Rescaling the “Alien,” Rescaling Personhood: Neoliberalism, Immigration, and the State

Abstract

Through an exploration of relevant legislation and court cases, this article discusses the contemporary constitution of neoliberal subjects via the devolution of select immigration powers to state and local governments by the federal government of the United States. Since the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the federal government has had plenary power over immigration, which has enabled it to treat “people as immigrants” (or as “nonpersons” falling outside of many Constitutional protections), simultaneously requiring that states and cities treat “immigrants as people” (or as persons protected by the Constitution). Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, the devolution of welfare policy and immigration policing powers has challenged the scalar constitution of personhood, as state and local governments have newfound powers to discriminate on the basis of alienage, or noncitizen status. In devolving responsibility for certain immigration-related policies to state and local governments, the federal government is participating in the rescaling of membership policy and, by extension, the rescaling of a defining characteristic of the nation-state. This recent rescaling is evidence of the contemporary neoliberalization of membership policy in the United States, and specifically highlights the legal (re)production of scale.

A través de una exploración de la legislación relevante y de casos judiciales, en este artículo se discute la constitución contemporánea de temas neoliberales mediante la devolución de ciertos poderes sobre la inmigración a los gobiernos estatales y locales por parte del gobierno federal de Estados Unidos. Desde las últimas décadas del siglo diecinueve, el gobierno federal ha tenido pleno poder sobre la inmigración, que le ha permitido tratar a las “personas como inmigrantes (o como “seres inexistentes” que son excluidos de muchas de las protecciones constitucionales), requiriendo simultáneamente que los estados y las ciudades traten a los “inmigrantes como personas” (o personas protegidas por la Constitución). Sin embargo, a partir de la mitad de la década de los noventa, la devolución de los poderes de las políticas de bienestar y del control de la inmigración ha desafiado la constitución escalar de la condición de persona, ya que los gobiernos estatales y locales tienen poderes recientemente adquiridos para discriminar en base a condición de extranjería o de no ciudadano. Al devolver la responsabilidad de ciertas políticas relacionadas con la inmigración a los gobiernos estatales y locales, el gobierno federal está participando en la reescalación de la política de afiliación, y por extensión la reescalación de una característica de definición de la nación-estado. Esta reciente reescalación es evidencia de la neoliberación contemporánea de la política de afiliación en Estados Unidos, y recalca específicamente la (re)producción legal de la escala.

Key Words:

• citizenship
• immigration
• neoliberalism
• scale

关键词:

• 公民权
• 移民
• 新自由主义
• 尺度

Palabras claves:

• ciudadanía
• inmigración
• neoliberalismo
• escala

Acknowledgement

I thank the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and Center for U.S.–Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, for a postdoctoral fellowship that provided crucial financial support during the initial conceptualization and drafting of this project in 2005. I also thank Daniel Trudeau and Luisa Veronis for organizing the session “Migrants, Migration, and Neoliberalization” at the Association of American Geographers meeting in 2007, which provided an important opportunity to present this material and receive helpful feedback. Finally, I give my sincere thanks to Madeline Adelman, Evelyn Cruz, Helga Leitner, Joshua Muldavin, Doris Marie Provine, members of the Arizona State University Institute for Humanities Research “Migration and Belonging” research cluster, and two anonymous reviewers, all of whom provided constructive and thoughtful comments at various stages of the project.

Notes

1. According to the Immigrant Policy Project of the National Conference of State Legislatures, in 2005, state legislatures considered approximately 300 immigration or immigrant-related bills and passed approximately fifty. In 2006, state legislatures in forty-three states introduced 570 immigration- and immigrant-related bills, eighty-four of which became law. These numbers expanded even more in 2007, with 1,562 pieces of legislation being introduced in all fifty state legislatures, and 244 becoming law (National Conference of State Legislators 2008).

2. For a discussion of “scale fixes,” see Smith (1995).

3. In 2001, whereas 9,500 Border Patrol agents were stationed along the U.S.–Mexico border (enhanced in 2005 with an additional 6,000 National Guard troops), only 124 agents were assigned to investigate and enforce workplace immigration violations within the United States (Cornelius 2005, 786). As a result, workplace enforcement has plummeted. For example, the number of employer audits (investigations into the legal status of employees) dropped from 10,000 in 1990 to less than 2,200 in 2003. Similarly, the number of warnings given to employers found to be knowingly employing undocumented workers fell from 1,300 in 1990 to 500 in 2003; and the number of fines levied for violations fell from 1,000 in 1991 to 124 in 2003 (Brownell 2005).

4. Although I prefer the term noncitizen and use it when possible, I also use the terms alien and alienage in this article as the U.S. comprehensive immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, is built around these terms and they are still the terms of choice in the legal literature. Even within the immigration law community, however, scholars recognize the exclusionary nature of these terms and express discomfort with their use (Johnson 1996).

5. As implied, there are limited circumstances in which this scalar division of personhood and alienage does not hold. For example, under the “political function exception,” states and local governments are able to treat people as immigrants and discriminate on the basis of alienage when the constitution of their political communities is in question, as “[a]liens are by definition those outside of this community” (Cabell v. Chavez-Salido 1982, 439–40; see also Sugarman v. Dougall 1973).

6. Prior to contemporary devolution, one prominent historical example of state and local involvement in immigration policing came during the Great Depression when more than 400,000 Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest and Midwest (approximately 60 percent of whom were American citizens by birth) were “repatriated” to Mexico by the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and city and county welfare relief agencies (Ngai 2003, 71–73; see also Balderrama and Rodriguez 1995).

7. In this sense, neoliberal membership (and the neoliberal subject) differs from Soysal's (1995) postnational membership thesis as her conception relies on a universal personhood standard that draws strength from the human rights regime and does not engage with the ways in which the nation-state still wields considerable power over its resident, noncitizen subjects (see also Aleinikoff 2002a).

8. For compelling and recent discussions of United States immigration law and policy, see Hing (2004), Johnson (2004), V. C. Romero (2005), Motomura (2006), Zolberg (2006), and Kanstroom (2007).

9. See, for example, the Passenger Cases (1849), Henderson v. Mayor of City of New York (1875), Chy Lung v. Freeman (1875), and the Head Money Cases (1884).

10. See also Harisiades v. Shaughnessy (1952, 588–89): “[A]ny policy toward aliens is vitally and intricately interwoven with contemporaneous policies in regard to the conduct of foreign relations, the war power, and the maintenance of a republican form of government. Such matters are so exclusively entrusted to the political branches of government as to be largely immune from judicial inquiry or interference.”

11. For another historical example of this dynamic, see Terrace v. Thompson (1923), in which the Supreme Court upheld California and Washington state laws prohibiting noncitizens from owning agricultural land on the grounds that these laws fell within the states' police powers to protect the public good. These “alien land laws” mainly targeted Japanese immigrants, who had been declared ineligible for naturalization on racial grounds in Takao Ozawa v. U.S. (1922; Ngai 2003, 37–50).

12. In the year following the passage of the PRWORA, many decried its harsh eligibility standards, and newspapers were full of stories about desperate disabled legal permanent residents who would lose their only lifelines for survival—SSI and food stamps—when the law came into effect, as well as unimaginably tragic stories of noncitizen adults and elders committing suicide, rather than facing the draconian cutbacks (see, for example, Hastings 1998). As a consequence, in 1997, the federal government reinstated SSI benefits for elderly and disabled noncitizens who would have lost their assistance as of September 1998, and more recently (in 2002) restored food stamp eligibility to legal immigrant adults and children regardless of the date they arrived in the United States.

13. For more on local policing practices and immigration, see Lewis and Ramakrishnan (2007).