Abolish ICE by Natascha Elena Uhlmann

Author:Natascha Elena Uhlmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781949017229
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2019-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

INVENTING “ILLEGALS”

In her groundbreaking book, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Aviva Chomsky speaks to the social construction of illegality. “The only thing that makes immigrants different from anybody else is the fact that they are denied the basic rights that the rest of us have,” she asserts.60 Anti-immigrant rhetoric maintains a veneer of neutrality by framing its opposition through respect for rule of law. But who is subject to a regime of surveillance and criminalization? As Dr. Chomsky asserts, “Becoming undocumented is a highly racialized crime.”

Dr. Chomsky traces the evolution of the US immigration system from one that openly upheld racial quotas to one that merely enforced them in a more roundabout way. As Michelle Alexander writes, “In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer permissible to hate blacks, but we hate criminals.”61 Building on Alexander’s seminal The New Jim Crow, Chomsky extends this logic of criminalization to immigrants. “Anti-immigrant . . . commentaries,” she notes, “frequently emphasize the legalistic nature of their anti-immigrant sentiment: ‘They broke the law!’ But it’s a law that, in design and in fact, is aimed at one, racially defined, sector of society.”62

I spoke to Aviva about how this racialized system of control is maintained. “If you look at almost any society historically worldwide, there have been arbitrary decisions about who deserves rights and who doesn’t. And those decisions, whether caste or enslavement, they define a certain group of people as inferior or undeserving.”

Before long, Aviva notes, the distinction becomes naturalized and legitimated. Those who benefit from structural oppression feel justified in possessing rights that others lack: “From the outside, if you look back, you can see it’s totally arbitrary. But in our own historical moment, we tend to be blind as to how it’s happening in our own time and place, because it’s been naturalized for us.”

While our immigration system maintains a veneer of colorblindness, in truth the system is heavily stacked against nonwhite migrants. Dr. Chomsky points to a practice of abstract liberalism, perhaps best exemplified by Anatole France’s famous words: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”63

By treating everyone “equally,” our immigration bureaucracy ignores historically constructed inequalities, whether social or economic. “We supposedly treat all countries equally in that every country has a quota. But countries are not all equal, neither in terms of population nor historically. Some countries are really big or tiny; if you grant an equal quota to a big and tiny country, that’s treating the individuals in those two countries differently. European countries are not explicitly privileged, yet our laws do in fact tend to favor immigrants from Europe by treating every country equally,” Chomsky continues.

Jeff Sessions’s zero-tolerance policy of criminal prosecution for all unauthorized border crossings exacerbated these inequities. Immigrants are branded criminals, but it’s an empty, circular logic: they’re criminals because we say they are—because we have criminalized the very act of escaping violence. Obama’s

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.