade, investment and intellectual property regimes
that favour the industrialised countries maintain underdevelopment in the South. Conflict and
forced migration are thus ultimately an integral part of the North-South division. This
reveals the ambiguity of efforts by the ‘international community’ (which essentially means the
powerful Northern states and the intergovernmental agencies) to prevent forced migration. They
seek to do this through both entry restrictions in the North and ‘containment’ measures in the
South. Containment includes humanitarian aid, peace-keeping missions and even military
intervention. At the same time, the North does more to cause forced migration than to stop it,
through enforcing an international economic and political order that causes underdevelopment
and conflict. However, violence and forced migration also causes social transformation. They
destroy economic resources, undermine traditional ways of life and break up communities.
Forced migration is thus a factor which deepens underdevelopment, weakens social bonds, and
reduces the capacity of communities and societies to achieve positive change. Post-conflict
reconstruction rarely leads to restoration of the pre-conflict situation, but rather to new and often
problematic social relationships. The study of forced migration therefore should be a central part
of the sociology of development. Forced migration is a factor in social transformation in an
additional sense, as Mark Duffield has recently argued (Duffield 2001). Persistent
underdevelopment in large parts of the South is not an economic problem for the North, because
these countries are largely disconnected from the global economy. However, underdevelopment
is increasingly seen as a threat to security in the North. This is because the South connects with
the North in unexpected and unwanted ways: through the proliferation of transnational informal
networks, such as international crime, the drug trade, people smuggling and trafficking, as well
as migrant networks which facilitate irregular mobility. Such phenomena are partly a result of
trends towards economic deregulation and privatisation in the North, which open up the space
for informal economies. The Al Qaida network can be seen as the very epitome of an
undesirable transnational network, whose goals and mode of operation would have been
unthinkable in any earlier epoch. Duffield argues that the result is a fundamental change in the
objectives of both development policy and humanitarianism. Containment of forced migration
through neutral humanitarianism has failed. Similarly, the Washington Consensus – the neoliberal credo of the World Bank and the IMF that underdevelopment could be countered by
economic growth based on foreign investments and export-led growth – has proved mistaken.
Humanitarianism and development policy have a new joint task: the transformation of whole
societies in order to prevent conflict and to achieve social and economic change. The principle of
transforming whole societies was contained in a remarkable lecture by the then Senior VicePresident of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, in 1998. He argued that development required
fundamental shifts in cultural values and social relationships, and that it was the task of
international agencies to help bring these about (Stiglitz 1998). In the meantime, Stiglitz has left
the World Bank and been awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. Development is now
seen by Northern governments and international agencies as impossible without security and
peace. This means that humanitarian action and military intervention can no longer attempt to
be neutral. Rather, such interventions seek to restore peace at the local level through
imposing certain political and economic structures as part of a system of ‘networked global
liberal governance’. This system has ‘a radical mission to transform societies as a whole,
including the attitudes and beliefs of the people within them’ (Duffield 2001). The price of being
connected to global economic and political networks is thus the adoption of Northern economic
structures, political institutions and value systems.
Intellectual Property
Neolib Bad IP Updates
Neolib Bad – Innovation
Intellectual property within neoliberalism kills innovation and ensures financial and
ecological collapse
Dant (Professor of Sociology and was until recently Head of the Department of Sociology at Lancaster)
12
(Tim, A Sociology of Financialisation?, Published: October 15, 2012,
http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2012/10/a-sociology-of-financialisation-beyond-an-economicanalysis-of-the-financial-crisis/)
Knowledge is not only part of understanding financial crises, it can, in its own way contribute to
them. The promise that through innovation science and technology might stimulate the continual
growth that neo-liberal market capitalist societies depend on has turned knowledge itself into a
financialised commodity. Information technology and bio-technology have been recognised as
opportunities for the extraction of monetary value as futures and derivatives rather than real or
sustained economic growth to create what Larry Reynolds and Bron Szerszynski (2012) call
‘political economies of promise’. Scientific knowledge has become a property, intellectual
property, that has an economic life all of its own beyond explanation by the economics of
science. David Tyfield argues (2012) that the progressive global propertisation of knowledge,
which makes great claims to be in the name of ‘innovation’, is actually making innovation
impossible. By restricting who can use knowledge, and for what, the economic possibilities of
new ideas are constrained. And the privatisation of the public institutions through which
knowledge has been shared for the good of all is making it impossible even to analyse the
economic effect of these restrictions on knowledge as property.
As the oil runs out, as world population continues to grow, as the climate heats up, as
environmental pollution increases, as natural resources – including food – fall short of the
demands on them and as technology fails to deliver the solutions because someone wants to
extract the maximum monetary value from it, there is one thing we can be sure of. Crises, which
will always manifest as financial crises at some point, are going to continue to exceed the
capacity to simply ‘manage’ them. Journalists and politicians need to start looking further than
the corporate interests in their lobbies, their own experience as business people and the advice of
economists trained in business schools. Or the future will be even worse for all but the rich than
it already promises to be… and eventually it will do for the rich too.
Neolib Bad – Pharma 2NC
Neolib kills pharmaceutical innovation – profits and innovation are inversely
correlated
Gagnon (PhD in Political Science from York University) 9
(MARC-ANDRÉ, THE NATURE OF CAPITAL IN THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED ECONOMY: THE
CASE OF THE GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY A DISSERTATION MAY 2009
http://www5.carleton.ca/sppa/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/MAGs-Dissertation-Final-May-2009.pdf)
By distinguishing the pharmaceutical industry (producing wealth) and the pharmaceutical
business (capitalizing income), this dissertation explains why the increasing earning capacity
in the global pharmaceutical business is paralleled with a decline in therapeutic
innovation. It contends that increasing profits is found not in a surge of productivity but,
instead, in the capacity by dominant pharmaceutical firms to increase their control over the
medical knowledge structure. The knowledge-based economy, in the case of pharmaceuticals,
should not be interpreted as an accumulation regime based on intellectual capital and
permanent innovation but, instead, as an accumulation regime based on institutional
transformations that bestow greater corporate power to dominant firms over the industry and
the community in general. The capitalization of knowledge, that is the increasing differential
earning-capacity for knowledge-based firms, is possible because of new institutional settings
that were put in place to increase dominant firms‘ monopolistic power since the beginning of
the 1980s. As such, the link binding knowledge, productivity and profitability is broken and we
observe rather a link between the knowledge structure, power accumulation and profitability.
Neoliberal IP rights make cartels inevitable – turning innovation and global
agricultural crises
Gagnon (PhD in Political Science from York University) 9
(MARC-ANDRÉ, THE NATURE OF CAPITAL IN THE KNOWLEDGE-BASED ECONOMY: THE
CASE OF THE GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY A DISSERTATION MAY 2009
http://www5.carleton.ca/sppa/ccms/wp-content/ccms-files/MAGs-Dissertation-Final-May-2009.pdf)
The nature of capital accumulation in the pharmaceutical sector can be interpreted not only as
an increasing control of the pharmaceutical business over the pharmaceutical knowledge
structure and the community at large, but also as an increasing dependence of the community
on Big Pharma. The privatization of ―knowledge commons‖ in the hands of dominant firms is
a central feature of contemporary economic restructuring. While, here, the results focused on
the GPB, the same dynamics seem to exist outside pharmaceuticals, for example, in the cases of
food (Tansey and Rajotte 2008) or the environment (Robin 2008). It does not seem far-fetched
to suggest that, in the last 30 years, corporate control over knowledge structures has been
globally increasing by allowing, among others, the private appropriation of essential aspects of
health, food, reproduction and environment. For 352 example, analyzing those dynamics,
Drahos and Braithwaite arrive at a gloomy prediction (2002, 166-168):
US support for big business regulatory agenda of ever longer, broader and stronger intellectual
property rights for the global information economy risks a deepening of cartelism. The
chemical and pharmaceutical oligopolies of the 20th century will, using intellectual property
rights over biotechnological processes and products, progressively transform themselves into
the biogopolies of the 21st. […]The dangers of biogopolies are not simply those that relate to
prices and consumer welfare, although they are real enough. They run deeper. The
globalization of intellectual property rights will rob much knowledge of its public good
qualities. When knowledge becomes a private good to be traded in markets the demands of
many, paradoxically, go unmet. […] Much of what happens in the agriculture and health
sectors of developed and developing countries will end up depending on the bidding or charity
of biogopolists as they make strategic commercial decisions on how to use their intellectual
property rights.
For sure, we are not there yet, but the current dynamics are projecting us in that direction. For
example, as a solution to the current innovation crisis in the pharmaceutical sector, drug
manufacturers suggest that they need to invest more in the production of new breakthrough
drugs, and, in order to do so, governments must lower taxes, increase IPR, speed up
commercialization of public R&D and reduce the regulatory ―burden‖. This dissertation shows
that, because of the confusion between productivity and profitability, such policies should not
be considered solutions to but, rather, as causes of the crisis in therapeutic innovation. The
current business model of low innovation and massive promotion emerged from the increasing
power offered to pharmaceutical firms, in order for them to extend their profitability. Looking
at industrial policies proposed by public authorities in the U.S (Economic Report of the
President 2006) or in Canada (Innovation in Canada 2007), it seems that states have embraced
the agenda of reforms proposed by pharmaceutical firms, since national competitiveness in a
specific sector is still measured only by the increasing profitability of national firms. A new
agenda for reforms must be put forth.
CIR Bad – K Version
Worker Exploitation Turn – 2AC
Case is an impact turn to the DA – current CIR leads to massive exploitation
Feldman 13
(Justin, An Anti-Immigrant Bill Masked as Reform, JUNE 26,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/26/an-anti-immigrant-bill-masked-as-reform/)
On Monday, 67 senators voted for cloture on Hoeven-Corker, a “border security” amendment to
the immigration reform bill. The vote virtually guarantees that immigration reform will pass in
the Senate. At the same time, it also guarantees the bill’s costs to immigrant communities will
far outweigh its benefits.
The refrain that Democrats and their allies have been repeating – that the immigration reform
bill offers a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants – is simply a lie. The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that if the bill were to pass, roughly 4 million of the
current 11.5 million undocumented immigrants would be excluded. Their estimate is overly
optimistic, and it’s possible that nearly half of undocumented immigrants would never benefit
from the legalization. But even those who would eventually benefit are in for a long, difficult,
precarious path.
Fifty Arizonas
The reform bill would create a bleak future for millions of undocumented immigrants. To kick
off the post-reform era, ICE would be required to organize a massive deportation campaign,
rounding up 90 percent of all immigrants who overstayed a visa in the previous year. As it
progressed, day-to-day life would become significantly more difficult for undocumented people
than it is currently.
Once all legitimate businesses adopt the E-Verify employment authorization system required
under the proposal, more immigrants would end up in dangerous, unregulated jobs where they
are misclassified as independent contractors for the shadiest of companies. If a worker presented
a fake Social Security number to her boss, she could be imprisoned for five years.
Undocumented immigrants are currently issued driver’s licenses in nine states, but they would
likely lose that privilege under reform. The immigration bill requires that state licenses comply
with the REAL ID Act and other federal regulations restricting identification cards. If a state
does not comply, most of its residents would be forced to obtain a US passport solely for work
authorization purposes. That is more than enough incentive to guarantee states will restrict
driver’s licenses.
There is also the matter of the border. Before the Hoeven-Corker amendment, the bill was set to
infuse an additional $6.5 billion into militarizing the US-Mexico border. But under the
amendment, which is so bad that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer initially expressed support, that
number comes to well over $40 billion. The plan involves doubling the size of the Border Patrol,
completing 700 miles of fencing, and flying more aerial drones over the area. The Border Patrol
would set up more checkpoints in border communities and commit dozens more human rights
abuses each day. Migrants would still cross, but in increasingly remote areas, and more people
would die as a result. If apprehended, border crossers would face between one and 30 years in
prison, depending on their prior criminal and immigration records.
A Raw Deal, Even for Immigrants Who Legalize
Militarization Turn – 2AC
***CIR enshrines an endless war on Brown and Black bodies and represents a
narrative of security that leads to the destruction of all life
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, In a Border World, Let's Talk About this "Reform" Business – Militarization
Wednesday, 15 May, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16379-lets-talk-about-this-reform-businessmilitarization)
The bulk of the rhetoric, and the bulk of the provisions and orientation of the bill, are around
militarization, euphemistically called “security”. What is the ideological function of the
emphasis on “security”? How can a militarization bill be advertised as “immigration reform”
thus positioning its champions as beneficiaries of immigrant votes? Whose “security”, exactly?
Casting immigration as a “security” issue is not new, and certainly has been more and more
explicit since 9-11. It functions to reproduce and reinforce a specific, and highly profitable,
narrative of the “immigration crisis”. It tells us that the crisis is this: all these dangerous migrants
are crossing the border and threatening our security and prosperity; they are coming here to take
what is ours, to undermine the sovereignty of the state and to harm us. According to this logic
the state has the “right and responsability” to protect itself . This part is about defining and
legitimizing a vision of “security” from the perspective of the state of the global economic
interests it represents. It works to turn our attention away from the actions of the state and the
previously mentioned transnational economic interests, and instead to focus on the migrants as
the cause of the crisis — migrants who must be hunted down, punished, adjusted, conditionally
included, physically and symbolically and legally diminished, exploited, destroyed.
This narratives gives justification to a process of translation or reduction: it justifies reducing
everything – the global economy, social dynamics, history and political relations, cultural
experiences and every aspect of daily life – to the terms of an expanded, spectacular and very
profitable battlefield of weapons, soldiers, a hi-tech hunt, 24 hour surveillance, databases, and
so on. All of life must be recast in the terms of a relentless war that is always “on”, always
unfolding. The border is its primary battle ground, and more: it is a staging area for
experimenting with and defining the possibilities of warfare in the future, the possibilities for
war as a generalized logic.
The bill not only translates questions of migration and of… well, anything, into questions of
war, but it also gives Homeland Security the authority to decide when the state is “secure
enough” as a controlling device that determines its unfolding in the future. It might seem like a
detail, but it is not: I think — and someone demonstrate to me if I am wrong — that the bill does
not guarantee migrants a single right or protection; it does not give a single migrant a right to
claim status that may remove them from the threat of deportation or that may give them full
personhood. Instead, it guarantees Homeland Security control over how current and future
migrants can be managed, registered, and legally categorized as non-persons or diminished
persons; it enshrines and expands its power to govern by discretion.
Specifically, the so-called pathway to citizenship is regulated in a series of steps (which we can
look more closely at in the next part and perhaps ask what that is really a pathway towards). But
for now, this: Homeland Security must determine the protocols and strategic plan for border
security and then must ascertain that the border is secure enough (according to an effectiveness
measure) before any provisions for applying for residency status can move forward. No one can
apply for residency much less citizenship, until DHS is satisfied that the border is secure enough.
But security forces can never be satisfied, because they can only exist as long as there is
perceived insecurity – in other words, Homeland Security would likely risk abolishing itself by
establishing that the border is “secure”. The bill also explicitly outlines the incentivizing
mechanisms for integrating Department of Defense operations with Homeland Security and local
and tribal policing, which turns back provisions of previous laws limiting the government’s
ability to wage war within the US. This bill creates a legal framework and procedural
mechanism (as well as a series of bureaucratic instruments) for an endless and limitless war, or
conversely illustrates the coincidence of law, bureaucracy and violence. A war on the border; but
the border, of course, is everywhere, extending into local neighborhoods, hospital emergency
rooms and schools, due to previous programs that stretch and expand the border to encompass
all social space.
Militarization Turn – 1AR
***Refuse their appeals to liberal pragmatism – Voting for CIR makes you complicit
with genocide
Moratorium on Deportations Campaign 6/22
(War Zone at the Border: Not in Our Name!, http://whoseimmigrationreform.com/2013/06/22/war-zoneat-the-border-not-in-our-name/)
When Senate Bill S.744 passed the Senate Judiciary committee, it already represented a
grotesque level of border militarization. With a price tag of 6.6 billion dollars, adding 3,5000
new troops and with a stated goal of total surveillance of the Southern border, the bill was
already characterized by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano as an “unmatched piece of legislation”
in border militarization. Now, senators have negotiated a deal that would increase this “surge” to
30 billion dollars, 20,000 new troops and even more military equipment.
Throughout this period of “reform fever”, we have been hearing this argument: militarization is
a necessary compromise if we are to pass immigration reform. This right-wing myth has found
its most fervent advocates among reform promoters who fashion themselves as champions of
immigrant communities: so-called “immigrant rights’ NGO’s and democratic party politicians,
who have become the main cheerleaders of the war machine. But there is no such thing as
harmless militarization; there is no justification for the genocide at the border, for violating the
sovereignty of indigenous nations; for terrorizing immigrants and border communities. And now
we see that promoters of immigration reform have pushed the debate so far to the right, that
cheering for genocide is the new “progressive” common-sense. Once reformists embraced
militarization, the only unanswered questions are: how many billions, how many troops, how
many lives.
We call on all social justice organizations and all immigrant communities to categorically
denounce border militarization; to resist any efforts to increase border enforcement; to fight
against any initiative that justifies these maneuvers as necessary or acceptable “compromise”.
Not one dollar. Not one more border officer. Not one drone. Not one more foot of border wall.
Not one more death. The struggle for migrant justice is the struggle against border militarization
and colonial violence.
It is time for organizations and campaigns claiming to promote immigrant rights to stop
supporting this bill. Accepting the border militarization “compromise” means being complicit in
the genocide at the border and the repression of millions of immigrants inside the country.
We stand in solidarity with the ongoing resistance of indigenous border nations. We refuse the
logic of justifying colonialism in the name of immigrant rights.
Militarization Turn – Structural Violence Impact
Covers up global structural violence which is the root cause of migration
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, In a Border World, Let's Talk About this "Reform" Business – Militarization
Wednesday, 15 May, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16379-lets-talk-about-this-reform-businessmilitarization)
Before fighting over amendments and specifics (how much or how little money should be
allocated to building new sections of the wall? Drones or no drones?) we should question the
master narrative of “security” and develop other understandings of the “immigration crisis” that
this narrative is intended to suppress. There is indeed a crisis that is most dramatically expressed
at the border. It emerges from a history in which the US has accumulated its wealth on the backs
of people from around the world. This accumulation has been through colonial expropriation, the
slave trade and continues through economic and military interventions that devastate local
economies and ways of life, that dispossess and displace millions of people and rob them of the
right to live – wars, trade agreements, coups and political deals. To survive, millions flee north,
(interpreted geographically and politically) where they are seen as “criminals” upon arrival,
where they are feared and attacked. Why fear this arrival? What kinds of fear are buried
underneath all the violence, are appeased by its exercise? The story of the “immigration crisis”
can be told in a different way than the narrative of millions coming to take what is ours, once we
understand that this global phenomenon is about millions of people, many of them indigenous,
coming to claim what is theirs – to claim the right to live that was robbed from them, to claim
access to the wealth they helped produce, to the lands and resources that are legitimately
theirs. The crisis of their dispossession has been turned into a spectacle of “defense” and
“security” , intended to mask the true nature and causes of migration in globalized capitalism.
And while every spectacle is false, it also contains some truth, at times in the most obvious and
routine aspects of its choreography. This truth is expressed in the confrontation between poor
and unarmed men, women and children on one side, and a multi-billion dollar army of soldiers
and drones and weapons, hi-tech surveillance technology, media, morgues, lock-ups and
draconian laws on the other. It is expressed in a surreal and hysterical border wall. Not
surprisingly, this theater of war is similar in its visual expression, in its forms and
choreographies, to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to other spaces of military
occupation. The spectacle of war at the border border reveals North America as occupied land,
and the arrival of the politically red-brown migrants as a challenge to the legitimacy of the
colonial democracy.
RPI Status Bad – Criminality
CIR will use RPI to criminalize the immigrant body – spills over to all of society
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, The Border Wars and Criminal vs Alien, June 22, http://inaborderworld.org/2013/06/22/theborder-wars-and-criminal-vs-alien/)
Crime and criminal are of course not natural categories, they are artifacts, and they are always
under construction. “Alien” and citizen are not natural or inevitable categories, they are artifacts
and are always under construction. How do these two notions come together in the concrete
myth of the “criminal alien”?
At first it would seem that “criminal alien” merely overlaps the two categories, designating
immigrants who are accused of committing crimes. But “criminal alien” serves at least two
functions. First, it is a way of inventing new crimes, of tinkering with the category of criminal.
In the US the deportation and detention system are seen as being outside of the criminal justice
system (for example, immigrant detention is seen as a form of incarceration that is not
imprisonment in a legal sense), so that immigrant or alien becomes a fertile experimental ground
for diminished forms of personhood and humanity, for new forms of imprisonment and
captivity. Using the “alien” to expand and tinker with the possibilities for “criminal” has a long
history, one that is not sufficiently addressed in migrant justice movements. In this bill for
instance, new crimes include gang affiliation, even if one has not committed any acts; attempted
use of fraudulent social security numbers, attempted crossing without authorization and so on.
This a way to criminalize presentation, identity, intention. Even though the immigration
system is technically outside of the criminal justice system, of course the forms of diminished
personhood introduced by the criminal alien and the extralegal forms of captivity developed as
immigrant detention will in turn alter the logic of the domestic penal system and expand the
possibilities for criminalization as a process.
But in this bill criminal alien serves a second function as well, in which there is not an
equivalence between criminal and alien — but a competition. This is more like criminal vs
alien. What does this mean?
Undocumented designates unlawful presence, and this has been increasingly criminalized as we
have seen — so that undocumented has tended to mean criminal or presumed criminal. In this
bill, a portion of the undocumented population are being drawn into the system by the promise
of a new status, RPI, which render them not undocumented but also not legalized. RPI can be
understood as something like registered potential criminal or a criminal on probation. This new
form of immigrant is not a citizen, but they are also not an alien in the same sense.
The absolute alien is the one who remains illegalized and undocumented: the border crosser,
the unregistered, or the one who loses their RPI status. Given the military triggers, the bill makes
the fate of RPI holders dependent on the success of border militarization, on the capacity of the
system to track and capture illegalized workers through E-Verify, on deportability and increased
incarceration, on an intensification of the alien-ness of the alien. Any consideration for the
humanity of the alien is a threat to the probational criminal, whose “security” and survival
depend on manufacturing and reproducing the possibility of a distinction/opposition between
criminal and alien. RPI holders must actively participate in a war waged against their sisters,
brothers, aunts and uncles. RPI is not only a status, it is a form of symbolic identification that
pits criminal against alien, that mobilizes the criminal as an agent of war against the alien.
That leads to disposability and massive structural violence
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, The Border Wars and Criminal vs Alien, June 22, http://inaborderworld.org/2013/06/22/theborder-wars-and-criminal-vs-alien/)
The bill of course not only defines a Registered Provisional (RPI) status that keeps people
vulnerable while registering them in a limbo underclass, but it also sets up a system of
increasingly tough criteria for who can qualify for and maintain the status. Contact with police,
changes in employment and many other factors means that RPI status can be lost at any time —
so that provisional also means probationary. Status is a minefield — and losing RPI means
becoming subject to deportation.
One of the main pretexts for exclusion is as until now the notion of crime. Criminal, as Mariame
Kaba mentioned, is code for disposable — the figure of the criminal is a political tool used to
render entire categories of populations as a “problem” that needs to be corrected, disposed of.
The figure of the criminal is a political pretext that allows for a way of articulating what, and
who, is the problem — a sleight of hand by which dispossession, impoverishment and
exploitation can be rendered as natural and inevitable conditions, while deviance and
strangeness are attached to the actions of those dispossessed, displaced and marginalized. In
other words, systemic processes obfuscated and we become transfixed by individuals on their
actions according to a set of rules that predetermine what and who is deviant.
RPI Status Bad – Racist
RPI founded on racism and anti-blackness
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, Abolish “papers”? Another look at Registered Provisional Immigrant,
http://inaborderworld.org/2013/06/04/abolish-papers-another-look-at-registered-provisionalimmigrant/)
But is RPI a step in the “right direction” as we have been told by the promoters of the bill? Does
it make the immigration system “more just?” It depends on what direction we think we need to
go — and on what is our understanding of justice. Can there be more or less justice, or justice
for some at the expense of others? How does one take the measure of a partial and selective
justice? We asked these same questions in relation to DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals) — here, as there, we understood that individuals and their families would have to make
incredibly difficult decisions to navigate a cynical system in the best way they can, trying to
defend themselves in the terms imposed by the system with what little is at their disposal. But as
a movement — and as a society — do we accept something like RPI as a new normal?
RPI is clearly no guarantee of rights. It does not entitle the bearer to make demands of the state,
to be recognized as “legal”. It it does not in any ways change the conditions of deportability. RPI
carves out a flexible space between authorized an unauthorized so that some people will still be
“not legal” (and exposed to the risk of deportation) and will be documented as such. What kind
of “papers” are these? Conversely, the bill guarantees that those forced out of RPI will face
harsher penalties, a greater threat of deportation and a greater level of criminalization.
This small correspondence has been a way to not look at immigration practices in isolation, but
instead recognize them in relation to longstanding practices of exclusion. There are many ways
that the rhetoric surrounding the bill (even of those who support it and promote it), and some of
the specific provisions, continue a trajectory of anti-blackness. Here I wanted to look at how RPI
is possibly linked to historically familiar examples of “registering” racialized populations as
less than fully included. Promoted under the benevolent guise of freeing people from illegality
or from the shackles of bondage, “registering” instead provided a mechanism for rendering
manageable populations that could be seen as “freed and not free”. Perhaps this is an
opportunity to test how these historical lessons can be applied; does it makes sense to make
these comparisons here?
“Freed” and unfree
In the history of slavery there are many examples of procedures that required blacks to register
for “free papers” in order to be recognized as freed slaves or non-slaves. It was supposedly
intended to stop the practice of slaves being hired for wages, granting the bearer what today we
would call employment authorization — the right to sell their services for a wage. The Virgina
laws of 1793 required people to re-register for these papers every three years; unregistered
blacks could be jailed as runaway slaves. Is this analogous to today’s RPI, or to the
implementation of a national E-Verify system for employment authorization, which works to
grant some a right to a wage while in effect also being a way to capture and illegalize? In the late
1800′s states such as Pennsylvania required free blacks to register with the authorities upon
arrival in a new town, to register incoming or visiting relatives. etc. So registering was coercive,
under threat of re-capture — rendering conditional the freedom of freed slaves, and their rights
“alienable”. Not having free papers was used to legitimize the continued bondage and
punishment of some, but registering also assured the surveillance and monitoring of all blacks….
and to reinforce blackness as illegality.
When the Chinese Exclusion Act expired, Chinese immigrants residing in the United States
would no longer be legally barred from residency or citizenship rights. Racist anxieties over this
inclusion were expressed in the Geary Bill, which was introduced as a way of differentiating
between authorized and unauthorized Chinese migrants — because, as Senatory Geary
infamously stated, “you can’t tell one Chinaman from another”. All people identified as Chinese
were required to register as the only means to prove their legal status. So even though people had
been legally granted rights, these were not inalienable. The state continued to assume that all
people racially marked in certain ways are illegal unless they could prove otherwise. Nonwhiteness carried with it the burden of proof of legality.
RPI Status Bad – Movements Trade Off
CIR kills real movements for change
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, Citizen as contested and the violence of “inclusion”,
http://inaborderworld.org/2013/05/19/citizen-as-contested-and-the-violence-of-inclusion/)
As Mariame stated, this is not a new story, it is a new form, or a new expression for something
very familiar in the story of “America”. How can organizing around something like this
particular “reform” bill become a moment for taking this into account — for challenging the
myth of citizenship and of inclusion? For stepping outside of the logic of advocacy for special
interest groups (immigrants, or immigrants with degrees in STEM disciplines, or those who
arrive before a certain date, under certain circumstances, or those with certain incomes, or with
no criminal record, or with citizen children, or from certain countries etc etc), but instead a
perspective on migrant justice that is anchored in resisting the exclusionary violence of the myth
of “citizenship”? What does an abolitionist perspective in terms of borders and citizenship look
like? These are broad questions — but this bill is also a specific thing, with specific provisions
that will impact many peoples lives and it is moving fast, very fast. Even if it does not pass, the
rhetoric and hey around it have succeeded in creating a new normal — by floating so many
possible provisions with little to no opposition, the “reform” process has very real consequences
even if the bill does not pass. This is not a time to ask general questions but to put those desires
into practice — to learn by doing. And so far the hype surrounding the bill, and the promise of a
quasi-status that renders some people documented but still not legal (which the dominant forces
in the movement are claiming as a “win”) are starting to feel like pacifying mechanisms, like a
way of preempting these very desires — of cooping and disarming what less than a decade ago
seemed like a powerful movement.
RPI Status Bad – A2: Legalization Good
Even the Senate bill alone is worse than nothing for undocumented in the US
Presente (national organization that exists to amplify the political voice of Latino communities; text of
the card is quoting from a letter signed by a dozen other Latin@ organizations) 13
(MORE THAN 30 LATINO ORGANIZATIONS CALL ON DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS TO REJECT S.744
IMMIGRATION REFORM BILL, July 26, 2013, July 26, http://presente.org/press/releases/2013/7/26/more30-latino-organizations-call-to-reject-S744)
A growing number of Latino leaders and organizations have declared their opposition to Senate
Bill 744, the U.S. Senate’s version of comprehensive immigration reform, which now languishes
in the House of Representatives. This new grouping of national, state, and regional organizations
signed-on to a joint letter and position paper sent to Democratic and Republican federal
legislators. The letter can be seen below.
“The border surge amendment was a deal killer for us and a growing number of advocacy groups
and individuals, which had sought fair and humane immigration reform, not authoritarian
immigration policies in the interior and a militarization of the border with Mexico,” declared
Angela Sanbrano of the National Network of Migrant Leaders and Organizations.
The groups have conducted polling and direct consultation with their constituents and concluded
that they could no longer support the Senate version.
According to Taína Vega, Director of Hermandad Mexicana, the oldest Mexican immigrant
rights organization in the U.S., “after thousands of interviews with our members explaining the
finer details of S.744, we have found extremely high opposition to President Obama’s take on
comprehensive reform, although high hopes for fair reform.” She added, “single female headsof-household will be disqualified due to the annual income requirement of 125% of the federal
poverty guideline.
According to Taína Vega, Director of Hermandad Mexicana, the oldest Mexican immigrant
rights organization in the U.S., “after thousands of interviews with our members explaining the
finer details of S.744, we have found extremely high opposition to President Obama’s take on
comprehensive reform, although high hopes for fair reform.” She added, “single female headsof-household will be disqualified due to the annual income requirement of 125% of the federal
poverty guideline.
“Numerous reputable organizations, and even the Congressional Budget Office have reported
that it is quite probable that less than half of the estimated 11 million undocumented would
qualify for the RPI permit, which doesn’t even constitute legalization or a path to citizenship,
and the remainder would be deported according to S.744,” observed Arturo Carmona, Executive
Director of Presente.org.
“We held out much hope for the “gang of eight’s” compromise legislation, but the disqualifying
hurdles for the Registered Provisional Immigration (RPI) permit would result in mass
deportations and decades long servitude,” explained Carlos Arango, Director of CASA Aztlan
of Chicago, Illinois.
“The guest-worker provisions of S.744 for both skilled professionals and unskilled workers and
for farm-laborers takes the country back a century in the unscrupulous use of contract labor
exceeding the annual numbers used in the infamous Bracero Program during 1942 to 1964,”
stated Professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos of California State University at Long Beach.
Professor Alfonso Gonzalez of CUNY in New York explained that, “It appears that the only
undocumented that would have an easier path to full legal residency are the so-called Dreamers,
youth born elsewhere but brought to the U.S. by their parents, yet we are observing growing
opposition from them to the many obstacles posed under S.744 for their parents and older
siblings.”
Salvador Reza of Tonatierra based in Phoenix, Arizona along with Enrique Morones of Border
Angeles of San Diego, California decried the mounting border deaths resulting from the
increased border militarization over the past fifteen years. “The border surge clause in S.744 will
only exacerbate the current situation,” concluded Reza.
The National Progressive Latino, Immigrant, and Indigenous Organizations have launched a
national campaign to oppose S.744 and advocate for fair and humane immigration reform, which
includes generous legalization provisions, no criminalization of immigrants or militarization of
border communities. These organizations represent long-time on the ground advocates and
organizers for immigrant rights.
TEXT OF LETTER
July 18, 2013
Re: Latino, Immigrant, and Indigenous Peoples Organizations and Leaders Strongly Oppose
S.744
Dear Representative:
We the undersigned representatives of Latino, immigrant, and Indigenous peoples organizations
and communities write to urge you to reject S.744 in its current form. After much reflection, we
have concluded that S.744 does more harm than good to the cause of fair and humane
immigration reform. We expect that the bill will only get worse and even more focused on
“border security-first” as it goes to the House of Representatives. Recent polling findings by
Latino Decisions underscore that Latino voters do not support the border militarization or
ineffective legalization components of S.744.
We marched, we protested, and we voted for real immigration reform. But rather than fulfill the
promise of citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people living in the country, we got
legislation, S.744, which will plunge millions in immigrant and border communities into a
more profound crisis than the one they already face. This flawed legislation begins with the
mistaken and dangerous premise that puts punishment over people and enforcement over
citizenship. S.744 is neither inclusive nor fair. We cannot in good conscience support S.744
without major substantive changes. Our rejection does not condone the defeat of immigration
reform. Rather, it represents the decency and dignity of a community drawing the line against
more punishment of immigrants. These same values will continue to guide our struggle for
humane and just immigration reform in 2013 and beyond.
In practice, S.744 will:
 - Block Registered Provisional Immigrants (RPI) from seeking lawful permanent resident
status or citizenship for decades or forever;
 - Exclude or disqualify, over time, more than 5 million undocumented persons from the
Registered Provisional Immigrant program; Subject Registered Provisional Immigrants to
reprehensible and unacceptable conditions for ten or more years in order to maintain status;
 - Increase discrimination and racial profiling of people of color through nationwide
mandatory E-verify of every worker- citizen and non-citizen- in the country; and
 - Create a virtual police-state and create environmental disasters in the 27 border counties by
militarizing the US- Mexico border including weapons-capable drones, 40,000 guards, and 700
miles of border walls;
Such a proposal does not, in any way, reflect the kind of humane, inclusive, and common sense
values that we envisioned before and since the 2012 elections. We write to ask you to join us in
rejecting this legislation in the name of continuing the fight for real immigration reform.
Illegality better – counter-movements against neoliberalism exist within immigrant
communities now but CIR’s militarization and bureaucracy will destroy them
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, Abolish “papers”? Another look at Registered Provisional Immigrant,
http://inaborderworld.org/2013/06/04/abolish-papers-another-look-at-registered-provisionalimmigrant/)
Migrants, by the millions, are on the move — waiting for no permission, as permission will not
come from the laws of misery — they breach national borders to claim a piece of the wealth that
was accumulated at their expense. Identifying them as “trespassers” is necessary if the state is to
assert its monopoly over the means of movement in the modern world. Deporting 12 million
people is not a realistic goal — not only is it not possible, it is undesirable given that an
underclass of exploitable workers is a condition for the domestic economy. Deportability
remains the condition of migrants today, predicated upon an expanded capacity for punishment
— to register is to manage migration enforcement, to streamline and make it more efficient. It is
about logistics, not justice.
But this is not merely about individual rights — in other words, it is not only that individuals are
increasingly surveilled, monitored, tracked and subjected to risk calculations – preemptively
considered dangerous, preemptively constrained. Over two years ago, when we looked at the rise
of Secure Communities after the age of the mega-raids, MDC wrote the following:
this is also an all-out attack on the communal economies and social structures they immigrants
often crucial in sustaining: neighborhood arrangements that collectivize domestic and
reproductive work, economies of barter and exchange, social and institutional practices of selfgovernance and so on. In other words, all the social arrangements and relations that correspond
to a definition of communities as living systems. These arrangements are a nuisance from the
perspective of logistics management; they are an impediment to efficiency and profit
maximization, as much an obstacle to the total marketization of life as public education and the
few remaining entitlement programs – and equally under attack. (see here)
The state and globalized capital are expressing anxiety over the potential insurgent threat
represented by unmanaged global migration: described in racist undertones as shadow worlds,
dark economies, black markets, these unauthorized movements and forms of presence defy both
the rules of the state and the imperatives of the “legal” economy. They represent a space that has
not been entirely captured within the dominant economies — a space where other logics can and
often do manifest, producing counter-economies at all scales, radical political possibilities and
forms of being that run counter to the dominant order. And all over the world we have seen that
the struggles of migrants offer all of us new possibilities for resistance. Bureaucracy is a way to
manage this threat.
In this bill, the more obvious violence of “securing the border” is paired with the more subtle
violence of bureaucracy: the development of a set of administrative tools that make other
activities (exclusions, punishments, restrictions and forms of diminishment) possible and
enforceable.
A2: Bill Solves Illegality/Structural Violence
CIR would increase structural violence
Feldman 13
(Justin, An Anti-Immigrant Bill Masked as Reform, JUNE 26,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/26/an-anti-immigrant-bill-masked-as-reform/)
On Monday, 67 senators voted for cloture on Hoeven-Corker, a “border security” amendment to
the immigration reform bill. The vote virtually guarantees that immigration reform will pass in
the Senate. At the same time, it also guarantees the bill’s costs to immigrant communities will
far outweigh its benefits.
The refrain that Democrats and their allies have been repeating – that the immigration reform
bill offers a path to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants – is simply a lie. The
Congressional Budget Office estimates that if the bill were to pass, roughly 4 million of the
current 11.5 million undocumented immigrants would be excluded. Their estimate is overly
optimistic, and it’s possible that nearly half of undocumented immigrants would never benefit
from the legalization. But even those who would eventually benefit are in for a long, difficult,
precarious path.
Fifty Arizonas
The reform bill would create a bleak future for millions of undocumented immigrants. To kick
off the post-reform era, ICE would be required to organize a massive deportation campaign,
rounding up 90 percent of all immigrants who overstayed a visa in the previous year. As it
progressed, day-to-day life would become significantly more difficult for undocumented people
than it is currently.
Once all legitimate businesses adopt the E-Verify employment authorization system required
under the proposal, more immigrants would end up in dangerous, unregulated jobs where they
are misclassified as independent contractors for the shadiest of companies. If a worker presented
a fake Social Security number to her boss, she could be imprisoned for five years.
Undocumented immigrants are currently issued driver’s licenses in nine states, but they would
likely lose that privilege under reform. The immigration bill requires that state licenses comply
with the REAL ID Act and other federal regulations restricting identification cards. If a state
does not comply, most of its residents would be forced to obtain a US passport solely for work
authorization purposes. That is more than enough incentive to guarantee states will restrict
driver’s licenses.
There is also the matter of the border. Before the Hoeven-Corker amendment, the bill was set to
infuse an additional $6.5 billion into militarizing the US-Mexico border. But under the
amendment, which is so bad that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer initially expressed support, that
number comes to well over $40 billion. The plan involves doubling the size of the Border Patrol,
completing 700 miles of fencing, and flying more aerial drones over the area. The Border Patrol
would set up more checkpoints in border communities and commit dozens more human rights
abuses each day. Migrants would still cross, but in increasingly remote areas, and more people
would die as a result. If apprehended, border crossers would face between one and 30 years in
prison, depending on their prior criminal and immigration records.
A Raw Deal, Even for Immigrants Who Legalize
Most people who legalize under the reform bill would be granted status as registered provisional
immigrants (RPIs). RPI status would be renewable in six-year increments. But immigrants
earning below the federal poverty line who have also been unemployed for more than 60
consecutive days would lose their legal status. Day laborers, seasonal workers, and many others
would likely face exclusion on this basis. (The Congressional Budget Office presumed that only
a “small percentage” would lose RPI status, leading them to overestimate the number of
immigrants that would be legalized).
To maintain RPI status, workers would be compelled to stay at jobs with abusive conditions so
as not to risk unemployment. Women would be forced to stay married to abusive men so they
could meet the household income requirement. Most immigrants would have to maintain RPI
status for at least 10 years before obtaining green cards. It would be at least 15 years before they
could qualify for most public benefits and at least 10 years before they could receive health
insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. Many would struggle to access health care
and other services over that time.
Fails to legalize and creates massive exploitation
Presente (national organization that exists to amplify the political voice of Latino communities; text of
the card is quoting from a letter signed by a dozen other Latin@ organizations) 13
(MORE THAN 30 LATINO ORGANIZATIONS CALL ON DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS TO REJECT S.744
IMMIGRATION REFORM BILL, July 26, 2013, July 26, http://presente.org/press/releases/2013/7/26/more30-latino-organizations-call-to-reject-S744)
S.744’s Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) program will exclude and/or disqualify over
time 5 million undocumented persons from adjustment of status
With the exceptions of the beneficiaries of the Dream Act and AgJobs programs, S.744’s
legalization provisions fail most of the 11 million undocumented people in the United States.
According to the recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study only 8 of the 11 plus million
undocumented persons in the US will initially achieve RPI status. .
Moreover, a recent analysis by leading immigration attorney and national advocate Peter Schey
of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law (CHRCL), of Senate Bill 744’s
legalization provisions found that (1) for several reasons the entire population of Registered
Provisional Immigrants may never be eligible to apply for permanent resident status or
citizenship, and (2) even if these obstacles are overcome, at least half of the remaining
approximately 8 million undocumented immigrants may never qualify for permanent status (or
citizenship) because of the onerous “continuous employment” and federal poverty guideline
requirements, and the high costs combined with the requirement to pay past taxes. Click here for
a legal and demographic analysis of Senate Bill 744’s Pathway to Legalization and Citizenship
by Schey.
The RPI program will have a disproportionately negative impact on immigrant women who only
have a 60% workforce participation rate according to a recent Migration Policy Institute (MPI)
study.
In the face of these facts, those positing that “11 million will be legalized” are exaggerating.
They do a disservice to both the U.S. public and, more importantly, to the millions of individuals
and families who do not know that they may be among the many excluded by S.744.
S.744’s Continuous employment and 125% of poverty income provisions subject RPI visa
holders to workplace discrimination, exploitation and sexual harassment;
Even those “fortunate enough” to meet the requirements to gain RPI status are at high risk to
become indentured servants locked into overly burdensome continuous employment and
income obligations for at least ten—and perhaps fifteen or more—years given the “backlog/back
of the line” and “border security” trigger provisions.
RPIs will be without health care and are ineligible for federal safety net benefits. They will be
excluded from access to billions of dollars in previously paid social security benefits.
S.744 RPI’s will be denied their most basic power as an employee -- the right to withhold their
labor if an employer abuses, harasses or exploits them. Conversely, employers will be
empowered to engage in unlawful worksite and labor law violations. RPIs who resist employer
abuses risk losing employment for 60 days or more. This puts them at high risk of losing RPI
status and/or becoming ineligible for permanent resident status.
Female RPI card holders will be disproportionately affected. For example, S.744 grants some
housewives “dependent” status; i.e. dependent on their husbands’continuous employment and
their continuous relationship. In practice, “dependents” suffering domestic abuse, including
children, will be significantly discouraged from leaving their homes or reporting abuse to the
authorities.
Notably, the provisions obligating that permanent resident status not be awarded to qualified RPI
card holders upon completion of the multi-year probationary period, unless the border is
“secure” and the backlog of pre- existing visa applications are resolved, create a scenario of
inevitable and unpredictable delays. There will be no objective way to “prove” border security
concerns have been met as S.744 is written, or assurances that resolving 100% of the current visa
back-log can be accomplished in 10 or 20 years, or ever. For example, the current backlog
includes cases more than 20 years old. S.744’s “backlog” and “border security” requirements
guarantee an indeterminate number of years of delay before RPI status holders can even apply
for permanent resident status.
At the same time, S.744 significantly increases judges, courts and the legal mechanisms to detain
and deport those excluded from RPI status or ultimately denied lawful permanent resident status.
Prison-Industrial Complex Module
The expansion of the PIC from CIR alone make it worse than nothing
Chen 13
(Michelle, Bargain on Immigration Would Feed Prison Profits, July 26, 2013,
http://my.firedoglake.com/meeshellchen/2013/07/26/bargain-on-immigration-would-feed-prisonprofits/)
Radical immigrant-rights activists say the Senate’s draconian enforcement provisions far
outweigh any potential benefit of the bill. In Mazón’s view:
Lawmakers and communities should go back to the drawing board and develop a piece of
legislation that will not only help strengthen the U.S. economy, but also strengthen worker
protections, and job growth and job security for immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, and base it
on a human rights framework, instead of a national security framework. That would definitely be
a lot cheaper also than going the prison and policing route.
While popular criticism of the immigration bill mostly reflects irrational right-wing panic over
immigrants “stealing American jobs,” a real danger lurks between the lines: that of expanding an
industry that exploits U.S. workers in order to oppress an arbitrarily defined Other.
The alignment between the prison industry’s interests and the centrist reformers in Congress
betrays the bill’s underlying motive: not to empower migrants or to lift the economic prospects
of U.S. workers, but rather, to adjust the line between “legitimate” and “criminal,” and to let
corporations extract a brutal social toll from those who try to cross.
Prison-Industrial Complex Module Ext.
Chen 13
(Michelle, Bargain on Immigration Would Feed Prison Profits, July 26, 2013,
http://my.firedoglake.com/meeshellchen/2013/07/26/bargain-on-immigration-would-feed-prisonprofits/)
So, while the bill produces new citizens, the “security” measures would produce more prisoners,
conveniently filling tens of thousands of detention beds, many of them run by forprofit contractors on the public’s dime. As Stephen Myrow, managing director of the investment
research firm ACG Analytics, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Immigration
reform will boost revenue at privately operated prisons.”
In other words, ”there is a tremendous incentive [in the Senate bill] for those contractors who
could bid for new prison contracts,” says Alexis Mazón, a researcher with Justice Strategies, a
criminal justice watchdog group. And they aren’t the only beneficiaries, she notes: Developers
and manufacturers of policing and surveillance technologies also stand to gain.
Though the private prison industry has denied lobbying directly for prison reform (although
executives have acknowledged how their businesses stand to profit), the enforcement-heavy
proposals bear the fingerprints of the industry’s longstanding backdoor political influence.
Research by Grassroots Leadership, Detention Watch and various media outlets reveals that
private prisons have spent millions on federal lobbying, and in the last election season
alone, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the coffers of governors, federal candidates
and both political parties.
Overall, the proposed overhaul would pump hundreds of millions of dollars into agencies and
contractors charged with “apprehending and detaining unauthorized residents,” according to
CBO estimates, along with prosecuting and deporting them. Reform, in other words, would
scale-up existing the harsh enforcement trends under the Obama administration. In 2010 alone,
an estimated 392,000 migrants passed through the detention system—more than doubling over
the past decade. Immigration-related convictions have driven up the prison population as a
whole, and the incarceration of Latinos in particular. In 2011, Latinos became the majority of
those placed in federal prison on felony convictions.
Coloniality Link
Inclusion is based on colonial nation building
Borcila (Prof at University of South Flordia) 13
(Rozalinda, Citizen as contested and the violence of “inclusion”,
http://inaborderworld.org/2013/05/19/citizen-as-contested-and-the-violence-of-inclusion/)
As you say, the process of nation-building involves, among many things, a process of exclusion,
of definition through negation. The nation is an imagined, invented concept, as is the citizen: the
body that is supposedly the bearer of “inalienable rights”. This is a relatively recent invention,
but already so normalized that its constructedness is often well concealed. The myth of the
citizen also works to conceal the ways that nation-building means not just citizens and noncitizens, but social categories that are both “citizens” and excluded from citizenship at the same
time. There are many forms of conditional inclusion , or selective inclusion, that are in effect
forms of exclusion. This is part of the process of establishing a social order of racial domination
in the United States, relegating blacks to a category of unequal or excluded citizens.
I think the questions you raise are precisely the ones that are absent from the debate around
“immigrant rights” – namely, the ways in which current immigration practices emerge from,
and express, longstanding practices of exclusion and marginalization of particular groups,
especially (not exclusively) along racial lines; what you call “nation-making along a particular
set of criteria”. The dominant logic within immigrant rights circles is to press for “papers”, any
papers, because presumably each small procedure that conditionally includes some is a small
step on the “path to legalization”. I think I was looking for ways to use the terms of that debate
in order to question some of its underlying assumptions, maybe to estrange the language just
enough to where something that appears normal, given, can once again be revealed as
contestable (as citizenship has been a highly contested category in certain critical traditions, as
you mention, but not as much in the context of immigrant rights in the US). The narrative of
“path to citizenship” i.e. “path to inclusion” is so pervasive, so dominant, there is little room to
ask: how does recognizing only some bodies as bearers of inalienable rights legitimize exposing
all others to forms of diminishment, exploitation and violence? How does the demand of
inclusion reinforce the logic that some lives are worth less?