From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed May 17 2006 - 13:24:53 EDT
Since Mae Ngai is a brilliant historian, she thinks we need a history lesson. But let's get serious about the political context of this immigration scare, though Ngai shows how with the requirements of visas and passports (especially following the national-statism consolidated by the Great War) and the ending of the statute of limitations, the "illegal alien" was invented just as homosexuality and childhood have been invented kinds. Ngai has rightly won many accolades for this most important study of kind making. Jonathan Xavier Inda draws from her work in his Targeting Immigrants. Yet the present 'crisis' is not the result of historical misapprehension! How is the state to legitimize itself if its tax structure is regressive, its public spending a defacto private subsidy and its military strategy failed and catastrophic? The state seeks legitimacy through its assertion of the sovereignty of its borders-- it can thereby claim to protect national citizens from welfare cheats, job stealers and terrorists. Not the domestic ones--not the subsidized and downsizing corporations and the wiretappers and the intolerant thugs who join the Militias and the Minutemen. But the foreign ones Or at least the state must appear to protect us from the non national threats as Joseph Nevins lays out in his important Operation Gatekeeper. So as poll ratings plummet Bush has declared himself the chief commander of the minutemen. Given that our essentially juridical social relations are instrumental, highly conflictual and alienated, the only community we can share is as equal citizens of the sovereign nation state (see Marx On the Jewish Question). Popular sovereignty is thereby alienated in sovereign control over the borders. The border war is a hallucination of popular sovereignty. The deployment of troops and the building of walls are in large part images--part and parcel of the society of spectacle. As social life tears us apart and the state loses the veneer of universality--indeed Nevins' findings suggest that the obsession with border security coincides roughly with the collapse of Keynesianism into stagflation in the mid 1970s--nationalism can still bring us together as abstract citizen subjects; and nationalism is stoked by anti illegal immigrant sentiment (which redounds on even those who are legal residents or citizens by naturalization or birth). Of course the call for the border patrol is grand-standing though the resulting deaths will be real. But once the mainstream parties hail the right wing thugs such as the minutemen to ride out the wave of popular discontent, they will have given the state's legitimacy to violent forces that they will not be able to control. To secure rule Bush has called on the evangelists and racist thugs. We will thus have to contend with them for some to come. Our political life has been poisoned. The new border war is not in capital's direct interest but it is in the interest of stabilizing alienated commodity relations through the creation of national unity. James O Connor may say that accumulation is sacrificed for legitimacy. Rakesh
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed May 31 2006 - 00:00:03 EDT