Legal Matters

I sometimes think that I live in a bubble, a rather privileged bubble at that, so it is hard to understand the struggles that so many people go through to try and make better lives for themselves, yet I was reminded of my upper-middle class fog when reading about how immigrant women, in the logic of biopolitics, should be denied prenatal care to discourage them from coming into this country. It appears to be commonplace in right wing thinking to be rigid about laws set up to keep people out, to keep people down, and to keep people in their “place,” using statistics and scare tactics implying that immigrants are the source of our crime, deteriorating schools, deficiencies of social services, etc. (p. 134). But those laws are set up by those who are the dominant culture and they want to keep it that way.

Of the three essays examining immigration and the law, Inda’s was the most compelling because it exposed the ugly nature of exclusionary tactics and the technology of power that Foucault terms “biopower.” The concept of presenting Third World immigrants as a threat to the cultural unity of the nation and likening it to Nazi policies seemed at first a bit extreme to me, but the more I thought about it and read the valid points made by the author, I see how easily the rhetoric of hate and mistrust can bolster a cause of exclusion that is inhuman and can lead to the elimination of a perceived threat--even here in America. As Ina explains, “Biopower thus implies nothing specific about what is to be done with those bodies construed as dangerous. One possibility, of course, is extermination. However, more typical of modern states is the practice of multiplying for some the risk of death or of subjecting dangerous bodies to marginalization, expulsion, and rejection.”(p. 139)

So often the statistics we are presented only show the crimes committed, the garbage left on the immigrant trails, the drug traffickers who are paired with a common laborer, and the drain on our local and state economies, but rarely do we hear of the statistics that show how immigrants contribute to society, whether they came here under legally sanctioned means or not. As a nation of immigrants, we all have family stories of such triumphs over adversity, including many of us going to school and getting our degrees when those in our families before us could or did not. What would it have been like if our own families were denied access to the opportunities we have been afforded? Inda’s article made me more cognizant of an agenda that is far more organized and directed as an agenda of fear and hate than I realized.

Most of us are all products one way or another of some kind of immigration or outside/inside status, and each and every one of us has heart-felt stories of our families and the struggles they underwent to get to this country and to make something of their lives. Why is it that we choose to ignore those statistics and focus on the elements of fear? Inda presents a very clear case of how such points of the argument have steered our legislation. It is not just economics that drives the immigrant flow these days—it is as much a product of generations of families that live on both sides of the border and shared memories and activities of those people who feel a connection to both countries. But economics would be enough to compel people to come here, and that’s the point being made—if a population feels their economic superiority is threatened, they will go to any measure to ensure their hegemony, but they will use every means at their disposal to discredit and reduce the immigrant to nothing more than an invader. Recently, the news reported about how bad the economy was in Europe and that many immigrants were returning to their home country because there were no economic advantages to stay in their adopted country. As the Mexican economy grows and with it more opportunities for its citizens, will be potentially see an exodus out of our country? And what would that do to our economy and our flow of labor? We are at once accepting of a cheap labor source and outraged by the presence of “outsiders” wanting the same services we enjoy. We seem to have a very short cultural memory.
-Julie Sasse