The Language of Inclusion and Exclusion in Immigration and Integration by Marlou Schrover Willem Schinkel

Author:Marlou Schrover, Willem Schinkel [Marlou Schrover, Willem Schinkel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138953659
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

‘Illegality’ and racial abjection: citizenship’s obscene supplement

Obscenity is constituted not only by acts of concealment but also through gestures of selective exposure. Even as the state produces migrant ‘illegality’ as an obdurate and seemingly incorrigible ‘problem’, these enforcement spectacles nonetheless reaffirm repeatedly that there is indeed a subordinate reserve army of deportable ‘foreign’ labour, always-already within the space of the nation state, readily available for deployment as the inevitably over-employed working poor. Therefore, in a manner that in fact dissimulates state power, the Border Spectacle is also a spectacle of the state’s dutiful, diligent, more or less energetic, but ever-beleaguered ‘response’ to the fetishized image of a ‘crisis’ of border ‘invasion’ or ‘inundation’. The phantasmatic invasiveness, relentlessness and ubiquity of undocumented migration then serve to prefigure and summon forth the ever more intense and expansive irradiation of everyday life by the state.

The corollary discourses of ‘human trafficking’ and ‘migrant smuggling’ even authorize the state to gratuitously fashion itself as a paternalistic (indeed, patriarchal) ‘protection racket’ (Tilly 1985), whereby protection is not merely preserved for its own ‘rightful’ citizens but even for some of its migrant denizens, particularly women who must be rescued from the presumably intrinsic criminal excesses of ‘illegal’ migration itself (Chapkis 2003; Sharma 2003; Aradau 2008; Andrijasevic 2010b; cf. Nyers 2003). Given the sleight of hand by which the gendered discourse of ‘trafficking’ displaces the onus of ‘exploitation’ onto nefarious ‘foreigners’ and the ‘opportunistic’ infrastructure of undocumented migration itself, undocumented migrants are deemed to be in need of ‘protection’ – from one another. Moreover, the pitiful and helpless (feminized) ‘victims’ of migrant ‘smuggling’ serve to further corroborate the image of a shadowy population of docile and infinitely tractable migrant denizens.

In this respect, the scene of exclusion compulsively discloses and thereby exuberantly affirms, yet again, the obscene fact of subordinate inclusion, as if to subtly reveal or expose its own ostensible ‘dirty secret’. Thus, it enhances the efficiency of its own most elementary gesture whereby migrants are figured as a menace, hereby complementing that spectral threat of their opportunistic agency with an allegation of their irredeemable incapacity for veritable (manly) self-determination, and thus, by implication, their incompetence for self-government and democratic citizenship. The exploitation of ‘illegal’ migrants is itself now refigured as merely the certification of what is taken to be their inherent and odious exploitability Their subjugation becomes merely the index of an essential slavishness.

Hence, the politics of citizenship is transposed into an essentialist politics of difference. The unequal and invidious politics of citizenship, which is institutionalized in immigration law, produces migrant ‘illegality’. The Border Spectacle, however, systematically renders that same ‘illegality’ effect to appear as a quasi-intrinsic deficiency of the migrants themselves, who may thereby be presumptively deemed undeserving of citizenship, inherently lacking.

In light of this transposition, every question of migration and border securitization – even if these are overtly differentiated in terms of ‘culture’ or ‘national’ origins – inevitably presents the concomitant question of migrants’ racialization. Contemporary formations of transnational migration are only apprehensible in relation

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