Borders Affirmative and Negative - Gonzaga 2013

Borders 1ac
We begin with the story of Prudenica Martin Gomez, who

died while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.
Doty, Associate Professor School of Politics & Global
Studies, 11
[Roxanne Lynn, Published April 12, 2011. Bare life: border-crossing deaths
and spaces of moral alibi. Page 601-602.
http://www.envplan.com/openaccess/d3110.pdf. RH]
On Friday, 6 July 2007, volunteers with two local humanitarian
groups in Tucson, Arizona, Humane Borders and Samaritans, went in
search of Prudencia Martin Gomez, age 18 from Guatemala. She was
headed to Oakland, California, to join her boyfriend/fiance and had been
missing since 11 June in the Ironwood National Forest, a 129 000-acre
expanse of land, in the Sonoran Desert 25 miles northwest of Tucson.
There are no facilities in the Ironwood National Forest, and visitors
are warned of the hazards of the extreme heat. Human beings simply
cannot survive in this part of the southwestern deserts for as long as
Prudencia had been missing, so there was no pretense that they would
find her alive, and they did not. The official location of her body was
recorded as GPS: N32 0 25.455/W1110307.80 (Arizona Daily Star 2010).
Prudencia had fallen ill and had been unable to continue. Her fellow
travelers left her with water, but it was not enough. She was only a mile
south of a Humane Borders' water station, but a mile can be a very
long way in the desert, in the month of June, when one has already
walked a long distance. Authorities determined that Prudencia had died on
15 June. The recorded high temperature on that day was 115F.
Prudencia was a contemporary version of what Agamben (1998)
refers to as bare life, life that can be taken without apology,
classified as neither homicide nor sacrifice. She was US border policy
stripped to its essence. And hers, tragically, is not an isolated example. In
2004 Mario Alberto Diaz, 6 feet tall with a black belt in karate and
working on a masters degree in biology crossed the border near
Sasabe, Arizona. His body was discovered twenty days later in a
creek in the foothills of the Sierrita Mountains (Bourdeaux, 2004). In
the summer of 2005 the Pima County medical examiner in Tucson,
Arizona, had to rent a refrigerated tractor-trailer to store the bodies
of migrants due to the record number of deaths that year (Arizona
Republic 2005). The deadly trend continues. Even as apprehensions
have steadily declined, deaths continue to rise (McCombs, 2009).(6)
The migrant death count for fiscal year 2009 is the third highest since 1998.
In the fifteen-year period since ``prevention through deterrence''
was first introduced approximately 5000 migrants have died, though
near universal agreement exists that estimates of migrant deaths
are undercounts and the actual number is likely much higher
(Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, 2007). When they debated, formulated,
and put into effect the various border control operations collectively known as
prevention through deterrence, policy makers likely had never heard of
GPS: N32 025.455/W1110307.80 or the Ironwood National Forest or
the Sierrita mountains or the many other locations at which migrant
bodies have been, and continue to be, found. However, it is arguably
inconceivable that they did not know of the harsh conditions to
which migrants would be subjected under this border strategy. The
Border Patrol's own blueprint for one of the early and well-known
manifestations of the new operations, Operation Gatekeeper, noted
that it would channel migrants to locations where ``the days are
blazing hot and nights freezing cold''.(7) In this section I argue that the
prevention through deterrence border control strategies exemplify
Foucault's theoretical writings on how biopower, sovereign power,
and racism can be articulated with one another thus to function in
concert. While biopolitics, as formulated by Foucault, is generally
understood as being concerned with the governance and regulation of a
population in matters such as health and sexuality, it is also consistent
with what Agamben refers to as bare life. For Foucault the emergence of
the ``problem of the population'' coincided with the development of an art of
government wherein the main concerns of government were on the wealth,
longevity, health, and sexuality of the population, giving rise to the notion of
biopower as ``making life live'' (Foucault, 1991). Through regulations in
these matters, subjects become entangled in the practices of
statecraft. Agamben has critiqued what he calls Foucault's ``progressive
disqualification of death'' (ie the circumscription of the issue of death to
discussions of classical sovereign power), offering a conceptualization of
biopower which focuses on the ways in which sovereign power
produces a radical exposure abandoning subjects, stripping their
identities to that of bare life, and thereby creating spaces of
exception or a ``juridical void'' which permits abuses and killings
without punishment.(8) While Agamben's theorizations of biopower and its
relation to bare life are invaluable for understanding how modern power
works, he arguably draws a bit of a strawman when it comes to Foucault. In
Society Must be Defended, Foucault poses the following question. How can
biopower, whose function is to improve life and prolong its duration, kill?
``How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a
political system centered upon biopower? '' (2003, page 254). His definition
of `killing' is not ``simply murder as such, but also every form of
indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing
the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death,
expulsion, rejections, and so on'' (page 256). Clearly Foucault recognizes
that biopower does not preclude the taking of life. He responds to his own
question by turning to race, suggesting that race performs two functions:
(1) it introduces a break in the domain of life under power's control
between what must live and what must die thus fragmenting the
field of the biological that power controls, and (2) it establishes a
relationship between life and death. `Ìf you want to live, you must
take lives, you must be able to kill'' (2003, pages 254 ^ 255).
Death and suffering on the border is increasing with each

passing daythe government formulates border security
in ways that funnel migrants into the harshest conditions
of nature and most dangerous passageways into the US.
Thousands of deaths can be attributed to US border
security.
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law
and Chicana/o Studies, Opening the Floodgates, New York University
Publication)
As of March 2006, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
attributed more than 3,000 deaths to a single southern California
border operation known as Operation Gatekeeper.97 Numerous other
operations have been put into place in the U.S.-Mexico border region. All
have had similar deadly impacts. Despite the death toll, the U.S.
government continues to pursue enforcement operations with great
vigor. Indeed, Congress consistently enacts proposals designed to bolster
border enforcement, with such proposals often representing the only items of
political consensus when it comes to immigration reform. Operation
Gatekeeper demonstrates the U.S. governments callous indifference
to the human suffering caused by its aggressive border
enforcement policy. In the words of one informed commentator, [t]he real
tragedy of [Operation] Gatekeeper . . . is the direct link . . . to the staggering
rise in the number of deaths among border crossers. [The U.S.
government] has forced these crossers to attempt entry in areas
plagued by extreme weather conditions and rugged terrain that
[the U.S. government] knows to present mortal danger.98 In
planning Operation Gatekeeper, the U.S. government knew that its strategy
would risk many lives but proceeded nonetheless. As another observer
concludes, Operation Gatekeeper, as an enforcement immigration policy
financed and politically supported by the U.S. government, flagrantly
violates international human rights because this policy was
deliberately formulated to maximize the physical risks of Mexican
migrant workers, thereby ensuring that hundreds of them would
die. 99 Apparently, the government rationalized the deaths of
migrants as collateral damage in the war on illegal immigration.
Even before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a reputation for committing
human rights abuses against immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican
ancestry.100 Created to police the U.S.-Mexican border, the Border Patrol
has historically been plagued by reports of brutality, shootings,
beatings, and killings .101 Amnesty International, American Friends
Service Committee, and Human Rights Watch have all issued reports
documenting recent human rights abuses by the Border Patrol.102
Furthermore, the politics of border crossing and border

security are thoroughly steeped in biopoliticsthe border
manages the distinction between desirable and
undesirable life and delineates the contours of bare life.
Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at
the University of London, 2004 (Joanna, The Universal Acts: Judith
Butler and the biopolitics of immigration, Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 526) MM
Performativity of the public sphere: The issue of asylum seekers lies at
the very heart of the broader issue concerning the constitution of
the public sphere . For Butler democratic participation in the public
sphere is enabled by the preservation of its boundaries, and by the
simultaneous establishment of its constitutive outside. She argues
that in contemporary Western democracies numerous singular lives are
being barred from the life of the legitimate community , in which
standards of recognition allow one access to the category of the
human. In order to develop a set of norms intended to regulate the state
organism, biopolitics needs to establish a certain exclusion from these
norms, to protect the constitution of the polis and distinguish it from
what does not properly belong to it. The biopolitics of immigration looks
after the bodies of the host community and protects it against parasites
that might want to invade it, but it needs to equip itself with tools
that will allow it to trace, detect and eliminate these parasites.
Technology is mobilized to probe and scan the bare life of those wanting to
penetrate the healthy body politic: through the use of fingerprinting, iris
recognition and scanners in lorries travelling, for example, across the
English Channel, the presence and legitimacy of asylum seekers can be
determined and fixed.4 The bio-politics of immigration is thus
performative in the sense of the term used by Butler; through the probing of
human bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate
members of the community is established. This process depends on a
truth regime already in place, a regime that classifies some bodies as
genuine and others (be it emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in
lorries in which they have been smuggled to the West, or confined to the
leaky Tampa ship hopelessly hovering off the shores of Australia) as bogus.
The bare life of the host community thus needs to be properly
managed and regulated , with its unmanageable aspects placed in what
Agamben (1998) calls a relation of exception. But the question that
remains occluded in these processes of life management is [w]hich
bodies come to matter - and why? (Butler 1993, p. xii).
This border biopolitics results in several impacts: the first

is that border manage is a murderous enterprise that
results in political death, exclusion, and a loss of value to
life.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative
Industries at Kings College London. 2005 [Btihaj, 2005
Surveillance and Biopolitics, Electronic Journal of Sociology. RH]

Embedded within this biopolitical overdetermination is a murderous
enterprise. Murderous not insofar as it involves extermination (although this
might still be the case) but inasmuch as it exerts a biopower that
exposes someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some
people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so
on (Foucault 2003 [1976]: 256), and inasmuch as it is based on a certain
occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence (Zylinska,
2004: 530); a symbolic violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of
naming as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida argue asylum seekers,
detainees, deportees, illegal immigrants, etc) as well as a material
one (for example, placing asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in
detention centres), attesting to that epistemic impulse to
resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and the residual of
disciplinary powers that seek to eliminate and ostracise the
unwanted-other through the insidious refashioning of the final
solution for the asylum and immigration question. Such an image
has been captured by Braidotti (1994: 20): Once, landing at Paris
International Airport, I saw all of these in between areas occupied by
immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had arrived,
but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious transit zones,
waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of the new European Community will
scrutinize them and not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the
margins and non-belonging can be hell. The biopolitics of borders
stands as the quintessential domain for this kind of 11 sorting, this
kind of racism pervading Western socio-political imaginary and
permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial sovereignty
despite its monolithic use of euphemism. It is precisely this task of
sorting and this act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border
security and surveillance are designed making the management of
misery and misfortune a potentially profitable activity (Rose, 1999:
260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism
(Coward, 1999: 18) where control and security are resting upon vast
investments in new information and communications technologies in
order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate, the infiltration and
riskiness of the unwanted. For instance, in chapter six of the White
Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven (2002), the UK government outlines a
host of techniques and strategies aimed at controlling borders and tightening
security including the use of Gamma X-ray scanners, heartbeat sensors, and
millimetric wave imaging to detect humans smuggled in vehicles.
We internalize border-thinkingthe disciplinary capacities

of border security reach into the very core of human
being and reduce life to mere calculability.
Subtle, internalised, and smooth (but not all too smooth) as it is,
(post)panoptical surveillance induces a certain conscious relation to
the self and organises the criteria for inclusion and exclusion (Rose,
1999: 243). Borders are thus the spatio-temporal zone par excellence
where surveillance gives substance to the working of biopolitics and
the manifestation of biopower. In this case mobility itself becomes
intrinsically linked to processes of the sorting of individualised citizens from
massified aliens. We can almost forgive theorists such as Bauman (1998, in
Boyne, 2000: 286) for wanting to articulate a dichotomous logic that hinges
on the notion of border, for, at times and at least with regard to circulation
(that is, the circulation of people, for as far as commodities and capital
are concerned, their free movement is encouraged and sustained by the
global capitalist machine), the world seems to be divided into two.
Those who have European/American/Australian/Canadian passports
and those who do not. We all know all too well what difference this
makes in terms of border crossing. Nevertheless, such conceptualisation
misses the point that borders are not merely that which is erected at
the edges of territorial partitioning and spatial particularity, but
more so borders are ubiquitous (Balibar, 2002: 84) and infinitely
actualised within mundane processes of internal administration
and bureaucratic organization 1 blurring the dualistic logic of the
inside and the outside on which Western sovereignty is calibrated.
The point is that in addition to this crude dual division within the global world
order there are further divisions, further segmentations, a
hypersegmentation (Hardt, 1998: 33) at the heart of that monolithic
(Western) half which functions by means of excluding the alreadyexcluded on the one hand and incorporating the already-included
and the waiting-to-be-included excluded on the other. This is done
more or less dialectically, more or less perversely, including and
excluding concurrently through a principle of activity (Rose, 1999:
240) and interwoven circuits of security. Surveillance is the enduring
of exclusion for some and the performance of inclusion for others to
the point where it becomes almost impossible to demonstrate ones
inclusion without having to go through the labyrinth of security
controls and identity validation, intensified mainly, but not solely, at
the borders. It is in similar contexts that Balibar (2002: 81) invokes the
notion of world apartheid in which the dual regime of circulation is creating
different phenomenological experiences for different people through the
polysemic nature (Balibar, 2002: 81) of borders. For as we have discussed,
borders are not merely territorial dividers but spatial zones of
surveillance designed to establish an international class
differentiation and deploy instruments of discrimination and triage
(Balibar, 2002: 82) whereby the rich asserts a surplus of right (Balibar,
2002: 83) and the poor continue to exercise the Sisyphean activity of
circulating upwards and downwards until the border becomes
his/her place of dwelling (Kachra, 2005: 123) or until s/he becomes
the border itself. Sadly, to be a border is to live a life which is a
waiting-to-live, a non-life (Balibar, 2002: 83). The biopolitics of
borders is precisely the management of that waiting-to-live, the
management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those
who are forcibly placed in detention centres), and at times, it is the
management of death. The death of thousand of refugees and
clandestine migrants drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait of
Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the worlds largest mass grave),
asphyxiated in trucks (as was the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants who died in
2000 inside an airtight truck at the port of Dover), crushed under trains (the
case of the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in the US-Mexican
border for example). It is the management of bodies that do not
matter. It is the management of the bodies of those to whom the status of
the homo sacer (Agamben, 1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management
of those whose death has fallen into the abyss of insignificance and
whose killing is not sacrificial (except to the few). On the other hand,
the biopolitics of borders is also the management of life; the life of
those who are capable of performing responsible self-government
(Rose, 1999: 259) and self-surveillance i.e. those who can demonstrate
their legitimacy through worthy computer-readable passports/ID
cards that provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing
of identity and citizenship at the border.
The fulcrum of biopolitics at the border is racism.

Milchman and Rosenberg 2005 [Alan & Alan, Michel Foucault:
Crises and Problemizations, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]

Society Must Be Defendedculminates in Foucaults chilling account of a
tendency immanent to bio-politics, a tendency to what he has
elsewhere designated as Athanato-politics, and its basis in what he
here terms state racism. The question that Foucault raises in his final
lecture in this course, is how can mass murder and extermination
become instantiated in a regime of biopower: If it is true that the
power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that
disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will
the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this
technology of power, which takes life as both its object and its
objective? ... How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political
power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order
to kill ... ? Given that this powers objective is essentially to make
live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of
death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? (p.
254) For Foucault, it is here that racism, which, indeed, has a long history,
intervenes, and now becomes inscribed in the basic mechanisms of
the modern state. According to Foucault: broadly speaking, racism
justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing
to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically
stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population,

insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. The
specificity of modern racism is not bound up with mentalities,
ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of
power, with the technology of power. We are dealing with a mechanism
that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the workings
of a state that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and
the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The
juxtaposition of - the way biopower functions through - the old
sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the
introduction and activation of racism. And it is, I think, here that we
find the actual roots of racism (p. 258). State racism then emerges,
when in a regime of biopower, internal or external threats lead the
state to engage in mass death: Once the State functions in the
biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of
the State (p. 256).
Racism outweighs all other impacts

Joseph Barndt, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White
America, 1991, p. 155-56
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences and
limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all,
people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as
the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate
from each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving
the human potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on
people of color by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are
cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects of uncontrolled power,
privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison will
inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that the walls of
racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate,
but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick,
stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural
racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the
efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all,
the walls of racism. The danger of self-destruction seems to be
drawing ever more near. The results of centuries of national and
worldwide conquest and colonization, of military buildups and
violent aggression, of overconsumption and environmental
destruction may be reaching the point of no return. A small and
predominantly white minority of global population derives its power
and privilege from sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color.
For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to
continue.
Furthermore, biopolitics culminates in genocide.

Smith 11 (Robert, Endgame Nearing an End: The Production of Bare Life
under the U.S. Deportation Regime, pg. 9, BW)
Agamben writes that the sovereign nomos is the principle that joins
law and violence to establish the territorial of order. The sovereign
occupies the point indistinction between violence and law. In The Production
of Space, Henri Lefebvre wrote that sovereignty demarcates a space
established and constituted by violence. This violence cannot be
separated from a principle of unification that subordinates all social
practices. Through its monopolization of violence the state claims to
create a space where society is perfected for all, though in fact it is
the interests of a minority class that are enforced. The Westphalian
state system, held as a defining element of modernity, established the
principle of territorial sovereignty in international law. Galina
Cornelisse defines the concept of territoriality as the founding of
political authority on demarcated territory (Cornelisse 2010). Though
the idea of universal human rights emerged after 1945, these rights
became inextricably tied to national citizenship and hence state
sovereignty. It is this sovereignty that finds itself under attack by
globalization, the free movement of labor across borders. Under
globalization, the State must fight irrelevancy by reconstituting itself
through the production of bare life. This is why, according to Schinkel,
deportation and detention are not shortcomings of the state under
globalization but its fulfillment (Schinkel 2009). According to Foucault,
another decisive event of modernity was the inclusion of bare life in
the political realm as a subject. The focus on this bare life as an object of
the calculations of state power is the practice known as biopolitics, which
finds its ultimate expression in the camp. Agamben understands this
causal chain as crucial to addressing modern democratic states
contradictions. The most horrific events of the 20th century, especially
Nazism and the death camps, can be traced to this stumbling block
of Western democracy: that it seeks to bring about peoples
happiness in the realm of bare life, which tragically brings
democracy into collusion with totalitarianism. The camp is thus the
nomos of the political space in which we live, leading Agamben to the
disturbing conclusion that the state of exception has become the rule, and in
truth we are all homo sacer. The absolute biopolitical space of the
camp, which establishes the political space of modernity (Schinkel 2010:
8), is topologically different from the prison because the prison is
securely embedded in the juridical realm, while the camp is the
space of the exception which makes the juridical realm possible. As
the localization of the state of exception where sovereign power confronts
bios, bare life, without mediation, the camp is a realm of
experimentation, exercise and symbolic reproduction of the violence
of sovereign power that also sends an ambiguous, threatening message
to the outside world (Minca 2005). We shall see below how these concepts
are tangibly realized in the deportation regime of the United States.
Thus the plan: the United States federal government

should open its border toward the United Mexican States.
Opening the border gives up on the notion that we, as a
nation, are in control of who we are. This refusal is the
core of redefining our relationship to biopolitics.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, Immigration Interrupted, Journal for Cultural
Research, 10.3]
Although it is often argued that Levinas as well as Derridas
unconditional hospitability cannot be unproblematically (or even possibly)
translated into a political action (Metselaar 2003, p. 9) insofar as it is merely
articulated at the level of the dual self-Other relationship rather than sociality
as a whole (this being particularly true of Levinasian ethics), their vision is,
nonetheless, salient in terms of provoking a radical transformation in
social and political imaginaries and invoking the exigency of a
politics of generosity that would foster rather than close off
different ways of being (Diprose 2002, p. 172). Such politics will not
proceed from a hermeneutics of depth (Rose 1999, p. 196) in which
subjectivity is wrought around self-containment, self-sufficiency and
self-determinacy, presented as a project to be accomplished.
Instead, it might find its point of departure in the potential
encounter with the other and the total exposure to embodied
alterity. For it is the experience of encountering and being-exposedto that infuses the crisis into the hyphen at the heart of the nationstate (Coward 1999, p. 12) and undoes any immanentist attempt to
essentialise identity, commonality and belonging. Whilst it is unclear
as to how such an ethico-political vision may be put into practice
(perhaps this not-knowing-how would save this alternative vision from being
turned into yet another figure of immanentism), it may be that the
rejection, transgression and obliteration of immigration controls are
to be regarded as the touchstone of this radical ethico-politics and
an epitome of the necessary shift from politics of borders to politics
of singularities where No One Is Illegal (Cohen 2003).
In a world of biopolitics, our aff is a radical ethical act.

The only ethical question in the context of politics
dominated by the Camp is how we can acknowledge and
reconfigure our relationship to the Other.
Butler and the biopolitics of immigration, Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 533-35)
MM
The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and
prospective guests - even, or perhaps especially , unwanted ones - is,
according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always
about answering for a dwelling place , for ones identity, ones

space, ones limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth,
family, home (Derrida 2000, pp. 149/151, emphasis added). Of course, this
absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming

or even impossible. But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is
always suspended between this unconditional hyperbolic order of the
demand to answer for my place under the sun and open to the alterity
of the other that precedes me, and the conditional order of ethnos, of
singular customs, norms, rules, places and political acts. If we see ethics as
situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer why
we always remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond
to it, or, in fact, why we will be responding to it no matter what. Even if we
respond nonethically to our guest by imposing on him a norm or political
legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in
the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended period
of time, send him back, cut off his benefits or place him in a
detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical call. In this
sense, our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction , which does not
of course mean that we will respond ethically to it (by offering him unlimited
hospitality or welcome). However, and here lies the paradox, we will respond
ethically to it (in the sense that the injunction coming from the other will
make us take a stand, even if we choose to do nothing whatsoever and
pretend that we may carry on as if nothing has happened). The ethics of
bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws
and acts of the polis and delineating some new forms of political
identification and belonging . Indeed, in their respective readings of
Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law towards
the foreigner that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can
be altered but also that we can think community and kinship otherwise. If
traditional hospitality is based on what Derrida calls a conjugal model,
paternal and phallocentric, in which [i]ts the familial despot, the father, the
spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of
hospitality (2000, p. 149), openness towards the alien and the foreign
changes the very nature of the polis , with its Oedipal kinship structures and
gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due to new family affiliations
developed by queer communities but also as a result of developments in
genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of national identity
and kinship that protects state boundaries against the influx of asylum
seekers is to be left wanting. This is not necessarily to advise a
carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all
passports and opening all borders (although such actions should at
least be considered ), but to point to the possibility of resignifying
these laws through their (improper) reiteration. Enacted by political
subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of tension with the
normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie
these laws, the laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the
idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf. Butler 1993, p. 231).It is precisely
Butlers account of corporeality and matter, of political subjectivity and
kinship, which makes Levinas ethics (and Derridas reworking of it)
particularly relevant to this project. Although the concepts of the body and
materiality are not absent from Levinas writings - indeed, he was one of the
first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot - Butler

allows us to redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter and question
the mechanisms of their constitution. Her others are not limited to the
stranger, the orphan and the widow of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the
more acceptable others who evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also
the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the drag queen / people whose bodies
and relationships violate traditional gender and kinship structures - that
matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of
universalization, Butler mobilizes us against naturalizing exclusion
from the democratic polis and thus creates an opportunity for its
radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not
thus amount to waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum
seeker to knock, and extending a helping hand to him or her. It also
involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my life to the
extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a
stranger in the skin of my own home.
We control all the internal links to their policy and

framework impacts as long as the paradigm of modern
politics is biopolitics, the aff is the only way to overcome
the demonic nature of the management of life.
Dean, 04 professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle (Mitchell,
Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death, Contretemps 5, December
2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/ 5december2004/dean.pdf)//HK)
Fourth thesis: Bio-politics captures life stripped naked (or the zo that
was the exception of sovereign power) and makes it a matter of political life
(bios). Today, we seek the good life though the extension of the powers over
bare life to the point at which they become indistinguishable. In this
formulation, the emergence of a government over life in the
eighteenth century does mark a rupture in forms of rule, which the
search for an originary structure of sovereignty cannot capture. For
Foucault, the nature of this rupture is the displacement, articulation or reinscription of sovereignty within a peculiarly modern form of politics, biopolitics. However, this capture of the government of the state by bio-powers
is already present in the structure of sovereignty. It would be a mistake, in
this sense, to view Agambens quest for the structure of sovereignty, with its
multiple thresholds, as ahistorical, that is, as insensitive to temporal
thresholds. His thesis offers a kind of history of modernity. Here, the
demonic character of modern states lies in the possibility that the
thresholds that maintained bare life as a state of exception are
breaking down. Zo is entering into a sphere of indistinction with bios in
modern politics. For Agamben the paradigm of modern politicsthe new
Nomosis not the liberal governing of freedom, but the
concentration camp. The camp is the material form of the
stabilization of the state of exception, the excluded inclusion, both
inside and outside modern political and legal ordering. Because the camp is
established by law as a space of exception, it is subject to no order
itself, only direct police command. It is thus a space of ordered
disorder in which bare life enters into a zone of indistinction with
legal order. While such views may appear to lead to a kind of radical
condemnation of many instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to
develop humane processing procedures for asylum seekers, the idea of
mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of analysis and
spheres of contestation rather than a site of dogmatic rejection. We have
become used to a style of criticism in which liberal notions of the
individual citizen have been revealed to be constituted through a
series of exclusions (of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane, the
poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5, December
2004 28 bio-power today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to
disability, criminality and insanity. The inclusion of women through their state
of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting questions concerning
sovereign violence given womens historic biological relationship to the
reproduction and care of human life. This relationship, itself excepted under
the universality of law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required
to take responsibility for sovereign decisions. If we are to take Agamben
seriously, this desire for inclusion may have the effect not simply of
widening the sphere of the rule of law but also of hastening the point at
which the sovereign exception enters into a zone of indistinction
with the rule. Our societies would then have become truly demonic,
not because of the re-inscription of sovereignty within bio-politics, but
because bare life which constituted the sovereign exception begins
to enter a zone of indistinction with our moral and political life and
with the fundamental presuppositions of political community. In the
achievement of inclusion in the name of universal human rights, all human
life is stripped naked and becomes sacred. Perhaps in a very real sense we
are all homo sacer. Perhaps what we have been in danger of missing is the
way in which the sovereign violence that constitutes the exception of
bare lifethat which can be killed without committing homicideis today
entering into the very core of modern politics, ethics, and systems of
justice.
Borders Affirmative Core
Border Conditions Inherency
Migrant Conditions Bad

The mobility regime creates a social division, segregating
those that seem suspicious into prisons, ghettos, and
quarantines- sometimes detaining them indefinitely on
nothing more than a suspicion of a threat.
Shamir 05 (Ronen, Professor of Sociology at Tel-Aviv University, 2005
Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime, Sociological

Theory 23.2 http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?
sid=a38a1096-53e7-4f5d-8fb2-678c41fae19b
%40sessionmgr10&vid=4&hid=26)
The mobility regime also operates within the perimeters of
privileged localities, countries, and economic and political blocs. It is
useful to distinguish between those elementary forms that work
through the prevention of exit (e.g., prisons) and those elementary
forms that work through the prevention of entry (e.g., gated
communities). While these two forms of social isolation address and
manage different social strata, and while they operate on the basis of almost
diametrically opposite logics, they may be sociologically located along a
continuum of practices designed to consolidate a mobility regime in
general and to strategically distance suspect social elements in
particular. Indeed, while there are strong sociological reasons not to
collapse such distinct phenomena as prisons and gated communities into a
single category, there are also other sociological reasons to treat them both
as products of distinct strategies of group power; in the former case, the
power of dominant groups to stigmatize, isolate, and immobilize suspect
groups by controlling their exit rights, and in the latter case, the power of
dominant groups to isolate themselves from suspect groups by controlling
their rights of entry into certain designated social spaces. Specifically, we
may thus see the integrated risk-management system of the mobility
regime as predicated upon two pillars: segregating suspect social
elements in prisons, urban ghettoes, and quarantines on the one
hand, and sheltering privileged groups in gated communities,
secured work places, and guarded shopping malls on the other
(Davis 1990). In this section, the concept of quarantines refers to multiple
forms of containment and imprisonment. Quarantine, in general, operates by
identifying and distancing people perceived as dangerous by subjecting them
to particular treatment protocols. Foucault (1980)while not specifically
discussing a mobility regimetheorized the development of modern
governance in relation to various forms of quarantine. Medieval cities, wrote
Foucault, already relied on two types of measures to deal with perceived
threats such as leprosy and plague: exclusion and quarantine (Curtis 2002).
Urban authorities in later times, pressured by the bourgeoisie, dealt
with the politicosanitary menace by perfecting the instrument of
quarantine. Yet what started as urban politics of health later
converged with other forms of containment to become an important

element of modern governmentality (Foucault 1991, 1980). Also on
the privileged side of border fences, the mobility regime still relies on
the old methods of using prisons, penitentiaries, detention camps,
and a host of other types of quarantines to isolate social elements
perceived to be dangerous. With the worlds largest prison population, the
United States imprisons at a far greater rate than both rich and many
impoverished and authoritarian countries. On a per capita basis, the United
States has three times more prisoners than Iran, four times more than Poland,
five times more than Tanzania, and seven times more than Germany 12
(Garland 2001; Wacquant 2001). Affirming a no-compromise approach
to jailing, as well as a conceptual fusion between immigration and
terrorism, the U.S. Department of Justice also announced that
undocumented immigrants could be detained indefinitely, without
bond, if the government provided evidence that their release might
threaten national security.
In order to counteract the deportation efforts of the

states they live in, migrants destroy their identity
documents, essentially rendering themselves without any
rights. The migrants live bare lives and suffer from
inhumane acts of violence.
Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia,

Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception, p 12,
http://aei.pitt.edu/33054/1/ellermann._antje.pdf)
As liberal states have stepped up their deportation efforts, migrants ,
in particular unsuccessful asylum seekers, have sought to escape the
states reach by destroying or hiding their identity documents. This
act of resistance is far from exceptional. While the following figures and
illustrations all refer to immigration enforcement in Germany, they
could easily apply to control contexts elsewhere in the advanced
democratic world. German interior officials estimate that, in the mid1980s, immigration authorities had to obtain travel documents for
about 30 to 40 percent of all asylum seekers. By the year 2000, the
population of undocumented asylum applicants is estimated to have
increased to 85 percent (Bhling 2001). The dilemma that an unknown
identity poses to the state is aptly captured by a deportation officers
account of the resistance strategies of illegal migrants: People have
started to realize, if they dont know who I am, they cant touch me.1
What is important to note is that homo sacers ability to render
herself unidentifiable is ultimately contingent on bare life. The lives
of illegal migrants and refugees in many ways exemplify the
condition of rightlessness that marks bare life. The territorialization
of life means that the refugee is put in a position where she lacks
apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid

workers or the police. The refugee is outside the law. Levels of
innuendo and violence unthinkable to regular human beings,
citizens, are regularly perpetrated against the refugee or asylum
seeker. The refugee as homo sacer describes the condition of exclusion
that those exempt from the normal sovereignty are subject to.
(Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004, 41)
Government border operations have empirically been

strategized to increase human suffering and death tolls
and strips crossers of their human rights
Publication)
As of March 2006, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation

attributed more than 3,000 deaths to a single southern California
border operation known as Operation Gatekeeper.97 Numerous other
operations have been put into place in the U.S.-Mexico border region. All
have had similar deadly impacts. Despite the death toll, the U.S.
government continues to pursue enforcement operations with great
vigor. Indeed, Congress consistently enacts proposals designed to bolster
border enforcement, with such proposals often representing the only items of
political consensus when it comes to immigration reform. Operation
Gatekeeper demonstrates the U.S. governments callous indifference
to the human suffering caused by its aggressive border
enforcement policy. In the words of one informed commentator, [t]he real
tragedy of [Operation] Gatekeeper . . . is the direct link . . . to the staggering
rise in the number of deaths among border crossers. [The U.S.
government] has forced these crossers to attempt entry in areas
plagued by extreme weather conditions and rugged terrain that
[the U.S. government] knows to present mortal danger.98 In
planning Operation Gatekeeper, the U.S. government knew that its strategy
would risk many lives but proceeded nonetheless. As another observer
concludes, Operation Gatekeeper, as an enforcement immigration policy
financed and politically supported by the U.S. government, flagrantly
violates international human rights because this policy was
deliberately formulated to maximize the physical risks of Mexican
migrant workers, thereby ensuring that hundreds of them would
die. 99 Apparently, the government rationalized the deaths of
migrants as collateral damage in the war on illegal immigration.
Even before the 1990s, the Border Patrol had a reputation for committing
human rights abuses against immigrants and U.S. citizens of Mexican
ancestry.100 Created to police the U.S.-Mexican border, the Border Patrol
has historically been plagued by reports of brutality, shootings,
beatings, and killings .101 Amnesty International, American Friends
Service Committee, and Human Rights Watch have all issued reports
documenting recent human rights abuses by the Border Patrol.102
Poor law enforcement along the border feeds the human

trafficking business which results in slavery and
prostitution
Publication)
Today, because of the money to be made in this black market, criminal

syndicates thrive in the trafficking of human beings. A product of
ill-considered law enforcement , these syndicates resemble the
crime networks that emerged in response to the federal
governments efforts during Prohibitions ban on the commerce in
alcohol. Criminal elements grew and asserted control over a new lucrative
industry. But it gets worse. Some undocumented immigrants have been
enslaved. Reports of slavery have increased dramatically in the past
few years. One 2005 report concluded as follows: Our research identified
57 forced labor operations in almost a dozen cities in California
between 1998 and 2003, involving more than 500 individuals from 18
countries. . . . Victims labored in several economic sectors including
prostitution and sex services (47.4%), domestic service (33.3%),
mail order brides (5.3%), sweatshops (5.3%), and agriculture
Bordering on the Immoral | 113 (1.8%). . . . Victims of forced labor often
suffer severe hardships and deprivations. Their captors often subject
them to beatings, threats, and other forms of physical and
psychological abuse. They live in conditions of deprivation and
despair. Their captors may threaten their families. Perpetrators exert
near total control over victims, creating a situation of dependency. Victims
come to believe they cannot leave. . . . They are terrified of their captors but
also fear law enforcement, a fear often based on bad experiences with police
and other government officials in their countries of origin.105
The immigrants plight in making it to the Land of the

free paradoxically risks life and limb and sells
themselves into a probable slavery
Johnson 07 (Kevin, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, School of Law,
and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at

the University of California, Davis. Opening the Floodgates, pg. 200, BW)
Although immigration reform has been the topic of extensive public
discussion, there has been no legislative proposal put on the table that would
address the fact that the U.S. immigration laws are dramatically out of
synch with the social, economic, and political realities of modern
immigration in the global economy. Moreover, todays immigration laws
are wholly inconsistent with the moral underpinnings of the United States of
America. Put simply, the U.S. immigration laws are broken and must be
fixed. Fixing them requires true comprehensive immigration reform,
not mere tinkering at the margins. Consider the incontrovertible facts.
Immigrants make up about 10 percent of the U.S. population. As many as 12
million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. This large
population exists even though, in the 1990s, the U.S. government
dramatically bolstered border enforcement with Mexico and engaged in a
number of high profile, military-style operations in border cities like El Paso,
Texas, and San Diego, California. In an attempt to avoid the Border
Patrol, undocumented immigrants today travel through isolated
deserts and mountains, literally risking life and limb in hopes of
making it to the land of the free and the home of the brave. As a
result, over the past decade, thousands of migrants, almost all of them
citizens of Mexico, have died attempting to cross the Southwest
border. Besides its deadly consequences, heightened immigration
enforcement has spurred a booming industry in the trafficking of
human beings. Criminal smugglers today charge undocumented
immigrants thousands of dollars for passage to the United States. Smugglers
show little respect for the safety of their human cargo and, at times,
abandon migrants to die in the desert or on the high seas. Many
migrants fortunate enough to survive the journey are forced to work
as indentured servants to pay off the debts of passage to smugglers.
Because trafficking arrangements are not in the least bit regulated,
exploitation and abuse run rampant.
Trafficking results in abuse and forced labor

Publication)
Besides its deadly consequences, heightened immigration enforcement has

spurred a booming industry in the trafficking of human beings.
Criminal smugglers today charge undocumented immigrants thousands
of dollars for passage to the United States. Smugglers show little
respect for the safety of their human cargo and, at times, abandon
migrants to die in the desert or on the high seas. Many migrants
fortunate enough to survive the journey are forced to work as
indentured servants to pay off the debts of passage to smugglers.
Because trafficking arrangements are not in the least bit regulated,
exploitation and abuse run rampant.
Exclusion of economic equality infringes on international

human rights
Publication)
The most frequently invoked substantive ground for excluding noncitizens is

that they are likely at any time to become public charges.11 The publiccharge exclusion squarely conflicts with the anticaste foundations of U.S.
law.12 One of the promises of America is the potential for upward
economic mobility. No persons station in life is dictated by class or
caste. To that end, the framers of the U.S. Constitution prohibited titles
of nobility. Nonetheless, the public-charge exclusion cements
economic disparities in place for those denied entry into the United
States. Through this barrier, the United States slams the door on
poor and working people and thus denies access to the American
Dream to those most in pursuit of it. Immigration law allows the United
States to do at its borders what it cannot do within them. Because the
Constitution guarantees free movement between the United States,
individual states cannot erect borders to limit entry. Therefore, efforts by
individual states to prevent the poor living in other states from
migrating into their jurisdictions have been Bordering on the Immoral | 89
found to be unconstitutional infringements on the right to travel.
Immigrant Detainees Suffering

Immigration detainees are skyrocketing, meanwhile the
conditions in these prisons remain inhumane
Griesbach 2010 (Kathleen UC San Diego Immigration Detention, State
Power, and Resistance: The Case of the 2009 Motn in Pecos, Texas pgs. 810) TYBG
The incarceration of men like Galindo reflects the recent trend to turn over
illegal immigrants to the justice system for criminal prosecution since 9/11,
rather than deporting them as previously22, particularly with the advent of
Operation Streamline. On December 2, 2009, the Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released a report that in 2009, 369, 483
people were held in custody by the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) in 2009, which is double the number of immigrants
detained ten years ago23. This reflects the increase in border and
immigration enforcement following the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001, particularly through initiatives like Operation
Streamline, the 2005 Bush initiative which dictated federal criminal charges
for anyone detained crossing the US-Mexico border illegally.24 The US
maintains the largest immigration detention center in the world; by
the end of 2007, 961 jails and prisons housing detainees were either
directly owned by or under contract with the federal government.25
Rampant human rights abuses include particularly poor or
nonexistent medical services, a lack of legal services for detained
immigrants, and squalid living conditions. Detained migrants face
imprisonment in county jails, privately run federal detention centers, or other
privately run federal prisons often with convicted criminals26. The success
of private prison management as an unregulated capitalist
enterprise explains the inhumane living quarters, lack of medical
services (so glaringly obvious in the case of Jos Manuel Galindos death),
and lack of legal resources for detainees.27 Another policy in common
practice by ICE is the transfer of countless prisoners from detention center to
detention center, often at great distances from each other and without
informing family or the detainees legal counsel if he/she has one (effectively
destroying the inmates defense).28
Immigrants Excluded
The system of immigration control creates exclusionary
social hierarchies that are clear in society, with the 3rd
border of exclusion of inferior Latinos. They are then
forced into a grey where they are stripped of their basic
rights
Power, and Resistance: The Case of the 2009 Motn in Pecos, Texas pgs. 1415) TYBG
Uneven power relations multiply and endure within the system of
immigration control. Luibhid stresses that relations of power and
inequality at the border cannot be separated from inequitable global
relations that structure migration patterns from social hierarchies
within the United States38. These relations of exclusion have been
more dramatically enforced in recent years, with the increase in
criminal punishment for illegal immigrants, without consideration of
extensive transnational familial relations. Immigrants are completely
beholden to a system of power relations directly dictated by
documentation status, as Galindos story illustrates. Foucault stresses
that power emanates through discourse, which is internal to the power
relations that pervade society. Mike Daviss discussion of the 3rd border
beyond the border zone and interior enforcement to Latino social
exclusion (through the racialization of space) in Southern California
illuminates the extension of disciplinary power and the creation of
Otherness from the political regime to informal society39. Davis
discusses and the recent segregationist tactics of wealthy neighborhoods to
exclude working-class Latinos from formerly public venues. A main strategy
is the incursion of high fees for non-residents of wealthy
neighborhoods in the San Gabriel Valley, for example. This Third Border
aims to keep Latinos away from public destinations like parks in affluent
white neighborhoods like San Marinos Lacy Park.40 This exclusion extends
a long trend of discriminatory policing, working as a magnification
of disciplinary power exercised unequally toward Latinos (many of
them immigrants). The third borders segregation complements the first and
second borders attempt to exclude Mexican immigrants from entry into the
U.S through force. Thus, the third border serves as a new form of
racial segregation deep within the country, 41 multiplying and
perpetuating the power of the State and its upper echelons over immigrants.
This latter definition of the normalizing quality of disciplinary power within
institutions characterizes many recent immigration laws and particularly the
treatment of US immigrant detainees both within the US and abroad. Yet as
Giorgio Agamben argues, the legal treatment of immigrant
detainees in some cases operates in a gray area outside the law,
which becomes normalized in the State of Exception. Agamben
argues that under the USA Patriot Act immigrant detainees like the
Taliban captured in Afghanistan do not even have the status of
persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither

prisoners nor persons accused, but simply detainees, they are the
object of a pure de facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not
only in the temporal sense but in its very nature as well, since it is
entirely removed from the law and from judicial oversight.44Though
most immigrants detained within the US for minor offenses like Galindo are a
different case than suspected terrorists, the record of legal and human
abuses within the prisons and in the justice system reflect the same
lack of judicial and human oversight to which Agamben refers. The
disturbing fact that the majority of detainees have not been convicted
of any crime demonstrates the exercise of disciplinary power far
outside the spirit of normal law. The official Immigration and Customs
Enforcement database showed on January 25, 20009 that of 32,000 total
immigrants in detention, 18,690 had no criminal conviction, even for
illegal entry; 400 of those without convictions had been in detention for at
least a year.
Social services have been withheld from aliens solely

because of their social standing in an unregulated utopian
society.
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies,
and citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics,
practices, and discourses of migrant domestic workers [Charles, Bare
Life, Interstices, and the Third Spaces of Citizenship, Womens Studies
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
For Rancire, democracy is about the power of those who
have no qualification for exercising power. It is the count of
the uncountedor the part of those who have no part (2004,
3045). As McNevin sums up: Resistance occurs as outsiders
attempt to recast their identity as politically legitimate
subjects of justice (2006, 138). Inside Isin and Rygiels abject
spaces, immanent outsiders have enacted themselves as
political by exercising rights that they do not have, thereby
turning bare life into political life (2007, 186). Scholars have
termed these political stagings as widely as insurgent
citizenship (Isin 2002), acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen
2008), non-citizen citizenship (Gordon 2005), democratic
cosmopolitanism (Honig 2001), or abject cosmopolitanism
(Nyers 2003). For instance, Isin and Rygiel point to acts of
suturing mouths by refugees in protest against state asylum
laws and setting boats on fire in order to avoid being sent off
to offshore detention centers (2007, 193). They also find acts
of resistance in the sanctuary city movements across
Europe and Canada where state law is suspended to provide
hospitality to aliens, as well as the Dont Ask, Dont Tell
campaigns in the United States that forbid city workers to
inquire into a persons status to ensure access to social

services (19899). In his study of the antideportation
campaigns by the refugee group, Action Committee of NonStatus Algerians (CASS) in Montreal, Peter Nyers further cites
political acts such as regular assemblies, weekly information
pickets, delegation visits to immigration offices, public
demonstration and marches, and leafleting against
deportations at airports (2003, 1083). Through these public
and collective demonstrations, undocumented subjects mark
themselves as visible and audible and write themselves into a
status of recognition.
The paradigm of suspicion criminalizes the mobility of

immigrants, the impoverished and other agents of
suspect.

In speaking about a paradigm of suspicion, I mean that the primary
principle for determining the license to move, both across
borders and in public spaces within borders, has to do with the
degree to which the agents of mobility are suspected of
representing the threats of crime , undesired immigration, and terrorism,
either independently or, increasingly, interchangeably. Apart from terrorism,
being a newly articulated form of organized trans-national violence (Tilly
2004),6 the perceived threats of crime and immigration, and particularly their
mutually constitutive interplay, are part of the history of modernity. The
residents of the modern cities that absorbed Europes new urban proletariat
in the 19th century retained a profound mistrust of people without
established connections. This mistrust has been an important engine in
the increasing formal criminalization of mobility itself, from the
concept of criminal vagabondage in France, where mobility was the
crime, through a series of vagrancy panics in Britain, to increasing legal
hostility to vagrants and anxiety about crimes of mobility in the United
States (Cole 2001:9). It is also no coincidence, therefore, that early efforts to
create reliable identification systems were based on the simultaneous
development of police records, photographic methods, and the perfection of
the passport system (Deflem 2002). The conceptual link between
immigration and social vices such as crime, disease, and moral
contamination has gripped the public mind long before the present
era and continually shapes immigration policies and border-control
measures. Mobility is perceived as a suspicious activity especially
when it relates to those without property. Immigration seekers aside,
consider the policy that guides the grant of nonimmigrant visas to the United
States. The standard reason for refusing to issue a visa, when such a reason
is given, is that the applicant did not qualify under Section 214(b) of the
Immigration and Nationality Act. This section is premised upon a paradigm
of suspicion that stipulates that every foreigner seeking to enter the
United States is considered an immigrant as long as he or she did
not convince the immigration officer that at the time of the
application he or she was eligible for a nonimmigrant status. To
convince the immigration officer, one has to show proof of strong ties to the
country of origin, such as a permanent job or ownership of property, in fact
identical in nature to the old need to establish settled connections. Both the
European and American media are flooded with reports and studies
that link immigration and crime, often mediated through indicators
of poverty. In the Netherlands, for example, reports abound about such
links, citing scientific evidence that illegal immigrants are by far more likely
to be involved with crime and singling out Moslem culture of religious
extremism as a factor. While crime records are not kept according to
ethnicity, Dutch police and government officials have publicly linked a rise in
crime to immigrants, and according to criminologist Chris Rutenfrans, 63
percent of those convicted of homicide are immigrantsMoroccans,
Antilleans, and sub-Saharan Africans being the chief culprits. 7 In the United
States, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies
published a study showing that immigrants and their minor children now
account for almost one in four persons living in poverty. The
proportion of immigrant-headed households using at least one major welfare
program is 24.5 percent compared to 16.3 percent for native households and
the poverty rate for immigrants and their U.S.-born children (under 18) is
twothirds higher than that of natives and their children, 17.6 percent versus
10.6 percent
Border Policies Bad

Closed borders punish human beings for their unlucky
birthplace, contributing to eternal human suffering,
inequality, human trafficking, slavery and death
Publication)
Although arbitrary constructs that are nothing more than legal
fictions, borders contribute to human suffering and economic
inequality. The accident of place of birth may effectively create a
life of relative opportunity or deprivation. Today, however, it is far
easier than ever before to rectify that accident. Migration between
nations is more common in the twenty-first century than it ever has been.
Goods, services, and people regularly flow across borders. Elaborate
transportation networks exist to move people and goods quickly and
inexpensively all over the world. A fundamental question for any body of
immigration law and policy therefore is whether it should facilitate
migration and increased access to economic opportunity and social mobility
or whether it simply should reinforce the inequalities attributable to the
luck of the draw. At a fundamental level, [a]n open entry policy is a
broad attack on the problem of morally arbitrary suffering and
inequality.55 Open entry is more egalitarian than closed borders, allows
for the possibility of a more just world, and recognizes that people
should not be trapped for life by the random occurrence of place of
their birth. Consequently, an anticaste justification for open borders, which
has also been an important basis for much of U.S. constitutional law,
warrants the most serious consideration. Other moral justifications exist
as well, many of them stemming from the immoral consequences of
current U.S. immigration law. Open borders can help eliminate the
immoral consequences that directly result from the nations efforts
to close the borders, including racial discrimi- 102 | Bordering on the
Immoral nation, exploitation in the labor market, human trafficking
and slavery, and deaths resulting from border enforcement.
Government Policies render immigrants exploitable,

change is vital for the system
Publication)
Labor exploitation is a special problem with respect to immigrants from

Mexico. Mexican citizens are the largest group of immigrants in the United
States. The U.S. governments policies have, over time, encouraged
their entry into this country, using them to supply an inexpensive,
exploitable labor force beneficial to American employers and

consumers. But the same government that encourages their migration
has wholly failed to protect them from exploitation and abuse. It has
persistently allowed these poor people to remain vulnerable to
exploitation. Moral obligations grow out of such treatment but have yet to
be recognized by the U.S. government. In order to bring U.S.
immigration law into line with the nations moral compass, change
is essential . The system, by almost all accounts, is broken. The
fundamental question about which there is serious difference of opinion is
the solution. The immigration issues that face the United States will not
go away due to wishful thinking or tough talk. Such responses,
unfortunately, dominate public discussion of immigration in the United
States.
Closed borders promotes isolation and the profound

acknowledgement of the other
Johnson 2007 (Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law
Publication)
Open borders could help ameliorate some of the problems experienced by
Mexican immigrants and Mexican-American citizens. Legal distinctions
between immigrants and citizens, which are currently central to the
immigration laws, serve to create in-groups and out-groups, promote
interethnic tension, and breed discrimination against perceived
outsiders. By tending to render such distinctions irrelevant, liberal
admission policies would promote full community membership for
all people living and working in U.S. society. By minimizing, if not
wholly, eliminating, the importance of immigration distinctions between
people in the United States, a liberal admissions system would also
tend to dampen the institutionalized stigmatization of domestic
minorities, such as Mexican-Americans, who share into ancestries with
disfavored immigrants. In so doing, the law would help to promote the
integration of noncitizens and certain groups of U.S. citizens U.S.
society.
Borders are Discriminating

Border controls serve discriminatory intentions of
segregation
Publication)
Another way of evaluating immigration restrictions proves instructive in

evaluating their racial impacts. Border controls have been characterized
as a form of employment discrimination against noncitizens because
they effectively bar many foreigners from accessing the U.S. labor
markets.63 Under the existing border controls, the persons barred from
seeking domestic jobs are predominantly people of color from the
developing world. Border controls thus serve to racially segregate
international labor markets. The discriminatory impacts of
immigration regulation can be seen starkly in the postSeptember 11
heightened scrutiny of noncitizens. Almost all of the legal measures taken in
the war on terror have been directed at the immigrant community, resulting
in racially disparate consequences. The recent governmental targeting
of Arabs and Muslims demonstrates how immigration law
conveniently can be employed to fo- 104 | Bordering on the Immoral
cus upon disfavored minority groups. This targeting was accompanied
by a precipitous rise in private racial discrimination and hate crimes
directed against Arabs and Muslims in the United States.64
Immigration laws label immigrants as disposable and

racially unequal in the class system
Publication).
Not coincidentally, the disposable labor force that immigration law
has helped to create in the United States is composed primarily of
immigrants of color from the developing world.133 In effect, we see the
existence of a new racial caste system in the United States that has
replaced the old system that existed in the days of Jim Crow. The current
immigrant labor system is nothing less than a variant of the old
sharecropping system in the South. Poorly paid, exploitative jobs are
reserved for marginalized immigrants of color. Immigration law thus
contributes to racial stratification in the U.S. labor market. In this way,
labor exploitation overlaps with concerns about the racial
discrimination embedded in the U.S. immigration laws and their
enforcement.
Closed borders purposely target people of color, the

disabled and ill
Publication)
The poor are not the only group that, although enjoying the protection
of the laws within the country, is denied that protection at the border.
Joining the poor as inadmissible aliens who are barred from entry
into the country are disabled persons. In the United States, they are
protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act.14 At the border, however,
the disabled can be denied admission into the country simply on
account of the fact that they are disabled .15 Congress also has
acted to exclude persons with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV),
even though the U.S. Public Health Service concluded that HIV-positive
noncitizens do not pose a significant health risk to the general
population.16 Despite technically complying with the colorblindness
demanded by the U.S. Supreme Court,17 modern immigration laws also have
racially disparate impacts. People of color are disproportionately
barred from entering the country. Such a result is in tension with the
nations stated commitment to equality under the law.18 Although
discrimination against the poor, the disabled, HIV-positive persons,
or racial minorities would be patently unlawful if directed against
citizens in the United States, it is nothing less than routine under
the U.S. immigration laws. One is left to wonder what the moral
justifications could be for keeping these groups out of the United
States. The elaborate system of controls that inflicts disparate impacts on
people of 90 | Bordering on the Immoral color raises similar questions. All of
these excluded groups seem to fall squarely within the category of the
huddled masses for whom the nation has longand loudly
declared itself open. There is, however, a simple answer. Most of the
exclusionary categories in U.S. immigration law are not based on
fairness, equality, or any respect for individual rights. Instead, the
restrictions and exclusions are based on crude and arbitrary
utilitarian calculations of the relative costs and benefits offered by
different groups of immigrants to U.S. society. Of course, such
considerations are the antithesis of a liberal devotion to individual rights.
Migrant Conditions is a D-Rule

Migrant abuse is a D-rule inclusion of the state reentrenches hierarchies of power
Hayter, Migration activist and graduate of Oxford
University, 2004 (Theresa, Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration
Controls, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004) MM
By far the most important reason for opposing immigration controls
is that they impose harsh suffering and injustice on those who
attempt to migrate , or to flee for their lives and liberty. The issue is
whether the purposes immigration controls are intended to serve justify the
imposition of such suffering. Controls are supposed to stop people
migrating to the countries which enforce them. They are supposed
to preserve and enhance the wealth of those countries against the
perceived threats posed by immigration, and so to reassure people who
believe that uncontrolled immigration might reduce them to Third World
conditions. They are supposed to meet the concerns of racists and so
reduce racism. They are supposed to control crossborder crime. In none of
these objectives are they very effective or useful. In reality they increase,
rather than decrease, both racism and crime , and they threaten to
undermine the human rights not just of migrants and refugees, but
of the existing inhabitants of the rich countries which are trying to
exclude them. Immigration controls should be abandoned.
We must consider global mobility and human rights first

and understanding the global political system is key
Salter 2006 [Mark, Assistant Professor at The American University in
Cairo, The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the
International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics, Alternatives 31]
The field of migration studies has been hamstrung by two dominant

approaches: microstudies of migration networks, and macrostudies of pushpull factors. This article argues for the consideration of a different kind of
micropolitics of power, that of the border itself. We must investigate the
legal state of exception at the border and the ways that these
exceptions are instantiated in laws and policies. The interface of the
body and the body politic is hotly contested, and scholars need to take
seriously the question of admission and exclusion to the political
community at its border, not solely from an immigration/refugee
rights perspective but from a wider view of the global mobility
regime and human rights. This corporealism must also take into
account the management of international populations through
biopolitics in creating, classifying, and policing specific kinds of
international bodies, and the way in which political technologies of
individuals such as passports, visas, and frontier control educate mobile
subjectivities in kinds of obedience and auto-confession. We must ask: How

does the global mobility regime foster conditions under which we
reorganize ourselves into international bodies and characterize
those bodies as national or stateless, laboring or leisured, healthy or
diseased, and safe or pathological? This is aided by understanding
the visa as part of a global biopolitical system. In the loose visa regime,
we see the control of population through the self-confession of our status as
national, working, healthy, and safe bodies through application procedures.
We need to unpack the way in which visa systems erase the middle ground
previously occupied by gastarbeiter programs and shunt economic migrants
into the category of asylum seekers, a category that does little to
acknowledge the material basis of well-founded fears of economic
persecution. Some of this work has been done by human rightsbased
advocacy groups like Statewatch and Amnesty International, but we also
need to conduct close ethnographies of the bureaucracies responsible for the
management of these decisions. Confession Is Good for the Soul In particular,
I see two dangers in this corporal/confessional regime. The issue of consent is
erased on both technological and governmental levels. First, the body comes
to testify or confess for the subject without the consent or even perhaps
knowledge of the subject. Leaving aside the sociological issue of the ways in
which body politics are constructed through stereotypes, there is an issue of
data being collected, analyzed, and assigned to a particular body without any
kind of check or balance. Second, the dynamics of these data flows are not
transparent. Once this corporeal information is added to our governmental
profile, we have little way of tracking its progress through private and official
channels. As David Lyon and Elia Zureik have argued elsewhere, the burden
of surveillance falls disproportionately on the poor and marginal.78
We must be vigilant of the expansion of state policing powers,
especially at the borders where the operation of state power is both
naked and hidden from view.
The protection of individual rights of migrants outweighs

the sacrifice that must be made by the citizen as a result
of a moral obligation
Pevnick 11 [Ryan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New
York University, Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open

Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, p. 100-101, AJM]
What is needed, in regard to our first question, is a principle that
prioritizes rights by giving them a special, but not absolute, weight.
Unhappily, specifying that principle is a task I can only leave to a better mind.
For us, the important point is only (once again) that those from non-compliant
territories should -like traditional refugees- be granted priority admissions,
and there is an obligation to grant entity to such individuals at least
up to the point where allowing more to enter promises to generate
significant costs. In regard to the first question, we saw that while a
commitment to individual rights surely demands at least some
willingness to sacrifice the general welfare, it is much less clear how
far this willingness to sacrifice must go. Likewise, in regard to the
question of the limits of a plausible duty to rescue, it seems clear that we
ought to be willing to accept some sacrifice. Consider the following
example: You are preparing dinner for an evening date (the other person has
yet to arrive) when you hear a faint knock at the door. Opening the door
reveals a severely bloodied individual. It is clear that the person requires
immediate transportation to the hospital. In this case, I think it is clear that
there exists a duty of assistance to stop preparations for your date and aid
the individual. It would be morally unacceptable to explain, while gently
shutting the door, that you have a risotto going on the stove that will surely
be ruined- along with the rest of your evening - if you leave. While assisting
the person requires you to accept some cost (rescheduling or delaying
your date), it nevertheless seems incumbent upon you to do so. We
might, then, agree that there is a duty to rescue that requires
accept ing some limits on the pursuit of our own interests (Singer
1972). Nevertheless, the extent of such limits remains unclear. Contrast our
first case with the one that follows: An individual in Nazi Germany, overcome
by the plight of her Jewish compatriots, decides to secretly hide Jews and help
them escape the country. She does this despite recognizing that her chance
of pulling off the task without eventually being detected and punished
accordingly is small. This case is importantly different from the first one. We
regard the Schindlers of the world as heroes. They, because of the
risk they undertake, leave the world of moral requirements and
embark upon the supererogatory. While we perhaps hope that- faced
with such a situation -we might reveal ourselves to be of the same
character, [yet] those who fail to do so, instead neither contributing
to nor preventing atrocities, are not blameworthy. Instead, they reveal
themselves to be mere mortals rather than heroes. The primary reason for
our different reactions to the cases is that the individual in the second case
assumes a serious burden or cost. If caught, she faces severe and costly
punishment above and beyond the mere inconvenience of a missed date. We
can see this by fancifully revising the first case so that rather than one
bleeding individual there are 2, then 8, then 100, then 1000, and so on. As
the numbers increase, so too do the demands imposed on he who
would provide assistance. What was at first a sacrificed date becomes a
sacrificed weekend which, in turn, becomes a holiday from work and
eventually the forgoing of significant life projects. The difference between
the required action and the saintly action seems to lie[s] in the
degree of self-sacrifice.27 These distinctions, though far too rough, set
the parameters of the debate: when refuge can be provided at
minimal cost, it is surely required. When the cost imposes important
risks or constraints on our lifestyle, it begins to enter[s] the
category of supererogatory. Candidly, I do not know how to further
specify this condition (for example, how much risk or self-sacrifice is one
obliged to take on?), and so we are left with a much too vague directive:
allow economic refugees (those from severely impoverished areas)
until it begins to have an important effect on the political
community's standard of living. At such a point, there is still reason,
albeit no longer dispositive, to allow further entry. While I wish that I
could say something more specific about this guiding principle, I doubt
whether we can get to a more precise conclusion from widely accepted
premises or shared intuitions. Despite not having adequate answers to these
questions, we have enough to- at least for the moment- guide our thinking
about immigration policy. In particular, there is reason to significantly

liberalize restrictions on those from severely impoverished areas
and to continue to do so, step by step, until there is good reason to
think that substantial costs are thereby being imposed. While these
costs can- in principle - be either material or in the form of radical and abrupt
cultural changes (as discussed in chapter 6), I see no reason to think that
current levels of immigration from very poor regions impose anything like
such costs. And, again, even once significant costs begin to be imposed
by the entry of economic migrants, there nevertheless remains
reason to continue to grant entry. Such reason is just no longer clearly
dispositive. Thus, at present, there seems to be good reason to admit far
more individuals from economically failing (or non-compliant) states.
Narrative Card
We present the story of Prudenica Martin Gomez, an
example of the migrants who died while attempting to
cross the US-Mexico border as a result of migrants
classification as bare life by the border patrol.
Studies, 11
On Friday, 6 July 2007, volunteers with two local humanitarian
groups in Tucson, Arizona, Humane Borders and Samaritans, went in
search of Prudencia Martin Gomez, age 18 from Guatemala. She was
headed to Oakland, California, to join her boyfriend/fiance and had been
missing since 11 June in the Ironwood National Forest, a 129 000-acre
expanse of land, in the Sonoran Desert 25 miles northwest of Tucson.
There are no facilities in the Ironwood National Forest, and visitors
are warned of the hazards of the extreme heat. Human beings simply
cannot survive in this part of the southwestern deserts for as long as
Prudencia had been missing, so there was no pretense that they would
find her alive, and they did not. The official location of her body was
recorded as GPS: N32 0 25.455/W1110307.80 (Arizona Daily Star 2010).
Prudencia had fallen ill and had been unable to continue. Her fellow
travelers left her with water, but it was not enough. She was only a mile
south of a Humane Borders' water station, but a mile can be a very
long way in the desert, in the month of June, when one has already
walked a long distance. Authorities determined that Prudencia had died on
15 June. The recorded high temperature on that day was 115F.
Prudencia was a contemporary version of what Agamben (1998)
refers to as bare life, life that can be taken without apology,
classified as neither homicide nor sacrifice. She was US border policy
stripped to its essence. And hers, tragically, is not an isolated example. In
2004 Mario Alberto Diaz, 6 feet tall with a black belt in karate and
working on a masters degree in biology crossed the border near
Sasabe, Arizona. His body was discovered twenty days later in a
creek in the foothills of the Sierrita Mountains (Bourdeaux, 2004). In
the summer of 2005 the Pima County medical examiner in Tucson,
Arizona, had to rent a refrigerated tractor-trailer to store the bodies
of migrants due to the record number of deaths that year (Arizona
Republic 2005). The deadly trend continues. Even as apprehensions
have steadily declined, deaths continue to rise (McCombs, 2009).(6)
The migrant death count for fiscal year 2009 is the third highest since 1998.
In the fifteen-year period since ``prevention through deterrence''
was first introduced approximately 5000 migrants have died, though
near universal agreement exists that estimates of migrant deaths
are undercounts and the actual number is likely much higher
(Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, 2007). When they debated, formulated,

and put into effect the various border control operations collectively known as
prevention through deterrence, policy makers likely had never heard of
GPS: N32 025.455/W1110307.80 or the Ironwood National Forest or
the Sierrita mountains or the many other locations at which migrant
bodies have been, and continue to be, found. However, it is arguably
inconceivable that they did not know of the harsh conditions to
which migrants would be subjected under this border strategy. The
Border Patrol's own blueprint for one of the early and well-known
manifestations of the new operations, Operation Gatekeeper, noted
that it would channel migrants to locations where ``the days are
blazing hot and nights freezing cold''.(7) In this section I argue that the
prevention through deterrence border control strategies exemplify
Foucault's theoretical writings on how biopower, sovereign power,
and racism can be articulated with one another thus to function in
concert. While biopolitics, as formulated by Foucault, is generally
understood as being concerned with the governance and regulation of a
population in matters such as health and sexuality, it is also consistent
with what Agamben refers to as bare life. For Foucault the emergence of
the ``problem of the population'' coincided with the development of an art of
government wherein the main concerns of government were on the wealth,
longevity, health, and sexuality of the population, giving rise to the notion of
biopower as ``making life live'' (Foucault, 1991). Through regulations in
these matters, subjects become entangled in the practices of
statecraft. Agamben has critiqued what he calls Foucault's ``progressive
disqualification of death'' (ie the circumscription of the issue of death to
discussions of classical sovereign power), offering a conceptualization of
biopower which focuses on the ways in which sovereign power
produces a radical exposure abandoning subjects, stripping their
identities to that of bare life, and thereby creating spaces of
exception or a ``juridical void'' which permits abuses and killings
without punishment.(8) While Agamben's theorizations of biopower and its
relation to bare life are invaluable for understanding how modern power
works, he arguably draws a bit of a strawman when it comes to Foucault. In
Society Must be Defended, Foucault poses the following question. How can
biopower, whose function is to improve life and prolong its duration, kill?
``How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a
political system centered upon biopower? '' (2003, page 254). His definition
of `killing' is not ``simply murder as such, but also every form of
indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing
the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death,
expulsion, rejections, and so on'' (page 256). Clearly Foucault recognizes
that biopower does not preclude the taking of life. He responds to his own
question by turning to race, suggesting that race performs two functions:
(1) it introduces a break in the domain of life under power's control
between what must live and what must die thus fragmenting the
field of the biological that power controls, and (2) it establishes a
relationship between life and death. `Ìf you want to live, you must
take lives, you must be able to kill'' (2003, pages 254 ^ 255).
Biopower Links
LinkPopulation Management
Modes of surveillance along the border are a form
epistemic control. Invoking the border is a good example
of this control.
Industries at Kings College London. 2005[Btihaj, 2005

With the increasing uncertainties of post September 11 world, the issue of
surveillance is given renewed importance through the discourses
surrounding the proliferation of control technologies and the
rhetoric of (in)security pervading contemporary politics. Electronic
technologies are seen to be intensifying the capacity and ubiquity of
surveillance creating new forms of social control. Not that the
newness of the current modes of surveillance is to be regarded from
a merely ontological vantage point and especially not as a shift to a new
type of society (Rose, 1999: 237) per se but more so from the epistemic
informationisation and hybridisation of control and monitoring
facilitated by the spread of digital technologies which lend to the
emerging trends of surveillance their label of newness while
sustaining the existing status quo of society. Examples of these
technologies include DNA fingerprinting, electronic tagging, drug testing,
health scans, biometric ID cards and passports, smart closed circuit
television, etc, all of which rely on algorithmic techniques as well as body
parts in order to perform their function of surveillance. Whilst there is a
myriad of issues pertaining to the phenomenon of surveillance, each of which
deserve a thorough examination both theoretically and empirically, this paper
will be mainly concerned with one specific aspect of surveillance and its
relation to biopolitics and the ways in which surveillance stands as
the emblem of the magnitude and dimension of that which
constitutes the management of life and death. In so doing, the
border will be invoked as the principal example of the interwoven
relationship between surveillance and biopolitics all the while drawing
upon the work of Foucault and others in order to elucidate the theoretical
foundations of the relationships as well as the existing juxtaposition of bodies
and technologies at the border.
The Panopticon is a metaphor for surveillance along the

border. This surveillance causes two forms of biopolitical
control in the form of extreme order and in extreme
exclusion.

In a chapter called Panopticism, Foucault (1975) begins by outlining two
major forms through which discipline and surveillance were exerted.
The first being the spatialisation of the plague-stricken town by
means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as placing

individuals within enclosures and under severe and permanent
supervision. Such surveillance involves tactics of individualizing
disciplines (Foucault, 1975: 199) which proceed from a system of
permanent registration (registering the details of each inhabitant of the
town) as well as mechanisms of distribution (in which each inhabitant is
related to his place, his body and his condition) so that the disease is met
by order, eradicating any confusion that may emerge out of the
mixing of bodies, be these living or dead. The second
organisational form is that of the treatment of the leper which,
unlike the plague and its segmentations, functions by means of
separation and exclusion of the leper from the healthy community
through mechanisms of branding, dichotomisation and exileenclosure. From these two different images (plague and leprosy) which
underlies the two different projects (segmentation and separation), Foucault
goes on to explain the two ways of exerting (political) power:
discipline on the hand (as is the case with the plague), and exclusion on
the other (as is the case with leprosy). However, and despite the
difference of the two modes, they are not incompatible ones (Foucault,
1995: 199) for power functions by way of excluding the infected
(here, the image of the leper stands as an emblematic figure of beggars,
vagabonds, madmen, etc, just as the image of the plague symbolises all
forms of confusion and disorder) and individualising the excluded so
much so that lepers (all those who are symbolised by this image) are
treated as plague victims (all those who are caught up within disorderly
spaces). Hence, power is but a concurrent amalgamation of the two forms,
and according to Foucault, Benthams Panopticon is par excellence the
architectural figure of this composition (1975: 200). Benthams utilitarian
plan for a prison which is based on an observing supervisor placed in a
central tower and who can see without being seen, serves as a compelling
paradigm for the kind of surveillance that is intrinsic to the
compound power of exclusion and individualization. As Elden (2002:
244) explains, the model of the Panopticon is where the space of exclusion (of
the figurative leper) is rigidly regimented and controlled (as is the case with
the figurative plague victim). The idea that visibility is a trap (Foucault,
1975: 200) (i.e. the presence of the tall tower at the centre does not
necessarily mean the supervisor is watching), that collective
individualities are overridden by separated individualities (the
treatment of lepers as a plague victims the trinity of segmentation,
individualisation and separation) and that power is unverifiable
(uncertainty about whether/when one is being watched), is what makes the
model of Panopticon such a subtle and effective architectural
apparatus. Power does not need to be enforced but merely internalised
through mechanisms of self-regulation. Such mechanisms render the
observed as simultaneously the bearer (subject) of and the one subjected to
power. Not that the Panopticon is merely a method of observation devoid of
other disciplinary modes of power but it is also a machine that could be
used to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct
individuals (Foucault, 1975: 203) within a variety of institutional
spaces, ranging from prisons to schools, hospitals, factories, etc. It is,
hence, the way in which the metaphor of the Panopticon encapsulates

different technologies and spaces of surveillance and discipline that
Foucault places the notion of disciplinary society under the umbrella of
panopticism in order to capture the diagrammatic strategies underlying
power relations and in which positions and identities are fundamental
features vis--vis the functioning of panoptical surveillance.:
Social Institutions within borders reinforce the control on

immigration and the management of life.
Other surveillance techniques involve the use of biometrics which

consists of an enrolment phase (European Commission, 2005: 46) where
physical attributes such as fingerprints, DNA patterns, retina, iris, face, voice,
etc are used to collect, process, and store biometric samples onto a database
for subsequent usage during the recognition phase in which these data are
matched against the real-time data input in order to verify identity.
Authorities have been keen on integrating biometric identifiers into ID cards
and passports as a means of strengthening security, enhancing modes of
identification and facilitating the exchange of data between different
countries. Further application of biometrics in information sharing can be
seen in the EU-wide database EURODAC (Koslowski, 2003: 11), used to store
the fingerprints of asylum applicants in order to prevent multiple applications
in several member states or what is referred to as the so-called asylum
shopping. Added to that, the employment of a broad array of private
actors (employers, banks, hospitals, educational institutions, marriage
register offices, etc) to perform the role of gatekeepers (Lahav, in
Koslowski, 2003: 5) (or more accurately, borderkeepers) and reinforce
immigration controls from within the internal and ubiquitous
borders, constituting a multiplicity of points for the collection,
inscription, accumulation and distribution of information relevant to
the management of risk (Rose, 1999: 260), and the administration of
life and death.
The conceptualization of borders has become a tool of the

privileged and powerful to block and contain mobility.
The first principle of division that governs the mobility regime is that
which separates privileged countries and regions from most other
regions of the world , in effect turning the latter into suspect
countries. It is typically within these suspect countries that we find
large concentrations of dispossessed groups, located in lesser

regulated areas such as slums or in the more regulated confines of
refugee camps. Concurrently, such countries are perceived as social spaces
that have the potential of exporting criminal elements, terrorists, and
undocumented immigrants into the more privileged social spaces of the
globe. Thus, while the traditional function of guarded borders was
conceived in terms of the need to defend sovereignty (physically
against organized violent invasion and symbolically as an affirmation of
national identity), the mobility potential that globalization processes
facilitate simultaneously produces the conceptualization of borders
in terms of the need to protect a perceived stable and secure social
fabric from unwarranted infiltration by suspect populations. Of
course, borders are not a new invention. Yet, it is noteworthy that the
rational and systematic closure of national borders in general and
the use of border controls to prevent immigration in particular are a
modern phenomenon. Tilly (1992), theorizing the history of state-building
in Europe, pays only cursory attention to borders despite the fact that control
over bounded territories is inseparable from his very definition of a state.
Rather than using the concept of borders, Tilly (1992) finds that rulers
normally tried to establish both a secured area within which they could enjoy
the returns from coercion and a fortified buffer zone to protect the secured
area. However, once such buffer zones could be turned into secured areas in
and of themselves, rulers initiated drives for creating newly expanded buffer
zones (1992:184). Borders acquired a more significant meaning only in
tandem with the consolidation of the modern national state, when
governments began to control movement across frontiers, to use
tariffs and customs as instruments of economic policy, and to treat
foreigners as distinctive kinds of people deserving limited rights and
close surveillance (1992:116). However, the regime of movement in
the present era is not unlike previous regimes in its primary
reliance on physical barriers as means of blocking and containing
mobility . These elementary practices, in turn, are based on the quite
conventional methods of constructing fences. Accordingly, and in tandem
with free trade agreements, an eight-foot fence stretches along the
2,000 miles border between Mexico and the United States, from
Brownsville, Texas to San Diego, California. As it ends in the Pacific Ocean,
between San Diego and Tihuana, the fence is 15 feet high. Hundreds of
names are scribbled on the Mexican side of the fence, a kind of
unofficial memorial to those killed while trying to outsmart the U.S.
Operation Gatekeeper. Before it stretches a few 100 feet into the ocean,
the fence also cuts across Friendship Park (Parque de la Amistad), so titled in
1971 as a gesture to the Mexican people (Nevins 2001; Andreas 2000).
The immigration regime is a tool used by the government

to manage populations
There is a Catholic mnemonic to recall how to cross ones self: spectacles,

testicles, wallet, and watch. This rhyme is an excellent entry into the
importance of confession in the recognition of the self as an international self.
In addition to recalling the notion of appeal to authority that is never quite
authorized (hence the need for a pneumonic), it also marks the stations of
the modern state: vision and surveillance, health and reproduction,
commerce and capital, and time. The gesture refers at once to an absolution
of sorts and a sanctification of actions and words. A penitents presentation to
the agent of God to name his sins, in return for which he is given absolution,
stands as a central metaphor in understanding the modern relationship
between individual and state. Foucault poses the question of obedience
and society in a genealogical frame: How is it that in Western
Christian culture the government of men demands, on the part of
those who are led, not only acts of obedience and submission but
also acts of truth, which have the peculiar requirement not just
that the subject tell the truth but that he tell the truth about
himself, his faults, his desires, the state of his soul, and so on?60
This part of the mechanism for the creation of the modern subject
who knows himself in relation to the confessionary state is a
function of unconditional obedience, uninterrupted examination,
and exhaustive confession and appears as an indispensable
component of the government of men by each other.61 Though not
traced by Foucault himself, the confessionary complex (obedience,
examination, confession) provides a crucial link between the
political economy of the body62 and the biopolitical
governmentality of international management of populations. It is
not simply that the international population is managed, but that we
come to manage ourselves through the confessionary complex.
Foucault describes the importance of the way by which, through some
political technology of individuals, we have been led to recognize
ourselves as a society, as a part of a social entity, as a part of nation
or of a state.63 Balibar relates the governmental function of the
border as the limit of community to the process of identityformation: The normality of the national citizen-subject . . . is also
internalized by individuals , as it becomes a condition, an essential
reference of their collective, communal sense, and hence of their
identity. . . . As a consequence, borders cease to be purely external
realities .64 The confessionary complex is a structure framed by law
and instantiated in various practices at the border (and in the faces of
agents of the state).
The border is inextricably linked to sovereignty

On his entry to the United States, Oscar Wilde was asked the customary
question: He apocryphally replied I have nothing to declare except my
genius!4 This act of confession before the vanguard of governmental

machinery is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and
the operation of sovereign power. It is those first acts of examination,
obedience, and confession that establishes the fundamental relationship
between sovereign and subject, between the body politic and a particular
body. Sovereignty and boundary maintenance are inextricable: since
there is no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by
filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing violence. 5 The border
represents a unique case of entry into the social contract; it is not an
entry that is inherited or claimed by right but a status that is requested.
Following R. B. J. Walker, I would argue that border practices are examples
of the very concrete practices that instantiate the abstract
doctrines of sovereignty.6 Conventional political accounts of migration
focus on masses of moving populations (broad demographic and social
trends) or the public policy process by which the regulation of those
populations are constrained or enabled.7 My account here seeks to turn
traditional analysis on its head and ask: What if we were to put the individual
body at the center of our analysis of the border? The nascent global
mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities
manages an international population through and within a
biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies
that understand themselves to be international.
The border is a state of exception where the sovereign

has absolute rule
What makes the border a state of exception? The sovereign decides
the political status of the individual as they cross the frontier:
national, stateless, refugee, foreigner, alien. This decision is absolute. The
agent of the sovereigns customs decides not only the nationality and status
of foreigners but of all travelers. There is a zone of indistinction wherein a
traveler possesses not even his/her nationality unless it is confirmed
by the decision of the sovereign. Nothing can compel a particular
decision; no appeal can be made; the only expulsion that bears any
intersovereign consequence is denationalization or becoming a refugee.
Thus, the traveler only gains some kind of advantage with other sovereigns
once s/he can prove that s/he is abject, will be afforded no protection
whatsoever, that one is bare international life, a seeker of refuge, a life that
without state rights but subject to the law of states. Only the national
border may be considered a state of exception, as opposed to other
social or spatial borders. Entry to a house is plainly governed by a
set of legal restrictions on the power of the state, such as the US
Fourth Amendment right to be protected from unreasonable search. However,
rights are configured quite differently at the border.21 In the United
States, the authority by which the Customs and Border Patrol is empowered
to search border-crossers is different from that of police [19 U.S.C. 1467],
which derives from an early congressional act of July 31, 1789 [1 St. 43]. It is
the very space of the border that makes the burden of law different. The
threshold between law and force is spatialized or rather conditional on a
particular mobility: searches made at the border, pursuant to the
longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and
examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable
simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border. 22 The right to
detain, examine, and search travelers is defined in relation to their
foreignness, their origins outside, which renders them without
protection while under question at the border. Searches within
states territory and at the border bear two different standards:
probable cause is replaced by reasonable suspicion. Thus, state
actions at the border are a special case of law. Border searches, then, from
before the adoption of the Fourth Amendment, have been considered to be
reasonable by the single fact that the person or item in question had
entered into our country from the outside.23 That which is outside both
constitutes and threatens the integrity of the inside, and the
decision to include/ exclude both defines the population of the state
and gives lie to the presumed homogeneity and stability of that
community.24 This situation of permanent threat is neutralized
through the successful management of risk at the border in a way
that renders threat permanent and insolvable. The visa regime, and the
delocalization of the border that it represents, is emblematic of this
management.
The border is used by the state to harness people for

labor
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that the body is molded by
a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest,
and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral
laws; it constructs resistances.57 To this, I would add that there is an
internationalization of the body: through biometric capture, the
assignation of risk profiles according to race, gender, ethnic,
national and religious scripts, and the visa system within the
institutions of customs and immigration controls. The visa system as
an essential component in the attempt of the state to claim a
monopoly over legitimate movement classifies mobile bodies as
legitimate through the schema of production and subjection. We have
already seen the criteria by which this management of population is
organized: labor, health, and risk. To understand the way this
governmentality creates populations and individuals, I will use two of
Foucaults key ideas: biopolitics and political technologies of the individual.
Foucaults writings on the topic of biopolitics ground this analysis. Foucault
examined the concomitant evolution of industrial and institutional
techniques of modern governance through an investigation of how
mobile, productive, healthy, moral bodies were constructed,
schooled, policed, and harnessed for labor.58 His investigation of the
how the penal system in particular led into the evolution of a disciplinary
society stopped at the borders of the state, but in principle can be expanded
to encompass a biopolitics of international relations: the management of
international bodies. Fundamental to the evolution of the modern state
was the control over mobility of citizens, which Foucault illustrates
architecturally in the panopticon and plague town, Timothy Mitchell within
Egyptian schools and urban architecture, and John Torpey through state
passports.59 What these authors neglect is the international aspect of this
control of mobility. Following work by Barry Hindess, Nevzat Soguk, and
William Walters, who describe a structure of international management of
population through the regulation of citizenship, refugees, and stateless
persons, the international control of persons is just as vital to the stability of
the modern state system as the domestic control of mobility. We can see
the ways in which the visa system contributes to the definition and
control of international populations: through the ascription of
biopolitical characteristics in terms of labor skill or capitalization,
epidemic or health liability, and risk or normalcy.
Biopower sets up a way for the liberal governance to

administer the prosperity of the population, ensuring the
human continuation to be the proper way.
Lee 2010, works at the interface of critical theory, cultural studies, and
citizenship/democracy studies. focuses on the cultural politics, practices, and
discourses of migrant domestic workers [Charles, Bare Life, Interstices, and
the Third Spaces of Citizenship, Womens Studies Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Michel Foucault has conceptualized the modern form of power as
bio-power, wherein the essential measure of liberal governance is
to oversee the welfare of the population (wealth, longevity, health,
etc.) through mechanisms of calculation, monitoring, regulation,
and utilization, such that citizen life will be fostered productively in
the interests and security of the state (1980a; 1997). Biopower taps
into the bodies and souls of human subjects to ensure the
reproduction of the social body in a proper mode and proper
way (Foucault 1980b). As a technique of liberal governance, the
inscription of subjects into modern citizenship initiates modern states

systematic surveillance of its population. David Lyon points out that
the civil, political, and social rights granted to citizens in the age of
modernity imply that people had to be registered, and their personal
details filed, which of course paradoxically facilitated their increased
surveillance 66 Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of
Citizenship (2001, 294). New and minute forms of surveillance and
control were established via documentary identification of citizens
(i.e., birth certificates, drivers licenses, Social Security cards,
passports, bankbooks, credit cards) throughout liberal societies by the
last quarter of the twentieth century (294). Rather than an
autonomous species standing in opposition to corporate
bureaucratic power, citizenship is itself entangled in the webs of
surveillance and subjection, discipline and normalization as a

constitutive part of liberal governance in the making of citizensubjects
LinkCitizenship
The perception of citizenship creates the dichotomy that
is known as society. The state is able to focus it
zoepolitical forces on those it does not deem worthy of
the political life.
To address the distinction between zoe, bare life, and bios, political life,
Willem Schinkel suggests that biopolitics be understood in two
dimensions: the zoepolitical and the biopolitical. Zoepolitics,
externally directed, focuses on the bare life of people outside the
state, including Guantanamo detainees and immigration detainees.
Biopolitics, directed internally towards people within states territory but
outside of society, focuses on the boundaries of the social body.
Citizenship thus functions as a mechanism of population control that
enables the exercise of biopower on both dimensions (Schinkel 2010:
19). Space, both social and physical, is the linchpin of illegality and
immigration detention, and we can see that bare life inhabits a social
space structured on a polarity of oppositions in the zone of
indistinction. Next we will examine how spatial ideas proceed from the
figure at the opposite pole from the homo sacer, the sovereign.
The idea of citizenship is inherently exclusive, the

government uses borders to make this exclusion possible
Ajana 06, (PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political
Science Btihaj. "Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
Central to this politics of particularity is the principle of inclusion (of good
particulars) and exclusion (of bad particulars) through which the idea of
normative universality (Zylinska 2004, p. 524) is established in relation to
constitutive particularity. Particularity in a sense could be understood as the
partitioning of differences and the demarcating of spatiality based on the
universal values of autonomy and self-governing, manifested in the notion
of statehood. The production and formulation of the particular citizen
within particular state is initially performed through modes of
inclusion and exclusion whereby individual, communal and national
identities are conceived of in terms of dichotomies of self and other,
of inside and outside, of belonging and alien, and so on. The state, as
such, represents itself as the locus par excellence of spatial particularity
territoriality through the politicisation of its borders, the principle
by which the concept of citizen is made possible. For without a state,
the particular character of the citizen dissolves into universality
(being a human) and without citizens, there could be no state
(Coward 1999, p. 9). This interdependent relationship between state and
citizens is in fact what produces the spurious needs and rationalisation
of division and containment which find their expression in the ruling of

sovereignty. Such a relationship also [this]explains why each time the
question of immigration is raised by governments, there is a
tendency to invoke the notion of people i.e. citizens in order to
substantiate the will to exclusion and total enclosure
LinkSecuritization
Deterrence at the border is also a symbolic power which
re-inscribes the stability of the border.
Studies, 11
and spaces of moral alibi. Page 605.
The significance of prevention through deterrence in terms of the
techniques of biopower can be found in the fact that it has not, nor
arguably was it ever intended, to completely eliminate unauthorized
immigration (Nevins, 2010, page 114). Like the border policies prior to it,
prevention through deterrence was in part a `border game', rife with
symbolic power which functioned to reaffirm the significance of the
boundary between Mexico and the United States and at the same
time asserted/reasserted the sovereignty of the latter.(18) However, it
inaugurated a new intensity in that US border policies became much more
than a symbolic game in the sense that crossing the border without
authorization now became an extremely dangerous proposition in
which death lurked in every new migrant crossing route, through formidable
mountain ranges and along desolate, heat-scorched desert lands. In terms
of the operation(s) of power, the significance of this new border
strategy lies in a subtle shift from the dominance of sovereign,
juridical power to biopower. I say `subtle' because I do not mean to
suggest that juridical power and biopower are opposed to one another.
Clearly, they work together in this case, and it is a matter of emphasis that I
am suggesting here. Juridical power intensified the US border
enforcement regime. However, biopower is clearly evident as the
newly intensified enforcement regime produced a radical exposure
for migrants which stripped them of their humanity and permitted
their killing without punishment.
LinkRacism
This perception of migrants as inferior is inextricably
linked to the state its inclusion cements biopolitical
control
MM
The notion of biopolitics comes from Michel Foucault, who in the final
section of The History of Sexuality puts forward a claim that, in
modernity, ancient sovereign power exerted over life and death has
been replaced by bio-power: a power to foster life or disallow it to
the point of death (1984, p. 138). Biopolitics thus describes the processes
through which Western democracies, with all their regulatory and corrective
mechanisms, administer life by exercising power over the species body
(1984, p. 139). What is now at issue, according to Foucault, is not so much
bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty as instantiating the idea
and sense of the norm, which is supposed to regulate society and ensure the
intactness of its sovereign authority. The biopolitics of immigration - one
of the forms through which bio-power is enacted in Western
democracies and through which life is managed - thus contributes
to the development of the idea of normative universality, against
which particular acts of political (mis)practice can be judged. And yet,
as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau have demonstrated in
numerous works, the notion of universality proposed in official political
discourses always entails (or is contaminated by, as Laclau has it) a
certain particularity. Indeed, the universal juridico-political acts acquire
their universal value only if they draw on the particularity of the official
and non-official regulatory mechanisms that are supposed to exclude
whatever may pose a threat to this idea of universality. This is to say,
they rely on state legislation already in place, on the concept of
citizenship embraced by the democratic community, but also on
public opinion that has to be taken into account and responded to.
Border Framing Impacts
ImpactOtherization
Immigration policy is not neutral it presupposes
superiority as a citizen of the state while simultaneously
tagging migrants as parasites, creating an us-them
mentality
Butler and the biopolitics of immigration, Cultural Studies 18.4, pg. 526) MM
Performativity of the public sphere: The issue of asylum seekers lies at
the very heart of the broader issue concerning the constitution of
the public sphere . For Butler democratic participation in the public
sphere is enabled by the preservation of its boundaries, and by the
simultaneous establishment of its constitutive outside. She argues
that in contemporary Western democracies numerous singular lives are
being barred from the life of the legitimate community , in which
standards of recognition allow one access to the category of the
human. In order to develop a set of norms intended to regulate the state
organism, biopolitics needs to establish a certain exclusion from these
norms, to protect the constitution of the polis and distinguish it from
what does not properly belong to it. The biopolitics of immigration looks
after the bodies of the host community and protects it against parasites
that might want to invade it, but it needs to equip itself with tools
that will allow it to trace, detect and eliminate these parasites.
Technology is mobilized to probe and scan the bare life of those wanting to
penetrate the healthy body politic: through the use of fingerprinting, iris
recognition and scanners in lorries travelling, for example, across the
English Channel, the presence and legitimacy of asylum seekers can be
determined and fixed.4 The bio-politics of immigration is thus
performative in the sense of the term used by Butler; through the probing of
human bodies, a boundary between legitimate and illegitimate
members of the community is established. This process depends on a
truth regime already in place, a regime that classifies some bodies as
genuine and others (be it emaciated bodies of refugees squashed in
lorries in which they have been smuggled to the West, or confined to the
leaky Tampa ship hopelessly hovering off the shores of Australia) as bogus.
The bare life of the host community thus needs to be properly
managed and regulated , with its unmanageable aspects placed in what
Agamben (1998) calls a relation of exception. But the question that
remains occluded in these processes of life management is [w]hich
bodies come to matter - and why? (Butler 1993, p. xii).
The global mobility regime is premised on a paradigm of

suspicion, working as a counterbalance to universal
rights, and creating further inequality in the world

In contrast, the theoretical contribution I propose in this article is to conceive
processes of globalization as also producing their own, so to
speak, principles of closure. I posit that above and beyond tensions
such as between national sovereignty and human rights, we are
witnessing the emergence of a new cultural/normative global
principle that operates as a counterbalance to the normative
principle of global human rights. We are witnessing the emergence of
a global mobility regime, oriented to closure and to the blocking of
access, premised not only on old national or local grounds but on
a principle of perceived universal dangerous personhoods (hereinafter
referred to as a paradigm of suspicion). The analytical framework of this
article is that the mobility regime is constructed to maintain high
levels of inequality in a relatively normatively homogenized world .5
In practice, this means that local, national, and regional boundaries are
now being rebuilt and consolidated under the increased normative
pressure of, and as a counterbalance to, the universal human rights
regime. Thus, in contrast to the tendency to announce the death of
distance (Cairncross 1997) and to declare a mobility turn (Urry 2003), in
this article, I seek to conceptualize and theorize globalization in terms of
processes of closure, entrapment, and containment. Specifically, I emphasize
the extent to which processes of globalization are also concerned with the
prevention of movement and the blocking of access. I posit that such
processes should neither be theorized as a systemic malfunction nor as the
unintended consequences of globalization. Rather, following the terminology
of Simmel ([1908] 1950), I argue that the social nearness that
globalization allows for is also constitutive of simultaneous
processes of social distance.
The mobility regime profiles people, objectifying them as

suspects and enabling the paradigm of suspicion to justify
restriction and containment
Profiling, and specifically racial and ethnic profiling, attracts significant
attention from sociologists, public policymakers, and legal experts. 15 In the
United States, racial profiling commonly refers to any police-initiated

action that relies on race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than on
particular individual behavior as criteria for selecting whom to stop
or arrest (Ramirez, McDevitt, and Farrell 2000). Here, I would like to expand
the notion of profiling to cover a whole range of practices aimed at
both ones physical and social identity that are undertaken by a host
of mobility regime market and governmental agents. I treat profiling and
more precisely, biosocial profiling , as an emergent technology of social
intervention that objectifies whole strata of people by assigning them
into suspect categories, thereby enabling the paradigm of suspicion
to be translated into elaborate practices of containment . In contrast
to the modality of law, which punishes and locks away through a binary
guilty/innocent distinction, and in contrast to the modality of the disciplines,
which corrects behavior and occasionally quarantines through bell-curve
matrices of normalization (Hunt 1992; Foucault 1977), profiling predicts
behavior and regulates mobility by situating subjects in categories of risk.
Now two qualifications of the above formulation must be immediately
introduced. First, laws and disciplines are not substituted for profiling. Legal
regulation and disciplinary procedures are widely applied and certainly play a
central role in facilitating imprisonments, deportations, and a host of other
types of containment. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that profiling
emerges as a more discrete technology of intervention that
facilitates and complements the regulation of mobility by legal and
disciplinary means. Moreover, while laws and regulations may formally
enable governance through profiling, they nonetheless lack the
instruments and the type of gaze that allows profiling to function as
a mode of spatial containment that is ableon the groundto
maintain the selectivity of boundary-crossing and to effectively
distinguish those who are licensed to move from those who are not.
As with the past, the segregation and alienation of the

Mexicans is due to the American unwillingness to simply
encounter the Other. They simply characterize the Other
as inferior and dehumanize them, which turns into an
issue of de facto segregation. Immigration bills (CIR)
cannot be applicable due to the deep rooted perceived
inferiority of immigrants
Astor 2009 (Avi, Post-Doc @ University of Michigan, later Pompeu Fabra
University, Department of Poltical and Social Sciences, Unauthorized

Immigration, Securitization and the Making of Operation Wetback, Latino
Studies (2009) 7, 5/29, http://www.palgrave-journals.com/lst/journal/v7/n1/full/lst200856a.html)
The practices of government agencies not only increased the
number of undocumented immigrants in the United States, but also
worked to isolate them from the social and political life of
communities in the Southwest. A common practice of the INS was to
disappear during the harvest season and then to magically reappear
once the harvest was over to apprehend undocumented workers

once their services were no longer needed (President's Commission on
Migratory Labor, 1951; Garca, 1980). Aside from exposing the INS to be a
tool of grower interests, this prevented immigrants from integrating into the
social life of the communities in which they resided. A study conducted in the
Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas at the time attests to the social isolation of
the immigrant population in the Southwest. The sociologists who conducted
the study, Lyle Saunders and Olen Leonard (1976 (1951)), write that the
typical immigrant establishes few or no intimate ties of friendship except
occasionally with other wetbacks and has human contacts only with the
group with whom he works and lives and with the employer or foreman who
hires him (p. 45). Immigrants often lived in makeshift camps that were
isolated from the rest of the community, or if they did manage to rent a place
in town, it was almost always in the Mexican sections, which were
segregated from the Anglo sections. During harvest season, when many
immigrants were present, it was even common for them to live out in
the open due to their employers unwillingness to give them shelter.
Mexican immigrants were also excluded from recreational facilities and
certain commercial enterprises. A quote by a Texas politician exemplifies
the attitudes that justified such segregation: Although there is no
discrimination in the Valley, of course there is segregation in a few
things, but that is for hygienic, not racial reasons. Spanish-speaking
people live in their own part of town and have their own businesses.
They prefer it that way. They are excluded from swimming pools and
barber shops. The exclusion from pools is because it is not possible
to tell the clean ones from the dirty, so we just keep them all out.
We just cant have all those dirty, possibly diseased people
swimming with our wives and children. (Saunders and Leonard, 1976
(1951), p. 67) Through the practices of government agencies and social
attitudes regarding Spanish-speaking populations, Mexican immigrants were
reduced to what Agamben (1998) calls bare life. Lacking legal protection
and political inclusion, immigrants had no recourse for complaint when they
were mistreated or underpaid. However, the absence of legal protection
and political inclusion alone does not explain why Mexican workers
were so frequently the objects of discrimination and abuse. Rather, it
was their isolation from social life that hindered general social
awareness of the abuses they suffered and prevented people from the
communities in which they resided from seeing them as social beings,
rather than cheap labor or potential threats. The only advocate Mexican
immigrants had was the Mexican government. However, the relative
weakness of the Mexican state and its poor bargaining position made such
advocacy ineffective (Calavita, 1992). Consequently, the welfare of Mexican
immigrants was completely at the discretion of their employers and others
with whom they interacted. This is well illustrated by Saunders and Leonard
(1976 (1951)), as they write, During the summer of 1950, the authors heard
a good many accounts, pro and con, about the health conditions and services
available to wetbacks. They ranged from the quite callous account of
one farmer who playfully chased a wetback with a tractor, crushed
his foot, and then turned him over to the Immigration Service for
return to Mexico, to humanitarian behavior of an employer who paid
medical bills averaging two hundred or more dollars each month for
the care of his wetback employees. (p. 48)
Immigrants are always an inch away from exclusion from

the geopolitical space of the United States and are
labeled as Illegal by the community, stripping away the
core of their humanity and their worth in the democratic
process.
Johnson 2007 Dean of UC Davis School of Law(Kevin R.,
2007Opening the Floodgates; Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and
Immigration Laws)
The fear of deportation haunts many immigrants. They know that
they can be torn away from established lives, family, friends, and
community in an instant for lacking the proper immigration papers
or for even something as minor as failing to file a change of address
form with the U.S. government within ten days of moving. The
undocumented immigrant who drives a car without a license faces the
possibility of deportation every time he turns the key. An immigrants
entire life in the United States is constantly at risk. Immigrants
become easy targets for harsh treatment because they have a
distinctively negative image in popular culture. Although not officially
found in the omnibus immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1952, the emotion-laden phrase illegal aliens figures prominently
in popular debate over immigration.1 Illegal aliens, as their
moniker strongly implies, are law-breakers, abusers, and intruders,
undesirables we want excluded from our society . The very use of the
term illegal aliens ordinarily betrays a restrictionist bias in the speaker. By
stripping real people of their humanity , the terminology helps
rationalize the harsh treatment of undocumented immigrants under
the immigration laws. Immigrants, as noncitizens, have little direct input in
the political process, a process that ultimately controls their destinies. Unlike
other minority groups, they cannot vote. Although interest groups, such
as Latina/o and Asian-American advocacy groups, advocate on behalf of
immigrants along with citizen minorities, they have limited political clout in
arguing for fair treatment of people who cannot vote. Politicians generally
do not court the immigrant vote. In the end, immigrants interests can
be ignored by lawand policymakers in ways that other citizen minorities
simply cannot be.2
ImpactDehumanization
Borders are dehumanizing: they allow the government to
determine who is worthy of existing
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
At the level of absolute separation, the figure of nation-state, as it were, is

constructed as an autonomous and unified entity whose ontological
immanence is premised on sovereignty and self-sufficiency in such a
way that the need for exposure (the clinamen) is regarded as obsolete. That
is not to say, however, that the possibility of exposure is entirely eliminated
from such figure. Instead, exposure becomes that which relates to
exteriority only in terms of exchange value and flow of capital in fact,
this kind of exposure is encouraged as it sustains the doctrine of free
market and perpetuates capitalism as well as the emerging modes
of measurement which are also applied on human beings, such as
quota for asylum seekers and points system for work permits and
residence. Nevertheless, measure here is not only the quantifying of
dimensionality (How many asylum seekers and immigrants should be let in?)
although this is often presented in some political discourses as the salient
point, but more so, measure is the quantifying of responsibility (Nancy 2000,
p. 180) so much so that the question becomes not only how many?
but which? (Which asylum seekers are genuine? Which asylum seekers
should one be responsible to? Which (skilled/needed) immigrants should
be given the right to enter and reside? Which marriages are not sham?
In short, which existences are deemed worthy of living ?). In such a
context, measure becomes concurrently the embodiment of exposure
as well as enclosure, both of which are, nonetheless, operated within the
intentionality of absolute separation.
Through the process of the physical and cultural border

separating the U.S. from Mexico, migrants have become
hated and dehumanized as the other by the
government and the people of the privileged America.
Immigration Laws)
Despite the rising death toll, there is no sense of urgency among

the public and policymakers to put an end to the human
tragedy. Rather, the death beat goes on. Complacency in the
United States over the deadly state of border affairs suggests a
blindness or indifference to the true human suffering that
directly results from border enforcement. Enforcing the border
has proven to be extremely difficult. Rather than formulate policies
that work, it is far easier to dehumanize the migrant as the

other and to consider the deaths of illegal aliens as simply
collateral damage as the nation seeks to defend against a
foreign invasion. In response to immigration reform proposals, an
immigrant civil rights movement emerged in the United States.
Protesting the punitive measures under consideration in the U.S.
Congress, marchers demanded that immigrants be fairly and humanely
treated. In March 2006, more than 100,000 people marched in the
streets of Chicago to protest proposed reform legislation, and, soon
after, more than half a million people marched in Los Angeles. Cities
across the United States saw similar protests.4 Despite this emerging
movement, the public as a whole remains deeply divided about
immigration. Many Americans register vocal opposition to immigration
and immigrants. In an April 2005 Fox News poll, 91 percent of the
persons surveyed believed that undocumented immigration was a
very serious or somewhat serious problem, primarily because of
the feared impact of immigrants on jobs, the economy, and national
security. At the same time, however, more than 60 percent of those
polled favored giving undocumented immigrants temporary worker
status, and only 43 percent favored eliminating all forms of public
assistance, including education and health benefits, to the
undocumented.5 This poll, consistent with many before and after,
exemplifies the nations profound ambivalence about undocumented
immigrants. Ambivalence among the U.S. public, however, can
quickly turn into fear and loathing . The public expresses
outrage at any hint of criminal aliens preying on citizens or
immigrants abusing the social welfare system. In 1994, California
voters supported an initiative known as Proposition 187 by a 21
margin. Absent judicial intervention, the law would have denied
benefits, including a public education, to undocumented immigrants
and cracked down on criminal aliens.6 The strong political
support for Proposition 187 convinced then-President Clinton
to greatly increase federal border enforcement and rapidly
militarize the U.S.Mexico border.7 Although the federal budget as
a whole shrank over the 1990s, the budget of the now-defunct
Immigration and Naturalization Service skyrocketed as border
enforcement became a national priority.
ImpactCauses Bare Life

The border and containment strategies reinforce borders
and attempt to define who is and is not a citizen or part of
a population. This reduces non citizens to bare life and
justifies their death
Studies, 11
Before considering how this phenomenon has played out in US border control
strategies I want to highlight two interrelated issues that are addressed
somewhat peripherally or implicitly by Foucault but that are key when it
comes to examining border politics and policies. First is the issue of
citizenship. Foucault's writings refer to the population, but clearly the
population is not a monolithic, all encompassing entity. Foucault's
writings on biopolitics can and have been interpreted to mean the local or
national population thus lending credence to the criticism of his neglect of
the international. However, as noted earlier, when his ideas are put to
work in the arena of border policies, the international looms large, and it
becomes clear that the definition of who is part of the `the
population' and who is not is to a great extent what is at stake. So
the issue of citizenship and the citizen is vitally important.(9) For
the citizen to live, the undocumented must be permitted to die.
Those lacking citizenship are potentially bare life.(10) The second issue
that warrants consideration is how Foucault understands race. Foucault asks,
``What in fact is racism?'' and refers to the appearance of distinctions, a
hierarchy amongst races, and racism's inscription within the state (Foucault,
2003, page 254). However, he is vague on precisely what race is. I am not
suggesting that this imprecision needs to be corrected or that it is a lacuna in
Foucault's writings. I call attention to this so as to maintain a space for an
understanding of race that can incorporate `differentialist' or `neoracism',
which is highly significant in understanding how race enters into
contemporary border politics. Nation, citizen, and race have been
historically intertwined in complex ways that are virtually impossible
to unravel. This is clearly illustrated in contemporary immigration
policies in the United States and throughout the world. The origins of
the `prevention through deterrence' strategy nicely illustrate
connections between the local, national, and global/international
and highlight how policies designed for the management of
populations at local levels cannot always be considered solely local
or national issues. More than this, though, the very distinctions between
local, national, and international can be a key aspect of such
policies. Three government efforts of the early 1990s that can
arguably be considered examples of biopolitics were key to the
beginnings of the US border blockade: (1) Operation Blockade/Hold

the Line in El Paso, Texas, in 1993; (2) the passage of Proposition 187
in California in 1994; and (3) Operation Gatekeeper in the San
Diego/Tijuana area 1994.(11) All of these were, in various ways, focused
on issues pertaining to the population and were ostensibly very local
in nature. However, they were ultimately intimately connected to the
international and to reinforcing the boundaries between the two.
The process of enacting such a reinforcement involved attempts to
define precisely who constituted the population. Operation Blockade
began far from the center of sovereign US power in the relatively isolated
area of El Paso, Texas, which is located at the tip of West Texas. Surrounded
by desert, this area in 1993 was the second busiest sector for undocumented
border crossings. The busiest was the San Diego sector. Silvester Reyes, the
Border Patrol chief of the El Paso sector, unilaterally launched Operation
Blockade on 19 September 1993, deploying 400 agents and their vehicles
along a 20-mile stretch of the border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez,
Mexico. (Nevins, 2010, page 111). Prior to this the border patrol
strategy had been to apprehend unauthorized entrants after they
had crossed the border. This meant that hundreds of thousands who were
suspected of being undocumented migrants were stopped every year. Most of
those stopped were El Paso residents of Hispanic appearance. Not
surprisingly, this led to charges of racial profiling (Dunn, 2009, page 12).With
Operation Blockade, apprehensions dropped 80 ^ 90%. The strategy
received much favorable national publicity and was quickly
replicated in October 1994 with Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego,
California (Nevins, 2010, page 111). The local situation in California was also
a significant factor leading up to Operation Gatekeeper, specifically the
debates over and eventual passage of Proposition 187, also known as the
Save Our State ballot initiative. Proposition 187 was an antiimmigrant
measure that proposed to deny public education from elementary to
postsecondary levels, social services, and public health care
(excluding emergencies) to unauthorized immigrants. It was passed by
59% of California's electorate. The proposition resulted from the efforts of
local immigration control groups in California as well as the national
antiimmigrant organization, Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR)(12)
National level politics were also key factors leading to the border build up of
the early 1990s. The antiimmigrant backlash loomed as a potential threat to
then President Bill Clinton's reelection. Gatekeeper was followed by
Operation Safeguard in central Arizona in 1995, which ``redirected
illegal border crossings away from urban areas near the Nogales
port-of-entry to comparatively open areas'' (National Border Patrol,
2000). Operation Rio Grande was launched in south Texas in 1997, which
encompasses McAllen, Brownsville, and Laredo (National Border Patrol, 2000).
The borderlands have become a state of exception, which

is ultimately the most oppressive of the zones of
exclusion. The state of exception destroys the human
rights offered to those outside the state of exception and
reduces those in the state of exception to living in an
indefinite state of bare life, with no chance of escape.
Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception, p 2-4,

Giorgio Agambens seminal work on the relationship between the individual
and the sovereign state is anchored in the concepts of homo sacer and
state of exception. Homo sacer, a figure of Roman law, embodies
what Agamben terms bare or depoliticized life (1998). Under
Roman law, a man convicted of certain crimes was banished from
society and stripped of his rights as a citizen. Drawing on Hannah
Arendts description of the naked life of the refugee (Arendt 1973),
Agamben juxtaposes the bare life of homo sacer who subsists in zones of
exclusion and rightlessness with the citizens politicized and rights-based
life. The existence of homo sacer is central to Agambens
understanding of sovereign power because the possibility of rightsstripping reveals a schism between the individuals biological
existence, on the one hand, and her political life, on the other.
Reduced to bare, or biological, life, the refugee is rendered
politically insignificant. Agamben elaborates on this relationship between
sovereign power and bare life in his historical treatise State of Exception
(2005). The notion of state of exception reflects the augmentation of
government powers during times of emergency when state sovereignty
is perceived to be under threat. In states of emergency,
governments suspend elements of the normal legal order and strip
individuals of the rights that mark politicized life. The state of
exception is thus the ultimate expression of state sovereignty as the
power to proclaim the emergency and suspend the operation of law.
Agambens understanding of life in the state of exception reflects a
conception of rights as fundamentally grounded in the institution of national
citizenship. Following Arendt, Agamben rejects the notion that human
rights are viable outside the confines of membership in the nationstate. Instead, the so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are
revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer
possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a state
(1998, 126). Accordingly, it is those excluded from citizenshipthe
refugee, the stateless person, the illegal migrantwho most
fundamentally represent bare life in the exception. In Agambens work,
the zone of exception is most clearly embodied in the detention center and
(concentration) camp. In State of Exception, Agamben treats the detention
center at Guantanamo Bay not only as the exceptions incarnation, but also
as a case whose exceptionalism surpasses that of comparable zones of
exclusion: What is new about President Bushs order [of November 13,
2001] is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus
producing a legally unnamable an unclassifiable being. Not only do the

Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POWs as defined by
the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of persons
charged with a crime according to American law. Neither prisoners nor
persons accused, but simply detainees, they are the object of a pure de
facto rule, of a detention that is indefinite not only in the temporal
sense but in its very nature as well, since it is entirely removed form the
law and from judicial oversight. (2005, 4-5) Agambens description of bare
life in Guantanamo thus suggests that the denial of citizenship rights
not only deprives individuals of the prospect of ever leaving behind
bare life, but the related denial of a legal identity completely strips
homo sacer of any state protection whatsoever. In Homo sacer and
State of Exception, Agamben focuses his theoretical lens on the sovereigns
power over the individual. Sovereign power in the state of exception
appears totalitarian in nature: not only does it hold complete sway
over the individual, but, in contemporary societies, the state of
exception is permanent, rather than temporary (2005, 2). While
Agambens notion of sovereign power does not explicitly rule out the
possibility of resistance against the state, there does not appear to be
much scope for acts or disobedience. To borrow from Rajaram and
Grundy-Warr (2007), bare life is, in extremis, that condition of abjection
from which no thought of resistance is possible. Power and
resistance are separated by the decisionist sovereign who identifies
the space of the law and its limits. . Sovereign power is the
decisive exercise of control over subjects, including the confinement
of subjects to a position of bar abjection. (2007, xxi)
The border divides the population into superiors and

inferiors and articulates criteria for the interior and the
exterior. This results in both the management of life and
death that both end in biopower and a loss of value to
life.
Subtle, internalised, and smooth (but not all too smooth) as it is,
(post)panoptical surveillance induces a certain conscious relation to
the self and organises the criteria for inclusion and exclusion (Rose,
1999: 243). Borders are thus the spatio-temporal zone par excellence
where surveillance gives substance to the working of biopolitics and
the manifestation of biopower. In this case mobility itself becomes
intrinsically linked to processes of the sorting of individualised citizens from
massified aliens. We can almost forgive theorists such as Bauman (1998, in
Boyne, 2000: 286) for wanting to articulate a dichotomous logic that hinges
on the notion of border, for, at times and at least with regard to circulation
(that is, the circulation of people, for as far as commodities and capital
are concerned, their free movement is encouraged and sustained by the
global capitalist machine), the world seems to be divided into two.
Those who have European/American/Australian/Canadian passports
and those who do not. We all know all too well what difference this
makes in terms of border crossing. Nevertheless, such conceptualisation
misses the point that borders are not merely that which is erected at
the edges of territorial partitioning and spatial particularity, but
more so borders are ubiquitous (Balibar, 2002: 84) and infinitely
actualised within mundane processes of internal administration
and bureaucratic organization 1 blurring the dualistic logic of the
inside and the outside on which Western sovereignty is calibrated.
The point is that in addition to this crude dual division within the global world
order there are further divisions, further segmentations, a
hypersegmentation (Hardt, 1998: 33) at the heart of that monolithic
(Western) half which functions by means of excluding the alreadyexcluded on the one hand and incorporating the already-included
and the waiting-to-be-included excluded on the other. This is done
more or less dialectically, more or less perversely, including and
excluding concurrently through a principle of activity (Rose, 1999:
240) and interwoven circuits of security. Surveillance is the enduring
of exclusion for some and the performance of inclusion for others to
the point where it becomes almost impossible to demonstrate ones
inclusion without having to go through the labyrinth of security
controls and identity validation, intensified mainly, but not solely, at
the borders. It is in similar contexts that Balibar (2002: 81) invokes the
notion of world apartheid in which the dual regime of circulation is creating
different phenomenological experiences for different people through the
polysemic nature (Balibar, 2002: 81) of borders. For as we have discussed,
borders are not merely territorial dividers but spatial zones of
surveillance designed to establish an international class
differentiation and deploy instruments of discrimination and triage
(Balibar, 2002: 82) whereby the rich asserts a surplus of right (Balibar,
2002: 83) and the poor continue to exercise the Sisyphean activity of
circulating upwards and downwards until the border becomes
his/her place of dwelling (Kachra, 2005: 123) or until s/he becomes
the border itself. Sadly, to be a border is to live a life which is a
waiting-to-live, a non-life (Balibar, 2002: 83). The biopolitics of
borders is precisely the management of that waiting-to-live, the
management of that non-life (the waiting-to-live and the non-life of those
who are forcibly placed in detention centres), and at times, it is the
management of death. The death of thousand of refugees and
clandestine migrants drowned in the sea (for instance, in the Strait of
Gibraltar which is argued to be becoming the worlds largest mass grave),
asphyxiated in trucks (as was the fate of 58 Chinese immigrants who died in
2000 inside an airtight truck at the port of Dover), crushed under trains (the
case of the Channel Tunnel) and killed in deserts (in the US-Mexican
border for example). It is the management of bodies that do not
matter. It is the management of the bodies of those to whom the status of
the homo sacer (Agamben, 1998: 8) is attributed. It is the management
of those whose death has fallen into the abyss of insignificance and
whose killing is not sacrificial (except to the few). On the other hand,
the biopolitics of borders is also the management of life; the life of
those who are capable of performing responsible self-government

(Rose, 1999: 259) and self-surveillance i.e. those who can demonstrate
their legitimacy through worthy computer-readable passports/ID
cards that provide the ontological basis for the exercising and fixing
of identity and citizenship at the border.
Living in a bare life nature strips people of political rights and

leaves them in a state of suspended life and suspended
death
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
In Homo Sacer, Agamben looks at the modern concentration camp as
the paradigmatic case of the ultimate state sovereignty that
intersects juridical power and biopower. Constituted as a state
of exception, the Charles T. Lee 59 camp designates a space where
the inmates are neither living as political subjects endowed with
juridical protections nor declared dead or outside the rule of law
(Agamben 1998). Rather, placed in a lingered state of bare
life, the camp dwellers are stripped of political rights and
reduced to a biological minimum, a state of suspended life
and suspended death (Butler 2004, 67). As a state of exception,
the camp signifies an external space while remaining immanent and
attached to the juridico-political order (Isin and Rygiel 2007, 183). In
Agambens words, The exception does not subtract itself from
the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the
exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception,
first constitutes itself as a rule (1998, 18). Inside the camp, the
norm and the exception are indistinguishable: the exception is
found to be part of the rule, and sovereign power is both legal
and outside the law, both outside and inside the juridical
order (15). In legally suspending the validity of the law,
sovereignty interjects normalcy and exceptionality and defines its
power through interstitiality in constituting the camp where
exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zo,
right and fact, enter into a zone of indistinction (9) For Agamben,
this interstitial zone signifies a breakdown of subjective right and
juridical protection, a space of abjection where laws are completely
suspended and anything becomes possible (170). The subjects caught
within the camp are so completely deprived of their rights and
prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any
longer as a crime (171). Furthermore, the zone of bare life is not only
juxtaposed to the democratic order, but is necessary for its continuing
function. In the words of Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr,
It is through the exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the

politicized norm exists (2004, 33). The normalcy of biopolitical life
depends upon the fringe elements of bare life to signify itself as the
norm. Sovereignty and biopower are inextricable: sovereignty is the
ability of the sovereign to step outside the law in order to (re)establish
the biopolitical regularity or normalcy of life necessary for law itself,
the juridical order, to function (Hannah 2008, 59). Sovereignty
perpetuates interstitial zones in maintaining the normalcy of the body
politic.
Migration studys prove that there are two conclusions to

the framework of migration, first, subjects who are not
constituted as citizens are intentionally left so that
they work as a part of the neoliberal normalcy, and
second, irregular migrants are deemed naked in the
context of normalcy due to their lack of official status left
without juridical protections or human rights.
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Agambens camp thus provides a compelling framework for
migration studies that generally results in two conclusions: (1)
unauthorized migrants, as subjects who are neither citizens nor
strangers, are deliberately left in an exceptional state of
irregularity in order to be constituted as a productive part of
neoliberal normalcy ; and (2) irregular migrants are reduced to the
state of homo sacer, a nakedness of sheer life without official
status to demand juridical protections of citizenship or human
rights . Yet despite the powerful parallel between the camp and
undocumented migrate Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of
Citizenship it is notable that what begins for Agamben (and his
migration studies followers) as an open-ended space of interstitiality
posited in sovereignty (i.e., camp, border, detention center)a zone

between life and death, inside and outside, citizenship and illegality
in the end slides into an immobile closure when it comes to the
undocumented, who are forced to scramble between a rigid binary
between political life (legality, rights, citizenship) and bare life
(illegality, no rights, nonparticipation). Such bipolar mapping invites
questioning, as one wonders whether it validly accounts for the
complex and intricate power relations in refugee and immigrant
struggles in various locations. Even if the borderland of unauthorized

migration embodies a juridical nonspace that one cannot celebrate
Taking away subjective rights creates a world where any
discipline is possible and depravity appears as a crime. In
order to have bio political life there must be bare life to prove
its norm
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
For Agamben, this interstitial zone signifies a breakdown of
subjective right and juridical protection, a space of
abjection where laws are completely suspended and anything
becomes possible (170). The subjects caught within the camp
are so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives
that no act committed against them could appear any longer
as a crime (171). Furthermore, the zone of bare life is not only
juxtaposed to the democratic order, but is necessary for its continuing
function. In the words of Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr,
It is through the exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the
politicized norm exists (2004, 33). The normalcy of biopolitical
life depends upon the fringe elements of bare life to signify
itself as the norm. Sovereignty and biopower are inextricable:
sovereignty is the ability of the sovereign to step outside the
law in order to (re)establish the biopolitical regularity or
normalcy of life necessary for law itself, the juridical order, to
function (Hannah 2008, 59). Sovereignty perpetuates interstitial
zones in maintaining the normalcy of the body politic.
Political intervention divides humanity into either

citizenship or bare life non participation. Forcing
subjects to behave as a citizen of a postcolonial state
driving a stagnant ideological life cycle
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
Yet while chronicling such resistant acts constitutes an urgent political
intervention that counters the state of abjection, by understanding
citizenship as solely visible and audible political acts, this line of
critique actually falls into Agambens rigid binary that divides
humanity into political life (citizenship) and bare life (no rights,
nonparticipation)with the only difference being that the latter, by
way of her citizen-like political acts, can now transform and elevate
into the position of the former. Importantly, both Agamben and his
critics alike have yet to extend his analysis of the interstitiality of
sovereign power to 58 Bare Life, Interstices, and the Third Space of
Citizenship examine the corresponding, interstitial agency of the
abject that sidesteps the binary of bare life and citizenship life.I
venture an alternative conception that conceives of citizenship
not only as juridical institutions or political acts, but as a
hegemonic cultural script that sustains liberal governance in
reproducing a normal and proper mode of social life that
interpolates how subjects should behave as citizens. This
liberal cultural script of citizenship, articulated through different
subscripts, such as membership, politics, economics, and life,
governs and regulates numerous material-cultural spheres of
social life in liberal and postcolonial states and regions and
reproduces a stagnant ideological life cycle of citizenship for
human subjects.
Biopower views population in multiplicity and wipes away

all individual identity. Biopolitical mechanisms by the
government are taken for granted and perpetuated by the
individuals themselves.
To begin with, and as proposed by Michel Foucault (2003 [1976]), the
concept of biopolitics entails the notion of biopower which, unlike
the theory of sovereign right (to take life or let live), is not
concerned with the practice of power over the individual/social body
but acts at the level of massification instead of individualisation
(2003 [1976]: 243). It preoccupies itself with the notion of population
in its multiplicity and on the global scale and thereby overrides the old
right of sovereignty with that of to make live and to let die. What
characterises biopower is not so much discipline directed at man-asbody, as was the case in disciplinary society, but the will to control and
regulate man-as-species in a preventive way so much so that biological
life becomes the main problem and the salient concern of politics.
Biopolitics is the process by which biopower is exerted and life is managed
with the aim to achieve equilibration, regularity (Foucault, 2003
[1976]: 246) and normality through mechanisms of control and
modes of intervention which are immanent (Hardt and Negri, 2000:
230, and Nancy, 1991: 3) to all areas of life and encompass a myriad of
subtle practices operating at the level of relations between human beings.
This (historical/political) passage from disciplinary society to control society
as Deleuze (in Hardt, 1998: 23, Rose, 1999: 233, and Hardt and Negri, 2000:
22-3) has it is what marks the fundamental shift from centralised power of
institutions (such as prisons, schools, hospitals, family, etc) toward rhizomatic
networks of control which proceed far beyond explicit disciplinary deployment
of power to much more dynamic and implicit forms inscribed into the
practices of everyday life. They are necessarily less authoritarian than the
former mode of coercive power (Hardt, 1998: 27). From Foucault and passing
through Deleuze, it can be understood how what is in question is the
dispersion and omnipresence of biopower within the various
transactions, relations and flows which render individuals as
dividuals (Deleuze in Rose, 1999: 234) characterised by their
capacities and identified by their pins, profiles, credit scoring, etc,
rather than their subjectivities. This withering away of subjectivity is
what makes biopower more effective and less obtrusive (Rose, 1999:
236). Without subjectivity, the possibility of resistance fades into the
immanent arrangements and administrative operations of
biopolitics. It is in similar light that Foucault (2003 [1976]: 246) asserts that
biopolitics does not intervene in a therapeutic way nor does it seek to
individualise and modify a given person. This would entail the
production of subjectivity itself. Instead it functions at the level of
generality with the aim to identify risk groups, risk factors and risk
levels, and therefore anticipate, prevent, contain and manage
potential risk, all through actuarial analysis and cybernetics of
control (Rose, 1999: 235, 237) rather than diagnostic scrutiny of the
pathological individual. In such a model of power the state is no longer the
sole agent of control but individuals/communities themselves
participate in their own self-monitoring, self-scrutiny and, selfdiscipline through mundane and taken-for-granted regulatory
mechanisms such as alcohol level testing, community care, technologies of
contraception, vaccinations, food dieting, training and other forms of
technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988). These technologies of the self
operate through instrumentalizing a different kind of freedom
(Rose, 1999: 237); different not in a quantitative sense but insofar as it
comes part and parcel of a process of responsiblisation through
which individuals are made in charge of their own behaviour,
competence, improvement, security, and well-being.
The stateless citizens stuck in the state of exception have

nothing to lose, and are filled with desperation, and
through this individualized resistance, they present the
greatest threat to the reign of the sovereign power.
Undocumented Migrants and Resistance in the State of Exception, p 4-5,

What is the nature of resistance in the state of exception? Rarely do

acts of noncompliance by those reduced to bare life amount to
collective acts of civil disobedience. Homo sacer exists in a state of
abjection where the scope of resistance falls far short of the resourcedemanding standard of organized political action. Instead, the cases of
resistance explored in this paper constitute individual acts of

desperation that resemble what James Scott aptly termed the
weapons of the weak. These everyday forms of resistance include
acts of passive noncompliance, sabotage, subtle evasion, and
deception (1985, 31). By contrast to institutionalized politics, then,
everyday resistance distinguishes itself by its implicit disavowal of
public and symbolic goals and is concerned with immediate, de facto
gains (1985, 33). In other words, the nature of resistance in the state
of exception is individualized, rather than collective, oriented toward

short-term, rather than systemic change, and fought by means that
present an indirect, rather than direct, challenge to sovereign
power. For illegal migrants, acts of resistance range from the
extreme of hunger strikes and suicide attempts to acts of physical
resistance and escape, to the destruction of identity documents.
Resistance as an act of desperation only constitutes a viable course
of action once the individual has nothing left to lose. In the state of
exception, resistance arises from the circumstance that the
individual already has lost all claims against the state and thus has
little to fear from defying state orders. In other words, the power of
resistance lies in the freedom from constraints that limit the scope of
noncompliance for those who still have sufficient standing to fear the
loss of rights. Ironically, then, it is homo sacers extreme political
powerlessness that is at the root of resistance and thereby presents

a potential threat to sovereign power.
Immigrants, both legal and not, have been targeted and

turned into the accursed Living in a structure without
structure, this is bare life.
The archaic-sounding formulation that the homo sacer can be killed

but not sacrificed has been realized in the bare life of the
immigration detainee. One hundred and seven migrants died in ICE
custody from 2003 to 2010, many under circumstances only revealed to
the public years after the fact, through investigations by the New York
Times and National Public Radio (Bernstein 2010). Unlike criminals who
must be executed through a formal juridical process, the immigration
detainee can die invisibly under the localized sovereignties of ICE
officers and prison guards, with no one held accountable. While a sacrifice
would be an execution, an inclusion as a citizen, the migrant homo sacer is
killed through his exclusion from state-granted rights. Attorneys and
advocates attempting to secure medical treatment for detainees have often
found that while a clear chain of institutional accountability is in place for
those incarcerated under criminal statutes, when immigration detainees
suffer abuse or neglect no formal structure exists (Macri 2004). The
immigration detainee inhabits a zone of indistinction that is not just
theoretical or rhetorical. Furthermore, this zone is not a static place but
a passage or process through a zone of indistinction that we will later look

at more closely as a topology. The bare life of the immigration detainee can
be conceptualized in four stages: Illegality: a migrant subjects
experience of living in a state of illegality or potential illegality, in the
territorial U.S.; Arrest (apprehension): an encounter between a noncitizen
and an enforcement agent that results in deportation or an attempt at
prosecution under immigration law; Detention: incarceration or bodily
immobilization of a subject on the basis or pretext of immigration
enforcement; Deportation (removal): coercive transportation outside the
physical territory of the United States. Though these stages seem to follow a
logical, causal-temporal progression, some of the most striking
contradictions of the deportation regime emerge when this
sequence is disrupted. What became more apparent than ever before in
the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was that illegality need not exist prior
to the noncitizens arrest. IIlegality is frequently created after the
persons arrest in order to legitimize it. Once the overriding institutional
imperative is created to produce deportable bodies, detention can and
does take place even in the absence of illegality. This has been shown
recently in the detention and even deportation of people who are
citizens or permanent residents, often on racialized grounds (Waslin
2010: 104). Further explication of these stages shows how the potential for
Illegality, deportability and detainability shape experience and events at least
as much as their actuality.
State intervention creates bare life

Kasli and Parla 2009[Zeynep and Ayse, Broken Lines of Il/Legality and the
Reproduction of State Sovereignty: The Impact of Visa Policies on Immigrants to
Turkey from Bulgaria, in Alternatives 34, pg 204]
Sovereign states make the ultimate decision to include or exclude

primarily by wielding the power of separating the rights of the
citizen from the rights of man.8 For Agamben, the separation of rights
of the citizen from the rights of man is consolidated through the
irrevocable unification of the principle of nativity and the principle
of sovereignty in the formation of the nation-state, resulting in the
inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political life, or, of zoe
from bios. As birth immediately becomes nation, the immigrants
subjecthood, irrespective of other affiliations, becomes homo sacer
(bare life), which is not the subject in the law but subject to the law,
suspended in a permanent state of exception.
ImpactRoot Cause
The aff precedes political impact scenarios and is a prereq to collapsing us-them mentalities rejection of
ethical considerations makes your impacts inevitable
MM
The problem of openness which is to be extended to our current and
prospective guests - even, or perhaps especially , unwanted ones - is,
according to Derrida, coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always
about answering for a dwelling place , for ones identity, ones
space, ones limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth,
family, home (Derrida 2000, pp. 149/151, emphasis added). Of course, this
absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming
or even impossible. But ethics in fact spans two different realms: it is
always suspended between this unconditional hyperbolic order of the
demand to answer for my place under the sun and open to the alterity
of the other that precedes me, and the conditional order of ethnos, of
singular customs, norms, rules, places and political acts. If we see ethics as
situated between these two different poles, it becomes clearer why
we always remain in a relationship to ethics, why we must respond
to it, or, in fact, why we will be responding to it no matter what. Even if we
respond nonethically to our guest by imposing on him a norm or political
legislation as if it came from us ; even if we decide to close the door in
the face of the other, make him wait outside for an extended period
of time, send him back, cut off his benefits or place him in a
detention centre, we must already respond to an ethical call. In this
sense, our politics is preceded by an ethical injunction , which does not
of course mean that we will respond ethically to it (by offering him unlimited
hospitality or welcome). However, and here lies the paradox, we will respond
ethically to it (in the sense that the injunction coming from the other will
make us take a stand, even if we choose to do nothing whatsoever and
pretend that we may carry on as if nothing has happened). The ethics of
bodies that matter also entails the possibility of changing the laws
and acts of the polis and delineating some new forms of political
identification and belonging . Indeed, in their respective readings of
Antigone, Butler and Derrida show us not only that the paternal law towards
the foreigner that regulates the idea of kinship in Western democracies can
be altered but also that we can think community and kinship otherwise. If
traditional hospitality is based on what Derrida calls a conjugal model,
paternal and phallocentric, in which [i]ts the familial despot, the father, the
spouse, and the boss, the master of the house who lays down the laws of
hospitality (2000, p. 149), openness towards the alien and the foreign
changes the very nature of the polis , with its Oedipal kinship structures and
gender laws. Since, as Butler shows us, due to new family affiliations
developed by queer communities but also as a result of developments in
genomics it is no longer clear who my brother is, the logic of national identity
and kinship that protects state boundaries against the influx of asylum
seekers is to be left wanting. This is not necessarily to advise a
carnivalesque political strategy of abandoning all laws, burning all
passports and opening all borders (although such actions should at
least be considered ), but to point to the possibility of resignifying
these laws through their (improper) reiteration. Enacted by political
subjects whose own embodiment remains in the state of tension with the
normative assumptions regarding propriety, gender and kinship that underlie
these laws, the laws of hospitality are never carried out according to the
idea/l they are supposed to entail (cf. Butler 1993, p. 231).It is precisely
Butlers account of corporeality and matter, of political subjectivity and
kinship, which makes Levinas ethics (and Derridas reworking of it)
particularly relevant to this project. Although the concepts of the body and
materiality are not absent from Levinas writings - indeed, he was one of the
first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot - Butler
allows us to redraw the boundaries of the bodies that matter and question
the mechanisms of their constitution. Her others are not limited to the
stranger, the orphan and the widow of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the
more acceptable others who evoke sympathy and generate pity.10 It is also
the AIDS sufferer, the transsexual and the drag queen / people whose bodies
and relationships violate traditional gender and kinship structures - that
matter to her. By investigating the contingent limits of
universalization, Butler mobilizes us against naturalizing exclusion
from the democratic polis and thus creates an opportunity for its
radicalization (1997, p. 90). The ethics of bodies that matter does not
thus amount to waiting at the door for a needy and humble asylum
seeker to knock, and extending a helping hand to him or her. It also
involves realizing that the s/he may intrude, invade and change my life to the
extent that it will never be the same again, and that I may even become a
stranger in the skin of my own home.
Modern otherization of immigrants occurs under an

imperialist framework fueled by the continual
maintenance of the border
Immigration problems are not a problem of excessive numbers of
immigrants. They are a problem of the racism of Europeans, North
Americans and white majorities elsewhere, who more or less
explicitly harbour notions of the superiority of the white race,
whatever that may mean, and the undesirability of destroying the
supposed homogeneity of their nation . In the past these notions have
been applied to virtually all new immigrants, whatever their nationality or
race. In the last forty years the main objects of anti-immigrant racism in
Britain and elsewhere have been, and are, people of African and Asian origin.
In the 1950s and 1960s British politicians tried to work out how to exclude
coloured Commonwealth citizens without excluding white Commonwealth
citizens and the much larger numbers of Irish immigrants, without giving an
appearance of discrimination and without causing offence to the
governments and peoples of the multiracial Commonwealth. Eventually they
abandoned the attempt, and immigration controls, from 1962 onwards, were
at first covertly and then blatantly based on racist discrimination not only
against foreigners in general, but against particular types of foreigners (see
Chapter 2). The currently dominant form of anti-immigrant racism,
that which is directed against black and Asian people, and most recently
Romany people, is sometimes explained by the assertion that they are
more easily identifiable as immigrants, or the children of immigrants,
than most of the other waves of migrants to Britain over the centuries. But
similar things have been said about the supposed non-assimilability of other
immigrants, and in any case it is unclear why such distinctions should
matter. The most convincing explanation for the strength and persistence of
anti-black racism is to be found in the myths which the imperialists invented
to justify to themselves the extreme forms of suffering they imposed on their
colonial subjects. These myths survive, permeate British peoples
consciousness, and infect the way all of us think and act. It would
nevertheless be surprising if prejudice against black people did not diminish
in the same way as prejudice against earlier immigrants has. Meanwhile, antiimmigrant hysteria is whipped up not only against black, Asian and Romany
refugees but also against other recent groups of refugees and migrants:
Kosovans and other white east Europeans. The primary targets of racism and
xenophobia are now refugees. Since the 1980s there have been rapid
increases, from a low level, in the numberof people coming from the Third
World and eastern Europe to Britain and other rich countries to seek asylum.
The increase in asylum seekers followed the closing of borders against people
coming to seek work in the 1960s and 1970s. The government and others
have made the false logical leap that this means that asylum seekers
are actually economic migrants trying to exploit a loophole in
immigration controls. A few are. But to claim that most asylum seekers
are bogus , as government ministers and the media often do, is false and
unjust. They come overwhelmingly from countries and regions in which there
are repressive regimes, civil wars and violent conflicts. Most of these are not
the areas from which people had previously migrated to work. There is in fact
a connection between the two types of migration, but not in the way in which
those opposed to immigration see it. This is that imperialism bears much
responsibility for both of them. Imperialism created links between the
colonies and the metropolis. While war, conflicts and repression are often
the product of many internal factors, including the chauvinism of religious and
ethnic majorities, various forms of nationalism and more straightforward
struggles for domination and wealth, it can be argued that some arise from
centuries of imperialist control, and in particular the imperialists divide-andrule tactics and the boundaries they drew on maps. Imperialism in its
modern guise has created new forms of impoverishment, which may
exacerbate existing nationalist and ethnic tensions. When the long
postwar capitalist boom ended in the late 1970s, the rich countries succeeded
in transferring much of the burden of their own crisis to the Third World. The
prices of Third World countries exports of primary commodities and raw
materials collapsed. When at the beginning of the 1980s first the Reagan
government in the United States and then European governments raised
interest rates to unprecedented heights, they massively increased the cost of
servicing foreign debt for governments in the Third World (which had been
pressed to borrow at low or even negative interest rates from Western banks
seeking a sinkhole for the money deposited by oil-exporters in the 1970s).
In order to force governments to continue to service their debt at these new
extortionate rates of interest, a cartel of the World Bank, the IMF, Western
governments and banks and Third World elites imposed cuts in public
expenditure on social services, wages and employment in Third World
countries which bore most heavily on the poor and urban wage earners. In
Algeria the massacres started when the military denied election victory to the
FIS, an Islamic party, whose strength was built especially among the poor in
urban areas impoverished by the governments turn to more orthodox proWestern economic policies. The imposition of IMF/World Bank
liberalisation in Yugoslavia led to severe poverty and unemployment
and heavy indebtednessto Western banks and financial institutions. In their
attempt to get Yugoslavia to service this debt, the IMF/World Bank forced the
federal government to cut investment and transfers to the regions. Michel
Chossudovsky in a detailed article on this issue says: Secessionist tendencies
feeding on social and ethnic divisions gained impetus precisely during
aperiod of brutal impoverishment of the Yugoslav population. ... The
economic therapy (launched in January 1990) contributed to crippling the
federal State system. State revenues which should have gone as transfer
payments to the republics and autonomous provinces were instead funnelled
towards servicing Belgrades debt ... . This in turn fuelled the populist
nationalism which led to the break-up of Yugoslavia and war
Militarized border discourse is the root cause of exclusion

the aff shifts from questioning the migrant to
questioning their forced eviction
In a more direct sense, repression and wars in the Third World are largely
made possible because both the regimes and those who fight them obtain
weapons from the industrialised countries, frequently with the help of official
loans. Many of the worlds most repressive regimes are supported, with aid
for example, by European governments and the United States. Boththe
Nigerian and the Zairean governments, as well as many governments in Latin
America and Asia, were supported for years while they oppressed and
tortured their peoples and stole their wealth. When right-wing
governments are thrown out or voted out by liberation the West
intervenes by cutting aid, boycotting trade and sometimes by
military intervention movements or left-wing political parties and

attempt to carry out reforms and to redistribute wealth to the poor,
, directly or through its surrogates. It thus has direct responsibility, for
example, for refugees from Chile and from Angola, among others. The
recent flow of refugees from eastern Europe follows the introduction of
capitalism and market systems and the break-up of Yugoslavia and the
Soviet Union, most of which was welcomed and supported by the West. In
1999 more than half of all asylum seekers in Europe were from the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, nearly all of them Kosovans. Those who assert
that refugees and migrants are a problem should examine the
causes of forced migration, rather than blaming and punishing
refugees .
ImpactSecuritization
The USfg is constantly attempting to further securitize
the border in an attempt to control the people attempting
to cross it
Power, and
Resistance: The Case of the 2009 Motn in Pecos, Texas pgs. 5-6) TYBG
Foucault points out that the foundations of the modern state were made by
soldiers as well as jurists and philosophers; the continued use of military
tactics as a primary method of immigration control - particularly in
border initiatives such as Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line
of the 1990s -attests to the perpetuation of these origins of powerover by force14. In and of themselves, these tactics seem natural for
any state interested in regulating its population and controlling its
outsiders. Disciplinary power operates within the US through the
system of immigration control as an extension of the disciplined
encounters with migrants at the border. The differentiation of
individuals by documentation is essential in the construction of the
Other. The soldierly tactics of US border enforcement illustrate
the militarization of the national front to keep out an Other whose
demographic characteristics have historically been constructed
through United States immigration policies from the 1882 Chinese
Exclusion Act and onward in more subtle ways. The surveillance and at
times armed expulsion of others once they enter the US, and not
merely if they enter it illegally, exemplifies the perpetuation of
disciplinary power. As Eithne Luibhid argues, Clearly, inspection at the
border is not a one-time experience but it is rather, as Foucaults image of
the carceral archipelago suggests, a process that situates migrants within
lifelong networks of surveillance and disciplinary relations.15
Foucaults discussion of panopticism illuminates the evolution of
institutions into disciplinary societies, through the extension of the
mechanisms of discipline throughout society in the formation of what might
be called in general the disciplinary society16. The theoretical Panopticon is
a place of constant surveillance, of power transmitted through the knowledge
that others are watching. The Panopticon shows us how power is exercised,
not simply held17. In Benthams Panopticon each comrade becomes
a guardian. This calls to mind the Minutemen, the citizen activist
group engaged in voluntary civilian border defense. Their
interventions in US border enforcement contribute to the
surveillance of the border, reinforcing the disciplinary power
exercised over would-be immigrants to the United States. They show
that disciplinary power is exercised on all levels of society, well
beyond the auspices of the state. The same spirit of surveillance
characterizes federal collaboration with local authorities, in the form of 287
(g) partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local
law enforcement. In 287 (g) partnerships (signed into effect with the
Immigrant Nationality Act of 1996), ICE trains local officials around the
US to act in its capacity, aggressively seeking and capturing
undocumented migrants within local jails (criminal aliens) and in the
local community.18 In this way, the local police become guardians,
exerting disciplinary power on behalf of federal officials over
immigrants illegally in the United States. The vast majority of migrants
apprehended through these strategies are Mexican19, and a great majority of
these immigrant detainees are charged for nothing more than illegal entry.20
The disciplinary power exercised toward the immigrant population of
course doesnt end at the border; surveillance of immigrants continues
once they enter the country in the context of documentation status
and far beyond official records in social segregation. Immigrants enter
the official records on conditional terms or else stay in the shadows as
undocumented migrants. Their immigration status determines the
amount of surveillance they face from the government, in the sense
that legal permanent residents or other non-citizens are in much greater
danger of being deported and can be denied citizenship for any misstep. The
actions of their lives (tax activities, criminal record) come under great
scrutiny when they apply for citizenship or for other government benefits. In
the pursuit of adjusting or acquiring status, then, they are voluntarily under
government watch throughout the probationary period before citizenship is
established, if it is at all. Differentiation by immigrant status
determines the degree of agency to vote, to get a higher
education, or to walk without anxiety down the street. If, as Luibhid
argues, immigration control is both a powerful symbol of nationhood
and people and a means to literally construct the nation and the
people in particular ways21, then differentiation by immigrant status
- a way of exercising disciplinary power - presents many complications to
a coherent construction of who belongs and who is Other. Mixed
status families exemplify this difficulty. Though he had lived in the United
States for almost 20 years, Jesus Manuel Galindo had a different status than
that of his wife, children, and extended family. As a result he was expelled
from the nation in which he had come of age and separated from his entire
family, and then sentenced to serve jail time for attempting to reunify with
his family by crossing the northern border
The issue with opening the border has long been framed
under the concept of securitization Securitization fails
in democratic regimes because the public is often swayed
by the overdramatized threat of terminal harms. As we
open the border, we want to lessen the dramatic
portrayal of the perceived threat and instead leave it up
to politicization.
Bare life is life that is excluded from the political order. The relation
of bare life to the political order, however, is not purely a relation of
exteriority. Rather, bare life is the zone of indistinction in which
political life and natural life constitute each other in including and
excluding each other (p. 90). Citizenship, the lynchpin of the modern
political order, would be meaningless without the presence, whether real or
imaginary, of non-citizens. But the role played by non-citizens in
constituting the political order is contingent on their exclusion from
this order. Agamben sees this exclusive logic as the fatal flaw of the
modern nation-state, and attributes the myriad abuses suffered by
refugees and denaturalized subjects during the last two centuries to its
immanent unfolding. The utility of Agamben's insights derive from
their uncanny ability to highlight both the constitutive role that
politically marginalized populations play in shaping the modern
political order and the logic of their exclusion from this order. They
are not excluded simply by virtue of being non-citizens, refugees or
stateless persons, but by virtue of being the embodiment of pure life
itself, which has no place in the modern political order when decoupled from
political existence. Scholars must be cautious, however, not to lose sight of
the fact that Agamben's analysis of bare life emerged from his analysis of
specific European events, most notably the Holocaust, and therefore may
miss unique aspects of the experiences of racism and exclusion in nonEuropean contexts. Hesse (2004), for instance, argues that Agamben's
conception of racism is Eurocentric, as it defines racism as a relation of
exception and consequently overlooks the ways in which racism is built into
social institutions. Taking the Holocaust as the ideal-typical case of
biopolitical exclusion, Hesse writes, obscures other experiences of racist
exclusion that cannot be assimilated into this paradigm. As I explain below, it
is highly important to contextualize Agamben's concepts within the given
socio-historical setting in which they are employed, and to be attentive to
processes that they may overlook. Nevertheless, Hesse's critique of his
framework does not do justice to Agamben's unique and innovative definition
of relations of exception. By focusing on the exception, Agamben by no
means wants to argue that racism and other exclusionary ideologies are not
built into social institutions. Indeed, he believes that relations of exception
are constitutive of the fundamental institutions underpinning the
modern political order, namely sovereignty and citizenship. Without
the ability to call forth a state of exception, and without the presence of noncitizens, sovereignty and citizenship would be meaningless. Following
Benjamin (1965), Agamben (2005) argues that the exception has become the
rule in modern society, as it is built into the basic workings of modern social
and political institutions. Agamben's argument does, however, suffer from
several shortcomings. The most serious is that it is overly teleological,
attributing essentially all atrocities committed against those at the margins of
the political community to the actualization of the logic inherent to the
foundational principles of nation-states. Consequently, Agamben's ideas are
not especially useful for explaining why xenophobic sentiment and
discriminatory practices crystallize during some periods and not others, or
why they target certain collectives but neglect others similarly situated
economically and socially. This shortcoming results, in part, from Agamben's
overemphasis on political and legal exclusion, and his neglect of the

important role of social processes and practices in determining which
populations become marked as excluded and targeted by discriminatory
policies, and when this tends to occur. Recent developments in the field
of security studies, most notably the concept of securitization
developed by the Copenhagen School, provide the analytic tools
necessary for a more contextualized and historically based analysis
of the exceptional politics discussed so eloquently by Agamben.
Waever (1995) originally developed the concept of securitization in reaction
to traditional conceptions of security, which confined issues of security to
military threats and their effects on international relations. Part of the
rationale for confining the field of security studies to military issues was that
broadening it to address other sectors would lead to a loss in analytic
coherence and focus (Walt, 1991; Dorff, 1994). However, it also reflected an
identification of security threats with the referent objects of such threats,
which were defined exclusively in terms of state sovereignty. The radical
move of Waever in developing the concept of securitization, which has been
elaborated further by Buzan et al (1998), was to shift the emphasis of
security studies away from referent objects alone and toward the processes
by which actors present threats (military and non-military alike) as a
justification for emergency measures and the transcendence of ordinary
politics, as well as the outcomes of these processes. Securitization,
according to Buzan et al, is a speech act that dramatizes and presents an
issue as of supreme priority. By claiming an issue is a matter of security, an
agent claims a need for and a right to treat it by extraordinary means (p.
26). Contrasting securitization with politicization, Buzan et al write,
Politicization means to make an issue appear to be open, a matter of
choice, something that is decided upon and that therefore entails
responsibility, in contrast to issues that either could not be different
or should not be put under political control. By contrast,
securitization means to present an issue as urgent and existential,
as so important that it should not be exposed to the ordinary
haggling of politics but should be dealt with decisively by top
leaders prior to other issues. (p. 29) A person or group that makes a
speech act, or securitizing move is a securitizing actor. But just
because an appeal to security is made, there is no guarantee that a
given issue will be securitized. The threat must also be seen as
reasonable by the audience of the speech act. The audience
may very well regard the securitizing move as illegitimate and
oppose attempts to elevate the threat into the realm of security.
Securitization is thus an inter-subjective process, encompassing
both the actor who makes the securitizing move and the audience
who perceives the move as legitimate. The possibility that
securitizing moves may fail is essential for understanding the
functioning of securitizing discourses in liberal democratic states, as
opposed to dictatorial regimes. Securitization involves, at least to some
degree, public endorsement of the suspension of normal rules and
procedures. Indeed, as Agamben (2005) similarly points out, the power
invested in the state during a state of exception comes from the fact that the
state's actions are viewed as having the force of law behind them, even
though they may violate the normal dictates of the law. However, unlike
Agamben, who talks very little about the conditions under which attempts to
engage in exceptional politics are likely or unlikely to be successful, Buzan et
al specify a set of facilitating conditions, or conditions under which a
speech act can succeed in securitizing an issue. First, the speech act must
follow the grammar, or general structure, of security discourse.
Second, the securitizing actor must possess sufficient social capital
to be convincing to the audience of the speech act. Finally, the
alleged threat must be perceived, at least to some degree, by the
audience as a legitimate threat to their well-being, rather than a
fabrication used to further the interests of a particular person or group. Thus,
not just anyone can securitize an issue, and not just any issue can be
securitized.
Under the broad umbrella of the Red Scare, illegal

immigrants have long been labeled enemies of the nation
and threats to national security. The securitization goes
as far as to dehumanize the Mexicans to the point where
their long-lost relatives, now of partial American descent
and full citizenship, despise them and shun them for selfpreservation.
Interests alone did not determine the way in which different social institutions
and actors embraced or resisted the securitizing rhetoric around immigration
during the 1950s. The case of unions and Hispanic civic organizations and
their embrace of the securitizing rhetoric promoted by the media, politicians
and the INS illustrates the importance of looking at the broader social field
and historical context in which the discourses surrounding immigration and
security were embedded. The restrictive and xenophobic stance of unions
toward Mexican immigrant workers during the 1950s had roots dating back to
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this period, it was
the norm for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and mainstream unions
to push for heavy restrictions on immigration, and to reinforce racism among
the general populace. Although there were a select few unions, such as the
Industrial Workers of the World, that espoused a more inclusive ideology of
worker solidarity and encouraged immigrant participation, such unions failed
to attract a strong enough membership base to sustain themselves over time
(Mink, 1986). The intensification of the Cold War and the atmosphere
of fear created by McCarthy and others who exploited the Red Scare
placed unions in a somewhat precarious position, as those
sympathetic to worker interests were frequently suspected of being
sympathetic to communism as well. Consequently, unions, at least at
the federal level, took strong measures to distinguish themselves as
allies, rather than enemies, in the war against communism. In
combination with their traditional xenophobic approach toward
dealing with questions of immigration, this led them to embrace

wholeheartedly the rhetoric linking immigration to communism. In
opposition to H.R. 355, Walter P. Reuther, the president of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), argued that the government's failure to tighten
border security and implicit encouragement of illegal entry into the United
States invited fifth-column activities of subversion and sabotage (United
States, Congress, House, Committee on Agriculture, 1954). A couple of
months later, in April of 1954, William Schnitzler, the secretarytreasurer of the AFL said that Communists and potential spies and
saboteurs were among the Mexican wetbacks entering the
country, and that Red-hunting Senators ignored this threat to national
security because of the interest of big business in cheap labor (Los Angeles
Times, 1954a, 17). In addition to contributing to fears of direct communist
infiltration through the Mexican border, union leaders argued that the terrible
exploitation of Mexican immigrants was being used by communists and other
ideologues to bolster anti-American sentiment by portraying the United
States as a country completely focused on the advancement of narrow
economic interests and unconcerned with the welfare of ordinary workers.
Reuther, for example, stated that the administration was playing
directly into the hands of Communist elements in Central and
South America, and that the legislation allowing unilateral
recruitment of farm labor would give the Communists invaluable
support in their unceasing efforts to picture the United States as
the colossus of the north, a Nation motivated solely by narrow
economic self-interest (United States, Congress, House, Committee on
Agriculture, 1954, 7677). Hispanic civic groups also partook in the use of
securitizing rhetoric linking Mexican immigration to threats to internal
security. The tenuousness of the relationship between Mexican Americans
and Mexican immigrants has roots dating back to the nineteenth century. Up
until the rise of the Chicano Movement and the civil rights struggles that took
place during the 1960s and 1970s, the main strategy of Hispanic civic
organizations was assimilationist. The goal was to become white, rather
than to gain acceptance as a national minority. Mexican Americans and
long-term Mexican residents in the United States perceived the entry of
poor Mexican peasants into the Southwest not only as a source of
job competition, but also as a barrier to their full assimilation and
acceptance in American society, as they were often poor, illiterate and
unfamiliar with the cultural and linguistic norms of the United States
(Sanchez, 1993; Gutierrez, 1995).
Securitization of the immigrant problem leads to a loss of

identity for the illegal immigrants and reduces
government policy to a point where it is no longer a
problem of the economy but a problem of national
security. This skews government policy in uncontrollable
and racist ways.

As this paper has shown, Operation Wetback was the culmination of a process
of securitization that had taken place over the course of several years
preceding the summer of 1954. The intensification of the Cold War
provided the context within which it was possible for myriad social
actors, including politicians, the media and the INS, to advance claims
linking unauthorized immigration to the Red Scare that would not
have been credible under different circumstances. Other actors,
including unions and Hispanic civic organizations, also took advantage of the
opportunity to use discourses linking immigration to national security in order
to advance their own struggles for position and recognition in society. Those
who resisted such securitizing moves, namely growers and
politicians from the Southwest, did so solely out of self-interest, and
cared little about the welfare of undocumented immigrants
themselves. When growers were guaranteed an adequate and stable supply
of bracero labor by government authorities, they generally embraced plans to
carry out the mass deportation of undocumented workers so as to avoid the
increasingly negative reputation that came along with employing
undocumented labor (Calavita, 1992). With minimal social organization
and integration into US communities, due in large part to INS postharvest deportations and spatial segregation, undocumented
immigrants remained faceless and invisible in US society, and they
had few advocates who genuinely cared about their well-being.
Consequently, the securitizing moves made by different actors were, by and
large, accepted by the American public as a legitimate justification for
elevating the issue of unauthorized immigration out of the realm of ordinary
politics and into the realm of security. Once unauthorized immigration
had been elevated into the realm of security, ordinary laws and
procedures no longer influenced what government officials and
agencies could or could not do. They had virtually complete
discretion to deal with the wetback problem as they saw fit. During
the planning stages of Operation Wetback, Brownell even suggested the
possibility of shooting some undocumented immigrants to
discourage others from crossing the border (Garca, 1980). The mere
consideration of killing as a possible means of dealing with unauthorized
immigration demonstrates the extreme dangers that come with elevating an
issue into the realm of security.
ImpactViolence
Immigration should be unlimited limiting it leads to
dangerous communal fusion movements such as Nazism
or Fascism
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
Instead of regarding being-in-common as the gathering together of
individuals who share some common property or essence and in which the
clinamen is removed from such gathering, Nancy (1991, p. 267) offers an
alternative understanding of this concept. He asserts that being-incommon is first and foremost being exposed to alterity through a
relationship of sharing, made possible by the Heideggerian notion of
being-with (Mitsein) which goes beyond commonality and identity
politics. Such an understanding, albeit abstract due to its breaking away
from any spatial particularity, does indeed save individuals or rather
singularities from the danger of communal fusion (witnessed for
instance in the movements of fascism and Nazism) and the
restraints of self-enclosure [like] (immigration controls for instance).
For in Nancys conceptualisation, singular beings are not regarded as
absolute figures of immanentist politics (i.e. citizens) but as beings
whose experience of being-in-common is constituted through their
predicate-free existential/ ontological position of being-there (Dasein)
and what they reveal to each other in their exteriority (which forms
their interiority) and their multiplicity (which forms their uniqueness). The
being-such of a singular being is irreducibly a being- with that draws its sense
of selfness from the existence of otherness without, however, having to
live up to a differentiating identity or a shared individuality that would place it
within the confines of categorisation i.e. suchness: such-and- such being is
reclaimed from its having this or that property (the reds, the French, the
Muslims) (Agamben 1993, p. 1). Thus, the realisation or rather
actualisation of being-in-common is only possible insofar as singular
beings are whatever (ibid.) beings (not having any particular identity)
whose membership could not be determined by or reduced to
having/sharing common characteristics. But a membership that can
only be experienced at the moment of exposure to singularity, at the
moment of its taking place (which is itself without a place, without a
space reserved for or devoted to its presence) (Nancy 1991, p. 72).
Exposure, sharing and being-with are thus constitutive of being-incommon in such a way that belonging itself becomes a bare
belonging stripped from any predetermined condition of
membership (Agamben 1993, p. 84) or demarcated territoriality. It is a
belonging where whatever (singularity such as it is and this such is
unidentifiable and fluid) belongs to whateverness (unconditional being-incommon). Immigration, in this sense, can be regarded as an aspect
of exposure, sharing and being-with, to which there could/should be

no fixed limit or neat bordering .
The implication of regulated immigration is violence

derived from this radical breach of ethics
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
For when the issue of immigration is contemplated from an ethical
standpoint, it becomes possible to reveal not only the failure but
also the violence embedded within Western politics (Metselaar 2003,
p. 1). This political violence is epitomised in the policies of detention,
the treatment of refugees, the proposal of asylum quotas, the forced
integration, or even, the act of naming (illegal immigrant, asylum
seeker, refugee, bogus, detainee, deportee, etc.), all of which
breach the ethics of radical generosity toward otherness in that
violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating
persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in
which they no longer recognize themselves (Levinas 1969, p. 21). It is,
hence, the call for ethics that puts the question of politics into doubt
and reconfigures the understanding of responsibility for the Other
(Levinas 1982, p. 95), for the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with
oneself (Levinas 1969, p. 39)4.
Conditional hospitality badleads to exclusion and

violence
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
For conditional hospitality entails a measuring of actions, a calculation

of responsibility and a selection of those to whom one may/should be
hospitable [or] responsible. This is indeed the political hospitality
manifested, for instance, in what Cohen (2003, p. 72) calls economic
elitism found in the schemes of points system and work permits
which function by means of filtering those who may economically
contribute more to the public purse (Spencer, in Cohen 2003, p. 73)
from those who have little or nothing to contribute (Cohen 2003, p. 73).
Added to that the current Worker Registration Scheme in the United
Kingdom relating to nationals of the new European Union member states7 as
well as the proposed quotas for asylum. Ramifications of this political
hospitality are [is] damaging and violent in that not only modes of
discrimination, inequality and exclusion are systematically
implemented, but also, the absolute responsibility for the Other is
negated and overridden by an exigency for reciprocity or a demand
for repayment
ImpactHuman Rights
Bioprofiling creates a web of nonegalitarian distinctions,
undermining human rights associated with globalization.

Bioprofiling, however, is not simply a more accurate and efficient way to
validate ones identity and to cross it with relevant data on illegal
immigration, crime, or terrorism. Bioprofiling inscribes a designated
category of suspicion on human bodies, facilitating a situation in which
ones fingerprints testify to ones travel log and consumption patterns along
with ones place of origin, ethnic background, or religious affiliation. In this
way, biosocial profiling transforms mobility into a public
performance, both in the sense of treating the human individual as a
mobile unit located within collective categories of suspicion and in
the sense of subjecting a relatively discreet social action to public
scrutiny. Perhaps ironically, however, the transformation of mobility into a
moment of utmost exposure does not enhance social proximity but rather
maintains and facilitates a regime of social distance. Profiling represents a
distinct modality of power, in this case the power to immobilize, to create
social distances, and in general to police and regulate spatial
behavior. Profiling has to be distinguished from other modalities of power.
Foucault characterized late modernity by arguing that an intricate web of
nonegalitarian distinctions enabled by technologies of normalization
underwrites the package of egalitarian and universal rights
promised to individuals in liberal constitutions . Normalization, as
Foucault called it, announced an era of lesser reliance on physical
punishment in general and on the life-taking powers of law in particular.
Rather, normalization uses disciplinary techniques that manage life by
subjecting individuals to an everexpanding list of standards to which they are
expected to conform. Perceiving people as moral and rational actors (Simon
1988), normalization aspires to change people and to correct behavior. In
guiding sentencing policies, write Feeley and Simon (1992), this meant
concerns with rehabilitation and reform. However, the new penology, they
argue, relies on actuarial techniques rather than individual characteristics to
determine punishment, aiming more at efficient risk management than at
rehabilitation (Feeley and Simon 1994, 1992). Because this actuarial justice
does not seek to change people but rather to manage them in place (Simon
1988:773), its logic seems to be in perfect fit with the mobility-curbing and
mobilityconfining tasks of biosocial profiling as well. Biosocial profiling,
activated at the service of a mobility regime, is not concerned with
correction (whether through education, persuasion, or sanctions), but
rather with fixing individuals into given categories of suspicion. If
various tests serve the disciplines in their attempt to normalize individual

behavior, then the classifications of profiling serve the mobility
regime in its attempt to block or contain individuals . Thus,
paraphrasing Foucault, we may argue that a dense web of nonegalitarian
distinctions establishing a system of highly differential movement
licenses underwrites the universal declarations of human rights
that are so strongly associated with globalization.
Generic Biopower Impacts
ImpactRacism
Racism is a function of biopolitics used as a means to
control populaitons

Society Must Be Defendedculminates in Foucaults chilling account of a
tendency immanent to bio-politics, a tendency to what he has
elsewhere designated as Athanato-politics, and its basis in what he
here terms state racism. The question that Foucault raises in his final
lecture in this course, is how can mass murder and extermination
disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how will
the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this
objective? ... How, under these conditions, is it possible for a political
power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order
to kill ... ? Given that this powers objective is essentially to make
live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the function of
death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower? (p.
254) For Foucault, it is here that racism, which, indeed, has a long history,
intervenes, and now becomes inscribed in the basic mechanisms of
the modern state. According to Foucault: broadly speaking, racism
justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing
to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically
stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population,
insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality. The
specificity of modern racism is not bound up with mentalities,
ideologies, or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of
power, with the technology of power. We are dealing with a mechanism
that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the workings
of a state that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and
the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The
juxtaposition of - the way biopower functions through - the old
sovereign power of life and death implies the workings, the
introduction and activation of racism. And it is, I think, here that we
find the actual roots of racism (p. 258). State racism then emerges,
when in a regime of biopower, internal or external threats lead the
state to engage in mass death: Once the State functions in the
biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of
the State (p. 256).
Race is a key facet implicated in the fabrication of bare

life
Studies, 11
and spaces of moral alibi. Page 607.
Race, as it pertains to immigration policies, is relevant to the criticisms and
questions that have been raised about Foucault's neglect of the international
realm and specifically his lack of attention to the operations of power beyond
the local and national realms of the West. Jabri (2007) points to the
contemporary relevance of race, arguing that it is just as much a part of
the ``late modern intervention into the societies of others'' as it was
in the colonial past (Hing, 2009, page 23).When it comes to
contemporary US border enforcement strategies, biopolitics is
implicated in the very construction of the boundaries that create a
national realm as distinct from an international realm, and race is
clearly implicated in this. The racialized underpinnings of various
contemporary local legislations such as Proposition 187 discussed
above as well as the long history of overt and structural racism in US
immigration policies culminate in the undocumented migrant as bare
life, a subject whose very existence is synonymous with illegality
and is therefore deemed a threat to US sovereignty and governance.
The unauthorized migrant becomes socially undesirable, and
ultimately one who can be killed without consequence. De Genova
(2002) observes that ``the category ìllegal alien' is saturated with
racialized difference and indeed has long served as a constitutive
dimension of the racialized inscription of `Mexicans' in the United
States''. This is consistent with Balibar's (2005) exploration of the
phenomena of racism and his argument(s) that the categories of
difference, otherness, and exclusion are crucial to an examination of
racism, especially in its multiple forms, notably pertaining to what
has been labeled differentialist or neoracism. Balibar (2005, page 20)
notes that ``globalization as such has, at least in principle, no exterior'' and
that such exterior as it exists to any degree `ìs only reinforced by
the working of political boundaries as mainly instruments of security
and control of the flows of populations with absolutely unequal
status and rights''. The unequal status and rights of populations
frequently break down along racialized lines.
ImpactGenocide
The biopolitical implications of the status quo create the
ideological priming needed for a holocaust

Agamben writes that the sovereign nomos is the principle that joins
law and violence to establish the territorial of order. The sovereign
occupies the point indistinction between violence and law. In The Production
of Space, Henri Lefebvre wrote that sovereignty demarcates a space
established and constituted by violence. This violence cannot be
separated from a principle of unification that subordinates all social
practices. Through its monopolization of violence the state claims to
create a space where society is perfected for all, though in fact it is
the interests of a minority class that are enforced. The Westphalian
state system, held as a defining element of modernity, established the
principle of territorial sovereignty in international law. Galina
Cornelisse defines the concept of territoriality as the founding of
political authority on demarcated territory (Cornelisse 2010). Though
the idea of universal human rights emerged after 1945, these rights
became inextricably tied to national citizenship and hence state
sovereignty. It is this sovereignty that finds itself under attack by
globalization, the free movement of labor across borders. Under
globalization, the State must fight irrelevancy by reconstituting itself
through the production of bare life. This is why, according to Schinkel,
deportation and detention are not shortcomings of the state under
globalization but its fulfillment (Schinkel 2009). According to Foucault,
another decisive event of modernity was the inclusion of bare life in
the political realm as a subject. The focus on this bare life as an object of
the calculations of state power is the practice known as biopolitics, which
finds its ultimate expression in the camp. Agamben understands this
causal chain as crucial to addressing modern democratic states
contradictions. The most horrific events of the 20th century, especially
Nazism and the death camps, can be traced to this stumbling block
of Western democracy: that it seeks to bring about peoples
happiness in the realm of bare life, which tragically brings
democracy into collusion with totalitarianism. The camp is thus the
nomos of the political space in which we live, leading Agamben to the
disturbing conclusion that the state of exception has become the rule, and in
truth we are all homo sacer. The absolute biopolitical space of the
camp, which establishes the political space of modernity (Schinkel 2010:
8), is topologically different from the prison because the prison is
securely embedded in the juridical realm, while the camp is the
space of the exception which makes the juridical realm possible. As
the localization of the state of exception where sovereign power confronts
bios, bare life, without mediation, the camp is a realm of
experimentation, exercise and symbolic reproduction of the violence
of sovereign power that also sends an ambiguous, threatening message
to the outside world (Minca 2005). We shall see below how these concepts
are tangibly realized in the deportation regime of the United States.
ImpactValue to Life
Biopolitcs is a murderous enterprise that results in
political death, exclusion, and a loss of value to life.
Embedded within this biopolitical overdetermination is a murderous
enterprise. Murderous not insofar as it involves extermination (although this
might still be the case) but inasmuch as it exerts a biopower that
exposes someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some
people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so
on (Foucault 2003 [1976]: 256), and inasmuch as it is based on a certain
occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence (Zylinska,
2004: 530); a symbolic violence (manifested, for instance, in the act of
naming as Butler (in Zylinska, 2004) and Derrida argue asylum seekers,
detainees, deportees, illegal immigrants, etc) as well as a material
one (for example, placing asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in
detention centres), attesting to that epistemic impulse to
resuscitate the leftover of late modernity and the residual of
disciplinary powers that seek to eliminate and ostracise the
unwanted-other through the insidious refashioning of the final
solution for the asylum and immigration question. Such an image
has been captured by Braidotti (1994: 20): Once, landing at Paris
International Airport, I saw all of these in between areas occupied by
immigrants from various parts of the former French empire; they had arrived,
but were not allowed entry, so they camped in these luxurious transit zones,
waiting. The dead, panoptical heart of the new European Community will
scrutinize them and not allow them in easily: it is crowded at the
margins and non-belonging can be hell. The biopolitics of borders
stands as the quintessential domain for this kind of 11 sorting, this
kind of racism pervading Western socio-political imaginary and
permeating the rhetoric of national and territorial sovereignty
despite its monolithic use of euphemism. It is precisely this task of
sorting and this act of fragmenting that contemporary modes of border
security and surveillance are designed making the management of
misery and misfortune a potentially profitable activity (Rose, 1999:
260) and evaporating the political into a perpetual state of technicism
(Coward, 1999: 18) where control and security are resting upon vast
investments in new information and communications technologies in
order to filter access and minimise, if not eradicate, the infiltration and
riskiness of the unwanted. For instance, in chapter six of the White
Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven (2002), the UK government outlines a
host of techniques and strategies aimed at controlling borders and tightening
security including the use of Gamma X-ray scanners, heartbeat sensors, and
millimetric wave imaging to detect humans smuggled in vehicles.
Biopower renders life calculable, and allows for the government to have total
control over all aspects of life, devaluing it.
Inda, 2002 (Johnathan Xavier, Department of Chicano Studies at University of California
Biopower, Reproduction, and the Migrant Womans Body, 100-101)
For a long time , Foucault notes, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign
power was the right to decide life and death (History: 135). For instance, If an
external enemy sought to overthrow him, the sovereign could justly wage
war, requiring his subjects to fight in defense of the state. So, without directly
proffering their death, the sovereign was sanctioned to risk their life. In this
case, he exercised an indirect power over them of life and death (135). However, if
someone hazarded to rebel against him and violate his laws, the sovereign
could exert a direct power over the transgressors life, such that, as penalty,
the latter could be put to death. The right to life and death, then, was
somewhat dissymmetrical, falling on the side of death: The sovereign
exercised his right to life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining
from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of
requiring.. The right which was formulated as the power of life and death was in reality
the right to take life or let live (136). As such, this type of power, Foucault observes,
was wielded mainly as a mechanism of deduction, making it essentially a right of seizure:
of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself (136). That is, power was
fundamentally a right of appropriationthe appropriation of a portion of the
wealth, labor, services, and blood of the sovereigns subjects---one that
culminated in the right to seize hold of life in order to subdue it. The power of
appropriation or of deduction, Foucault suggests, is no longer the principal
form of power in the West. Since the classical age, the mechanisms of power
here have undergone a radical transformation. Power now works to incite,
reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it; it is a
power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,
rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or
destroying them (History: 136). Thus, in contrast to a power organized
around the sovereign, modern power would no longer be dealing simply with
legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living
beings, and the mastery if would be able to exercise over them would be
applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more that the threat
of death, that gave power its access even to the body (142-143). In short, political power
has assigned itself the duty of managing life. It is now over life that power
establishes its hold and on which it seeks to have a positive influence. This
power over life, which Foucault calls biopower, is most apparent in the
emergence of population as an economic and political problem in the
eighteenth century. This population is not simply a collection of individual
citizens. We are not dealing , as Foucault notes, with subjects, or even with a
people, but with a composite body with its specific phenomena and its
peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of
health, frequency of illness, patterns of diet and habitation (History: 25). The
population, in other words, has its own form of order, its own energy, traits,
and dispositions. The management of this population, principally of its
health, Foucault suggests, has become the primary commitement as well as
the main source of legitimacy of modern forms of government: its the body
of society which becomes the new principle [of political organizations] in the
nineteenth century. It is this social body which needs to be protected, in a
quasi-medical sense. In place of the rituals that served to restore the

corporeal integrity of the monarch, remedies and therapeutic devices are
employed such as the segregation of the sick, the monitoring of contagions,
the exclusion of delinquents. (Body/Power: 55) The concern of government,
then, is to produce a healthy and productive citizenry. Its commitment is to
the protection and enhancement of the health of particular bodies in order to
foster the health of the composite body of the population. This means,
according to Foucault, that biological existence has now come to be reflected in political
existence (history: 142). As such, biopower ultimately designates what brought life
and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations (143), its main overall
concern being the life of the population, that is, of the species bodythe
body that functions as the foothold of biological processes pertaining to birth,
death, health, and longevity. Simply put, the species body and the individual as a
simple living being have become what are at stake in a states political tactics, marking the
politicization of life, turning politics into biopolitics and the state into a biopolitical state.
ImpactBare Life
The end point of biopolitics is a state in which legal order
is indistinguishable from bare life
Dean, 04 professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle (Mitchell,
2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf)//HK
Fourth thesis: Bio-politics captures life stripped naked (or the zo that
was the exception of sovereign power) and makes it a matter of political life
(bios). Today, we seek the good life though the extension of the powers over
bare life to the point at which they become indistinguishable. In this
formulation, the emergence of a government over life in the
eighteenth century does mark a rupture in forms of rule, which the
search for an originary structure of sovereignty cannot capture. For
Foucault, the nature of this rupture is the displacement, articulation or reinscription of sovereignty within a peculiarly modern form of politics, biopolitics. However, this capture of the government of the state by bio-powers
is already present in the structure of sovereignty. It would be a mistake, in
this sense, to view Agambens quest for the structure of sovereignty, with its
multiple thresholds, as ahistorical, that is, as insensitive to temporal
thresholds. His thesis offers a kind of history of modernity. Here, the
demonic character of modern states lies in the possibility that the
thresholds that maintained bare life as a state of exception are
breaking down. Zo is entering into a sphere of indistinction with bios in
modern politics. For Agamben the paradigm of modern politicsthe new
Nomosis not the liberal governing of freedom, but the
concentration camp. The camp is the material form of the
stabilization of the state of exception, the excluded inclusion, both
inside and outside modern political and legal ordering. Because the camp is
established by law as a space of exception, it is subject to no order
itself, only direct police command. It is thus a space of ordered
disorder in which bare life enters into a zone of indistinction with
legal order. While such views may appear to lead to a kind of radical
condemnation of many instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to
develop humane processing procedures for asylum seekers, the idea of
mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of analysis and
spheres of contestation rather than a site of dogmatic rejection. We have
become used to a style of criticism in which liberal notions of the
individual citizen have been revealed to be constituted through a
series of exclusions (of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane, the
poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5, December
2004 28 bio-power today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to
disability, criminality and insanity. The inclusion of women through their state
of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting questions concerning
sovereign violence given womens historic biological relationship to the
reproduction and care of human life. This relationship, itself excepted under
the universality of law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required
to take responsibility for sovereign decisions. If we are to take Agamben
seriously, this desire for inclusion may have the effect not simply of
widening the sphere of the rule of law but also of hastening the point at
which the sovereign exception enters into a zone of indistinction
with the rule. Our societies would then have become truly demonic,
not because of the re-inscription of sovereignty within bio-politics, but
because bare life which constituted the sovereign exception begins
to enter a zone of indistinction with our moral and political life and
with the fundamental presuppositions of political community. In the
achievement of inclusion in the name of universal human rights, all human
life is stripped naked and becomes sacred. Perhaps in a very real sense we
are all homo sacer. Perhaps what we have been in danger of missing is the
way in which the sovereign violence that constitutes the exception of
bare lifethat which can be killed without committing homicideis today
entering into the very core of modern politics, ethics, and systems of
justice.
ImpactExtinction
The pursuit of biopolitics creates dichotomies between
the evil foreign and the secure domestic, drawing
boundaries that justify killing in the name of saving life.
This society of control spreads across the globe as the
domestic populous becomes ever more isolated
Campbell 05 Professor of Cultural and Political Geography in the
Department of Geography at Durham University in the UK (David, The
Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle, American
Quarterly 57.3 (2005) 943-972, JSTOR)
As an imagined community, the state can be seen as the effect of
formalized practices and ritualized acts that operate in its name or in
the service of its ideals. This understanding, which is enabled by shifting
our theoretical commitments from a belief in pregiven subjects to a concern
with the problematic of subjectivity, renders foreign policy as a
boundary-producing political performance in which the spatial
domains of inside/outside, self/other, and domestic/foreign are
constituted through the writing of threats as externalized dangers.
The narratives of primary and stable identities that continue to govern much
of the social sciences obscure such an understanding. In international
relations these concepts of identity limit analysis to a concern with
the domestic influences on foreign policy; this perspective allows for a
consideration of the influence of the internal forces on state identity, but it
assumes that the external is a fixed reality that presents itself to the pregiven
state and its agents. In contrast, by assuming that the identity of the
state is performatively constituted, we can argue that there are no
foundations of state identity that exist prior to the problematic of
identity/difference that situates the state within the framework of
inside/outside and self/other. Identity is constituted in relation to
difference, and difference is constituted in relation to identity, which means
that the "state," the "international system," and the "dangers" to
each are coeval in their construction. Over time, of course, ambiguity is
disciplined, contingency is fixed, and dominant meanings are established. In
the history of U.S. foreign policy regardless of the radically different contexts
in which it has operated the formalized practices and ritualized acts of
security discourse have worked to produce a conception of the United States
in which freedom, liberty, law, democracy, individualism, faith, order,
prosperity, and civilization are claimed to exist because of the constant
struggle with and often violent suppression of opponents said to embody
tyranny, oppression, anarchy, totalitarianism, collectivism, atheism, and
barbarism. This record demonstrates that the boundary-producing
political performance of foreign policy does more than inscribe a
geopolitical marker on a map. This construction of social space also
involves an axiological dimension in which the delineation of an
inside from an outside gives rise to a moral hierarchy that renders
the domestic superior and the foreign inferior. Foreign policy thus
incorporates an ethical power of segregation in its performance of

identity/difference. While this produces a geography of "foreign"
(even "evil") others in conventional terms, it also requires a
disciplining of "domestic" elements on the inside that challenge this
state identity. This is achieved through exclusionary practices in which
resistant elements to a secure identity on the "inside" are linked through a
discourse of "danger" with threats identified and located on the "outside."
Though global in scope, these effects are national in their legitimation.12 The
ONDCP drugs and terror campaign was an overt example of this sort of
exclusionary practice. However, the boundary-producing political
performances of foreign policy operate within a global context
wherein relations of sovereignty are changing. Although Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri have overplayed the transition from modern sovereignty to
imperial sovereignty in Empire, there is little doubt that new relations of
power and identity are present. According to Hardt and Negri, in our current
condition, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does
not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and
deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates
the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire
manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges
through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors
of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial
global rainbow.13 As shall be argued here, the sense of fading national colors
is being resisted by the reassertion of national identity boundaries through
foreign policy's writing of danger in a range of cultural sites. Nonetheless, this
takes place within the context of flow, flexibility, and reterritorialization
summarized by Hardt and Negri. Moreover, these transformations are
part and parcel of change in the relations of production. As Hardt and
Negri declare: "In the postmodernization of the global economy, the
creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call
biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which
the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and
invest one another."14 While the implied periodization of the term
postmodernization renders it problematic, the notion of biopolitics, with its
connecting and penetrative networks across and through all domains of life,
opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing the complex
relationships that embrace oil, security, U.S. policy, and the SUV. In
Todd Gitlins words, "the SUV is the place where foreign policy meets
the road."15 It is also the place where the road affects foreign policy.
Biopolitics is a key concept in understanding how those meetings
take place. Michel Foucault argues that biopolitics arrives with the historical
transformation in waging war from the defense of the sovereign to securing
the existence of a population. In Foucault s argument, this historical shift
means that decisions to fight are made in terms of collective
survival, and killing is justified by the necessity of preserving life.16
It is this centering of the life of the population rather than the safety of the
sovereign or the security of territory that is the hallmark of biopolitical power
that distinguishes it from sovereign power. Giorgio Agamben has extended
the notion through the concept of the administration of life and argues
that the defense of life often takes place in a zone of indistinction
between violence and the law such that sovereignty can be violated
in the name of life.17 Indeed, the biopolitical privileging of life has
provided the rationale for some of the worst cases of mass death, with genocide deemed "understandable" as one group s life is violently secured
through the demise of another group.18 However, the role of biopolitical
power in the administration of life is equally obvious and ubiquitous in
domains other than the extreme cases of violence or war. The difference
between the sovereign and the biopolitical can be understood in terms of the
contrast between Foucault s notion of "disciplinary society" and Gilles
Deleuzes conception of "the society of control," a distinction that plays an
important role in Hardt and Negri s Empire. According to Hardt and Negri, in
the disciplinary society, "social command is constructed through a
diffuse network of dispositifi or apparatuses that produce and
regulate customs, habits, and productive practices." In the society of
control, "mechanisms of command become ever more democratic,
ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the
brains and bodies of the citizens." This means that the society of control
is "characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing
apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily
practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside
the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and
fluctuating networks."19 Network is, therefore, the prevailing metaphor for
social organization in the era of biopolitical power, and it is a conception that
permits us to understand how the effects of our actions, choices, and life are
propagated beyond the boundaries of our time-space location.20 It is also a
conception that allows us to appreciate how war has come to have a
special prominence in producing the political order of liberal
societies. Networks, through their extensive connectivity, function in terms
of their strategic interactions. This means that "social relations become
suffused with considerations of power, calculation, security and threat."21 As
a result, "global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the
principle of war is assimilated into the very weft and warp of the
socio-economic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations."22 This
theoretical concern with biopolitical relations of power in the context of
networked societies is consistent with an analytical shift to the problematic of
subjectivity as central to understanding the relationship between foreign
policy and identity. That is because both are concerned with "a shift from a
preoccupation with physical and isolated entities, whose relations are
described largely in terms of interactive exchange, to beings-in-relation,
whose structures [are] decisively influenced by patterns of connectivity."23 At
the same time, while conceptual approaches are moving away from
understandings premised on the existence of physical and isolated entities,
the social and political structures that are produced by network patterns of
connectivity often appear to be physical and isolated. As Lieven de Cauter
argues, we don't live in networks; we live in capsules. Capsules are
enclaves and envelopes that function as nodes, hubs, and termini in
the various networks and contain a multitude of spaces and scales.
These enclaves can include states, gated communities, or vehicles
with the latter two manifesting the "SUV model of citizenship"
Mitchell has provocatively described.24 Nonetheless, though
capsules like these appear physical and isolated, there is "no

network without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules. Ergo:
the degree of capsularisation is directly proportional to the growth of
networks."25 The result is that biopolitical relations of power produce
new borderlands that transgress conventional understandings of
inside/outside and isolated/ connected. Together these shifts pose a
major theoretical challenge to much of the social sciences, which have
adhered ontologically to a distinction between the ideal and the material,
which privileges economistic renderings of complex social assemblages.26 As
we shall see, overcoming this challenge does not mean denying the
importance of materialism but, rather, moving beyond a simplistic
consideration of objects by reconceptualizing materialism so it is understood
as interwoven with cultural, social, and political networks. This means that
"paying increased attention to the material actually requires a more
expansive engagement with the immaterial."27
ImpactGenocide
Biopolitics necessitates genocidal slaughters of entire
groups of people in the name of the survival of humanity
writ-large
Rey Chow, Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 2002, The Protestant
Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, p. 9-10
Let me attempt to reformulate Foucaults argument in a somewhat different
manner. When life becomes the overarching imperative, his argument
implies, all social relations become subordinate to the discursive
network that has been generated to keep it going, so much so that
even a negative, discriminatory fact such as racism is legitimated in
the name of the living. Rather than straightforwardly assuming the form of
a callous willingness to kill, therefore, racist genocide partakes of the
organization, calculation, control, and surveillance characteristic of
powerin other words, of all the civil or civilized procedures that
are in place primarily to ensure the continuance of life. Killing off
certain groups of people en masse is now transformed (by the process
of epistemic abstraction) into a productive, generative activity
undertaken for the life of the entire human species. Massacres are,
literally, vital events.6 If Foucault thereby shows how murder (a negative
act) can be legitimated by a valorization of life (a positive idea), his logic
may, I think, also be turned around to demonstrate that the valorization of
life itself, by the necessity of practice, can give rise to processes of
discrimination, hatred, and, in some extreme cases, extermination. In
other words, if the notion of legitimation shows how murder can, indeed,
make sense as part of a positive idea, the reversal of Foucaults logic shows
that the material process of enforcing a positive idea inevitably derails it into
something destructive and unjust. It is, of course, always possible to explain
this derailment economically: since an infinite valorization of life cannot
possibly be sustained on the basis of finite resources, various forms of
disciplinary and regulatory controls must be introduced in order to handle
population increases, thereby resulting in a hierarchical situation in which
resources are assigned to the privileged few rather than distributed equally
among all, etc. Yet this type of explanationwhich sees unequal economic
distribution as the primary source of social injusticedoes not seem
adequate to account for the persistence of racism, especially in places where
there is actually sufficient wealth, where the democratization of resources
seems to some degree to have been achieved. How, in other words, is one to
account for an environment in which one may be allowed to stay alive, may
be told that all is equal, may be given access to many things, only then to
realize that an insidious pattern of discrimination continues systematically to
reduce one to a marginal position vis--vis mainstream society? Such an
environment, which is characterized by a schism between the
positively proclaimed values of life, on the one hand, and an affective
dis-ease felt by those who sense they are nonetheless the targets of
discrimination, on the other, cannot be addressed purely on economic
grounds. The schism in question is not simply a matter of lies versus truths,
or false ideology versus lived reality. It is rather, if we follow Foucaults
thinking, symptomatic of the generative functioning of biopower
itself. To illustrate this, some examples may be useful.
Biopolitics legitimizes racism and genocide

Milchman and Rosenberg 5 (Alan and Alan, Both @ Queens College,
Review Essay: Michel Foucault: Crises and Problemizations, The Review of
Politics vol67 no2, JSTOR)
"Society Must Be Defended "culminates in Foucault's chilling ac

count of a tendency immanent to bio-politics, a tendency to what he
has elsewhere designated as "thanato-politics," and its basis in what
he here terms state racism. The question that Foucault raises in his final
lecture in this course, is how can mass murder and ex termination
disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary power is on the advance, how
will the power to kill and the function ofmurder operate in this
objective? ....How, under these conditions, is it possible for a
political power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give
the order to kill... ?Given that this power's objective is essentially
tomake live, how can it let die? How can the power of death, the
function of death, be exercised in a political sytem centered upon
biopower? (p.254) For Foucault, it is here that racism, which, indeed, has
a long history, intervenes, and now becomes inscribed in the basic
mechanisms of the modern state. According to Foucault: broadly
speaking, racism justifies the death0function in the economy of
biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of others
makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is amember of a race or a
population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality.... The
specificityof modern racism... is not bound up with mentalities,
ideologies, or the lies of power. It isbound up with the techniques of
power, with the technology of power. We are dealing with
amechanism that allows biopower towork. So racism is bound up with
the workings of a state that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races
and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The
juxtaposition ofor the way biopower functions through? the old sovereign
power of life and death implies the workings, the introduction and activation
of racism. And it is, I think, here that we find the actual roots of racism
(p. 258). State racism, then emerges, when in a regime of biopower,
internal or external threats lead the state to engage in mass death:
"Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can
justify the murderous function of the State" (p. 256). But, according to
Foucault, what is it that constitutes a group within the population as a "race?"
Race is a "way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is
under power's control: the break between what must live and what
must die" (p. 254). The basis for such a break in the biological continuum
can be ethnic or religious; it can be founded on sexual orientation, on
deviance from a society's norms, on mental or physical illness, or on

criminality. Any such "cut" in the continuity of the species can constitute a
race in Foucauldian terms, so long as the "identity" in question is
meataphysically defined, attributed to the very being of the individual or
group. Moreover, the constitution of race entails "... the hierarchy of
races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that
others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is away of
fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.... It is, in short,
away of establishing a biological-type caesura within a population that
appears in the biological domain" (p. 255). And on the bases of such a
caesura, the exclusion or elimination of the inferior race can be
undertaken, purportedly in the interests of the life and health of the
superior race, those who are normal. Race, for Foucault, is linked to
the "dividing practices" through which a population can be regulated
and controlled in a bio-political regime. The Foucauldian notion of race is
a novel one, permitting us to see the numerous ways in which such dividing
practices are instantiated in the modern world, as so many manifestations of
a racialization of politics, even where there is no necessary genetic basis for
the invidious distinctions that it entails.Foucault's analysis of state racism
focuses on the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Nazism is seen as the
"paroxysmal" development of the technologies and mechanisms of
biopower, while Stalinism has perfected what Foucault terms a
"social-racism," inwhich the state exercises its right to kill or
eliminate "class" enemies, the abnor mal, and "criminal" elements,
no less metaphysically defined than the Jews or "Gypsies" that were
the target of the Nazis. Foucault's linkage of state racism and the
perpetuation of mass murder to ten dencies immanent to biopower, makes it
clear that, for him, regimes such as Nazism and Stalinism are not
atavistic reversions to the premodern past, but historically specific
manifestations of tenden cies that are also found throughout the
modern, democratic, West. Indeed, in their essay "Situating the Lectures,"
the editors of "Society Must Be Defended," Alessandro Fontana and Mauro
Bertani, point out, "That there would appear to be a very strange
kinship between 'liberal societies' and totalitarian states, or between
the normal and the pathological, and sooner or later itmust be investigated"
(p. 276). It seems to us, that Foucault's meditation on biopower and
"thanato-politics," provides a basis for just such an investigation.7
Foucault's focus on the state racism of regimes such as Nazism or
Stalinism, now past, should not mislead us into think ing that his
vision of a "thanato-politics" was not a prospective one. Foucault
lectured 15 years before the genocide in Rwanda and the Moreover, bloody
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But these outbreaks of murderous state violence
and racism, the examples of which have continued multiply, confirm the
danger that Foucault saw ensconced within to the dispositif of bio-politics.8
ImpactRoot Cause
Exception is the law of pure violence without logos: it
declares itself as the decider of which violences are and
are not legitimate.
Doxdater 2008 [Eric, The [Rhetorical] Question of Exception, For Now,
in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5.2]
Will Americans Understand What It Means to Live in a State of
Emergency? On the day after the day, this perceptive question was asked
of me by a friend who struggled against the emergency in South Africa that
ran between 1985 and 1990. The answer could only be, By and large,
no. And, little has changed. In relatively traditionless America, as
Hannah Arendt once put it, the promise of a return to progress has
done well to obscure the grey zone that forms when a
sovereign(s) rule of law strives to sanctify and negate the
normative power of its own precedent.11 A reflection of his concern for
the nature and cost of this hypocrisy, Agambens letter is more than a
rehearsal of Foucaults thesis on biopolitics. Expressing a preference not to
participate in efforts to convince us to accept as normal and humane those
means of control which have always been considered exceptional and
properly inhumane, the letter offers an important clue about the
operativity of the exception, that which is both an anomic space in
which what is at stake is a force of law without law and a mythic
violence by means of which law seeks to annex anomie itself.12
Paradoxically, one is never fully in a state of exception. An unformulatable
manifestation of sovereigntys structure, the declaration of exception is
also an event that dissolves and then appropriates the question of
the political itself; when everything and everyone is deemed
suspect, the task of deciding the humanity of living man is
converted into a spiraling causality of fate, a form of life that is
guilty as such.13 If Agambens philosophical claim about the paradigm of
the camps confounded the New York Times politically correct editorial desk,
the exceptions unraveling of citizenship into bare life can also be understood
in terms of what Arendt called general subjectivity, a law of pure violence
without logos and a logos that obscures the power*the word and deed in
concert*which appears before and constitutes the law.14
Solvency
SolvencyOpen Borders
We should reject the notion that we can control who
we are.
Ajana 2006 [Btihaj, Immigration Interrupted, Journal for Cultural
Research, 10.3]
Although it is often argued that Levinas as well as Derridas
unconditional hospitability cannot be unproblematically (or even possibly)
translated into a political action (Metselaar 2003, p. 9) insofar as it is merely
articulated at the level of the dual self-Other relationship rather than sociality
as a whole (this being particularly true of Levinasian ethics), their vision is,
nonetheless, salient in terms of provoking a radical transformation in
social and political imaginaries and invoking the exigency of a
politics of generosity that would foster rather than close off
different ways of being (Diprose 2002, p. 172). Such politics will not
proceed from a hermeneutics of depth (Rose 1999, p. 196) in which
subjectivity is wrought around self-containment, self-sufficiency and
self-determinacy, presented as a project to be accomplished.
Instead, it might find its point of departure in the potential
encounter with the other and the total exposure to embodied
alterity. For it is the experience of encountering and being-exposedto that infuses the crisis into the hyphen at the heart of the nationstate (Coward 1999, p. 12) and undoes any immanentist attempt to
essentialise identity, commonality and belonging. Whilst it is unclear
as to how such an ethico-political vision may be put into practice
(perhaps this not-knowing-how would save this alternative vision from being
turned into yet another figure of immanentism), it may be that the
rejection, transgression and obliteration of immigration controls are
to be regarded as the touchstone of this radical ethico-politics and
an epitome of the necessary shift from politics of borders to politics
of singularities where No One Is Illegal (Cohen 2003).
The aff breaks down the distribution of rights in terms of

citizenship, giving rise to universal personhood, and
eliminating the distinction between citizen and alien.

Hence, she finds that under the new conditions of global migration and
an emergent global regime of human rights, the logic of
personhood supersedes the logic of national citizenship (1994:164)
and that citizenship is losing ground to a more universal model of
membership anchored in transcendent and de-territorialized notions
of personal rights (1994:3). Studying illegal immigration and guest-
workers in both Europe and the United States, and with different normative
concerns than those of Soysal in mind, Jacobson nonetheless seems to share
with Soysal some core theoretical observations. In his Rights Across Borders:
Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship, Jacobson (1996) argues that the
combined effect of trans-national migration and the emergence of a
sweeping trans-national regime of human rights brings about the
erosion of the traditional basis of nation-state membership, namely,
citizenship. Under the emergent global human rights regime, he argues ,
the notion of universal personhood comes to dominate the social
and political imagination. Subsequently, rights are increasingly
predicated on residency rather than on citizen status, eroding the
very distinction between citizen and alien and compromising the
link between territorially bounded national sovereignty and
citizenship. Both Soysal and Jacobson, therefore, seem to share the view
that normative or cultural globalizationhere conceptualized in terms of an
emergent global human rights regimeis a process that profoundly
challenges the heretofore sacred notion of bounded territoriality and its
bundle of associated citizenship rights. The perceived tension is thus between
the trans-national (open) principle and the national (close) principle. In
other words, to the extent that some states or political blocs try to
halt or slow the process of conferring rights on immigrants in the
name of sovereignty and social integrity, the assumed implication is
that we have to theorize these attempts as running against the
sweeping pressure of globalizationqua-openness.
The method of analyzing biopolitics at the border is key to

understand the manifestation of biopolitics through
immigration controls. We must abandon the discourse of
the resolution to deconstruct the biopolitical order any
other action is further delay.
From this inventory of the kind of surveillance technologies
deployed at the border and in relation to asylum and immigration,
and from what has been discussed hitherto, we might be able to see
how discipline and control are being merged together within the
realm of biopolitics through the hybridisation of management
techniques and the dispersion of networks of control. In fact, the
biopolitics of borders is precisely where the metaphoric transition
from disciplinary society to control society is complicated insofar as
it is intrinsically entrenched within a domain of complex contestation
and dialectical constellations in which the two modalities of power
coexist through the juxtaposition of top-down and bottom-up
mechanisms of discipline and control. This, being manifested in the
existence of detention centres where panoptical practices are inflicted
upon those who are imagined as potential (rather than actual) risk (or, in
fact, as being both) as well as in the technologies of securitisation
which function by means of instilling a sense of self-surveillance and selfcontrol, constructed as the basis for freedom, legitimacy, right and citizenship
(in the case of ID cards and passports for example). Not for a moment
should we suggest that the era of discipline and confinement has
completely ceased to exist, nor should we avoid attending to the
myriad of changes taking place at the heart of contemporary
societies. Instead, it is imperative to distil some fresh understanding
from the actualities (and virtualities) of everyday life by abandoning
teleological, dualistic and progressive discourses and venturing into
what might be discovered in the vicinity of strange couplings,
chance relations, cogs and levers that arent connected, that dont
work, and yet somehow produce judgements, prisoners, sanctions
(Foucault, in Rose, 1999: 276). To this I would add, refugees, detainees,
deportees, the exiled and so on, for such is the system of biopolitics; a
system of peculiar assemblages and violent ramifications to which there can
be no neat analysis or simple theorisation.
Aff is key to prevent bare life rethinking of individual

ethics in the context of the border is key
MM
Indeed, even the very process of naming an Iraqi, Albanian or Kurdish refugee
an asylum seeker, towards whom the hospitality of the host nation is to be
extended, is inevitably violent. Butler explains that The naming is at once
the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm (1993,
p. 8). Taking account of the performativity of the hegemonic political
discourses can enable us to shift the borders that delineate and
establish the contours of the human within these discourses. This in
turn can create a possibility for a new politics of immigration, a
politics that is informed by an ethics of response and responsibility
that goes beyond the set of moral obligations. Looking at excluded, abject,
non-human bodies positioned at the threshold of the legitimate political
community, Butler declares: The task is to refigure this necessary
outside as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion
is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal
importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets
its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given regime of truth
acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability,
illuminating the violent and contingent boundaries of that normative
regime precisely through the inability of that regime to represent
that which might pose a fundamental threat to its continuity. (1993,
p. 53) Taking a cue from Butler, we might thus argue that a responsible
immigration politics should not be based on the idea of integration and
immersion but rather on the preservation of the outside as the site where
discourse meets its limits. This does not of course mean that all asylum
seekers should be permanently kept on the threshold of the country
or community they want to enter, and that we should naively
celebrate them as an irreducible alterity that resists incorporation.
However, it is to suggest that the biopolitics of devouring the other,
of digesting and disseminating him or her across the body politic, in
fact forecloses on the examination of the normative regime that
establishes and legitimates the discourse of national identity. The
asylum seeker / itself a product of the regime to which s/he is subsequently
opposed / can only function on the outside of that regime as its limitation and
a guarantee of its constitution. (Once the community truly opens itself up to
what it does not know, both its knowledge of alterity and self-knowledge are
placed under scrutiny, a state of events that leads to the inevitable shifting of
the boundaries between the host as the possessor of goods and the
newcomer as their seeker.) The idea of liberal multiculturalism in which all
alterity is welcomed and then quickly incorporated into the host community
risks occluding the violence at the heart of the constitution of this very
community, even if this community defines itself in terms of diversity or
pluralism, and not necessarily national or ethnic unity. The task of
refiguring the outside as a future horizon, without attempting to
annul and absorb this outside altogether, presents itself as a more
responsible response to the asylum question. An ethics of bodies that
matter It is through Butlers engagement with bodies that matter that I now
want to sketch an ethical response to the biopolitics of immigration practised
by the UK and many other sovereign democracies. Of course, Butlers own
argument develops out of the investigation of the heterosexual matrix
whichlegislates genders through the reiterated acting of accepted gender
roles. Nevertheless, it also enables us to think through the regulatory
mechanisms that are involved in producing/performing legitimate
citizenship . Butler suggests that in our investigation of juridical acts that
legislate different forms of political subjectivity we should turn to the notion
of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that
stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we
call matter (1993, p. 9, original emphasis). She is interested in investigating
how the materialization of the norm in bodily formation produces a domain of
abjected bodies, a field of deformation that, in failing to qualify as the fully
human, fortifies those regulatory norms (1993, p. 16). But the main thrust of
her investigation is to find out what this contamination means for the
universal acts of Western democracies, and for the political actions
embarked upon to guarantee the survival of these acts. And, further, if there
is a certain ambivalence already inherent in these acts, can we think them
otherwise? Butler thus formulates the following question: What challenge
does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic
hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies
as bodies that matter, ways of living that count as life, lives worth
protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving? (1993, p. 16). I
want to suggest that the challenge that the excluded and abjected realm
produces to a symbolic hegemony therefore comes in the form of an ethical
injunction, in revealing the originary ethicality of the universal political acts
already in place. For these acts - such as the 2002 Nationality,

Immigration and Asylum Act - can only be formulated in response
to the other, an other whose being precedes the political and makes
a demand on it . Knocking on the door of Western democracies, bodies
that matter are ethical in the originary Levinasian sense; they are already
taken account of, even if they are to be latter found not to matter so much to
these sovereign regimes. Butlers argument thus poses a blow to the alleged
sovereignty of the democratic subject, whose response to the needs of the
other has to be properly managed through the application of utilitarian
principles intermixed with a dose of human-rights rhetoric. Though in
Excitable Speech she does not arrive at her questioning of political
subjectivity via Levinas but rather via a parallel reading of Austin and
Althusser, to me her account of how the subject constituted through the
address of the Other becomes then a subject capable of addressing others
(1997, p. 26) sounds positively Levinasian.9 In Totality and Infinity , Levinas
describes this relationship between self and other in the following way: The
alleged scandal of alterity presupposes the tranquil identity of the same, a
freedom sure of itself which is exercised without scruples, and to whom the
foreigner brings only constraint and limitation. This flawless identity freed
from all participation, independent in the I, can nonetheless lose its
tranquillity if the other, rather than countering it by upsurging on the same
plane as it, speaks to it, that is, shows himself in expression, in the face,and
comes from on high. Freedom then is inhibited, not as countered by a
resistance, but as arbitrary, guilty, and timid; but in its guilt it rises to
responsibility. . . . The relation with the Other as a relation with his
transcendence / the relation with the Other who puts into question the brutal
spontaneity of ones imminent destiny / introduces into me what was not in
me. (1969, p. 103) Levinas understands this inevitability of responsibility and
ethics as a need to respond to what precedes me and challenges my selfsufficiency and oneness, to what calls on me to justify my place under the
sun. This realization is crucial for developing our notion of
citizenship and political justice . To actively become a citizen, a host,
a member of the public sphere / instead of just passively finding
oneself inhabiting it as a result of an alleged privilege that occludes
what it excludes / I need the other not in a negative sense, as an outside to
my own positive identity, but to put me in question and make me aware of
my responsibility. This is the only way in which mature political
participation can take place; otherwise we will only be running a
software , as Derrida describes it, i.e. applying a ready-made
computer program to an allegedly predictable situation in which a
need for a decision gives way to a technicized manoeuvre. It is the
other that makes me aware of the idea of infinity in me, an idea that,
according to Levinas, establishes ethics (1969, p. 204). Through an
encounter with the other I realize that the political subjectivity I inhabit is
always temporarily stabilized, that it can be changed, redrafted or, to use
Butlers term, recited. And it is biopolitics that establishes a certain
sense of normativity through managing and regulating bare life , a
life that is subject to this ethical injunction, to intrusion and

wounding, to a call to response and responsibility.
Unconditional hospitality solves it creates an absolute

openness to the Other
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
In contrast, unconditional hospitality is a response to the ethical
imperative which precedes the realm of politics, philosophy and
sociality. It is offered to anyone and everyone regardless of whether
they are TB/HIV negative or not, whether they are skilled migrants or
not, whether they would contribute to the economy or not, whether
they would conform to the customs and values of the host entity or not. This
notion of hospitality entails a responsibility that has no limits, no
particularity, and an absolute openness to the Other that goes beyond
any expectation, determination and knowledge. For hospitality isan
experience which proceeds beyond knowledge toward the other as
absolute stranger, as unknown, where I know that I know nothing of him
(Derrida 2000, p. 8) so much so that the subject becomes not a host but a
hostage to the Other (Levinas in Derrida 2000, p. 9) with no choice but to be
responsible and hence hospitable. (However, this notion of being hostage to
the Other is not to be regarded in negative terms for it is the alterity of the
other and his/her call that shape ones subjectivity, incite one to think, to feel
(Diprose 2002, p. 134) and to become). Thus, and to use Levinas (1981, p.
98) allegory, which is probably derived from Nietzsches (1997, p. 91) Ye love
your virtue as a mother loveth her child; but when did one hear of a mother
wanting to be paid for her love?, the ethical relation of self (in our case,
this would be the State) to the Other becomes something akin to the
relation of the mother to her fetus; an inevitable and, at times,
excessive responsibility for which nothing is necessarily expected in
return.
The concept of alienation is dehumanizing and only

opening the borders can solve
Publication)
Embracing open borders would send an expressionist message that

all people, including people of color from the developing world, have
equal dignity.73 Rather than be classified as undesirable and
dehumanized aliens subject to exclusion and, at times, brutal
border enforcement, 74 citizens of other nations would be welcomed as
persons worthy of full membership in America. People of color would be
valued as equals under the law in U.S. society. Unlike current
immigration law and its enforcement, such important messages would
tend to dampen rather than exacerbatethe nativism and racism
that often have infected public discourse on immigration and shaped

the treatment of immigrants and certain groups of citizens in the United
States.
Limiting immigration is paradoxical and needs to be

interrupted
Ajana 06 (Btihaj. PhD in Sociology from London School of Economics and
Political Science "Immigration Interrupted." Journal for Cultural Research 10.3
(2006): 259-273. Digital.
Western governments are permeated with assumptions vis--vis the
prevalence of freedom and democracy. These assumptions seem to be
paradoxically and ironically giving the right to some to categorise,
criminalise, demonise, detain, expel and exclude, whilst invoking
virtues of fairness and tolerance: We live in a country which places great
store on democracy, tolerance, fair play and freedom of speech We will set
an annual limit to immigration, including a quota for asylum seekers (Howard
2005). This enduring paradox which animates the political discourse
is indeed what reveals the hollowness of these claims (freedom and
democracy), which are, after all, [theyre]mere figures of speech,
ornaments hanging on the politics of exclusion and regimes of
domination. Such a paradox demands an interruption of these
assumptions in order to rethink the question of immigration and
reconfigure the notion of otherness that dwells at the heart of
political philosophy.
Open Borders would solve the racial inequality being

caused by the current system, and could serve as a
stepping stone to other forms of equality
Immigration Laws)
Border enforcement could focus on the true dangers to U.S. society,
rather than the exclusion of hardworking people simply seeking to
better their lives in pursuit of the American Dream. The immigration
laws would thus stand to better protect national security and public safety
than the current ones do. The current system is woefully inadequate at basic
tracking of the noncitizen population. The United States, by ensuring the
legal entry of most noncitizens, would have a much better record than it
currently does of who in fact is entering the country and where they live once
here, furthering the important goal of protecting public safety and national
security. Millions of noncitizens would not be living in the shadows of
American society, outside the purview of law enforcement and the
protections of the law, as they are today. With immigrants fear of
removal reduced significantly, exploitation of undocumented
immigrants in the workplace might well decline on its own accord.
Employers would not hold the strong lever of undocumented status over
these immigrants, which often allows employers to dictate the terms of the
employment relationship to workers. However, better enforcement of basic
labor and employment law would presumably still be necessary.
Governmental resources could be redirected from wasteful border
enforcement efforts to enforcing basic workplace protections for all workers.
Removing the stigma of illegal immigration status thus would
benefit all workers. In no small part, this would happen because the
current dual labor marketone regulated by law and the other that is not
that exists today would be dismantled, thus creating the opportunity for
regulation of the workplace of all workers. Legal avenues for immigrating
to the United States would replace illegal means of entry. Open
borders thus hold the promise of drastically reducing deaths on the
border, an everyday occurrence in contemporary times. They would
also reduce the current racial discrimination that plagues
immigration enforcement in the United States and seeps into all
aspects of American social life. Human trafficking would be reduced ,
as would the criminal element engaged in the deadly, exploitative,
and downright horrifying trade in human beings . In essence, open
borders would go far to clean up the inequality and injustice that
are perpetrated by the current U.S. immigration laws and their
enforcement.
The concept of alienation is dehumanizing and only

opening the borders can solve
Publication)
Embracing open borders would send an expressionist message that
all people, including people of color from the developing world, have
equal dignity.73 Rather than be classified as undesirable and
dehumanized aliens subject to exclusion and, at times, brutal
border enforcement, 74 citizens of other nations would be welcomed as
persons worthy of full membership in America. People of color would be
valued as equals under the law in U.S. society. Unlike current
immigration law and its enforcement, such important messages would
tend to dampen rather than exacerbatethe nativism and racism
that often have infected public discourse on immigration and shaped
the treatment of immigrants and certain groups of citizens in the United
States.
Deregulation is the only option, current management

collapse is inevitable
Publication)
It is entirely possible for the United States to return to a system of

more open borders. Although not perfectly analogous, the massive
deregulation of various industries near the end of the twentieth century
demonstrates the potential for moving from a highly regulated body of public
law to a much less regulated system.54 Although the deregulation of
immigration would generate knee-jerk resistance, this model makes
perfect sense for the United States. The micromanagement of
migration against the tide of market, political, and social forces, as
U.S. immigration laws currently attempt to do, is doomed to fail. We
need look no further than the current immigration mess in which we
find ourselves today to see that.
Mobility is key to ultimate freedom and essential rights of

all human beings
Johnson 2007(Dean and Mabie-Apallas, Professor of Public Interest Law and
Chicana/o Studies, Opening the Floodgates, New York University
Publication)
Because immigration enforcement has conventionally been viewed as the
sovereign power of a nation, little attention has been paid to the deep
impacts that immigration law and enforcement have had on
immigrants. In the world of immigration, the rights of the nation-state
have historically trumped any interests of the individual. Thus,
despite its commitment to individual rights, the United States has
expressly denied noncitizens any general rights to travel into this
country. One can envision few personal choices that can have greater
lifealtering impacts than the decision about which country one chooses to
live and work in. The ability to move can obviously have profound
impacts on a personsand his or her familysentire life.
Accordingly, free movement of people can be seen as the ultimate
freedom and the fundamental right of all human beings. 22 The

right to migrate between nations couldand shouldbe viewed as a
basic civil right of the individual. Such a view would be more consistent
with liberal theory than a Bordering on the Immoral | 91 claim that state
sovereignty trumps any and all limits on immigration restrictions. 23
Only by embracing the other, neighbors, strangers and

enemies alike, will we overcome the empirical happenings
of class hierarchies and war
Ashcroft 2009 ( Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the
University of NSW, editor of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and the author
of The Empire Writes Back, Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope, The
Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia) Australian Studies
Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
Gilroys aim is to see whether multicultural diversity can be combined with
an hospitable civic order (1), whether a convivial acceptance of difference
might be achieved in a different kind of multicultural society than the
examples presently available, particularly in Britain. A key moment in the
book comes when he considers Freuds rejection, in Civilization and its
Discontents, of Christs admonition to love thy neighbour as thyself.

Not all men, Freud concludes, are worthy of love (72). But Gilroy responds I
want to dispute his explicit rejection of the demand to practice an
undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, intimates and
strangers, alike () I want to explore ways in which the ordinary
cosmopolitanism so characteristic of postcolonial life might be
sustained and even elevated. I would like it to be used to generate
abstract but nonetheless invaluable commitments in the agonistic
development of a multicultural democracy that Freud and the others cannot
be expected to have been able to foresee. (80) Like many forms of utopian
hope, Gilroys utopianism is critical, relying on a planetary
consciousness in which the world becomes not a limitless globe,
but a small, fragile and finite place, one planet among others with
strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally (83). On such
a planet the injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself, an
undifferentiated attitude toward friends and enemies, might
become a necessity rather than a vain hope . This, at least, for Gilroy, is
worth exploring. Paradoxically, the ground on which the possibility of a
convivial diaspora rests is the melancholia of a post-imperial Europe, and of
Britain in particular. The imperial melancholia first articulated by Mathew
Arnold in Dover Beacha peculiarly Victorian version of the condition
started to yield to [a post-imperial] melancholia as soon as the natives and
savages began to appear and make demands for recognition in the Empires
metropolitan core (99). Consequently, immigration, war and
national identity began to challenge class hierarchy as the most
significant themes from which the national identity would be
assembled (99). Former colonial subjects were confident that their
reasonable requests for hospitality would be heard and understood.
They had no idea, says Gilroy, that those requests were impossible
to fulfil within the fantastic structures of the melancholic island
race (111).
Through the power of discourse we must break through

the ontological constriction of national borders, only then
will we be free
Ashcroft 2009 ( Bill, teaches at the University of Hong Kong and the
University of NSW, editor of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader and the author
of The Empire Writes Back, Beyond the Nation: Post-Colonial Hope, The
Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia) Australian Studies
Centre, Universitat de Barcelona
Yet in cultural terms the nation is perhaps an even more ambiguous
phenomenon than it has been in the past, and this is particularly so in postcolonial theory. The nation-state has been critiqued in post-colonial analysis
largely because the post-independence, postcolonized nation, that
wonderful utopian idea, proved to be a focus of exclusion and
division rather than unity; perpetuating the class divisions of the
colonial state rather than liberating national subjects. However

nationalism, and its vision of a liberated nation has still been extremely
important to post-colonial studies because the idea of nation has so clearly
focussed the utopian ideals of anti-colonialism. There is perhaps no greater
example of this than India, where independence was preceded by decades of
utopian nationalist thought, yet in Rabindranath Tagore we find also the
earliest and most widely known anti-nationalist. For Tagore, there can be no
good nationalism; it can only be what he calls the fierce self-idolatry of
nation-worship (2002, 15)the exquisite irony being that his songs were
used as Bengali, Bangladeshi and Indian Copyright Bill Ashcroft 2009. This
text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard
copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is
charged13 national anthems. So the trajectory of colonial utopianism has
been deeply ambivalent: on the one hand offering the vision of a united
national people, and on the other a perhaps even more utopian idea of the
spiritual unity of all peoples. The years since 1947, when India led the way
for other colonial states into post-colonial independence, has been marked
by the simultaneous deferral of pre-independence nationalist utopias, and
yet a vibrant and unquenchable utopianism in the various postcolonial
literatures. This utopianism has taken many forms but its most significant
postcolonial characteristic has been the operation of memory. Yet in the
decades before and after the turn of the century utopianism has taken a
significant turnone affected by globalization, with its increasing mobility
and diasporic movement of peoplesthat might be cautiously given the
term cosmopolitan. Again it is India that has led the way in its literature, not
only because of the proliferation of South Asian diasporic writing, but also
because India itself has thrown the traditional idea of the nation as imagined
community into question. That national ideal of one people, so successfully
championed by Nehru has never been more challenged than it has by Indias
size and complexity. India shows us that the nation is not synonymous with
the state and despite the increasing mobility of peoples across borders, the
proliferation of diasporas, the increasing rhetoric of international
displacement, India reveals that before national borders have been crossed,
the national subject is already the subject of a transnation. I want to propose
the concept of transnation to extend the post-colonial critique of nation, (or
more specifically the linking of nation and state) and to argue with the
entrenched idea of diaspora as simply defined by absence and loss. Such a
definition of the diasporic population as fundamentally absent from the
nation fails to recognise the liberating possibilities of mobility. The
transnation, on the other hand, represents the utopian idea that
national borders may not in the end need to be the authoritarian
constructors of identity that they have become. The beginning of
the twenty first century reveals a utopianism as powerful as it is
different from the nationalist utopianism that began to grow in the early
decades of the twentieth. This cosmopolitan utopianism reaches
beyond the state and considers the liberating potential of difference
and movement. This is, of course, dangerous territory because we have
ample evidence of the melancholic plight of people who must move
across borders, must in fact flee the nation either as economic or
political refugees, or as subjects oppressed in some way by state

power. Such people are decidedly unfree. Transnation may be mistaken
to rest on a far too benign view of global movement and may encounter the
objection that the idea of freedom from borders is in fact ignoring the plight
into which globalization has thrown people disadvantaged by class, ethnicity,
war, tyranny and all of the many reasons why they may need to escape. For
this reason I treat the term cosmopolitan with considerable caution, as a
word complicated by overtones of urbanity and sophistication, a term much
more successful as an adjective than a noun. The term transnation,
while it pivots on a critique of the nation, and a utopian projection
beyond the tyranny of national identity, nevertheless acknowledges
that people live in nations and when they move, move within and
beyond nations, sometimes without privilege and without hope. The
transnation is more than the international, or the transnational, which
might more properly be conceived as a relation between states. The concept
exposes the distinction between the occupants of the geographical entity
the historically produced multi-ethnic society whom we might call the
nation and the political, geographic and administrative structures of that
nation that might be called the state. Transnation is the fluid, migrating
outside of the state (conceptually and culturally as well as geographically)
that begins within the nation. This is possibly most obvious in India where
the nation is the perpetual scene of translation, but translation is but one
example of the movement, the betweenness by which the subjects of the
transnation are constituted. It is the interthe cutting edge of
translation and renegotiation, the inbetween spacethat carries the
burden of the meaning of culture. Nevertheless, the transnation does
not refer to an object in political space. It is a way of talking about subjects
in their ordinary lives, subjects who live in-between the positivities by which
subjectivity is normally constituted. That the transnation is distinct from
diaspora can be confirmed by seeing Salman Rushdies Midnights Children
(1981) as the founding text of a new generation. This generation was indeed
characterised by mobility and hybridity and gained worldwide attention
through Indian literature in English, literature from what might called the
third-wave diaspora. It was characterised by a deep distrust of the
boundaries of the nation, a distrust embodied in Saleems despair. But
Rushdies novel had a different, more utopian vision as he explains in
Imaginary Homelands The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair.
But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities
allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the
narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it teems. The form
multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country is the
optimistic counterweight to Saleem's personal tragedy. (1991, 16) Saleems
personal tragedy is of course the tragedy of the post-colonial nation. But it
is also the tragedy of the idea of the bordered nation itself, the very
concept of a bounded utopian space within which a diverse people
could come together as one. The saving grace, for Rushdie, is the
capacity of a people to teem, its irrepressible and exorbitant capacity to
transcend the nation that becomes its most hopeful gesture. This way of
describing national concerns deeply rooted in culture and myth engages the
nation as a transnation, a complex of mobility and multiplicity that
supersedes both nation and state. What is perhaps most striking about
contemporary post-colonial utopianism is that it captures the spirit of
liberation strengthened rather than suppressed by the massive absurdities of
the War on Terror. Marxist utopianism was generated paradoxically by the
growth of neo-liberal capitalism, growing stronger and stronger during the
latter half of the Twentieth Century as communist states imploded. But I
think this growth can be matched by the deep vein of postcolonial
utopianism that we find in literature, a vein of hope that becomes more
prominent with the growth of transnational and diasporic writing. This is
quite different from that nationalist utopianism that died under the
weight of post-independence reality. This is a global utopianism
now entering the realm of critical discourse , even in the most
agonistic of critics. While the utopianism of post-colonial literature has
developed extensively during the Twentieth Century, I want to address
examples of this utopian tendency in post-colonial criticism at the turn of this
century. Paul Gilroys After Empire (2004) and Edward Saids Freud and the
non-European (2003) indicate that the element of hope circulating around
the possibility of freedom from nation, (or at least from the
ontological constriction of national borders) , and freedom from
identity itself, may be gathering strength as a feature of twenty
first century literature and criticism. Indeed, the characteristic these
works all share is a utopianism deeply embedded in critique, a tentative
hope for a different world emerging from a clear view of the
melancholic state of this one.
Neoliberalism Links
LinkControl
Border control is used to propagate neoliberalismthose
deemed without economic value are managed and
excluded by the border
Sparke 2006 - [Matthew, Professor of Geography and International
Studies, Adjunct Professor of Global Health, Director of the University of
Washington's Online Integrated Social Science Major A Neoliberal Nexus:
Economy, Security, and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,
published in an edited form as A Neoliberal Nexus: Citizenship, Security, and
the Future of the Border, in Political Geography, 25.2 pp. 156]
It would be mistaken to exaggerate the transnationalism of NEXUS lane
enrollees. Theirs would not appear to be a particularly challenging or worldly
cosmopolitanism, but rather what Calhoun (2003: 106 e 107) calls a soft
cosmopolitanism undisturbed by having to leave a country behind, let alone
by intercultural negotiations with communities of difference. Aided by the
frequent flyer lounges (and their extensions in international standard
hotels), Calhoun argues that such soft cosmopolitans meet others of
different backgrounds in spaces that retain familiarity. The
familiarity of the NEXUS lane space for its enrollees seems espe-
cially convenient and economical. They do not have even have to
meet others and can simply stay in their cars or move unmolested
through the airport. Moreover, while the lane reinstates the fast
border-crossing movements once afforded by the PACE lane, it is
also obviously more deeply integrated with the many other familiar
features associated with the fast track lifeworlds of what Adey (in
press) usefully describes as todays kinetic elites. Expedited airport
screening for upper class frequent fliers, shorter check-in lines,
valet parking, pay as you go highway express lanes, and the
multiple privileges and protections for owners of premier-status
credit cards would all appear to share a deep affinity with the sort
of fast lane transnational civil citizenship rights provided by
NEXUS. At the very same time, though, it needs noting that all the
border biometric developments can also be reconsidered from a
more skeptical position as part and parcel of a more restrictionist
regime. Alongside the NEXUS lane, after all, the U.S. government has
been simultaneously preparing to send military drones, so-called
unmanned UAVs, to patrol the borders, and in the Pacific Northwest, where
the business boosters once called for border bulldozing, the Pentagon has
already deployed a sensor-laden aircraft, a Blackhawk helicopter and boats
that will operate out of a new command center in Bellingham, Washington (
Biesecker, 2004; UPI, 2004 ). Moreover, it might also be noted that NEXUS is
itself basically modeled on an older biometrics-based pre-clearance system
called SENTRI that was first developed on the US e Mexico border as part of
the geopolitical border hardening regime made famous in the restrictionist
terms of Operation Block- ade and Operation Hold the Line ( Ackelson,
2005 ). The acronym SENTRI supposedly stands for Secure Electronic
Network for Travelers Rapid Inspection and the program operates in the
words of the US Customs agency to swiftly accelerate the inspections of
certain low risk, pre-enrolled crossers at ports of entry ( U.S. Customs,
2005a,b ). However, by simultaneously signaling a sentry-like defense
of the border, SENTRI also sends a message of militarized border
control which the same Customs agency describes in the following
defensive details: A combination of electric gates, tire shredders,
traffic control lights, fixed iron bollards, and pop-up pneumatic
bollards ensure physical control of the border crosser and their
vehicles. Using computer generated random compliance checks, and
the Inspectors own initiative, the Federal Inspection agencies have
detected only minor violations of customs and immigration laws
( U.S. Customs, 2005a,b ). It is this display of border control through
SENTRI that has now been extended north to NEXUS. Before, the northern
border, the so-called longest undefended border in the world, was merely
bridged by a PACE lane advertising the benefits of speedy crossing. But now
NEXUS, following the model of SENTRI, promises to bring the demands
of economic facilitation together with a much more restrictionist
regime for those deemed unwanted and undeserving of expedited
service. In other words, just like SENTRI, NEXUS now also seems to
perform the double talk of economy and security, thereby
sending the message that it is working to increase rather than
undermine homeland securitization. Commentators in American antiimmigration groups in turn apparently get this message of control and like it.
Vaughan (2005) of the Center for Immigration Studies, for example, has thus
recently lauded both SENTRI and NEXUS as the modernized direction in
which U.S. border control should be developed more generally. Programs
like NEXUS, SENTRI, she says approvingly, have been shown to help
minimize the impact of new security measures on lines at the ports of en-
try. And meanwhile, even the Canadian authorities who have been most
keen to push the economic facilitation side of the Smart Border
developments remain keen to underline the security side on the NEXUS
webpage. Thus after the invitation to Cross Often? Make it simple, use
NEXUS, the CBSA site goes on to stress: The NEXUS programs enable
Canadian and Unites States customs and immigration authorities to
concentrate their efforts on potentially high-risk travelers and goods, thereby
upholding security and protection standards at the border.
The political economy fuels the mobility gap, excluding

the poor and creating the global mobility regime
The fundamental elements of the mobility regime are analytically
distinguished in this article. For this analysis to take place, the point of
departure is that the differential ability to move in spaceand even
more so to have access to opportunities for movementhas become
a major stratifying force in the global social hierarchy. The so-called

mobility gap covers a wide continuum of social possibilities, stretching from
the differential ability of farmers to deliver their products to nearby towns, to
the differential ability to enter a corporate compound in a third-world country;
from the severely restricted ability of an unemployed inner-city woman to find
work and to shop, to the severely restricted ability of Pakistani citizens to visit
family members in London. The mobility gap, in and of itself, is an
expression of the conditions of the possibilities of movement, such
as socioeconomic factors, geographical locations, cultural
imperatives, and political circumstances. However, all of these
variables operate in relation to a trans-national political economy of
movement. The blatant inequality of access to mobility , writes
Bauman, is not just the expectable, since natural, effect of income
differentiation, casting the costs of transport beyond the reach of
the poor . Differentiation of mobility chances is one of the few
strategies avidly and consistently pursued by the governments of
more affluent areas in their dealings with the population of less
affluent ones (2002:83). The epistemological, technical, and
institutional expression of this political economy is that which I
hereby designate as a global mobility regime. Thought of as a modality
that works at local, regional, and global levels, we may thus begin to theorize
the mobility regime as an important feature of globalization. A series of
questions ensue. How does the mobility regime develop and how is it
maintained? What are the social technologies that facilitate it? What sorts of
social imageries sustain it?
LinkSecuritization
Global competition and hegemony influence immigration
policy, leaving out considerations for the migrant worker.
Tannock 09 (Stuart, 9-1-13, White-collar imperialisms: the H-1B debate
in America, Social Semiotics 19: 3, 320-1, J.C)
Current calls for expanding the H-1B visa program, then, when made by
business dominated coalitions such as Compete America and others, have
come to be linked explicitly with a project of protecting Americas
supremacy, leadership, preeminence, or edge over other
nations (AILA 2007; Compete America 2007; National Academies 2005).
This is thanks in part to the increasingly naked language of US
imperialism that was unleashed with the attacks of September 11
(Foster 2005). Without more access to H-1Bs, the AILA (2007, 51) insists,
the US stands to lose rapidly not only the competitive edge generations of
Americans have worked so hard to achieve, but also its pre-eminence in a
variety of scientific and technical fields areas vital to our prosperity and
national security. What astonishes about these arguments is their
utterly unquestioned assumption, first, that America should have the
absolute right and ability to hire and retain the worlds best
talent (Compete America 2007); and second, as seen in the quotation of
President Bush above, that foreigners should be expected to want to
help America address its problems and increase its prosperity
rather than those of the countries elsewhere around the world
where their own communities and families live. Former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld is often alleged by anti-war campaigners to have
once said: its not our fault God put Americas oil under other peoples
countries (Galloway 2007). It is this kind of logic precisely that
generates the endlessly repeated statements that highly-skilled
foreign workers should be brought to Americas shores to buttress
its position of global hegemony. The rest of the worlds resources
exist in order to service American needs and help America help
itself. Whether these resources be oil and gas or scientific and engineering
talent, the ideology of imperialist self-interest remains essentially
unchanged. The anti-H-1B side: preserving US privilege I grew up in the
border town of El Paso, Texas. Occasionally I would stand on the bridge that
spans the Rio Grande River. From this bridge I could watch the illegal aliens
from Juarez, Mexico, with suitcases in hand, dash across the shallow river to
enter the United States . . . . As a young boy I couldnt understand why the
army wasnt on the border and ever since that time I was interested in
border issues such as immigration . . . . My education was completed at the
University of Texas at El Paso . . . . I earned a Bachelors degree in Electrical
Engineering which I used to get a job at Motorola in Arizona . . . . For most of
my career as a software engineer I never imagined that immigration would
personally affect my career that was until I felt the sting of unemployment.
As I approached the age of 40 I learned that foreign nationals that come to
the US with H-1B visas were flooding the labor market, and companies were
using these young workers to eliminate older Americans like myself. (From
biography of Rob Sanchez, host of the anti-H-1B web site:

www.jobdestruction.info) At first glance, opposition to the H-1B program in
America is based, as Chakravartty (2006b) and others have observed, on a
particularly strident and sweeping, closed and insular, and often overtly racist
form of nationalist sentiment. Lined up against pro- H-1B groups such as
Compete America is an assemblage of labor unions, disaffected worker
groups and anti-immigrant organizations that argue that strict limits should
be placed on both temporary and permanent skilled worker visas, and even
that the H-1B program should be eliminated entirely (Chakravartty 2006b).
The argument of these groups is that jobs in America (good jobs,
especially) are American jobs that should be preserved for American
citizens first before being given away to undeserving foreigners,
whether through offshoring to other countries or expanded H-1B and green
card programs domestically (Jackson 2002; Matloff 2003; Roberts 2005).
Such views are represented transparently in the names of many of the
groups set up to oppose the H-1B: the National Hire American Citizens
Professional Society, the Rescue American Jobs Foundation, the Organization
for the Rights of American Workers, the Coalition for the Future American
Worker, and so on. Despite this apparent nationalist insularity, however, the
politics of anti-H-1B protest, like that of the pro-H-1B side, are global in scope
and spring from a particular moment in the evolution of international political
economy. The opposition of these groups to the H-1B visa is based
on their anger, dissent and confusion over the changing terms of
how the spoils and privileges of American imperialist and capitalist
power are to be distributed domestically. In testimony before Congress
in spring 2006, AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employment executive
director Michael Gildea laid out the basic point of contention: [ The] H-1B
was initially designed to address small , spot labor shortages of
minimum duration. Our affiliated organizations have no problem
with that basic concept. But we vehemently object to how this
program has over time contorted into something completely
contrary to its original intent and that now victimizes large numbers
of highly skilled, American professionals . . . . As they used to say in
one of this nations greatest technology initiatives, the space program
Houston, weve got a problem. And I would suggest its a big one. Only this
time its not those textile, steel, machine tool and other manufacturing jobs;
many of them are long gone. Now its the high tech, high end, high paying
jobs that are headed out of town. These are the same jobs we were smugly
assured by free trade advocates the US would retain as our manufacturing
base was exported. (Gildea 2006) The vitriol and hyperbole that often
accompany opposition to the H-1B visa program arise because this program
symbolically threatens an implicit agreement struck between US capital and
the American middle and working classes during the early phases of neoliberal globalization. In return for supporting (or at least consenting to) a
neo-liberal project of reform that would see much high-wage
manufacturing work disappear to low-wage destinations outside America (or
to lowwaged immigrants in America), the American middle and working
classes were to inherit the worlds professional, knowledge-
economy jobs. America, along with other rich nations, would become a
magnet economy, pulling in high-wage, high-skill work from all over the
globe (Brown and Lauder 2006). This vision was spelled out most clearly in
former Secretary of Labor Robert Reichs (1991) The work of nations. In
principle, wrote Reich (1991, 247), all of Americas routine production
workers could become symbolic analysts and let their old jobs drift overseas
to developing nations. Rather than fight the erosion of the welfare
state, high-wage public-sector and manufacturing employment, and
the labor unions that had helped create these, American workers
were to look to the promise of higher education, high skill and their
own innate talent instead. American workers are angry, says
economist Steve Pitts, because they were told to accept the loss of
blue-collar manufacturing jobs because these jobs will be replaced
by better white-collar service jobs . . . Now those jobs are being
lost as well (quoted in Reddy 2004).
LinkLabor Forces
Immigration policy is influenced and fueled by global
neoliberalism.
During the intense debate that raged over whether or not to expand
H-1B numbers in the 1990s, arguments focused explicitly on claims of
labor shortages in the national economy. The lack of skilled workers
available domestically in the vital IT sector, H-1B proponents claimed, was
not just harmful to IT employers but threatened to slow down overall
economic expansion. Foreign workers had to be brought into the country to
perform this essential work. Opponents of the H-1B program focused on
challenging these claims of labor shortage and insisted that plenty of skilled
citizens were available to work, if employers would only give them a chance,
a decent wage and a small amount of on-the-job training (Freeman and Hill
2006; Watts 2001). As Kamat, Mir, and Mathew (2004, 17) suggest, claims
that the H-1B program was a temporary measure, designed to alleviate
short-term labour shortages while appropriate local labour was being trained
and developed, provided politically expedient cover at the time for
what was actually a longer-term project of opening up the US highskill labor market to global competition. In hindsight, it seems clear
that these debates were part of the opening salvos of the latest
stage of neo-liberal reform : in the wake of globalizing capital , trade
and production, business and political elites across the world now
seek to liberalize the global movement of skilled labor, and create a
truly global labor market . After a brief cooling-off period that followed the
collapse of the Dot-Com bubble in 20002002, and the September 11 attacks
on the Pentagon and World Trade Center in 2001 (in the wake of which, all
talk of immigration matters was put on hold in the United States), concern
over the H-1B visa program heated up once more in 20062007 (see, for
example, Thibodeau 2007). In this second round of the H-1B debate,
however, the terms of the argument were subtly shifted. No longer was the
premise simply about opening doors on a throttled national labor market, but
rather working to capture the full benefits of an already open and globalized
labor market and higher education system. To understand this shift, we need
to put the H- 1B debate in the context of two fundamental transformations in
national and global political economy that have occurred since the H-1B was
first created in the Immigration Act of 1990. First, there was the dramatic
internationalization of higher education and the high-skill labor market in the
United States, especially in the fields of science and engineering: the
proportion of foreign-born PhD recipients from US universities in science and
engineering increased from 23% in 1966 to 39% in 2000 (Freeman 2005); by
2005, the foreign-born were earning over 63% of US engineering PhDs
(Matthews 2007); among science, technology, engineering and mathematics
post-doctoral scholars, the share of temporary residents rose from 37% in
1982 to 59% in 2002 (National Research Council 2005); the percentage of

scientists and engineers with PhDs in the United States who were foreignborn increased from 24% in 1980 to 37% in 2000 (Wulf 2005). Nearly 60% of
the growth in the US science and engineering workforce in the 1990s came
from the foreignborn (Freeman 2005). This internationalization was driven, in
part, by a second fundamental shift over the course of the 1990s: the rise of
a global war for talent (Kuptsch and Fong 2006). Nation-states around the
world have increasingly opened their borders to highly skilled
immigrants, and have actively sought to recruit high-level
professional and managerial workers and students from overseas
(OECD 2006). This war for talent is driven in large part by the United
States: US think-tanks and ideologues are at the forefront of trumpeting the
benefits of liberalizing the global movement of high-skill labor; and US
immigration policy reforms such as the 1990 creation of the H-1B visa itself
have become models for other countries to imitate. Further, the United States
is the worlds number-one talent magnet: with just 5% of the worlds
population, it attracts about one-half of the college-educated migrants who
come to the rich OECD countries (its closest competitor, Canada, pulls in 13%
of these immigrants) (Docquier and Marfouk 2005, 168). To be
economically competitive in the global economy, business and
political elites now argue, it is imperative to recruit the worlds most
talented individuals, from wherever they come. Since other nations
are also competing for these same workers (as well as for ones own set
of domestic skilled workers), nations must continually adjust their
immigration, education, economic and social policy to make
themselves more welcoming and appealing to them. The global war
for talent puts into play a game of perpetual one-upmanship, in
which political and business leaders of all nations insist they have no
choice but to compete (Florida 2005; Shachar 2006; Wooldridge 2006)
Current immigration policy perpetuates exploitation of

migrant workers by business owners.
This critique is essential, as even the governments own Accountability
Office points to flaws and loopholes in the H-1B program that allow
employers to violate the programs ostensible protection of labor
standards (Government Accountability Office 2003, 2006). But this critique
of exploitation tends to fall short as an effective analysis and response to the
increasingly globalized high-skill US labor market on two counts. First, the
critique is too narrow. The goal of a globalized labor market for highskill workers is, indeed, very often quite explicitly about reaping cost
savings that come from reducing wages (Bloomberg News 2007; Winters
et al. 2002; World Bank 2003). But it is about far more than just this. The
core principle at stake in global talent war/global meritocracy
discourse is the absolute prerogative of employers to hire whoever
they want whenever they want, based solely on business need, fully
liberated from the kinds of public good expectations that have been
most operationalized at the nation-state level (e.g. the expectation that
employers bear some of the cost of the public education and vocational
training of their workforce, or that they give opportunity to individuals from
disadvantaged social backgrounds, etc.). H-1B visas may often be used at the
bottom ends of the high-skill labor market; but they are used at the upper
levels as well (Mir, Mathew, and Mir 2000). Control (or liberation from state
and public control), not cost, is the fundamental issue. The second
limitation of the exploitation critique of the H-1B visa program is that it is
used most often by labor commentators in the United States as an
excuse to exclude and banish, rather than organize H-1B workers
(Chakravartty 2006b). While the American Federation of Labor and Congress
of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO) and other American labor
organizations have come to see the exploitation of low-skilled
immigrant workers as a reason to reach out to these workers and
include them in their organizing efforts, this has distinctly not been the
case with high-skilled immigrant workers on H-1B and other work
visas (AFL-CIO 2003; Freeman and Hill 2006; Lal 2003). To explain this
difference, it is necessary to look at how the H- 1B debate fits into the
articulation of imperialist self-interest on the part of the US state, capital and
labor
The paradigm of suspicion immobilizes immigrants and

the impoverished, viewing them only as a source of cheap
labor
However, suspect states are often also prime hosts of refugees and of
increasing numbers of displaced groups who are concentrated in refugee
camps and shanty towns. Refugees and internally displaced people are
therefore often doubly immobilized , coerced into designated and
stigmatized areas, and located at the very bottom of the social
mobility hierarchy of an already suspect country. The overwhelming
majority of refugees and internally displaced people reside in
impoverished countries at the global periphery, as refugees typically
flow in from other impoverished and warstricken suspect countries.
Asia hosts half of the worlds refugees, Africa 22 percent, Europe 21 percent,
and 10 percent are located in South and North America. Among the leading
host countries of refugees in the world are Pakistan, Tanzania, the Democratic
Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Armenia. Iran was until recently the worlds
number one host of refugees, hosting nearly 2 million Afghan people. 10
Moreover, the population of suspect countries as a whole tends to be located
at the lower end of the mobility gap. In general, its mobility constraints
reflect lack of access to the resources required for mobility (e.g.,
money, information, and travel documents) and, moreover, this
population often serves as a source of cheap labor, directly and
indirectly catering to the needs of multinational corporations. From

this perspective, the hyper-ghettoes of suspect countries look closer, in terms
of Wacquants analytic terms, to the ghetto end of the continuum. Typically,
most attention has been given to the increasing difficulties of residents of
suspect countries to obtain immigration permits and political asylum. Yet not
less indicative for sorting out the elementary forms of the mobility regime,
when it comes to the effective constitution of stigmatized suspect countries
and stigmatized suspect populations, is the fact that the ability to leave them
is increasingly difficult for nonimmigrants as well. Holding a Turkish or a
Russian or a Nigerian passport does not so much indicate ones identity as a
bearer of rights as much as it marks one as a potential unwanted immigrant.
Accordingly, the mobility regime is increasingly based on limiting the
travel opportunities of such citizens en masse, putting enormous
difficulties on the ability to get ordinary tourist visas, often using
basic tactics such as long waits, high application fees, and a variety
of bureaucratic hurdles.11
Neoliberalism Impacts
ImpactBorder Issues
Neoliberalism creates inequalities amongst the population
those who are not economically valuable are deemed
worthless
For Marshall (1998) social citizenship was associated with the expansion of
equality rights in tandem with the development of the welfare state in the
mid-twentieth century, and political citizenship was associated with the
development of the public sphere, voting and other sorts of political rights
from the nineteenth through to the twentieth century. Prior to these
developments, his evolutionist account associated the earliest innovations in
British national citizenship with the growth of the civil citizenship made up
of such newly codified and legally protected rights as mobility rights and
rights to sell ones labor that developed in concert with the establishment of
bourgeois property rights in early capitalism. The historical trajectory and
the transferability of Marshalls narrative to other contexts are questionable,
as too is the adequacy of his triptych of citizenship in light of feminist and
postcolonial critiques of the normative white western man of property that
stands at the center of most modern formulations of liberal citizenship (
Fraser & Gordon, 1998; Kofman, 2003; Marston, 1994; Mehta, 2000 ).
However, as Marston and Mitchell have argued, Marshalls attention to how
eighteenth century civil citizenship was associated with the liberal
repudiation of interventionist government helps explain how a certain sort of
retreat to civil citizenship is now coincident with the entrenchment of neo-
liberal policies ( Marston & Mitchell, 2004 ). This is the retreat marked by the
erosion of social citizenship through the roll-back of the welfare state and the
rolling out of what Peck (2001, 2004) calls workfare states. It is also a
retreat characterized by the demise of political citizenship through the
privatization of the public sphere, the increasing intrusion of money into pol-
itics, and the legal restriction of political debate to various oxymoronic
protest zones, free speech zones and what Mitchell (2005) , examining
the re-imagination of public space in recent US court decisions, critiques as
the privatized bubble spaces of an atomised SUV citizenship. But as such
the retreat has not been back to a static, nationally fixed form of civil
citizenship based on property and mobility rights merely within the nationstate. SUV citizenship has instead been twinned transnationally with the
development of the frequent flyer Gold clubs, Platinum elites, Red Carpet
communities and even with what might be dubbed the Gulfstream
citizenship of todays hyper-mobile business class (Adey, in press). Faced
with developments like these - including expedited border-crossing
innovations such as NEXUS - we need to consider how neoliberal
government practices, both macro and micro, have been busily

rescaling civil citizenship in transnational ways. At the macro-level of
inter-government agreements and policies, neoliberal governance is
creating what the Gramscian theorist Gill (2003: 116e142) calls a market
civilization. In Gills analysis this needs to be conceptualized as a
quasi-constitutional process that is creating through agreements
such as NAFTA wholly new rights for the class core of todays
hegemonic bloc: the transnational business class. This transnational
class which organizes itself through elite gatherings such as the G7, OECD,
and annual Davos meetings is, according to Gill, entrenching for itself all
sorts of new oligopolistic privileges while imposing market discipline on the
poor and weak (see also Lapham, 1998). Amongst the privileges with which
Gill is most concerned are the privileged rights of citizenship and
representation (2003: 132) conferred on corporations through the
protections secured by international trade agreements and the more hidden
hands of the financial markets. Yet, alongside this new constitutionalism for
capital, Gill also gestures towards developments such as gated communities
in order to point up the more personal implications of neoliberal citizenship
for entrepreneurial individuals. Other theorists who have focused directly on
the transnational business class subjects have in turn fleshed out how this
market-mediated remaking of citizenship relates to personal rights at a more
micro level of governmentality (e.g. Mitchell, 2004; Olds & Thrift, 2005; Ong,
1999 ). And, in a different way, Sklairs (2001) work on the transnational
capitalist class of business elites highlights the seemingly unbounded global
visions of belonging (including rights to move and belong in societies all over
the planet as well as the rights to amass and control belongings globally)
that animate corporate discourse (see also Sparke, 2003, 2005 ). It is
precisely this combination of abilities and attitudes associated with
transnational corporate mobility that underpins what I am describing
here as the transnational rescaling of civil citizenship. Through a whole
set of governmental practices e from the formal and most obvious acts
of remaking national law in accordance with transnational trade
law ( Wallach & Woodall, 2004 ) to the most informal and often unnoticed
developments in education and popular culture ( Hillis, Petit, & Cravey, 2002;
Roberts, 2004 ) e we are witnessing an emergence, albeit an extremely
uneven emergence, of a new kind of transnationally envisioned,
transnationally protected and transnationally mobile citizensubject. However, the big challenge for scholars e not to mention for
transnational business class entrepreneurs themselves e involves coming
to terms with how such transnational transformations of citizenship
are worked out on the ground in the context of all sorts of
countervailing imperatives, including not least of all the sorts of
intensified border securitization we have seen in North America in the
aftermath of 9/11.
ImpactDiscrimination
Smart border programs in combination with neoliberal
agendas create a class discrimination for immigrants

In this paper I explore what the development of an expedited border-crossing
program called NEXUS reveals about the changing political geography of
citizenship in contemporary North America. Developed after 9/11 as a hightech solution to competing demands for both heightened border security and
ongoing cross-border business movement, NEXUS and other so-called Smart
Border programs exemplify how a business class civil citizenship has
been extended across transnational space at the very same time as
economic liberalization and national securitization have curtailed
citizenship for others. The biopolitical production of this privileged
business class citizenship is explored vis-a`-vis the macroscale entrenchment
of neoliberal policy through NAFTA and the microscale production of
entrepreneurial selfhood. By examining how this transnational
privileging of business class rights has happened in an American
context of exclusionary nationalism, the paper also explores the
relationship between neoliberalism and the development of new
spaces of exception defined by exclusion from civil rights. Examples of
such exclusion include expedited removal and extraordinary rendition,
two forms of American anti-immigrant control that have been developed in
concert with expedited border-crossing programs. Examining these forms of
expedited exclusion and comparing the carceral cosmopolitanism they
produce with the soft cosmopolitanism of the NEXUS lane, the paper ends
by offering an argument about the relationship between the neoliberal
privileging of transnational mobility rights and its exclusionary counterparts.
Neo-liberalistic programs on the border have created

clear inequalities amongst different classes
One obvious underside to the transnational citizenship of expedited
crossing lanes is the slowed down border-crossing experience
imposed on ordinary travelers who cannot afford to purchase or do
not have the organizational capacity or the desire to acquire membership in
the fast lane. In his analysis of the code-spaces of contemporary

airports,Adey (2004: 1376)suggests in this way that there are also emerging
kinetic underclasses moving alongside - but much more slowly - the fast lane
kinetic elites. Such an argument in turn begs questions about the different
speeds allotted to different kinetic underclasses. Coach class delays and
secondary processing may be frustrating for many ordinary travelers today,
including many academics, but they are largely just minor annoyances for the
travelling middle-classes. Unless such travelers are vulnerable to racial
coding as supposed security risks, these club-class passengers still move
with significant speed in the comfy cosmopolitan circuits created by
international conference trips, international tourism and international family
get-togethers. For the worlds working classes and for those subject to
security risk codification, by contrast, being in the kinetic underclasses
has altogether more oppressive and more unpredictable outcomes including, not least of all, much more volatile mixes of movement
and immobility. The experience of immobility in these cases means
something entirely different to the petty class resentments that come with
seeing business suits and Lexus cars speed by in NEXUS lanes. Immobility
for the really subaltern underclasses means incarceration and, as Joe
Nevins underlines in his important work on the experiences of working-class
Mexican migrants crossing into America, sometimes death too (Nevins,
2002). It should also be noted that as well as representing ever more
appalling exclusions from the privileges of citizenship and civil rights, those
surviving on this bleak underside of NEXUS lane privilege also sometimes
ironically experience very rapid movement too: rapid movement into
detention centers, rapid movement between detention centers, and,
ultimately, rapid transnational movement out of America, sometimes into
incarceration elsewhere. The result is a kind of carceral cosmopolitanism that
underlines the value of arguments by scholars such as Cheah (1998), Clifford
(1998) and Robbins (1998) that we must distinguish between different
formsediscrepant forms, as Clifford calls theme of cosmopolitanism. Two
North American examples of such carceral cosmopolitanism stand out as
especially disturbing parallels-cum-contrasts with the soft cosmopolitanism of
expedited crossing lanes. The first called expedited removal began in the
mid-1990s as an another outcome e like Section 110e of the new immigration
controls of IIRIRA; and the second called extraordinary rendition has
developed most explicitly in the context of the War on Terror as a way of offshoring US terror suspects for what one critic has called the outsourcing of
torture (Mayer, 2005). By considering both of these radical forms of
expulsion from citizenship and civil rights, I want to end this paper by asking
how the harsh kinds of oppressed and brutalized cosmopolitanism they
represent actually might relate to the soft cosmopolitanism of the NEXUS
lane.
ImpactLaundry List
Undocumented labor in a neoliberal economy spurs a laundry
list of impacts and our government is literally leaving migrants
in an unregulated limbo, either they are full members but not
part of society or they are in the space between unaccepted.
Quarterly, 38.1/2]
First, Agambens depiction of the interstitial is salient to the situation
of refugees and migrant workers, who are neither fully recognized as
members nor completely excluded as strangers. As William Walters
notes, embodying an in-between space, the camp constitutes an
ambiguous, grey zone between the inside and the outside, the social
condition of being neither fully excluded nor fully recognized that
resonates with border-crossing refugees and migrants (2008, 18788).
Moreover, the interstitiality of irregular migration is immanent to the
liberal biopolitical order. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr point out, The
refugee or other irregular migrant, the detritus or remainder, is
integral to the sovereign law that encompasses the interiorized
humanity (2004, 35). They write, The encounter with an excess . . . is
both a threat to the regular order and integral for its continuation. It is
a threat to the order because it reminds of the ruses undertaken to
confine human beings to a politicized life within the nation-state. And
it is integral to the continuation of the system of the nation-state
because its unruliness serves to define the norm. . . . [The sovereign
law] maintains a ruse of inside/outside while at the same time creating
the ambiguous system of the nation-state that depends on the
appropriation of the ostensibly excluded in order to maintain the
inside. (36; emphasis in original) Building upon Rajaram and GrundyWarr, the remainder is integral to sovereign power not only juridically
or politically, but also economically: the exception of
undocumented labor is immanent and integral to the normalcy
of neoliberal economy. Sovereign power simultaneously adopts
labor laws to regulate the market while willfully withdrawing
itself from subcontracted sweatshops, export processing
zones, and the informal economy that hire undocumented
immigrants in order to sustain and reproduce the
hypercapitalist order. Migrant workers are not simply
excluded: they are deliberately brought in, sought after, and
tolerated by the capitalist regime to play a critical part as the

disposable and compliant labor of the state operation (thus
inside), while their membership is deliberately left
suspended as undocumented individuals who have no
official resort to participate politically in the state as citizens
(thus outside). Anne McNevin argues that undocumented
immigrants are immanent outsiders who are incorporated
into the political community as economic participants but
denied the status of insiders (2006, 141). Undocumented labor is
left in an exceptional state of interstitiality and in-between-ness so to
be constituted as an immanent and productive part of neoliberal
economy and biopolitical citizenry.
ImpactBiopolitics
Current neoliberal effects to control the border reifies
biopollitical control

Neoliberalism as a regime of governance is easy enough to describe
in the abstract. Ideologically it is organized around the twin ideas of
liberalizing the capitalist market from state control and refashioning
state practices in the idealized image of the free market. At the
macro-scale of government policy these ideas have inspired and informed the
promotion and entrenchment of the now familiar neoliberal approach to
governance that includes free trade, privatization, financial deregulation,
monetarism, fiscal austerity, welfare reform, and, the punitive policing of the
poor. At the level of the more micro practices that Foucault's
followers have called governmentality (see Burchell et al 1991),
neoliberalism is also commonly associated with the remaking of
state regulation through the market-based mentalities and
techniques associated with audits, performance assessments,
benchmarking, risk ratings, and, at a still more personal level, the
educational and cultural cultivation of a new kind of self-promoting
and self-policing entrepreneurial individualism. Whether macro or
micro, all these innovations in governmental policy and practice
represent transformed patterns of state-making and rule. Even in
the abstract, therefore, it is clear that, despite the common-sense
cant about 'deregulation' in neoliberal rhetoric, neoliberalism leads
in practice to re-regulation. 5 However, when such context contingent
neoliberal reregulations are examined in detail, the contradictions and
resulting theoretical complications expand exponentially (Sparke,
forthcoming). Examined in historical and geographical context, neoliberalism
represents an extraordinarily messy mix of ideas and practices that have
been developed and deployed in different ways with different names in
different places (Larner, 2000; Mitchell, 2004). While the ideas go back to
Smith and Ricardo, their reactivation as neoliberalism is connected to the late
twentieth century rejection of Keynesian liberalism. This rejection had been
persistently demanded through the 1940s, 50s and 60s by critics of state
control such as Friederich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. However, it only
came to be implemented as policy in the aftermath of the economic crises of
the 1970s when politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
came to power promising the roll-back of state control over capitalism. At the
time of the Thatcherite and Reaganite revolutions, however, their national
critics tended to talk not about neoliberalism but rather about a 'New Right',
or about 'Thatcherism', 'Reaganism' and their much touted but generally
flouted commitments to 'fiscal conservativism'. Only retroactively have
Thatcher and Reagan been reviewed as revolutionaries of neoliberalism per

se. During the 1970s and 1980s it was instead more commonly critics in the
Global South, most especially in Latin America, who were early to use
neoliberalism to critique externally imposed but internally reproduced
market-based governance (Adelman and Centemo, forthcoming). This is
worth remembering because the Latin American experience also reminds us
that neoliberalism frequently had an authoritarian underbelly. This does not
mean that neoliberalism is always and everywhere connected to the sorts of
coercive political violence that cast out the socialists and brought Pinochet
and his Chicago trained economists to power in Chile (Valds, 1995). Nor
does it mean that it is all about the eclipse of national citizenship by the
structural adjustment imperatives of transnational finance. However, the
Latin American lessons do clearly suggest that we should approach any
examination of neoliberal governance with a sensitivity to its contradictions,
to its subordination of national citizenship, and to the casting out from the
neoliberal nation-state of sundry others deemed unworthy of civil rights (see
also Hart, forthcoming). 6 Alongside the lessons that can be garnered about
neoliberalism's contradictions from studying its uneven innovation and
implementation as a macrological mode of governance, the actual approach
taken in what follows to the neoliberalism of the NEXUS program draws just
as much for inspiration on the more micrological approach to neoliberal
power relations developed in the governmentality literature (Burchell et al
1991). In an exception to his normal focus on the development of
government in France, Foucault spent some time in his 1979 Collge de
France lectures also examining German and American innovations in liberal
government. Especially in his account of Gary Becker and the Chicago School,
Foucault was keen to chart the totalizing assumptions of neoliberal economic
theory and, in particular, its assumptions about a new homo economicus, an
"individual producer-consumer," in Colin Gordon's gloss, who is "not just an
enterprise, but the entrepreneur of himself or herself" (Gordon, 1991: 44). In
Gordon's interpretation this normative model of personhood
identified by Foucault as a symptomatic feature of neoliberalism
simultaneously signified a wholesale transformation of societal
belonging too: a transformation from a society of collective
citizenship to a society of radically individuated citizenship, a new
market-mediated society over which state practices rule as what
Foucault called "une sorte de tribunal conomique permanent" - a kind of
permanent economic tribunal (quoted and translated in Lemke, 2001: 198).
As a result, argues Gordon, the transition from liberal Keynesian government
to neoliberal government means that: "[t]he notion of the social body as a
collective subject committed to the reparation of the injuries suffered by its
individual members gives [way to a new] role for the state as a custodian of
a collective reality principle, distributing the disciplines of the competitive
world market throughout the interstices of the social body" (Gordon, 1991:
45). Also following Foucault, other theorists of governmentality such as
Thomas Lemke suggest in this way that "the key feature of neo-liberal
rationality is the congruence it endeavours to achieve between a responsible
and moral individual and an economic-rational actor" (Lemke, 2001: 197).
Lemke might just as well have said "responsible and moral citizen" because it
is precisely the normative individuality of national citizenship that neoliberal
governmental practices are busily reworking into a new more marketmediated "citizenship regime" of economic-rational actors (Dobrowolsky and
Jenson, 2004; and Jenson and Phillips, 7 1996). Expanding on Lemke's
argument, Wendy Brown underlines that in this way neoliberalism
"normatively constructs and interpellates individuals as entrepreneurial
actors in every sphere of life" (Brown, 2003). As Barry Hindess (2002)
further points out, these marketization developments in
governmentality therefore have profound consequences for both the
political and the social rights of citizenship we have inherited from
struggles of the twentieth century (cf Fraser, 2003). He argues thus that
"political rights (such as they are) may remain but their scope is restricted as
market regulation takes over from direct regulation by state agencies and the
judgement of the market is brought to bear on the conduct of states, while
the social rights of citizenship (where they exist) are pared back as provision
through the market replaces provision directly or indirectly through the state"
(Hindess, 2000: 140). Hindess here takes his categories of social and political
citizenship from the 1960s' work of the English sociologist T.H. Marshall, and,
while focusing on how social and political forms of citizenship have been
increasingly restricted and economically recoded in the subsequent years, he
does not reflect on how Marshall's third category of 'civil citizenship' might
have changed rather differently. As I have argued elsewhere (Sparke,
2004b), however, it is useful to reflect further on how the economic
recodings of this third form of citizenship have not only led to its
increasing restriction to entrepreneurial social classes, but also to
its rescaling: a territorial rescaling, most notably, from the scale of
nationally-defined and territorially enclosed rights to the scale of
transnationally-defined and territorially open-ended rights.
Biopolitics is the result of neoliberal refashioning at the

border
Taking my cue from Foucaults own work on the so-called biopolitical
production of self- governing citizen-subjects in modern prisons, clinics,
classrooms and so on, my suggestion in what follows is that we can
usefully examine the context contingent transnationalization of
civil citizenship including how it is shaped by countervailing
nationalistic forces by focusing on the particular spaces of
border management technologies. The jargon of biopolitics is useful in
this respect because it points to what the recoding of citizenship
through border discipline can tell us about the assumptions,
attitudes, and abilities associated with the more general neoliberal
refashioning of civil citizenship. Biopolitics for Foucault included both
discourses about the self-governing subject and the actual production of
self-governed life within particular modern spaces. Some of the
governmentality literature that supposedly follows in his footsteps has not

always addressed both these aspects of biopolitics. Nikolas Roses depiction
of advanced liberalism, for example, offers such an abstract discursive
account of the self-government of the entrepreneurial subject that the nittygritty activities of biopolitical production under neoliberalism disappear from
view. Partly this is because he associates neoliberalism more with ideology
than government practices, and partly this appears to be because he wants
to avoid an epochal account of historical transition from an age of liberalism
to an age of neoliberalism. However, his disembodied account is also
ironically indicative of a structuralism that he disavows. Thus, as Larner
cautions, without analyses of the messy actualities of particular neoliberal
projects, those working within this analytic run the risk of precisely the
problem they wish to avoid - that of producing generalized accounts of
historical epochs (Larner, 2000: 14). Here, therefore, I want to explore the
messy actualities of the development of the NEXUS lane as a way of
examining in a more grounded way the convolutions, contradictions and
countervailing forces surrounding the neoliberalization of citizenship in
contemporary North America. In underlining the reterritorialization of
the resulting civil citizenship and by therefore highlighting how the
new normal - as Bhandar (2004) calls it - of this neoliberalized
citizenship is distinctively transnational in scope, I also want to
point towards the parallel transnationalization of the new abnormal
too. As a result, I complement and conclude this study by exploring how
NAFTA region neoliberalization also entails new forms of
exceptionalism: new exclusionary exceptions from citizenship that
are based upon older raciological imaginations of nation, but which
work through new techniques of expedited and transnationalized
alienation that expel so-called aliens as quickly as business
travelers can now buy fast passage across the NAFTA regions
internal borders.
ImpactOtherization
Neo-liberalism on the border categorizes individuals into
kinetic elites and foreigners who are deemed unfit

The main argument made in this article about NEXUS concerns the ways in
which this little known expedited border-crossing program and its
development are symptomatic of the neoliberalization of citizenship
in todays North American context. This is a context, as I have
explained, shaped at once by the transnational entrenchment of free
market rights and the increasingly oppressive impact of securitized
nationalism. NEXUS lane participants - the people who cross often and
want to make it simple, the people who are prepared to buy flexible
citizenship because the fastlane is where you want to be - would
seem to represent the paradigmatic neoliberal citizen-players on the
transnational level playing field of free trade, neoliberal citizens for
whom transnational mobility rights are part of the more general
transnational business class privilege that continues to be expanded
and entrenched globally through the new constitutionalism of free
trade and related laws. As such, the kinetic elites of the NEXUS lane
appear to be able to buy for themselves at least a little of the
borderless world fantasy-life whose most transcendently
transnational subjects can rise above it all as Gulfstream citizens of the
world, the world of transnational property rights and mobility rights seen best
through the Enhanced Vision System of a Gulfstream jet. But then we have
the kinetic underclasses of expedited removal and extraordinary
rendition whose borderless world is, by contrast, a world without a
constitution, a world which may well extend transnationally via
Gulfstream jets across borders, but only so as to better cast out its
dehumanized and rights-deprived subjects into the spaces of
exception that now increasingly seem to form a transnational gulag
of incarceration and outsourced torture. The violence of extraordinary
rendition may seem especially context contingent, in this regard, not a
neoliberal or otherwise economically induced outcome, but a result of an
exceptional American ability to combine free market fundamentalism with an
inhuman disregard for foreigners deemed unfit (often because of orientalist
codes) for business. Consider in this regard what happened when Edward
Markey, a democratic congressman from Massachusetts, introduced
legislation to ban extraordinary rendition in 2005. Republican House speaker
Dennis Hastert said the legislation was going nowhere, and, when Herbert
(2005: A 25) , a columnist from the New York Times asked why, he was told:
The speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that
suspected terrorists should be sent to their home countries. Then, when
Herbert asked why they should not be held and prosecuted in the US, Pete
Jeffries from the speakers office replied: Because U.S. taxpayers should
not necessarily be on the hook for their judicial and incarceration costs.
This response seems a telling illustration of the white-Americansfirst exceptionalism that has led many in US government to think
that creating spaces of exception to human rights laws is just fine.
But it is also, I think, an extraordinarily telling indictment of the
neoliberal logic through which extraordinary rendition has been
thought out and justified by its perpetrators. American taxpayers,
Jeffries seemed to be saying, should not have to pay for government services
(whether they be torture or its prevention) when they are being consumed
by those who do not pay taxes in America. Also overdetermined by
economic codes, expedited removal seems to reflect a similarly
consumerist neoliberal revisioning of citizenship and security, being
imagined by the 1996 legislative promoters of IIRIRA as part of the same
individualized- contractualism that turned welfare into workfare and recoded
American citizenship more generally in the terms of the payments and
debts of private commercial contracts. In other words, while both
extraordinary rendition and expedited removal both clearly need to
be understood in terms of the extra-capitalistic imperatives
associated with virulently nationalistic (and thus racist and masculinist)
imperatives, they also appear to reflect some of the same economic
hall-marks of a neoliberalism that, as Foucault once argued, turns
citizens into entrepreneurs of their selves. Thus, while asylum
seekers thrown into subcontracted prison space by DHS and carceral
cosmopolitans such as Maher Arar are completely deprived of agency and
choice, their plight needs nonetheless to be understood in relation
to the ways in which the normative citizen of North America has
meanwhile been re-specified as an active agent both able and
obliged to exercise autonomous choices. ( Larner, 2000 : 13).
ImpactSecuritization
Neoliberal thought is inextricably tied to securitization of
the border

By securitized nationalism I am referring to the cultural political
forces that lead to the imagining, surveilling and policing of the
nation state in especially exclusionary but economically discerning
ways. The increasingly market-mediated methods of such
securitization often involve commercial risk management and
dataveillance strategies, but with securitized nationalism they are
combined with long-standing nationalistic traditions of imagining the
homeland, encod- ing bodies, and in Campbells (1998) terms writing
security through identity-based exclusions of people deemed to
be untrustworthy aliens. By free market transnationalism, by contrast, I
am referring to distinctively incorporative economic imperatives that involve
increasing transnational capitalist interdependencies and the associated
entrenchment of transnational capitalist mobility rights through various
forms of free market re-regulation. Such a regime of free market
transnationalism may well be considered by many readers to be a rough
synonym for neoliberalism. But here I am proposing a more conjunctural
approach to theorising neoliberalism as a contextually contingent
articulation of free market governmental practices with varied and often
quite illiberal forms of social and political rule (see also Sparke, 2004a, in
press ). This context contingent definition of neoliberalism should not be
taken to imply that it is a form of rule that is all-inclusive or simply
continuous with the long history and heterogeneity of capitalism itself. The
neo does mark something discrete and new historically, including, not least
of all, the transnationalism of todays liberalized market regimes. While
neoliberalism certainly represents a revival of classical nineteenth century
free market liberalism, it is also clearly a new kind of capitalist liberalization
that is distinct insofar as it has been imagined and implemented after and in
opposition to the state-regulated national economies of the twentieth
century. It is because such imagination and implementation have been
worked out in different ways in different places that neoliberalism needs to
be examined conjuncturally. The Neoliberal Nexus referred to in the title
of this paper is therefore meant to indicate this conjunctural approach
as well as underlining how the Nexus program itself can be
understood as an example of neoliberalization. A conjunctural
approach, it needs underlining, does not foreclose the possibility of
making more general claims about neoliberalism and its
reterritorialization of social and political life. Thus while explaining the
emergence and significance of the Nexus program as a context contingent
response to the contradictory imperatives of national securitization and

economic facilitation, the article still makes a claim that the program
exemplifies broader changes to citizenship most notably, new
transnational mobility rights for some and new exclusions for
others under a combination of macroscale neoliberal governance
and microscale neoliberal governmentality. In order to clarify this
argument, I begin by explaining what I mean by neoliberal governance and
governmentality and why border management can be viewed as a useful
window on to the neoliberal remaking of citizenship. Subsequently, I will chart
the contradictory story of the development of the NEXUS program and
consider the ways in which it exemplifies both the inclusions and exclusions
of neoliberal citizenship.
ImpactExploitation
Neoliberal Nation States exploit and systematically
reduce migrants to an invisible entity that is easily
exploitable.
Kasli and Parla 2009[Zeynep and Ayse, Broken Lines of Il/Legality and the
Reproduction of State Sovereignty: The Impact of Visa Policies on Immigrants to
Turkey from Bulgaria, in Alternatives 34, pg 204]
It has been widely claimed that the acceleration and intensification of

globalization, especially in conjunction with the neoliberal economic
restructuring of the last few decades, poses challenges to nation-states
not only through trahnsnational corporations and international
political bodies but also through the transnational ties migrants
forge beyond national borders.1 Nonetheless, as Bauman argues, there
seems to be an intimate kinship, mutual conditioning and reciprocal
reinforcement between the globalization of all aspects of the economy. and
the renewed emphasis on the territorial principle.2 The elective affinity
between globalization and the territorial principle, or what others have
more generally described as the continuing relevance of the nation-state,3
increasingly renders state borders and visa policies the sites of an
asymmetric relationship between the sovereign state and
immigrants who develop formal and informal strategies to expand
spaces for maneuver, the limits of which are nonetheless still demarcated
by the sovereign state. It has also been argued that the reproduction of
state sovereignty often utilizes the temporariness of the legal status
of immigrants.4 According to Calavitas primarily economic emphasis, the
law systematically reproduces the irregularity of migrants in order
to ensure a vulnerable and dispensable workforce. The sorting of
people into categories of otherness no longer occurs on the basis of
cultural or ethnic markers, but rather on their positioning in the
global economy.5 In a similar vein, King underlines that illegality seems
to be constructed in an illogical (but perhaps cynical) way by host
societies which seem to be willing to exploit cheap migrant labor
(and even be structurally dependent upon it) yet at the same time to
deny the legal and civic existence of migrants.6 Balibar, too, points to
the reproduction of illegality despite the rhetoric of immigration control but
places the emphasis on how illegality and discourses about illegality become
the raison dtre of the security apparatus.
ImpactA2: Neolib Good

Immigration policy doesnt guarantee value to life for
migrant workers.
in America, Social Semiotics 19: 3, 322, J.C)
Professional and technical workers in this nation have made enormous

personal sacrifices to gain the education and training necessary to
compete for the knowledge jobs in the so called new American
economy,says the AFL-CIOs Michael Gildea (2006): They deserve better
than to be victimized by guest worker programs like H- 1B. H-1B
opponents rhetoric is also infused with a powerful sense of betrayal and
shock that foreign competition and economic misfortune should be
happening to them not just because they are Americans, but because they
are educated Americans. Education was supposed to protect them from
the ravages of neo-liberal globalization; and skilled work was to be
the preserve of citizens exclusively. Anti-H-1B activist Rob Sanchez, in
his biographical sketch above, thus recalls seeing immigrants coming into
America throughout his life, without ever imagining that immigration might
affect his own career as a skilled software professional. We are Americas
best and brightest and we are being systematically replaced by
cheap foreign labor, an online anti-H-1B group protests: The jobs that
are being replaced are Computer Scientist, Computer Engineers ... Now are
these the type of jobs you would like foreigners to have? (quoted in
Chakravartty 2006b, 46). Appealing as the new knowledge economy
model may have been to many in the United States, it had two fundamental
flaws as a just and effective class compromise. First, it was inherently
unstable and doomed to unravel quickly. The US state had long had
its own political interests in bringing the foreign-born to study and
work in US universities and high-skill workplaces; and American
capital, as soon as technological, political and social conditions permitted,
was as interested in sourcing high-skill work overseas, or importing
high-skill immigrant workers to the United States, as it had been
previously with the low-skill manufacturing sector. Three decades after
the arrival of the knowledge economy had first been broadcast in books such
as Daniel Bells (1973) The coming of the post-industrial society, moreover,
high-wage, high-skill (college-educated) work is still a minority of the overall
job market in every country on earth, the United States included. Skill and
education, in and of themselves, are simply not effective guarantors
of secure employment, high wages, a high standard of living or a
good quality of life for everyone over the long run (Brown et al. 2006).
A2
A2: Utilitarianism
Utilitarian arguments amoral the number of eligible
people receiving rights is irrelevant; the recognition of
the rights preferred
Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, p. 87-88, AJM]
Some may worry that it is pointless to grant a legal right of free
movement to people who are so deeply impoverished. After all,
international migration is a costly process and only a very small proportion of
those entitled to the right will be able to claim it. Although I concur with the
empirical claim behind this objection, I deny - for three reasons - that it
undermines the case for the right in question. First, there are many
legal rights that are not claimed by most people to whom they are
available, and we do not rypically regard this as reason to abandon
the right in question. Many people do not exercise their right to vote or
their right to worship, but we certainly do not think that this non-exercise of a
right undermines the rationale for its existence. Second, the fact that few
people manage to claim the right does not undermine its value for
those who do. Third, to deny qualified individuals the legal right to
immigrate makes one complicit in the violation of the subsistence
rights in question. As Thomas Pogge explains, we "must not avoidably
restrict the freedom of some so as to render their access to basic necessities
insecure - especially through official denial or deprivation" (Pogge 2002, 67).
Thus, even if it is true that few of the qualified individuals will be
able to claim the right in question, this fact does not undermine the
importance of legally recognizing it.
A2: Politics/Framework
Those advocating open borders are not welcome in
political discourse. The unjust effects of the others
exclusion become apparent
Borders and Absolute Sovereignty, p. 79, AJM]
The open borders view occupies a somewhat strange position in
debates regarding immigration. On the one hand, arguments for open
borders are rarely heard in popular political discussion (which typically
assumes the state's right to block migration). Even when the position is
advanced in public debate (for example, by The Wall Street journal), it is not
seen as a serious policy option or engaged as anything more than fanciful
provocation. Alternatively, it is no exaggeration to describe open
borders as the dominant position among academics writing about
justice and immigration. Indeed, here it is any non-open borders position
that is seen as so much fanciful provocation. One author goes so far as to
say that, although many arguments are employed by those who
object to open borders, "there seems little reason to consider them
all in derail, since all are fallacious: they are expressions of racist
attitudes or general hostility to foreigners rather than the product of
serious assessment" (Dummett 2001, 67). Whether or not one is
antecedently sympathetic to the position, it is worthwhile to engage
seriously and carefully with the arguments given in favor of open
borders. If nothing else, it is useful to think of open borders as the null
hypothesis. Any restrictions that groups of individuals want to place
on the movement of others must be justified with a set of reasons
consistent with the equal status of all. The kinds of reasons one gives
for rejecting open borders shape the types of restrictions (and so the type of
immigration policy) that one can logically accept. For example, if open
borders is rejected because of the importance of maintaining a given national
identity (and we will examine arguments of this type in chapter 6),
restrictions will be shaped so as to protect that identity. Other rationales for
restricting immigration vvill set us on the course to very different kinds of
immigration policies. Thus, even if it turns out that the open borders
position is [are] mistaken, it is nevertheless important to carefully
consider the strength of the arguments that can be offered in its
support.
A2: Immigration Bad Args

Their warrant for militarization links to the criticism
rejection of immigration severs the origins of the state
Current nation states are the result of successive waves of
immigration, most of which took place before the twentieth century.
Although migrants are currently vilified and subjected to
unprecedented levels of restriction, to deny the validity of
migration is to deny part of the social nature of human beings. But
the rate of migration in relation to total population is now lower than it has
been at times in the past. In spite of scaremongering about the
supposed threat of swamping by immigrants and refugees, there
is in fact little evidence that migration is increasing significantly , or
likely to do so. The numbers about which so much fuss is made are in
reality rather small. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the
imperialist expansion of Europe, the main migratory movements
(apart from emigrations from Europe) have resulted from the requirements
for labour of capitalist industry, mines and plantations. In the conquered
territories these were often satisfied by the more or less overt use of
force. In The New Helots Robin Cohen describes a spectrum of labour
recruitment which ranges from total compulsion, as in the slave trade,
through situations where people are forced into wage labour by regimes
which deprive them of their land and/or force them to raise money to pay
taxes and where once recruited they are virtually deprived of their liberty, to
situations where the dislocations caused by imperialism and war more or less
force people to seek work and safety abroad. After the Second World War
European governments sent agencies to recruit workers from, for example,
southern Europe, North Africa, Turkey and the Caribbean. Especially in
Germany and Switzerland, workers were recruited on contracts which
denied them the right to change employment or to settle and gave
them few of the other rights enjoyed by native workers.
Border control is ineffective and immoral, increase in

immigration is inevitable
Publication)
The damage caused by immigration controls would be difficult to

justify morally even if the measures were in fact effective at reducing
undocumented immigration. Since immigration controls are woefully
unsuccessful, it is impossible to make any sense of the damage. By most
accounts, enforcement has been a failure . The undocumented

immigrant population has increased despite the unprecedented
escalation in border enforcement over the past twenty years.
Border enforcement measures have punished, stigmatized , and, at
times, killed immigrants. But they have not significantly reduced
undocumented immigration. Thus, they have been both ineffective and
immoral.
Turn: border enforcement increases likelihood of

permanent residencies and immigration as increased
Publication)
In spite of the high human costs, increased border enforcement has
proven to be woefully ineffective. Its self-defeating nature is
demonstrated by its counterintuitive consequence. Contrary to
expectations, migrants who come to the United States under the
current regime are more likely to remain permanently in the country
than those who came in the past. Understandably, undocumented
immigrants who have made it to the United States do not want to
risk running the gauntlet of border controls and literally place their
lives on the line a second time.108 As a result, the undocumented
immigrant population in the country has increased from an estimated
5 to 7 million when the various border operations were put into place
in the 1990s to approximately 11 to 12 million today. This bears repeating.
The undocumented population has increased 114 | Bordering on the Immoral
despite the monumental border enforcement initiatives adopted in the
past decade, efforts that have cost millions of dollars and resulted in
the deaths of thousands of people. The undocumented immigrant
population has also risen in the face of the unprecedented focus on
immigration enforcement after September 11
A2: Backlash
Backlash args emerge from a worst-case lens because of a
lack of concrete reference points the EU illustrates the
numerous benefits of open borders
Delacroix, former professor of management, & Nikiforov,
business development specialist, 9
[Jacques & Sergey, 9, If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border
Freely, The Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 107, MM]
The bold open-border solution is not the subject of serious debate

because Americans lack reference points from which to consider
even its most predictable implications. In regard to open borders, the
collective American imagination may be dealing mostly in
nightmarish caricatures . Yet a concrete precedent exists in the
European Union, which for more than forty years has been progressively
eliminating all internal barriers, including those that pertain to the free
movement of persons. (We emphasize, though, that we do not propose
that the European Union constitutes a general model of behavior for the
United States. It should also be obvious that a study of the unions experience
with internal migrations does not imply admiration for its bureaucratic
proclivities.) Between 1986 and 1992, ten countries of the European
Union, some formerly vengefully nationalistic states, reached a
situation in which practically any citizen of a union country may pull
up stakes and go to live anywhere else in the union.2 The European
Union grants citizens of newer members states the same privileges gradually,
after a more or less extensive waiting period, thereafter withholding only the
right of suffrage in national elections. Anecdotal evidence of this policys
effectiveness is all over the map of Europe. An English coupleof all
peopleruns their own cafe in deepest France. Paris apartment
house conciergesat all times, a central cultural role in French society
today normally speak French with a Portuguese accent. Irishmen shoe
horses in Seville. Real Italian restaurants run by real natives of Italy
are everywhere.3 This kind of smooth integration is remarkable
given that several of the member countries suffered grievously at
the hands of other member countries within living memory. (In fact,
the architects of this success belong to the very generation that experienced
most of this intra-European aggression.) Nothing approaching such a
legacy of hostility exists between the United States and Mexico. If it
did, the resentment would belong on the Mexican side because of the 160year-old Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by which Mexico lost half of its territory
The DA enforces unending violence only a critical

cosmopolitanism can dismantle the ideologies that make
the upholding of exclusion a possibility
Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature
at Duke University, 0
[Walter, 0, The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical
Cosmopolitanism, Public Culture, Volume: 12, p. 739-744, MM]
I have shown three stages of cosmopolitan projects of the modern/colonial
world system or, if you prefer, of modernity/coloniality. In the first,
cosmopolitanism faced the difficulties of dealing with pagans, infidels, and
barbarians. It was a religious and racial configuration. In the second,
cosmopolitanism faced the difficulties of communities without states and the
dangers of the foreigners that, at that point in time, were the foreigners at
the edge of the Europe of nations. In the third stage, communists replaced
pagans and infidels, barbarians and foreigners, as the difficulties of
cosmopolitan society were reassessed. Today the scenario Kant was
observing has changed again with the dangers presented by recent
African immigration to Europe and Latin Americans to the United
States. Religious exclusion, national exclusion, ideological
exclusion, and ethnic exclusion have several elements in common:
first, the identification of frontiers and exteriority; second, the racial
component in the making of the frontier as colonial difference
(linked to religion in the first instance and to nationalism in the second);
and third, the ideological component in the remaking of the imperial
difference during the third historical stage (liberalism versus socialism within
the modern/ colonial world). Ethnicity became a crucial trademark after the
end of the Cold War, although its roots had already been established in
connection with religion and nationalism. While there is a temporal
succession that links the three stages and projects them onto the current
postCold War globalization, they are each constitutive of the modern/colonial
world and cohabit today, as Kosovo clearly bears witness to. Furthermore,
the three stages that I am reconstituting historically but that are the
ground of the present, are successive and complementary moments
in the struggle for the survival and hegemony of the North Atlantic or, if
you wish, the reconstituted face of the Western world. I suspect that it is
possible now to talk more specifically about a fourth stage, perhaps a
postmodern/postcolonial moment, of the modern/colonial world, which I have
been announcing in the previous paragraph and in which current discussions
on cosmopolitanism are taking placea stage that Immanuel Wallerstein
(1999) described as the end of the world as we know it. It also
may be possible now to have a cosmopolitan manifesto to deal
with the world risk society (Beck 1999).6 The erasure of the
imperial difference that sustained the Cold War and the current process of
its relocation in China brings us back to a situation closer to the one faced
by Vitoria: imagining conviviality across religious and racial divides.
Global coloniality is drawing a new scenario. Capitalism is no longer

concentrating in the Mediterranean (as in Vitorias time) or in the Europe of
nations and the North Atlantic (as in Kants time) when liberalism went
together with Christian Protestantism and skin color began to replace blood
and religion in the reconfiguration of the colonial difference. At that time,
capital, labor control, and whiteness became the new paradigm under which
the colonial difference was redefined. In the second half of the twentieth
century but more so after the end of the Cold War, capitalism is crossing the
former colonial difference with the Orient and relocating it as imperial
difference with China thereby entering territories in which Christianity,
liberalism, and whiteness are alien categories. Perhaps Samuel Huntington
(1996) had a similar scenario in mind when he proposed that in the future,
wars would be motivated by the clash of civilizations rather than by economic
reasons. Which means that when capitalism crosses the colonial difference, it
brings civilizations into conflicts of a different order. In any event, relevant to
my argument is the fact that while capitalism expands, and the rage for
accumulation daily escapes further beyond control (for instance, the
weakening of nation-states or the irrational exuberance of the market), racial
and religious conflicts emerge as new impediments to the possibility of
cosmopolitan societies. The new situation we are facing in the fourth
stage is that cosmopolitanism (and democracy) can no longer be
articulated from one point of view, within a single logic, a mono-logic
(if benevolent) discourse from the political right or left. Vitoria, Kant,
the ideologues of interdependence, the champions of development, and the
neoliberal managers believing, or saying, that technology will lift poverty left
little room for those on the other side of the colonial difference. And,
obviously, managed cosmopolitanism could (and more likely will) remain
as a benevolent form of control. In the New World order, how can critical
and dialogic cosmopolitanism be thought out without falling into the traps of
cultural relativism (and the reproduction of the colonial difference) as pointed
out by An-Naim? I have been suggesting, and now will move to justify, that
cultural relativism should be dissolved into colonial difference and that the
colonial difference should be identified as the location for the critical and
dialogic cosmopolitanism that confronts managerial global designs of
ideologues and executives of the network society. Instead of
cosmopolitanism managed from above (that is, global designs), I am
proposing cosmopolitanism, critical and dialogic, emerging from the
various spatial and historical locations of the colonial difference
(Mignolo 2000). In this vein, I interpret the claim made by An-Naim.
Replacing cultural differences with the colonial difference helps change the
terms, and not only the content, of the conversation: Culture is the term that
in the eighteenth century and in the Western secular world replaced religion
in a new discourse of colonial expansion (Dirks 1992). The notion of cultural
relativism transformed coloniality of power into a semantic problem. If we
accept that actions, objects, beliefs, and so on are culture-relative, we hide
the coloniality of power from which different cultures came into being in the
first place. The problem, then, is not to accommodate cosmopolitanism to
cultural relativism, but to dissolve cultural relativism and to focus on the
coloniality of power and the colonial difference produced, reproduced, and
maintained by global designs. Critical cosmopolitanism and new

democratic projects imply negotiating the coloniality of power and the
colonial difference in a world controlled by global capitalism (Redrado
2000). Rights of man or human rights, of course, would have to be negotiated
across gender lines (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1997; Beijing Declaration [1995]
1997), but also across the coloniality of power that structured and still
structures the modern/colonial world around the racially grounded colonial
difference. Human rights can no longer be accepted as having a content that
Vitoria, Kant, and the United Nations discovered and possessed. Such
expressions, as well as democracy and cosmopolitanism, shall be conceived
as connectors in the struggle to overcome coloniality of power from the
perspective of the colonial difference, rather than as full-fledged words with
specific Western content. By connectors I do not mean empty signifiers that
preserve the terms as the property of European Enlightenment while they
promote benevolent inclusion of the Other or making room for the
multicultural. The Zapatistas have used the word democracy, although it has
different meaning for them than it has for the Mexican government.
Democracy for the Zapatistas is not conceptualized in terms of European
political philosophy but in terms of Maya social organization based on
reciprocity, communal (instead of individual) values, the value of wisdom
rather than epistemology, and so forth. The Mexican government doesnt
possess the correct interpretation of democracy, under which the Other will
be included. But, for that matter, neither do the Zapatistas have the right
interpretation. However, the Zapatistas have no choice but to use the word
that political hegemony imposed, although using the word doesnt mean
bending to its mono-logic interpretation. Once democracy is singled out
by the Zapatistas, it becomes a connector through which liberal
concepts of democracy and indigenous concepts of reciprocity and
community social organization for the common good must come to
terms. Border thinking is what I am naming the political and ethical move
from the Zapatistas perspective, by displacing the concept of democracy.
Border thinking is not a possibility, at this point, from the
perspective of the Mexican government , although it is a need from
subaltern positions . In this line of argument, a new abstract universal
(such as Vitorias, or Kants, which replaced Vitorias, or the ideologies of
transnationalism, which replaced Kants abstract universal) is no longer either
possible or desirable. The abstract universal is what hegemonic perspectives
provide, be they neoliberal or neo-Marxist. The perspective from the
colonial difference (illustrated in the dilemma formulated by An-Naim and
further developed with the example of the Zapatistas) instead opens the
possibility of imagining border thinking as the necessary condition for
a future critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism. Such a critical and dialogic
cosmopolitanism itself leads toward diversality, instead of toward a new
universality grounded (again) on the potential of democratic politicization as
the true European legacy from ancient Greece onward (Z izek 1998:
1009). A new universalism recasting the democratic potential of the European
legacy is not necessarily a solution to the vicious circle between (neo)liberal
globalization and regressive forms of fundamentalist hatred ( Zizek 1998:
1009). It is hard to imagine that the entire planet would endorse the
democratic potential of the European legacy from ancient Greece onward.

The entire planet could, in fact, endorse a democratic, just, and cosmopolitan
project as far as democracy and justice are detached from their
fundamental European heritage, from Greece onward, and they are taken
as connectors around which critical cosmopolitanism would be articulated.
Epistemic diversality shall be the ground for political and ethical
cosmopolitan projects. In other words, diversity as a universal project (that
is, diversality) shall be the aim instead of longing for a new abstract universal
and rehearsing a new universality grounded in the true Greek or
Enlightenment legacy. Diversality as the horizon of critical and dialogic
cosmopolitanism presupposes border thinking or border epistemology
grounded on the critique of all possible fundamentalism (Western and nonWestern, national and religious, neoliberal and neosocialist) and on the faith
in accumulation at any cost that sustains capitalist organizations of the
economy (Mignolo 2000). Since diversality (or diversity as a universal project)
emerges from the experience of coloniality of power and the colonial
difference, it cannot be reduced to a new form of cultural relativism but
should be thought out as new forms of projecting and imagining, ethically and
politically, from subaltern perspectives. As Manuel Castells (1997: 109) puts
it, the Zapatistas, American militia, and Aum Shinrikyo are all social
movements that act politically against globalization and against the state. My
preference for the Zapatistas and not for the other two is an ethical rather
than a political choice. Diversality as a universal project, then, shall be
simultaneously ethical, political, and philosophical. It cannot be identified,
either, with oppositional violence beyond the European Union and the United
States. And of course, by definition, it cannot be located in the hegemonic
global designs that have been the target of critical reflections in this essay. As
John Rawls would word it in his explorations on the law (instead of the right)
of peoples, diversality as a universal project shall be identified with the
honest non-liberal people (Rawls 1999: 90, see also 89 128). But also with
the honest non-Western people or people of color that Rawls, following
Kant, doesnt have in his horizon. Critical and dialogic cosmopolitanism
as a regulative principle demands yielding generously (convivially
said Vitoria; friendly said Kant) toward diversity as a universal and
cosmopolitan project in which everyone participates instead of
being participated. Such a regulative principle shall replace and
displace the abstract universal cosmopolitan ideals (Christian, liberal,
socialist, neoliberal) that had helped (and continue to help ) to hold
together the modern/colonial world system and to preserve the
managerial role of the North Atlantic. And here is when the local histories
and global designs come into the picture. While cosmopolitanism was thought
out and projected from particular local histories (that became the local
history of the modern world system) positioned to devise and enact global
designs, other local histories in the planet had to deal with those global
designs that were, at the same time, abstract universals (Christian, liberal, or
socialist). For that reason, cosmopolitanism today has to become border
thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those local
histories that had to deal all along with global designs. Diversality
should be the relentless practice of critical and dialogical cosmopolitanism

rather than a blueprint of a future and ideal society projected from a single
point of view (that of the abstract universal) that will return us (again!) to the
Greek paradigm and to European legacies (Z izek 1998).
They make oppression worse its a question of relative

abuse their form upholds immigration-control programs
that make violence inevitable and more explosive
Archuleta, Professor and Pre-Law Advisor of English at
Pennsylvania State University, 5
[Elizabeth, 5, Securing Our Nation's Roads and Borders or Re-circling the
Wagons?
Leslie Marmon Silko's Destabilization of "Borders", Wicazo Sa Review,
Volume: 20, p. 127-130, MM]
In its militaristic response to the perceived threat that Mexican
immigrants pose, the United States that Silko learned about as a child no
longer differs in certain respects from communist countries and
militarized borders such as those in North Korea, Cuba, and the
former East Berlin and Soviet Union. In effect, immigrants have
replaced communists as the threat that warrants the same kind of
military strategies used during wartime . Timothy J. Dunns The
Militarization of the U.S. Mexico Border, 19781992 documents how border
policies and practices have replicated the Pentagons doctrine of
low- intensity conflict. One element of low- intensity conflict used
domestically has included the use of police, paramilitary forces, and military
forces working together to combat the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs
entering the country. These military strategies, meant to establish
social control over specific civilian populations, were originally
created for use in third world countries that presumably threatened
U.S. national security.57 Dunn notes that the Clinton administration
introduced the strategies domestically under the guise of securing
and regaining control of the border. Under the second Bush administration,
the strategy of low intensity conflict has only intensified. For instance, the
military has aided the border patrol in constructing a seven- mile wall
of corrugated steel between Tijuana and San Diego, the first of several
such walls that could be said to resemble the old Soviet Unions
metaphorical Iron Curtain or East Germanys Berlin Wall. In The
Border Patrol State, Silko has redefined Manifest Destiny so that it reflects
the notion of containment symbolized by the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall
rather than the idea of expansion or westward movement typically associated
with the phrase. According to Silkos new definition, Manifest Destiny may
lack its old grandeur of theft and blood, but lock the door is what it means
now, with racism a trump card to be played again and again by both political
parties.58 Thus, the walls of corrugated steel and bright lights
positioned along the border become security devices designed to
alleviate white fears of contamination by an alien population who

might bring a foreign culture , language, or belief system to the
United States. To be sure, many white Americans, especially those living
near the border, believe that an army of Mexican illegals and
criminals has already begun their conquest of America, and based
on this threat, private citizens have responded, increasing the panopticon
technique of subjection. The governments racial profiling of aliens
reinforces and strengthens Nativist sentiment and encourages private
citizens to perceive peoples south of the border as well as those who
resemble them as posing a threat to the United States. Exploiting this fear
are anti-immigration groups such as American Border Patrol, Ranch
Rescue, Voice of Citizens Together, and Civil Homeland Defense, groups that
the Anti- Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have
identified as hate groups. These groups have won support by
heightening concerns about crime, drug smuggling, violence, and a
Mexican takeover of the United States. They have also exploited the
intense emotions surrounding September 11 by asserting that their work is a
response to President Bushs call for all citizens to help fight terrorism. They
have purposely confused drug and immigration enforcement policy with
efforts to fight terrorism in their quest to combat the movement of people
across the border. Caught up in a wave of terror increased by the presence of
vigilante groups are indigenous groups who live along the border or who
regularly cross the border to participate in ceremonies or to visit family
members.59 Vigilante groups have revised legalistic interpretations of drug
and immigration laws, declaring that these laws sanction their efforts to
protect ranchers and homeowners property. In March 2003, Chris Simcox,
founder of Civil Homeland Defense, issued a proclamation to Arizonas
Governor Napolitano and Tucsons Border Patrol announcing his intent to
begin patrolling the border with armed citizens. In this public call to arms, he
declared, we have the legal right and moral obligation [to form a militia] as
per our Arizona State Constitution and Federal Constitution and our respect
for American citizens.60 Allegedly, his militia is meant to prevent drug
dealers and criminals from terrorizing ranchers and homeowners.61
According to Simcox, they have already assisted ranchers near the border to
secure their property from what he refers to as hordes of criminal
trespassers that have damaged or destroyed property.62 With the help of
the Internet, Simcox spreads his message on news venues such as Glenn
Spensers American Patrol Report or the USA Daily, where he presents
readers with chilling headlines such as Illegal Aliens Violently Attacking
American Citizens: Anarchy and Lawlessness Rule U.S.Mexican Border. In
this particular article, he describes what he perceives as an all out invasion
by illegals: Friday night the roads were bustling with Border Patrol vehicles
driving everywhere in an attempt to keep up with the hundreds that were
moving up the San Pedro river basin; the trend continued for three straight
days and nights. All weekend helicopters were buzzing in the air locating
group after group of illegal intruders. USA Dailys editor appended to
Simcoxs story information that appears even more ominous: There have
been increasing reports of Mexican military involvement in illegal alien and
drug smuggling as well as threats and bounties placed on the life [sic]
American citizens. Racial dynamics have already conditioned relations along

the border, and extremist groups such as Simcoxs only exacerbate tensions
by exploiting paranoia over illegal immigration in order to gain publicity and
increase support for their organizations. What is even more surprising is that
fringe groups are not alone in cautioning the United States about an
impending takeover by Mexico. This same sentiment is expressed in a
novel written by President Reagans former secretary of defense, Caspar
Weinberger.63 Weinbergers 1996 futuristic novel, The Next War, coauthored
with Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer, creates an exaggerated and
chilling account of border problems. In order to increase support for more
military spending, the authors build on the American populations fear of a
Mexican invasion by creating a hypothetical conflict between the United
States and Mexico along with North Korea, China, Iran, Russia, and Japan. In
the setting involving Mexico, that countrys economy dissolves and the
resulting unrest spills over into the United States in the form of mass
migrations. In order to check the flow of illegal immigration, which is linked
with Mexican drug cartels, corruption, and terrorist attacks against San Diego
and Houston, the United States invades Mexico. Weinberger does not explore
the outcome of his fictional invasion; his goal is to caution the government
about the United States military readiness and the viability of its defense
strategies. Like Silkos collection of essays, the publication of Weinbergers
novel falls on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States
Mexico war. Whether he intended for the dates to coincide is unclear, but it is
apparent that his fictional invasion of Mexico expresses the reality of
the border and the ongoing consequences of Manifest Destiny. In
other words, the United States created the border in violence and has
maintained and regulated it through violence. This new face of
Manifest Destiny encourages racism at the borders as media
representations of a brown invasion convince white Americans
that conquest must be resisted to avoid the unlawful
encroachment of aliens. The narrative of Manifest Destiny once
mandated the spread of democracy; now it appears that the United
States wants to contain the material benefits of democracy for real
Americans living within the United States geopolitical boundaries.
Opening borders is necessary to stop border violence and

increase civil liberties
Dalmia 2013 [Shikha, Senior analyst at Reason
Foundation, Nation of Immigrants, Reason.com, July
2013, http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/13/nation-ofimmigrants. NG]
Every country has its mythology. Americas is that we are a nation of

immigrants. The Statue of Liberty, the countrys most iconic monument,
stands tall in New York Harbor, welcoming your tired, your poor, your
huddled masses yearning to breathe free. If the United States had been true
to these ideals, its history would have been a simple tale of openness and
acceptance. The real story is far more complex. For the first half of its
existence, America had virtually open borders. That stopped in the late
19th century, when the first major restrictions were introduced to stem the
tide of incoming Asians. The country then slammed its doors shut
around 1925 after anti-immigration animus, which had always bubbled
beneath the surface, boiled over in the form of quotas based on national
origins, among other things. For the first time, federal bureaucrats inserted
themselves between willing American employers and willing foreign workers,
placing strict limits on both the total number of immigrants and the number
from each country. Ever since then, every time the country has
opened its door to one set of immigrants, it has rebuffed another.
The upshot is a mishmash of contradictory laws that cant keep up
with the desires of individuals or the needs of the American
economy. Since the 1960s, immigration laws in theory have favored family
reunification and labor-force augmentation. In practice, naturalized
Americans have to endure up to a two-decade wait before they can bring
even certain blood relatives into the country. High-tech employers cant meet
even half their need for foreign workers, who also have to wait decades to
gain permanent residency. Yet the tech sector has it easy compared to the
agricultural, hospitality, and construction industries. Their demand for foreign
laborers is even greater, but the work visas available are both fewer and less
usable. And contrary to popular belief, there is no line for poor or lowskilled foreign workers seeking to gain permanent residency. All of this has
helped create a massive unauthorized population whose fate is
polarizing the country. In short, virtually every aspect of the U.S.
immigration system is broken. It is out of sync with American ideals
and American needs. We have a choice between raising the barricades
further and ejecting people already here or moving toward a more
open system that allows more human and labor-market freedom. If
we go the first route, the price will be paid not just by poor
foreigners who are literally dying to make a better living but also by
the economy. Civil liberties will be degraded, along with our sense of
humanity. According to a recent study by the National Foundation for
American Policy, immigrant deaths at the border rose by 27 percent in
2012 to nearly 500a result of the crackdown on border towns that
has pushed Latin American risk takers ever further out to the
dangerous and inhospitable desert. As reason contributor Malia Politzer
has noted, between 1997 and 2007 the U.S.Mexico border was about 10
times deadlier to immigrants than the Berlin Wall was to East Berliners
in its entire 28-year existence. It is impossible to get a grip on the full
economic costs of restrictionism. How does one calculate, for example, the
businesses that never form because labor is too expensive? Still, the Texas
comptroller estimated in 2006 that although low-skilled unauthorized workers
cost the state treasury $504 million more than they paid in taxes in 2005,
without them the states economy would have shrunk by 2.1 percent, or
$17.7 billion. But the biggest toll restrictionism takes is on the civil liberties
of Americans. You cannot track every movement and activity of every
immigrant without imposing similar restrictions on natives who benefit from
these immigrants. Abandoning its commitment to welcoming
immigrants enshrined in the Statue of Liberty will cost Americans
dearly.
Increase in violence is tied to debate about immigration,

the plan ends the debate
The Leadership Conference 2009 ["The State of Hate:
Escalating Hate Violence Against Immigrants." The
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 2009.
<http://www.civilrights.org/publications/hatecrimes/escala
ting-violence.html>. NG]
The increase in violence against Hispanics correlates closely with the
increasingly heated debate over Comprehensive Immigration Reform
and an escalation in the level of anti-immigrant vitriol on radio, television,
and the Internet. While reasonable people can and will disagree about the
parameters of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, in some instances, the
commentary about immigration reform has not been reasonable; it
has been inflammatory. Warned an April 2009 assessment from the Office
of Intelligence and Analysis at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
(DHS), "in some cases, anti-Immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor
has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn
violent." This toxic environment, in which hateful rhetoric targets immigrants
while the number of hate crimes against Hispanics and others perceived to be
immigrants steadily increases, has caused a heightened sense of fear in
communities around the country. Some groups opposing immigration reform,
such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Center
for Immigration Studies (CIS), and NumbersUSA, have portrayed immigrants
as responsible for numerous societal ills, often using stereotypes and outright
bigotry. While these groups, and other similar organizations, have strived to
position themselves as legitimate, mainstream advocates against illegal
immigration in America, a closer look at the public record reveals that some
of these organizations have disturbing links to or relationships with
extremists in the anti-Immigration movement. These seemingly
"legitimate" advocates against illegal immigration are frequently
quoted in the mainstream media, have been called to testify before
Congress, and often hold meetings with lawmakers and other public
figures. This is one of the most disturbing developments of the past
few years: the legitimization and mainstreaming of virulently antiimmigrant rhetoric that veers dangerously close to and too often
crosses the line beyond civil discourse over contentious immigration
policy issues.
A2: Borders are Important

Borders are nothing more than lines influenced by public
perception and the corresponding idea that the
government is influenced by the public; they can be
changed and modified to match social perception
Immigration Laws)
At bottom, borders are what we as a country say they are; they mean
what we say they mean. Borders are not inherently significant, they are
significant because we attach meaning to them. We can change the
significance of borders without changing their location by changing
what they signify what comes along with them.18 The same is true for
many sorts of political boundaries within the United States, such as those
defining states, municipalities, and congressional districts, which are all
subject to change. Although the reliance on geography makes the task of
constructing borders between nations easier in certain respects, the
meaning attached to borders is socially defined and, consequently,
continuously in flux and under stress. The globalization of the world
economy, rapid technological change, and changing conceptions of nationstates have all contributed to a decline in the practical importance of physical
borders between nations. Information, culture, goods, and services regularly
flow across the borders between nations. Although globalization indeed
has its critics,20 many observers consider the decline in the
significance of borders to be a positive development .
A2: Mexico Says No

The economic, social, and political implications of the plan
draws in the Mexican governments interest
From 2001 to the present, the governments of Mexico and the United
States have had ongoing discussions about migration, a major issue of
interest to the two governments.126 For the Mexican government,
ending human rights abuses and ensuring the continued flows of
remittances from migrants in the United States to Mexico127 make
U.S. immigration law relevant to its own national interests. Neither
are served by border enforcement-only reforms. For well over a decade,
however, U.S. lawmakers have failed to enact little more than laws that
increase border enforcement. A much-needed reconceptualization of the
meaning and nature of the U.S.-Mexico border stands to benefit both
nations.128 An immigration scheme consistent with the economic,
political, and social needs of the two nations, as has been outlined
here, could be constructed. A more realistic legal regime would remedy the
problems that plague immigration enforcement today and avoid repetitions of
the mistakes of the past.
A2: Terrorism
Wont increase Terrorism- Multiple reasons
Open Borders 2012 ( no name, 3/1/12, Open Borders: The case,
Terrorism, http://openborders.info/terrorism/, 7/12/13, TZ)
here are several lines of counter-argument, some of which are provided
below: The problems of terrorism are greatly exaggerated: For
instance, John Mueller has argued (here, here, and in his book
Overblown) that terrorist threats are greatly exaggerated by
politicians, pundits, and the media for various reasons, and that
overreacting to such threats can be counter-productive and
endanger safety in other ways. Tourist visas are a lot easier to get
anyway: People interested in carrying out terrorist attacks have a
wide range of options available other than immigrating. In particular,
they can obtain tourist visas, which are generally a lot easier to get.
The US issues about 4 million B1/B2 (business/pleasure visit visas, which
allow visit durations of a few months) compared to about 100,000 H1B visas
every year. Moreover, since B1/B2 visas are often multiple entry visas, the
actual number of tourist visitors to the US in a given year is in the tens of
millions. David Friedman makes this point in the blog post Immigration and
Terrorism. The absence of legal migration channels is responsible for
large scale illegal immigration, which diverts law enforcement
resources to combating it: This includes large scale illegal
immigration along the southern US-Mexico border. By allowing more
legal migration flows, security agencies could focus on genuine
terrorist threats rather than trying to keep out peaceful workers.
Note that despite the large scale illegal immigration, there have
been almost no instances of terrorists smuggling themselves across
the southern border of the United States. All terrorist attacks in the US
carried out by foreigners have been carried out by legal immigrants, tourists,
or people on non-immigrant visas, including some who overstayed their visas.
For more, see terrorism and illegal immigration in the United States.
Nonetheless, an insecure border is responsible for other problems such as
drug trafficking, and reducing the pressure to immigrate illegally can reduce
the resources that need to be spent on border control. There are cheaper
and more sustainable methods to tackle the problem of terrorism:
This fits in with the general principle of keyhole solutions. The
methods may include (depending on your diagnosis of the problems of
terrorism): Better intelligence networks that could detect and foil
terrorist plots more effectively. As pointed out above, security agencies
could focus more on genuine terrorist threats if greater legal migration
channels reduced the security threats associated with illegal immigration.
Intellectuals and thought leaders could counter radical ideologies in the realm
of ideas and seek to win hearts and minds against such ideologies.
Interestingly, the free movement of people between countries could lead to
more effective spreading of these counter-ideologies to people in the
countries that are large-scale sources of terrorists. Those who believe that
terrorism is influenced by the poor political and economic systems in certain
countries could seek ways to improve those political and economic systems.
Interestingly, freer movement of people can help in these regards, through its
direct effect on world GDP and ending poverty, and its indirect effects on
immigrant-sending countries. Those who think that such problems are
exacerbated by aggressive foreign policy could seek changes to such policy.
The upshot is that whatever your diagnosis of the causes of
terrorism, there are probably ways of tackling these causes that
more directly address the global problem than immigration
restrictions. If all else fails, there may be a case for maintaining current
immigration restrictions on people from ethnic/religious backgrounds that are
highly correlated with terrorism: For instance, for those who believe that
Islamic immigration to the United States poses a unique threat, this may be a
reason to maintain present restrictions on immigration from Islamic countries
and self-identified Muslims from other countries. But its not a reason to
restrict immigration of individuals from other countries. True, any
immigrant from any country could succumb to the lure of radical
Islam, but so could native born Americans, like John Walker Lindh
and Adam Gadahn.
The act of targeting terror will only perpetuate the

otherization of immigrants It supplies U.S. policy with
the headlines it needs to terrorize and subjugate the
helpless
The history of immigration law in the United States is driven by
shifting rationales for alienage: The 1996 laws, which have greatly
expanded illegality and local enforcement of immigration law, were
passed in the immediate wake of the Oklahoma City bombing prior to
the arrest of Timothy McVeigh. That the fourfold expansion of deportation
was set in motion by a Congress seized by the false assumption that
Arab nationals had committed the then-largest terrorist act on U.S. soil
is a testament to the historical arbitrariness of the legislative production of
illegality. This sovereign power over the noncitizen is enshrined in the
Plenary Power doctrine. First invoked in 1882 to secure the passage
of the Chinese Exclusion Act from racial violence into law, places
Congress as sovereign over the alien homo sacer. Following 9/11, this
power abrogated the right to equal protection by assuring that nationals
from predominantly Muslim countries could be targeted by Special
Registration and the Absconder Apprehension Initiative. Such policies will
likely remain impervious to legal challenge until and unless the Plenary
Power Doctrine is revised (Mehta 2003). So long as violations of immigration
law are eventually found, non-citizens can be essentially detained at
will. In the first two years after the attacks of 9/11, as thousands of
noncitizens linked to terrorism were detained under Attorney
General John Ashcroft, the imperative of counter-terrorism was used
with naked opportunism as a means to legitimize secrecy and opacity to
democratic scrutiny. But the logic of exception was soon to be made

permanent.
Potential National Security threats can be regulated

through narrow investigation and remains constant with
human rights priorities
Publication)
Even with the deregulation of immigration, the concept of selfdefense and the need to protect the public order could justify
certain types of narrow restrictions on migration that are consistent
with liberal theory. The use of criminal background checks and
evidence of past criminal activity such as reports from reliable
intelligence agencies could allow the U.S. government to attempt to
ensure that the nation did not admit migrants who endanger the public
safety. Databases that provide reliable intelligence about noncitizens who
represent colorable threats to the national security could assist in
helping to screen for public-safety risks. Focused background checks
looking for true dangers to national security and public safety could
improve the accuracy of security checks and could ensure that
safety and security were the true focus of screening of persons
seeking to enter the United States. The safety-related focus of individual
inquiries, however, would be much narrower than is the case under current
law. The law should presume that all immigrants are admissible to
the United States unless a strong justification for exclusion based
on a narrowly tailored set of criteria designed to protect national
security and public safety is established. Narrow exclusions would
prevent overbroad enforcement, which is arguably one of the deepest
flaws in the modern U.S. immigration laws. Exclusions based on
safety risks posed by individual immigrants, rather than blanket exclusions
based on group membership and alleged group propensities, make the
most policy sense and are the most consistent with liberal theory
and the nations commitment to individual rights
Opening the borders will allow the US to focus more of its

efforts on the war on terror and shift away from policing
the impossibility that is the border
However, open borders are fully consistent with efforts to prevent
terrorism. More liberal migration would allow the government to
devote its undivided attention to the true dangers to national security
and public safety. Rather than trying to keep most noncitizens out of
the country, the government could focus on terrorists, dangerous
criminals, drugs, and other contraband in enforcing the borders. Valuable
resources would no longer be wasted on fruitless efforts to shut the border,

and these funds could go instead to identifying and eliminating these threats.
Enforcement efforts could move beyond the morass of exclusion grounds,
caps, ceilings, and many other complexities that have made enforcement of
the Immigration and Nationality Act unwieldy, inefficient, and unfair.
Historically, U.S. immigration law has been overbroad in attacking
the perceived evil of the day, whether it be terrorists, racial minorities,
the poor, political dissidents, gays and lesbians, or the disabled. An effective
war on terror should attempt to exclude from admission true
dangers to national security and public safety, rather than simply
trying to seal the borders, which has proven to be virtually
impossible. As seen in other areas of law enforcement, more calculated
immigration law enforcement has a greater likelihood of rooting out unlawful
conduct than scattershot efforts that infringe on the civil rights of many
people.
A2: Econ
Link turn influx of immigrants fuels economic growth solves right-wing extremists who act based on economic
downturn
Freely, The Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 114-116, MM]
Commentators generally assume that future immigration from Mexico

must be of the same kind as the current immigration. This
assumption ignores the possibility that illegality itself influences the
self-selection of immigrants to the United States. Accordingly, the
mention of an open border, de facto or de jure, evokes the specter of evergrowing numbers of very poor, semiliterate, non-English-speaking immigrants
almost exclusively of rural origin. This scenario is naturally objectionable on
both economic and cultural grounds. First, such a population tends
everywhere to consume a disproportionate share of social services. Second,
the poor and uneducated who may be illiterate even in their mother tongue
may be more difficult to assimilate than middle-class immigrants. Both
objections need be taken seriously, but the assumption of unchanged
quality of immigration does not stand up well to examination.
Illegality itself must dissuade potential middle-class immigrants
disproportionately. Middle-class people are much the same
everywhere. They tend to lack the skills, the stamina, and the
inclination to trudge through the desert to elude the Border Patrol at
real risk to their lives. If moving to the United States becomes legal for
Mexicans, the character of Mexican immigration ought to change
immediately toward more skilled and better-educated people. More
Skilled Immigrants: Unemployment in Mexico is typically low, rather
lower than it is in the United States (and, incidentally, lower than it
was in the poor countries that joined the European Community and the
European Union ). By and large, Mexicans move to the United States less
for jobs than for better jobs. Their labor resources are better employed in the
advanced U.S. economy than in the underdeveloped, institutionally crippled
Mexican economy. Accordingly, their labor is better rewarded here than there
because it is more productive here. This general idea should hold as well for
skilled and well-educated potential immigrants as it does for the unskilled
and the poorly educated. Removing legal obstacles to immigration
should encourage better-educated and more-skilled immigrants to
enter the United States. Such higher-quality immigrants would earn more
than do current Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal. Because
workers wages signal their economic contribution to the overall
economy, this improved quality of Mexican immigration should
improve U.S. prosperity in general, at least in the long run. The short-
term effects of an increase in immigration on U.S. unemployment remain an

obstacle to opening the southern border. A Possible Influx of
Entrepreneurs and Capital Opening the southern border would also
increase the number of entrepreneurs migrating here. In Mexico, the
distorted market conditions, overregulation, corrupt government
practices, and the existence of large politically supported monopolies
restrict the scope of entrepreneurial activity. Mexican entrepreneurs
and potential entrepreneurs, who are usually avid students of American
life, tend to be aware of the contrast between their own situation and that
prevailing in the United States. The history of immigration to the United
States suggests that culturally different groups of immigrants tend to
contribute different kinds of enterprises. Thus, political correctness
notwithstanding, it is not foolhardy to suppose that the influx of
Italian immigrants before World War I improved considerably the
restaurant scene across the United States . Likewise, current Indian
immigrants , coming originally as well-educated hired hands, have
contributed greatly to the abundance of hi-tech engineering startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. As strange as it may appear at first
glance, some in this new breed of immigrants would also bring fresh
capital. One of the constants of underdevelopment is not so much a
lack of capital as the underemployment of the existing capital. The
complex reasons behind this state of affairs are beyond this article (Dekle
2004), yet it should be obvious that as soon as bureaucratic and economically
flash-frozen India began modestly to liberalize its economy, Indian capital
appeared seemingly out of nowhere, as if by magic. (The source of this magic
may be as simple as young middle-class Indian women deciding to carry a
little less gold hanging from their ears in order to invest in the stock market.)
Although Mexico is now liberalizing its economy and might endeavor
to do so more swiftly if it had an open border to its north, such an
opening would initially probably coincide with an influx of capital into
the United States. Such capital would be carried by hitherto
frustrated Mexican entrepreneurs ready and willing to make their own
specific contributions to the U.S. economy as generations of
immigrants from other countries did in earlier times.
Illegal Immigrants contribute to Social Security, and are

vital to the economy
Romn 08 (Ediberto, Professor of Law, Florida International University,
9/20/2008, THE ALIEN INVASION? Houston Law Review 45:3, pg. 858
Moore also concluded that overall, immigrants are huge net
contributors to the Social Security and Medicare programs, and
immigrant entrepreneurs are a major source of new jobs and vitality
in the American economy.i122 Moore ended his testimony with the
following observation: It is in Americas economic self-interest and in
the interests of immigrants themselves that we keep the golden gates
open to newcomers from every region of the world. The net gains to U.S.
workers and retirees are in the trillions of dollars. Given the coming
retirement of some 75 million baby boomers, we need the young and
energetic immigrants now more than ever before . . . .123 In fact,
economic analysts as well as domestic business community mainstays
have long advocated for less restrictive immigration polices.124 As a
leading immigration scholar recently observed, iThe U.S. immigration laws
must be fundamentally revised to make them and their enforcement more
consistent with the economic needs of the nation.i125 One writer recently
noted: In defiance of economic logic, U.S. lawmakers formulate
immigration policies to regulate the entry of foreign workers into the
country that are largely unrelated to the economic policies they formulate to
regulate international commerce. .... . . . Perpetuating the status quo by
pouring ever larger amounts of money into the enforcement of immigration
policies that are in conflict with economic reality will do nothing to address
the underlying problem.126 Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, repeatedly
complains about strict immigration policiesi impact on the ability for
businesses to hire skilled workers.127 In terms of other sectors of the
economy, an American Farm Bureau Federation study notes that iif
agricultures access to migrant labor were cut off, as much as $5n 9 billion in
annual production of . . . commodities . . . would be lost in the short term.
Over the longer term, this annual loss would increase to $6.5n12 billion as
the shock worked its way through the sector.i128 Preeminent economist
John Kenneth Galbraith effectively responded to those who have
advocated for closed borders and mass deportation of our undocumented
workers: Were all the illegals in the United States suddenly to return
home, the effect on the American economy would . . . be little less
than disastrous. A large amount of useful, if often tedious, work...would
go unperformed. Fruits and vegetables in Florida, Texas, and California
would go unharvested. Food prices would rise spectacularly. Mexicans
wish to come to the United States; they are wanted; they add visibly to
our well-being. . . . Without them, the American economy would
suffer . . . .129
Immigrants are net positive in terms of government

spending and taxes
Romn 08 (Ediberto, Professor of Law, Florida International University,
9/20/2008, THE ALIEN INVASION? Houston Law Review 45:3, pg. 858
In terms of the second major basis for the recent attacks on
immigrationothe alleged deleterious effects on the U.S. economythe
NRC Report similarly refutes the modern xenophobes assertions. In
fact, the report notes several of immigrations significant positive
impacts on the federal fiscal picture. For instance, the NRC Report
states: [A] net positive fiscal impact with immigrants and their
concurrent descendents paying nearly $51 billion [in 1994n 1995 dollars]
more in taxes than they generate in costs. . . . Particularly important
were transfers from immigrants and their descendants of about $28 billion to
the rest of the nation through the Social Security system (OASDHI), reflecting
the young age distribution of this group.109 The NRC Report observes that
i[i]n per capita terms, immigrants . . . contributed about $700 more in
payroll taxes than they received in OASDHI benefits each year,

whereas the balance of the population just broke even.i110 iFor the
remainder of the federal budget, immigrants . . . [were found to pay] $500 or
$600 more in taxes than they cost in benefits, and in total they had a positive
federal fiscal impact of about $1,260 [per person], exceeding their net cost at
the state and local levels.i111 With respect to overall economic impact, the
NRC Report concludes: Our calculations indicate that definition of the study
population is critical to the outcome. If limited to immigrants themselves, the
overall fiscal impact is $1,400 (taxes paid less costs generated) per
immigrant. If limited to immigrants plus their U.S.-born children under the
age of 20, corresponding to the immigrant household formulation, the
average fiscal impact is about $600 per immigrant (or $400 per immigrant
and young child). If extended to all descendants of living immigrants, the
average fiscal impact is $1,000 expressed per immigrant, or $600 expressed
per immigrant and descendants. Therefore, the most widely used method
based on the immigrant household is the only one that returns a negative
value.112 Therefore, not unlike the conclusions reached with respect
to assertions of mass invasions that can literally change the makeup
of this country,113 the NRC Report similarly discredits the
allegations concerning the tales of woe regarding immigrations
negative fiscal and economic impact on the national economy.114
The need for working immigrants outweighs any desire to

enforce borders
Publication)
Free migration among the NAFTA nations would be in keeping with certain
existing political, economic, and social realities. Labor integration between
the United States and Mexico is occurring. It has been fueled from the
bottom up. Market forces have driven U.S. employers and Mexican workers in
this direction for years. Governments and laws, however, have been left by
the wayside. Law has been a minor hindrance to immigrants and
employers but has not been an effective deterrent to unlawful
conduct. Efforts to bar the employment of undocumented workers have
been largely ineffective. Employer sanctions have not been vigorously
enforced and in recent years have been enforced The Economic Benefits of
Liberal Migration of Labor Across Borders | 165 with even less enthusiasm
than before. Certain industries in the United States, such as
agriculture and construction and many service industries, rely on the type
of low-wage labor provided by immigrants. Unlike other industries,
which have increasingly moved operations overseas to exploit lowwage labor, jobs in these industries cannot be exported. Lowwage
immigrant labor, therefore, remains essential to the U.S. economy.
Immigrants are a key role in sustaining Americas

economy and demand is rising
Publication)
Today, undocumented Mexican workers are critical to the economic
viability of many businesses. Agriculture, hotels and restaurants,
construction, and the domestic-service industry depend on these
workers. Growers have relied upon generations of migrant labor to pick the
nations crops and keep produce prices down. Hotels and restaurants rely
on immigrant labor to provide a ready and available labor force and to
ensure profitability. With the number of two-wage-earner families
having increased greatly in the past few decades, U.S. middle-class
families demand domestic-service workers in abundance. That demand
continues to increase because of the increasing participation of
U.S. women citizens in the labor force.
Opening the borders would fuel US economy and create

more orderly migration
Publication)
More liberal immigration admissions would help ameliorate the rampant

discrimination that the immigration laws aid and abet. The consequences of
such a system need not generate fear. Open borders might ultimately
have consequences similar to those brought by the increased migration of
African Americans from the rural South to the urban North in the twentieth
century. In the era of Jim Crow, interstate migration helped fuel
economic growth and provided economic and other opportunities
to subordinated African Americans. Similarly, freer movement of workers
from the developing world would create economic opportunities
and ensure orderly migration and the maintenance of a more fair
and just set of immigration laws.
Open borders would appeal to growing globalization

Publication)
The arguments for facilitating the migration of highly skilled immigrant

workers to the United States have become increasingly powerful in
light of the globalization of the international economy. In the midst of
globalizing markets in capital and goods, adherents of closed borders must
justify the exclusion of labor from a system of increasingly permeable
borders. Economic arguments generally favor easy migration between
nations and the ready mobility of labor to its most productive use.
The labor market benefits of immigrant workers to the United

States are undeniable.
Key industries to the economy rely heavily on employing

immigrants
Publication)
Large employers in certain industries often rely heavily on
undocumented immigrants. Recently, several high-profile companies
have had their hiring practices exposed. The poultry giant Tyson Foods
faced a criminal indictment, and was later acquitted, for participating in a
scheme to traffic immigrant workers. Its employment of undocumented
workers, however, could not seriously be disputed.11 Wal-Mart repeatedly
makes the news for its employment of undocumented immigrants.12
Entire industries, such as agriculture, meat and poultry processing,
construction, and the hotel and restaurant sector, have come to
rely heavily on undocumented labor to remain competitive. This
dependence on undocumented labor has led to vigorous resistance to
federal enforcement efforts. For example, when the federal government
began an operation to enforce the laws barring the employment of
undocumented immigrants in meat-packing plants in Nebraska in 1999,
state and local politicians protested because of the impacts on the state
economy.13 An American Farm Bureau Federation study concluded that, if
agricultures access to migrant labor were cut off, as much as $59
billion in annual production of . . . commodities . . . would be lost in the
short term. Over the longer term, this annual loss would increase to
$6.512 billion as the shock worked its way through the sector.14
Without undocumented workers, businesses in some industries would
be forced to close. Such a collapse would drag down the U.S. economy. As
the preeminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith stated, Were all the
illegals in the United States suddenly to return home, the effect on
the United States economy would . . . be little less than disastrous . . . .
A large amount of useful, if often tedious, work . . . would go unperformed.
Fruits and vegetables in Florida, Texas, and California would go unharvested.
Food prices would rise spectacularly. Mexicans wish to come to the
United States; they are wanted; they add visibly to our wellbeing. . . . Without them, the American economy would suffer. 15
Win win for immigrant and economy relationships

Publication)
Of course, employers are not the only economic actors to benefit from
immigrants. Upon migrating to the United States, immigrants often see
tangible economic benefits in the form of increased wages. Indeed,
economic opportunity is unquestionably one of the primary motivators

behind many migrants difficult decision to leave their homeland and come
to this country. Not surprisingly, the immigrants most likely to migrate to
the United States come from the developing world, where wages and
economic opportunities are much less than those in this country. Many,
perhaps most, immigrants come to this country for jobs that pay more than
those in their homeland. Earnings that are low by U.S. standards
represent real improvements over what many migrants would be
able to earn at home. Working conditions, while substandard by
American lights, may well be worth the wage gains to the migrant
worker from the developing world. Indeed, they may be comparable to,
or perhaps better than, those available in the migrants homeland. But, there
are other economic gains from undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants living in this country are not just workers.
They also are consumers who purchase goods and services. As the
undocumented immigrant population has grown in this country, so
has its purchasing power, and thus its importance to economic
activity at the national, state, and local levels. Not surprisingly,
businesses, seeing the future, have responded aggressively to this
new, and growing, market.
Undocumented Immigrants contribute billions in taxes for

nothing in return
Publication)
Despite not having a Social Security number, undocumented
immigrants can and do pay federal taxes by securing a Taxpayer
Identification Number. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented
immigrants work under assumed names and false Social Security
numbers. Undocumented immigrants thus help keep the financially
strapped Social Security system afloat to the tune of billions of
dollars. They contribute to the system without ever collecting
benefits .71 Thus, while many antiimmigrant activists howl at the
unfairness of allowing immigrants, particularly the undocumented, to
utilize public resources in the form of benefits, in actuality the current
system, which denies immigrants access to many benefits, is patently
unfair to noncitizens. The fact that undocumented immigrants pay taxes
and contribute to the Social Security system militates in favor of granting
them access to certain benefits. The fact that they are ineligible for most
social benefit programs means that, under the current system, it is the
government, and not the undocumented worker, which gains
handsomely.
Majority of undocumented immigrants pay taxes with no

benefits in return
Publication)
The public is generally unaware that many undocumented immigrants
pay federal, state, and local taxes, a fact militating in favor of their
receiving certain public benefits. [E]ach year undocumented immigrants
The Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor Across Borders | 151
add billions of dollars in sales, excise, property, income and payroll
taxes, including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment taxes,
to federal, state and local coffers. Hundreds of thousands of
undocumented immigrants go out of their way to file annual federal and
state income tax returns.70 Undocumented immigrants are often
counseled to pay taxes in order to improve their chances of
regularizing their immigration status at a later date. Somewhere in the
neighborhood of onehalf of all undocumented immigrants pay federal taxes.
Nonetheless, ineligible for major public benefit programs, undocumented
immigrants see few direct benefits from their tax payments.
A2: Wages
Wage impacts are small and benefits outweigh
Publication)
Any wage impacts due to immigration, according to economic
studies, are relatively small .53 Moreover, immigrants may contribute
to overall gains to the economy, which ultimately translates into an
overall increase in average wages for all workers .54 The labor added
by migrants may add to the overall economic growth of the nation. As the
economy grows, benefits are realized by the entire nation. In the
end, the benefits provided by immigrant workers appear to outweigh
the costs associated with downward pressures on wages.
Opening borders enhances the living standards for

everyone
Lehman 1995 [Thomas, Adjunct Professor of Economics
and Western Civilization, "Coming to America: The
Benefits of Open Immigration." Foundation for Economic
Education. 1 Dec. 1995.
<http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/coming-toamerica-the-benefits-of-open-immigration>. NG]
Many Americans argue that free immigration would destroy working class
Americans ability to earn a living. They claim that allowing free and open
borders to any and all immigrants would put decent, hard-working Americans
out of work. Perhaps what these Americans really fear, however, is that
someone will emerge from the immigrant class who would be willing to
work for less than they while producing equal or greater output. The present
immigration policy of the United States amounts to nothing less than a tariff
or barrier to entry on the commodity of labor, and harms American
consumers in the same manner as tariffs and trade barriers on other capital
or consumer goods. A policy of open immigration would indeed force
unskilled American laborers to compete for their jobs at lower wages.
However, far from being an evil, this is a desirable outcome, one which
should form the basis for a new immigration policy. By inviting competition
into the American labor markets, artificially inflated labor costs
could be eliminated and a greater level of labor efficiency could be
achieved. As the cost of labor (itself a cost of production) decreased,
entrepreneurs and producers could produce more efficiently,
enabling them to offer products and services at lower prices as they
compete for consumers dollars. Lower prices in turn increase the
purchasing power of the American consumer, and thus enhance
living standards for everyone. This is happening even now as some small
business owners use illegal immigrant labor to lower their operating costs
and thus lower consumer prices: . . . small-business executives do agree

that some of their competitors who knowingly or unknowingly hire illegal
immigrants use the cheap labor to undercut prices of business owners who
play by the rules.[1] This is good for both consumers and the economy at
large. As immigration makes the American labor market more
competitive, costs of production are reduced and prices decline. In
the long run, even the domestic laborer who is forced to lower his
wage demands is not any worse off, since what he loses in terms of
lower nominal wages he may well regain in terms of lower prices on
the goods and services he purchases as a consumer. Meanwhile,
everyone else benefits, and no one is privileged at the coerced
expense of anyone else.
A2: Welfare is Costly

Immigrants dont and cant leach off welfare and other
public benefits
Publication)
Furthermore, few immigrants aim to consume public benefits. Many

immigrants would never even consider attempting to access any
public benefits program. They fear that receipt of any benefit could
result in their deportation from the country. Provisions in the immigration
laws give credence to this fear. The word is out in immigrant communities
about the risk associated with receipt of public benefits. In evaluating
immigrant benefit consumption, it is important to note that immigrants are
not even eligible for the most costly federal public benefits
programs. In 1996, Congress enacted welfare reform that made both lawful
and undocumented immigrants ineligible for Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families and Food Stamps, two major federal public welfare programs.69
Previously, lawful immigrants had been eligible for such benefits. Although
many have criticized welfare reform, it nonetheless remains clear
that immigrants who are ineligible for such benefits cannot
bankrupt the public benefits system. Importantly, undocumented
immigrants have never been eligible for the majorand most costly
public benefits programs.
Immigrants have little effect on welfare

Lehman 1995 [Thomas, Adjunct Professor of Economics
and Western Civilization, "Coming to America: The
Benefits of Open Immigration." Foundation for Economic
Education. 1 Dec. 1995.
<http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/coming-toamerica-the-benefits-of-open-immigration>. NG]
Another argument used in favor of immigration controls concerns the
American welfare system and its potential abuse by immigrants who migrate
into America merely to feed at the public trough of social services. The claim
is made that the welfare system, not potential economic freedom, is the lure
which draws immigrants into the American economy. Immigrants
unproductive, slothful, and indigentconstitute a dead-weight loss on the
American economy, and further increase the tax burden on productive
Americans. Therefore, we must police our borders and keep out the
undesirables. This argument is statistically and theoretically flawed. Contrary
to prevailing public opinion, current immigrants do not abuse the
public welfare system, even in the areas where immigration (legal or
illegal) is most concentrated. In fact, immigrants have little effect on
the current system of taxation and wealth redistribution. As Julian
Simon relates: Study after study shows that small proportions of
illegals use government services: free medical, 5 percent; unemployment

insurance 4; food stamps, 1; welfare payments, 1; child schooling, 4. Illegals
are afraid of being caught if they apply for welfare. Practically none receive
social security, the costliest service of all, but 77 percent pay social security
taxes, and 73 percent have federal taxes withheld. . . . During the first five
years in the United States, the average immigrant family receives $1404 (in
1975 dollars) in welfare compared to $2279 received by a native family.[3]
Some may disagree with these statistics. Others would no doubt argue that if
immigration controls were eliminated and borders completely unpoliced, a
massive number of immigrants would enter the United States and overload
the welfare system, causing taxes and the national debt to skyrocket.
Certainly this is a possibility. But, even if we grant this argument the
benefit of the doubt and concede that unrestricted immigrants
would indeed flood the welfare system, the answer to the problem
lies not in closing off the borders or beefing up border security.
The answer lies in eliminating the American welfare state, and prohibiting
anyone, native or immigrant, from living at the coerced expense of
another.
A2: Undocumented Immigration Bad

Undocumented immigration is inevitable, attempts to
police it are futile

We as a nation must recognize that, under current U.S. immigration law,
undocumented immigration is a fact of modern social life. Many
otherwise law-abiding citizens who hold positions of prestige and
authority employ undocumented immigrants in their homes. They often
have undocumented immigrants care for their children, clean the house, and
work in their yards. In 2004, former New York City police commissioner
Bernard Kerik withdrew as President Bushs nominee to be the first
Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the federal agency
now primarily entrusted with enforcing the immigration laws, because he
had failed to pay taxes for a domestic-service worker who may have
been undocumented. Kerik is not the first nominee to a highlevel
cabinet position to suffer that fate. Conservative pundit Linda Chavez
withdrew as President Bushs first nominee for Secretary of Labor because
she had previously employed an undocumented immigrant. Nor is this simply
a problem for Republican Presidents. Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird, President
Bill Clintons first two nominees for the position of Attorney General,
the highest law enforcement office in the United States, experienced
the same fate. The presence of undocumented immigrants in the United
States is a plain reality that needs to be addressed. Open borders would
provide a pragmatic, long-term solution to this nations
undocumented-immigrant and related immigration problems. Freeing
up migration through a liberal admissions policy would recognize that the
enforcement of closed borders cannot stifle the strong, perhaps irresistible,
economic, social, and political pressures that fuel todays international
migration. Border controls, as currently configured in the United States,
simply waste billions of dollars and result in thousands of deaths.
They have not ended, and cannot end, unlawful immigration.
A2: Devalues Citizenship

The argument that citizenship would be devalued is a
misconception and promotes supremacy over other
individuals
Publication)
Some might argue that an open-borders regime would devalue
citizenship in the United States.108 The use of the term
devaluation in this context is misleading. All of a nations residents
should be treated fairly. The rights and privileges of citizens need
not be diminished to increase the rights of immigrants. Any effort to
maintain legal distinction to avoid devaluation of citizenship
would require continued disparities in rights and maintenance of
the status quo. Adopting a similar logic, whites could have argued that
desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s devalued their whiteness.
A2: Causes Overpopulation

No flood of immigrants takes out their perception links
Freely, The Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 109-110, MM]
The image of a massive , continuing, one-way exodus of Mexicans
flooding the United States in all circumstances is probably unrealistic
because it is a simple projection of what is going on under current
conditions of legally restricted immigration . In all likelihood, legalizing
immigration from Mexico would alter the movement of persons in
more complex ways. Discussions of open or more-open borders nearly
always assume a one-way migration of one kind of population. They
presume that, given a chance, some unknown but probably large fraction
of the poorer segments Mexicos population would move permanently to
the United States. They also implicitly assume no movement of
population from the United States into Mexico. Both assumptions are
probably wrong on several grounds. First, on the whole, Mexicans do not
want to live in the United States. Although real, dont-look-back
immigrants (such as ourselves) exist, people who leave their countries
usually do so in search of a better standard of living. Most simply
want to earn more money. In many cases, they wish they could have
their cake and eat it too: obtaining superior earnings in a foreign
country, but spending them at home , where relatives live,
grandmothers can be drafted as baby-sitters, and the customs and
especially the language are well understood. For Mexicans, home also
happens to be where their money goes further. Finally, without a doubt,
some Mexican immigrants would rather raise their children in Mexico
for moral and personal reasons. A rich American literature of personal
experience suggests that immigrants usually find their adaptation to a
new land excruciatingly painful as well as extremely difficult (McCourt
1996). The United States, far from the heaven that the native born often
imagine it to be, is for many immigrants a kind of purgatory they hope
will eventually lead to salvation in their home country. Furthermore,
numerous immigrants of all origins spend their adult lifetime in a state of
minimally functional adaptation. A surprisingly high number master only a
pidgin form of the local language. They can say a quart of antifreeze but
not Believe me, if I had known my daughter would turn out this way, I would
have brought her up differently. In consequence, individuals who are well
educated and sometimes appreciably cultured in their country of origin
operate during their entire adult lifetime at the self-expressive level of a sixyear-old. Or they take refuge in the exiguous, mindnumbing, limiting social
space of their own ghettos, which are always psychologically much
impoverished versions of their home societies. The considerable efforts that
Mexican immigrants own philanthropic organizations exert to make their

hometowns more livable attest indirectly to the emotional undesirability of
emigration (Hendricks 2008). Such endeavors are not specific to Mexican
emigrants. The French daily Le Figaro tells a similar story about illegal
Egyptian immigrants to France (Salaun 2008).
The fear of overpopulation is hyped

Publication)
Moreover, despite persistent claims that the nation has reached its
carrying capacity, it is far from self-evident that the United States is
overpopulated or that the country is even approaching its population
limit. Although it is true that certain urban areas of the country have
relatively high population densities, that density fails to approximate that
found in certain cities and regions of the world. Moreover, many regions of
the United States are not densely populated at all . In fact, some
states, such as Iowa, have actively sought to attract immigrant
workers in recent years. Today, many immigrants settle in the South and
Midwest, where there is room to build and expand, a need for labor, and
relatively inexpensive housing. Continued migration into less populous
regions of the United States minimizes the risk of overpopulation in the
major cities. Even California, most closely associated with the
metropolises of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, has
thinly populated areas. In addition to its Mexican colonias, the Central
Valley has seen the emergence of many diverse communities over the past
twenty years. Today, Sikh Indians, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese, Russians,
and many other groups make up a significant portion of the areas
population. Besides The Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor
Across Borders | 159 adding much richness to the region, immigrants
have contributed to a booming, robust economy that today includes
manufacturing, technology, and other industries in addition to its worldrenowned agricultural sector of state and local economies.
There will be no overload, thousands of immigrants

deport annually by will
Publication)
Many of the immigrants removed are long-term residents of the
United States. Some of the deportations are based on convictions for
relatively minor crimes, such as, in certain circumstances, driving under
the influence. To make matters worse, the statistics fail to account for
the hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens who depart
voluntarily each year. Many, many more immigrants avoid a formal
hearing and deportation order by agreeing to depart than are formally
removed from the country. If voluntary removals did not occur at these
rates, the immigration system in the United States would become

overburdened and soon shut down. Thus, removal statistics
represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mexican citizens
adversely affected by the U.S. immigration laws.
A2: Ecosystem Impact

Recent compromise was reached to build a fence
spanning from The Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, acting
now is key to prevent environmental hazards
The Gazette 6/20 2013 Harkin opposes compromise calling for more
border fences
http://thegazette.com/2013/06/20/harkin-opposes-compromise-calling-formore-border-fences/
Its not just the cost of maintaining a fence along the U.S.-Mexican
border that keeps Sen. Tom Harkin from supporting a compromise
that has improved prospects for immigration reform. This idea of
building a fence from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean is just a
bad idea, Harkin told reporters after key senators announced a
compromise had been reached that called for building 700 miles of
fence and doubling the number of federal agents patrolling the U.S.Mexico border. Quite frankly, this idea that somehow were going to
build a fence all along our border with Mexico doesnt make sense,
he said. It doesnt look good for us as Americans. Harkin voted to table an
amendment by Sen. John Cornyn to increase the number of Border Patrol
agents by 5,000 Thursday. The new deal worked out by Republican Sens. Bob
Corker of Tennessee, and John Hoeven of North Dakota, would require the
construction of 700 miles of border fencing and provide money for aerial
drones, according to reports. It is believed the deal would increase support
among Republicans for immigration reform. The Iowa Democrat supports
building fences where they make sense. However, he said, fencing is
costly to build, damages the environment, disrupts animal
migrations routes and requires continuous upkeep . Among the
alternatives are drones, which, he said, are relatively cheap to operate and
can cover long distances, as well as other technology. He also called for
negotiating agreements with the Mexican government to do some patrolling.
We need to hold them responsible for the protection of the border, Harkin
said. They should have responsibilities in that area. In addition to
building 700 miles of fence, the compromise would double the
number of Border Patrol agents to more than 40,000, adding about
$40 billion in cost to the immigration reform.
Continued border fencing along Mexico results in

fragmented ecosystems
FLESCH and CLINTON 2010 (W. EPPS/ D. AARON, School of Natural

Resources, University of Arizona, 325 Biological Sciences East, Department of
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Potential Effects of the
United States-Mexico Border Fence on Wildlife Conservation Biology
Volume 24, No. 1) Blackwell Publishing Limited 2010
Animal movements are an important determinant of distribution,

abundance, extinction, and colonization dynamics, and gene flow
(Colbert et al. 2001; Hanski & Gaggiotti 2004). In highly fragmented
environments, animal movements among resource patches may be
of greater consequence to population persistence than the
demographic potential of the patches themselves (Lande 1987).
Landscape connectivity is the degree to which an environment facilitates
movement among resource patches (Taylor et al. 1993) and is a function of
landscape structure and organisms ability to perceive and respond
to it (Tishendorf & Fahrig 2000). Because species distributions shift due to
climate change (Parmesan 2006), landscape connectivity may be essential
for persistence (Malcolm et al. 2006), especially near range margins where
the size, quality, and proximity of resource patches often decline (Holt et al.
2005). Although human activity has degraded connectivity in many
landscapes, forecasting effects on populations is complex because movement
is difficult to study. Along international boundaries, increasing
concerns over national security complicate conserving landscape
connectivity. Transboundary development, including fences,
roadways, lighting, vegetation clearing, and increased human activity,
threatens to alter connectivity at large scales in over 20 nations. In Asia,
for example, a security fence recently built along the disputed IndiaPakistan
border may have already affected wildlife movements (Pahalwan 2006). In
North America a 1125-km security fence along more than one-third
of the U.S.Mexico border (U.S. Public Law 109367) is under
construction. Although fence structures vary, most segments are4 m
tall, have vertical gaps 510 cm wide, and are associated with vegetation
clearings and roads 25 m wide. Other sections consist of vehicle
barriers often coupled with barbed-wire fences (Fig. 1). Mitigating the
effects of these structures on wildlife requires information on movement
behavior and landscape structures that foster connectivity. The
international boundary between the states of Arizona in the United
States and Sonora in Mexico traverses a diverse region. Spanning
over 600 km and a 10-fold gradient in annual rainfall, this region extends
from coniferous forests near the northern Sierra Madre Occidental to
vast deserts of the Colorado River Valley. In contrast to other regions along
the U.S.Mexico border, most areas directly north of Sonora are federally
managed, often according to explicit conservation mandates, and in
combination with reserves in Sonora form one of the largest networks of
protected areas in North America (Felger & Broyles 2007). Transboundary
connectivity is especially relevant to conservation in this region
because several major biogeographic provinces converge and
produce the range limits of many Neotropical and Nearctic taxa
(Turner et al. 1995; Escalante et al. 2004). Moreover, broad elevation and
moisture gradients produce fragmented distributions of many
populations (Hoffmeister 1986; Flesch 2008) that presumably are linked by
dispersal. Despite the biological significance of this region , virtually
the entire ArizonaSonora border has been fenced or is proposed for
fencing.
Interaction is Key, fragmentation results in loss of that

ecosystem
Diaz 2005 (S Daz, D Tilman, J Fargione, FS Chapin, R Dirzo, T Kitzberger, B

Gemmill, M Zobel, M Vil, C Mitchell, A Wilby, Gretchen C. Daily, M Galetti, WF
Laurance, J Pretty, Rosamond L. Naylor, A Power, D Harvell Ecosystems and
Human Well-being: Current State and Trends, Biodiversity Regulation of
Ecosystem Services, Chapter 11) Island Press, Washington, DC
Many ecosystem processes and the services they provide depend
on obligate or facultative interactions among species. Direct
interactions between plants and fungi, plants and animals, and indirect
interactions involving more than two species are essential for
ecosystem processes such as transfer of pollen and many seeds,
transfer of plant biomass production to decomposers or herbivores,
construction of habitat complexity, or the spread or suppression of plant,
animal and human pathogens. Because of this, interactions between
different trophic levels are among the most important processes by
which biodiversity regulates the provision of ecosystem services, as
illustrated in Figure 11.1 (see also Chapin et al. 2000a). Although
experimental evidence is growing (e.g. van der Putten et al. 2001; Haddad et
al. 2001), most of the examples come from the dramatic community and
ecosystem effects of the introduction or removal of only one or a small
number of species. There is clearly still insufficient information to
determine whether there are general principles that describe how biotic
linkages between different trophic levels and indirect interactions affect
various ecosystem processes. Nevertheless, the available studies suggest
that the integrity of these interactions is important for maintaining
ecosystem processes and that threats to them via habitat
destruction and fragmentation (see Box 11.1) are likely to result in
losses of ecosystem service
Loss of a local ecosystem results in a domino effect of

biodiversity loss
Diaz 2005 (S Daz, D Tilman, J Fargione, FS Chapin, R Dirzo, T Kitzberger, B

Gemmill, M Zobel, M Vil, C Mitchell, A Wilby, Gretchen C. Daily, M Galetti, WF
Laurance, J Pretty, Rosamond L. Naylor, A Power, D Harvell Ecosystems and
Human Well-being: Current State and Trends, Biodiversity Regulation of
Ecosystem Services, Chapter 11) Island Press, Washington, DC
Species composition is often more important than the number of species in
affecting ecosystem processes (high certainty). Thus, conserving or
restoring the composition of communities, rather than simply
maximizing species numbers, is critical to maintaining ecosystem
services. Changes in species composition can occur directly by
species introductions or removals, or indirectly by altered resource
supply due to abiotic drivers (such as climate) or human drivers (such as
irrigation, eutrophication, or pesticides). Although a reduction in the
number of species may initially have small effects, even minor
losses may reduce the capacity of ecosystems for adjustment to

changing environments (medium certainty). Therefore, a large number
of resident species, including those that are rare, may act as
insurance that buffers ecosystem processes in the face of
changes in the physical and biological environment (such as changes
in precipitation, temperature, or pathogens).
Specialist species already in low numbers will be effected

drastically by new fences
FLESCH and CLINTON 2010 (W. EPPS/ D. AARON, School of Natural

Resources, University of Arizona, 325 Biological Sciences East, Department of
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Potential Effects of the
United States-Mexico Border Fence on Wildlife Conservation Biology
Volume 24, No. 1) Blackwell Publishing Limited 2010
Results of our case studies suggest other species may be significantly
affected by security infrastructure in the ArizonaSonora
borderlands if they are terrestrial and large enough to be physically
excluded by security infrastructure (cannot pass through a 5- to 10cm gap), deterred by vegetation openings, or fly at heights <4 m
during dispersal. Furthermore, although bighorn sheep and many
other species in discontinuous habitat patches can disperse across
nonbreeding habitat, those species are most likely to experience
loss of connectivity at larger scales when linkages incorporating
transboundary movements are disrupted (e.g., Fig 4b). For instance,
desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) also occupy disjunct rocky habitat
separated by valleys and make interpopulation movements approximately
once per generation (Edwards et al. 2004); those characteristics could
increase vulnerability to disruption by border fencing. Among
nonmigratory birds, ground dwellers such as Wild Turkey (Meliagris
gallopavo) and quail (Phasianidae) may not readily cross fences unless
gap widths facilitate movement (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, bats such as
endangered lesser-long nosed bat (Leptonycteris curasoae) and migratory
birds likely will fly over fences. Among wide-ranging mammals,
persistence and recovery of other species present in low numbers
such as jaguar and Sonoran pronghorn may depend on
transboundary movements (Krausman et al. 2005; McCain & Childs 2008).
Persistence of black bears (Ursus americanus) in northern Sonora and Texas
may depend, respectively, on movements from Arizona (Varas 2007)
and northern Coahuila (Onorato et al. 2004). Population-level consequences
for species that are more widespread and abundant such as pumas (Puma
concolor) and mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) are likely to be less severe.
Detailed information on distribution, movement behavior, and the effects of
interpopulation connectivity on local persistence are required to fully assess
the potential effects of transboundary development on wildlife and to
develop effective mitigation strategies.
Government actions inherently take in no account of the

environment, this fence would be the end of those
ecosystems
Bigham 2007 (Roy, Pollution Engineering, Abuse of Power) BNP Media
March, 2007
Politicians are often accused of abusing their power . Rarely do we
see such a display of it than what was recently reported by the news
about our Homeland Security Secretary. A recent news item from the
Associated Press caught this editor's eye and resulted in a stunned moment
of silence to let the information settle in. Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff announced he was waiving all environmental rules
in order to clear the way to construct a fence. The result of his
action circumvents the Endangered Species Act, the Federal Water
Pollution Control Act and the National Environmental Policy Act , to
name a few. The engineering proposal involves 37 miles of
traditional and virtual fencing along the U.S. and Mexico border in
Southwestern Arizona. It includes radar and other infrastructure,
lighting, all weather and drag roads. The project is anticipated to cost
nearly $64 million. According to Homeland Security spokesperson Russell
Knocke, Chertoff voided "environmental requirements and other legalities
that have impeded the department's ability to construct fencing and deploy
detection technology on the range." Apparently, our government has
indeed authorized a single entity to ignore our environmental rules
and regulations at a single person's whim. Chertoff needs no approval
in such regards and no public comments are allowed
A2: Crime
Crimes committed by immigrants are statistically skewed
They are more law-abiding than Americas own citizens
Even though statistically migrants commit less crimes than citizens,

the 1996 laws helped produce millions of criminal aliens by
creating new crimes out of civil immigration violations. Of the criminal
statutes used in DHS immigration prosecutions in FY 2004, over 80%
consisted of one of two of these crimes: entry of alien at improper time or
place, (47%) Reentry of deported alien (34%) (TRAC 2005). In the years
after 9/11, the imperative of finding and arresting criminal aliens
was the principal governmental priority that propelled the 64% rise in
detentions between FY 2005 and FY 2009. Budget appropriation bills
stipulated that the Department of Homeland Security shall prioritize the
identification and removal of aliens convicted of a crime by the severity of
that crime (U.S. Congress 2009). In ICEs yearly budget request, the
Secretary would start his or her speech thanking the members of Congress
and in the next paragraph invoke the need to protect the American people
from criminal aliens. Unfortunately for ICEs stated mission, the 200% rise
in funding in FY 2005FY 2009 did not lead to a commensurate increase
in the detention of criminal aliens. There was only a 12% rise in
criminal aliens in that period, but the number of detainees who have
never been convicted of a crime increased 99%, from 139,583 to
273,408. Even more troubling, in FY 2009, 76% of non-criminal arrests were
made by the programs whose primary purpose was to target criminal aliens
(TRAC 2010).
Criminal Stereo types are hyped

Publication)
However, despite popular stereotypes about the criminal alien, there is

no evidence that the crime rate among immigrants in the United
States is any higher than that among the general population. As Peter
Schuck stated in a comprehensive review of the data a few years ago,
Although the systematic data on point are somewhat dated, legal
immigrants do not appear to commit any more crime than demographically
similar Americans; they may even commit less , and that crime may be
less serious. Nor does todays immigrant crime appear to be worse
than in earlier eras. The immigrants who flooded American cities around
the turn of the century (the ancestors of many of todays Americans) were
also excoriated as congenitally vicious and usually crime-prone, not
only by the public opinion of the day, but also by the Dillingham Commission,
which Congress established to report on the need for immigration
restrictions. The evidence suggests that those claims were false then,
and similar claims appear to be false now.85
Framework
Plan Key to Education

Our counter-interpretation is good for topic-specific
education: We must think through the biopolitical nature
of global mobility controls in order to come to terms with
our instrumentalized relationship to life.
Salter 2006 [Mark, The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies
of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics, Alternatives 31, pp.
167-189]
There are three directions for further research and analysis: the corporeal
turn in global mobility studies, the global mobility regime as biopolitical
management of international populations, and the confessionary complex.
Corporeal Turn The field of migration studies has been hamstrung by two
dominant approaches: microstudies of migration networks, and macrostudies
of push-pull factors. This article argues for the consideration of a different
kind of micropolitics of power, that of the border itself. We must investigate
the legal state of exception at the border and the ways that these exceptions
are instantiated in laws and policies. The interface of the body and the body
politic is hotly contested, and scholars need to take seriously the question of
admission and exclusion to the political community at its border, not solely
from an immigration/refugee rights perspective but from a wider view of the
global mobility regime and human rights. This corporealism must also take
into account the management of international populations through biopolitics
in creating, classifying, and policing specific kinds of international bodies, and
the way in which political technologies of individuals such as passports, visas,
and frontier control educate mobile subjectivities in kinds of obedience and
auto-confession. We must ask: How does the global mobility regime
foster conditions under which we reorganize ourselves into
international bodies and characterize those bodies as national or
stateless, laboring or leisured, healthy or diseased, and safe or
pathological? Managing Mobility This is aided by understanding the
visa as part of a global biopolitical system. In the loose visa regime,
we see the control of population through the self-confession of our
status as national, working, healthy, and safe bodies through
application procedures. We need to unpack the way in which visa systems
erase the middle ground previously occupied by gastarbeiter programs and
shunt economic migrants into the category of asylum seekers, a category
that does little to acknowledge the material basis of well-founded fears of
economic persecution. Some of this work has been done by human rights
based advocacy groups like Statewatch and Amnesty International, but we
also need to conduct close ethnographies of the bureaucracies responsible
for the management of these decisions. In particular, I see two dangers in
this corporal/confessional regime. The issue of consent is erased on
both technological and governmental levels. First, the body comes
to testify or confess for the subject without the consent or even
perhaps knowledge of the subject. Leaving aside the sociological issue of
the ways in which body politics are constructed through stereotypes, there is
an issue of data being collected, analyzed, and assigned to a particular body

without any kind of check or balance. Second, the dynamics of these data
flows are not transparent. Once this corporeal information is added to our
governmental profile, we have little way of tracking its progress through
private and official channels. As David Lyon and Elia Zureik have argued
elsewhere, the burden of surveillance falls disproportionately on the poor and
marginal.78 We must be vigilant of the expansion of state policing powers,
especially at the borders where the operation of state power is both naked
and hidden from view.
Epistemological critique produces new ways of

understanding our complicity in systems of biopolitical
domination
Hamann 2009 [Trent, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics, in
Foucault Studies 6]
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of

judgment that would subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a
specifically modern atti-tude that can be traced historically as the
constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith Butler
points out in her article What is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue,39
critique is an attitude, distinct from judgment, pre-cisely because it
expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and rationalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular
form of gover-nance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art
of government has al-ways relied upon certain relations to truth:
truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-ing knowledge of individuals, and
truth as a reflective technique comprising general rules, particular
knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, inter-views,
etc. And while critique has at times played a role within the art of
government itself, as weve seen in the case of both liberalism and
neoliberalism, it has also made possible what Foucault calls the art of
not being governed, or better, the art of not being governed like that
and at that cost (WC, 45). Critique is neither a form of ab-stract
theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright rejection or
condemnation of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical
and agonistic engagement, re-engagement, or disengagement with the
rationalities and practices that have led one to become a certain
kind of subject. In his essay What is Enlightenment? Foucault suggests
that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain
people, a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time
marks a relation of be-longing and presents itself as a task. Its task
amounts to a historical investigation into the events that have led
us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of
what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying (WE, 125). But how can we
distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the
endless calls to do your own thing or be all you can be that stream forth
in every direction from political campaigns to commercial advertising? How is
it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does
not simply lend technical sup-port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On
the one hand, we can distinguish criti-cal acts of resistance and ethical selffashioning from what Foucault called the Cali-fornian cult of the self (OGE,
245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in discovering
ones true or authentic self, or the merely cosmetic forms of rebellion
served up for daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand we might
also be careful not to dismiss forms of self-fashioning as merely aesthetic.
As Timothy OLeary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of Ethics,
Foucaults notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern
conception of art as a singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the
social, political, and ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of
why it is that a lamp or a house can be a work of art, but not a life. OLeary
writes: Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the
artistic or plas-tic power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no special
advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy
unnecessarily restricts our possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is
Foucault aware of the specif-ic nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously
hostile to it. What OLeary rightly identifies here is Foucaults interest in an
aesthetics of exis-tence that specifically stands in a critical but immanent
relation to the ways in which our individuality is given to us in advance
through ordered practices and forms of knowledge that determine the truth
about us. The issue is not a matter of how we might distinguish
authentic forms of resistance (whatever that might mean) from
merely aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether
or not the practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the
manner in which our freedomhow we think, act, and speakhas been
governed in ways that are limiting and into-lerable. In short, critical
resistance offers possibilities for an experience of desubjectification. Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of
governmentality, this would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or
opposing not only the ways in which weve been encouraged to be
little more than self-interested subjects of ra-tional choice (to the
exclusion of other ways of being and often at the expense of those
irresponsible others who have chosen not to amass adequate amounts of
human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments,
institutions, communities, work places, and forms of political
engagement have been reshaped in order to foster the production of
Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of work can be found in
many locations, from the international anti-globalization movement to local
community organizing.
Limits Impact Turn

The ethical creation of self comes before their political
prescriptions -- it determines our relationship to
biopolitical decisions regarding which lives and lifestyles
are and are not allowed to subsist politicallytheir
framework arguments just recreate this violence
Gabardi 2001 [Wayne, Negotiating Postmodernism pp. 77-79]
Based on his research into ancient Greek ethics, Foucault identified four interrelated modes of ethical
practice that formed the basis of both a framework of ethical analysis and a model of freedom.
They were ethical substance, a mode of subjectivation, ethical work, and telos.5 Ethical substance
refers to that aspect or part of an individuals behavior that is determined to be the main focus or
the prime material of his (or her) moral conduct. The mode of subjectivation is the form with which the different
parts or aspects of ones self are arranged. It is the model that fashions or molds ones self into a distinctive style of existence.
Foucaults own mode of subjectivation fused aesthetics and politics into a model of creative resistance, making ones life into a
work of art formed out of social and political struggle. Ethical work involves the means, the methods, and the
techniques by which we change ourselves into an ethical subject. Telos involves committing oneself
to a certain mode of being and striving to consciously place ones everyday actions within a pattern
of conduct. Taken together, these ethical practices inform a conception of selfhood in which a
person takes an active role in shaping his or her identity, rather than conforming to existing
external standards and systems of power/knowledge. The self is an assemblage of practices rather than
an innate entity. While both disciplined bodies and active ethical subjects are forged within the same
power environments, the active reflexive self appropriates practices of conduct from
power/knowledge formations without being dependent on their disciplinary codes. Foucault based
this activity principally on an aesthetic model because it was his conviction that art is the most potent
medium of radical reflexivity and resistance. Art is a potentially explosive transformative force. By
linking it to the pursuit of an ethical life, Foucault was able to stabilize and channel its energy into a
relationship where self-care and responsibility for the other inform and enhance the aesthetic
drive. The interview The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom (1984) illuminates how in his final work
Foucault was reweaving ethics, aesthetics, and politics by making connections between power, resistance, self-care, liberty, and
caring for others. He states that freedom is the ontological condition and the basis of ethics.5 He defines
ethics as a practice, a way of life, an ethos, rather than as a theory or a codified set of rules.52 He makes clear that self-care
implies complex relations with others and that this ethos of freedom is also a way of caring for others. He states that
power means relationships of power: that resistance and freedom are implicit in power
relations, and that domination is different from power. It is a situation in which the relations of
power are fixed in such a way that they are perpetually asymmetrical and the margin of liberty is
extremely limited?54 Foucault further concludes that the relationship between philosophy and
politics is fundamental and that philosophy is charged with the duty of challenging all
phenomena of domination at whatever level or under whatever form they present themselves55 This
leads me to conclude that Foucaults idea of freedom as ethical agency involves choosing a life
style and then integrating specific techniques of self-formation within an environment of power
formations. The power context of life stylization further requires the cultivation of self-discipline
and agonistic struggle to both resist disciplinary power matrices and carve out a space for selfempowerment and creative choice. In other words, freedom entails a movement from resistance to
ethics to political action. Resistance, the most primal expression of freedom, involves the revolt of
the body against the normalizing effects of disciplinary biopower. This critical resistance, largely
reactive and defensive, is channeled into an affirmative ethical project concerned with self-care.
The rejection of an imposed identity and a set of norms becomes the impetus for fashioning ones
own ethical code and conduct. The ethical agent becomes a political actor in joining struggles that
seek to alter power relations so that one can more freely live ones life. The battle is joined at the
local and microlevels by countering norms with norms and techniques with techniques. I further
conclude that if, as I have argued, ours is a time of cultural postmodernization, of global-local flows
of postmodern goods services, and identities, of greater aesthetic-reflexive individuation, and of the
pervasive effects of information and mass media in our Lives, then quality of life and lifestyle
issues should take (and have taken) on a greater importance in our daily social interactions,
economic decisions, ethical considerations, and political concerns. Understood in this way,
Foucaults idea of freedom as an aesthetic-ethical-political practice of lifestyle determination
takes on greater significance. It is both a product of our late modern/postmodern transition and a
new mode of being and normative guide in negotiating this condition.
State Inclusion BadViolence

Inclusion of the state supports liberatory border politics
while also dooming them to corruption leads to more
violence
MM
Indeed, Blunketts prophetic vision for Britain as a safe haven

depends on a number of exclusions firmly in place. First, the Home
Secretary affirms that this new vision will only work if we are secure
within our sense of belonging and identity. Significantly, Butler makes
it clear that This exclusionary matrix by which subjects are formed
thus requires a simultaneous production of a domain of abject
beings, those who are not yet subjects, but who form the
constitutive outside to the domain of the subject (1993, p. 3). At best
a utopian fantasy of homeliness , at worst a conscious foreclosure of
ethics of openness to the alterity of the other - an alterity that
always poses a challenge to our own security and self-knowledge Blunketts politics of migration therefore seems premised on a logical
impossibility .7 It is a hospitality that is in fact based on the originary
closure, on foreseeing the foreign threat and trying to avert it. This is the
moment when the classical heritage gives way to bizarre miscegenation.
Blunkett-Tiresias stops instructing Creon to actually become Creon: a
protector of the public sphere whose law both produces and excludes the
unlawful, those without the integrity and belonging shared by the members
of the polis . For it is this when he goes on to announce: We have
fundamental moral obligations which we will always honour, only to
counterbalance this claim with the following reservation: At the
same time, those coming into our country have duties that they
need to understand and which facilitate their acceptance and
integration. His paradoxical immigration policy of squaring the circle is
also described as a two-way street requiring commitment and
action from the host community, asylum seekers and long-term
migrants alike . It is perhaps not surprising (which does not mean it is
intentional on Blunketts part) that a linguistic paradox is used when outlining
our moral obligations and their duties, since the asylum seekers position
before the law itself entails a paradox: even though they are outside it, they
are supposedly subject to its power. Constituted as threshold political
beings, migrants and asylum seekers are defined precisely through
their liminal status that places them on the outskirts of the
community. Then how can they be expected to have duties imposed on
them by the host community and manifest commitment to these duties if this
very community needs a prior definition of itself, a definition that confirms
identity and belonging in relation, or even opposition, to what might threaten

it? We also need to consider how the political status of asylum seekers and
migrants is actually established. Who legislates the duties that they will be
expected to follow? What is the source of the moral obligation that will help
Britons manage the asylum issue? Agamben explains that The sovereign
decides not the licit and the illicit but the originary inclusion of the living in
the sphere of law (1998, p. 26).8 To what extent, then, is the sovereign
entitled to impose the law on those whose identity he defines as being
situated before the law, both in the spatial and temporal sense? In
particular, given that Iraqis constitute the majority of all asylum seekers in
the UK, is this conditional openness in the context of the Gulf War II, not a
certain blind spot in the rhetoric and politics of the sovereign government
that does not see a connection between the Iraqi refugees from their own
country, whose lives are threatened by Western bombs, and the Iraqi asylum
seekers trying to come into Britain? This form of politics, with its
underlying moral obligations, seems to be based on a certain
occluded but inevitable and thus constitutive violence , where the
sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the
threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes into
violence (Agamben 1998, p. 32).
State-focused policies cause violenceand their limits

arguments reify the impacts of border thinking
(2006): 259-273. Print.)
The fact that technology is an aspect of immanentist biopolitics, is in itself an
attestation to how the political has faded into a state of technicism
(Coward 1999, p. 18) a depoliticisation of society in the Agambenian sense
in which governments policies and debates are merely technical
discussions on the type of mechanisms to be deployed in order to
protect borders, filter movements, eliminate infiltrations, and ultimately,
sustain sovereignty by means of measurement and exclusion.
Biopolitics, nowadays, is too pervasive, too subtle that borders are no
longer constituted around the physical but actualised in the takenfor-granted institutional-organisational-administrative processes; in the
density and ubiquity of information networks. This perpetual actualisation
of borders or what we may refer to as infinite bordering is enacted
into our very ousia, creating far-reaching implications on bodies
that do not matter, bodies of those left to float in the Strait of Gibraltar,
bodies of those left to die on the USMexican border, bodies of those
who are, at this very moment, being raped, tortured and humiliated.
Borders are becoming the epitome of Western hypocrisy: on the one
hand, they embody visions of Western progress, civilisation and technological
advancements. On the other hand, they are turning into mass graves, a
monolithic disposal of dispensable bodies and unnecessary
existences. This is the dialectical reality of borders!
State Inclusion BadGuts Solvency

Usage of the state prophesizes forward-looking political
solutions as a veil to conceal top-down solutions that
doom solvency
MM
The politics of blindness: In his own reading of Antigone in the context of

hospitality towards the alien and the foreign, Jacques Derrida justifies
referring to classical figures in the context of contemporary political matters
by arguing that these urgent contemporary matters do not only bring the
classical structures into the present. They interest us and we take a look at
them at the points where they seem, as though of themselves, to deconstruct
these inheritances or the prevailing interpretations of these inheritances
(2000, p. 139). Derrida does not of course suggest abandoning these classical
structures altogether once they have been placed in deconstruction, but
rather thinking them differently, or allowing them to reveal, as though of
themselves, certain ambiguities inherent in them, ambiguities that will in
turn allow us to interpret and enact our current democratic laws in a
new way. To give an example of such an enactment of the Greek
democratic tradition in our twenty-first century polis, I want to look at
another borderline character in Sophocless Antigone (2000): the figure of
Tiresias. The blind prophet Tiresias seems to have returned to the British
state in the figure of UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, proponent
of the new immigration regime and author of the White Paper, Secure
Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain (February
2002), a document that paved the way for the subsequent Nationality,
Immigration and Asylum Act. What is it that links Tiresias with Blunkett,
apart from their physical blindness? In Sophocles play, Tiresias
appears before Creon to warn him that Thebes is on the edge of peril
and that Creon should listen to the voice of reason and withdraw his
prohibition against the burial of Antigones brother, Polynices. On hearing
Creons refusal to open the city gates, Tiresias accuses Creon of suffering
from the disease of wealth and predicts the impending wrath of gods that
will descend upon Creon and his family. The figure of Tiresias as a blind
seer on the border of the polis is particularly relevant for me in the
context of current legislation regarding asylum and immigration in
Western democracies. However, one might perhaps say that it is too facile
a gesture to equate a modern Western politician with an ancient prophet of
doom and gloom on the basis of their shared disability, or even that it is
inappropriate to draw attention to Blunketts actual blindness. Aware of such
possible reservations, I am nevertheless prepared to risk accusations of
impropriety and pursue the Tiresian (dis)inheritance, and its accompanying
blind spots, in the discourse on immigration and asylum as developed in the

UK governments White Paper, Secure Borders, Safe Haven.5 Secure
Borders, Safe Haven opens with a foreword, which has been
authored and signed by the Home Secretary himself. Blunkett adopts
here a somewhat paternalistic, sermon-like tone to explain to the
British public that There is nothing more controversial, and yet
more natural, than men and women from across the world seeking a
better life for themselves and their families.6 In his apparent attempt
to win over the British public, he establishes a sequence of (il)logical
equivalences (e.g. between a natural desire for migration and a natural
feeling of apprehension felt by those whose territory the migrants enter) that
are supposed to embrace and convey how the nation feels about the issue
of immigration. In a tone reminiscent of the Greek prophet, Blunkett speaks
about the need to offer a safe haven to those arriving on our often
wet and windy shores. Just as Tiresias takes it upon himself to point
out that Creon speaks unwisely, the Home Secretary addresses and
unravels the anxieties of all those self-appointed guardians of the
national shores (from editors of tabloid newspapers to my home is my
castle John Bulls) who want to turn Britain into a fortress. Blunketts
discussion of the problems connected with migration and asylum is supposed
to rebuke accusations that Britain is out of line with other European nations in
the way in which it deals with illegal immigration and asylum seekers, and
that people coming through the Channel Tunnel, or crossing in container
lorries, constitutes an invasion. Blunketts Foreword is thus aimed
against false perception, which he attempts to overcome with
clarity and reason. Blunkett lays out his argument carefully, indicating
errors in the public perception and correcting them with his own argument.
But it is not only the correction of errors that interests the Home Secretary.
Blunketts primary aim is the development of an immigration and asylum
policy that looks forward. As if repeating the instruction given to Creon
by Triesias, Blunkett warns the people not to act unwisely; he explains
carefully that migration brings significant benefits and that it can advance the
prosperity of the nation, provided it is properly managed. This last reservation
makes Blunkett a thrifty prophet, resorting to the discourse of economics and
management to explain his vision. As we know from Foucault, the biopolitics
of modern democracies works precisely through the administration of bodies
and the calculated management of life (1984, p. 140). As if to illustrate
this, it is by means of proposing rational controlled routes of
immigration (rather than the international free for all, the so called
asylum shopping throughout Europe, and the it is not our problem
attitude which is too often displayed) that Blunkett hopes to promote his
policy. However, the calculated rationality of his outlook seems
permanently threatened by the irrational - coming not only from the
opponents of his policy but also from the author of the White Paper himself.
After laying out his proposal for a rational and controlled
economic migration and asylum system, Blunkett adds: It is possible
to square the circle. At this instant the voice of reason founders,
and immigration policy reveals that it is only a very rough sketch,
one that allows the draughtsman to resort to illicit geometrical

moves in order to complete the picture.
Border Thinking Causes Policy Failure

The paradigm of suspicion has high influence on
policymaking

Beyond studies, reports, and cover stories that shape public
discourse in this direction, the conflation of the perceived threats of
terror, crime, and immigration into a unitary paradigm of suspicion
now routinely guides policy making , institution building, and regulation.
Thus, for example, the 1998 Cairo summit of the Interpol launched a
joint international policy for handling crime, immigration, and
terrorism, and the United States explicitly designed its USVISIT
programregulating nonimmigrant entry to the United Statesto
identify travelers who violate immigration controls, have criminal
records, or belong to groups listed as terrorist organizations. Once
we identify a conflated paradigm of suspicion that brings together the
perceived threats of terrorism, crime, and immigration, we may appreciate
the strong sociological affinity between metal detectors in American public
schools and airport X-ray machines, between passports burnt with the
sociobiological profile of their bearers and Interpol records of tissues and
retinas, or between armed guards in restaurants, guarded gated
communities, and the strengthening of immigration and border police. In all
these instances, although located in different spatial settings, and although
often formally established to address different types of social threats, a
paradigm of suspicion is an overarching framework that sets these
diverse practices in motion . In the next two sections, I therefore
introduce some of the elementary forms that constitute some of the physical
features of the emerging mobility regime.
Orienting Away from the State Key

Analysis of biopolitics cannot succeed from a stateoriented approach
According to Dean, it is through an analytics of government that the

specific technologies, practices and rationalities of liberal
government, and its implication in a regime of bio-politics, can be
investigated. For Dean:
An analytics is a type of study concerned with the analysis of the
specific conditions under which particular entities emerge, exist and
change. It is thus distinguished from most theoretical approaches in that it
seeks to attend to, rather than efface, the singularity of ways of
governing and conducting ourselves. Thus it does not treat particular
practices of government as instances of ideal types and concepts.
Neither does it regard them as effects of a law-like necessity or treat
them as manifestations of a fundamental contradiction. An analytics of
government examines the conditions under which regimes of practices come
into being, are maintained and are transformed. These regimes also
include, moreover, the different ways in which these institutional
practices can be thought, made into objects of knowledge, and made
subject to problematizations (pp. 20-21). Thus, an analytics of
government in the Foucauldian mode, is genealogical; it examines the
historicity and contingency of both liberal regimes of practices, and
the modes of subjectification to which they give rise, even as it
eschews any metaphysics, philosophy of history, or philosophical
anthropology. Moreover, such an analytics of government also
acknowledges the enormous significance of political power beyond
the state in the liberal regimes of modern democracy. From the
perspective of governmentality, with its arts and regimes
encompassing, as Rose points out, a multitude of programmes,
strategies, tactics, devices, calculations, negotiations, intrigues,
persuasions and seductions aimed at the conduct of individuals,
groups, populations-and indeed oneself(p. 5), the state is no longer
the sole, or necessarily primary, power container. Indeed, for Rose: From
this perspective, the question of the state that was so central to earlier
investigations of political power is relocated. The state now appears simply as
one element-whose function is historically specific and contextually variablein multiple circuits of power, connecting a diversity of authorities and forces,
within a whole variety of complex assemblages (p. 5). Thus,
governmentality studies, which investigate power relations at the
molecular as well as at the molar level, cannot limit themselves to an
analysis of the state. The web of power relations in modern
democracies requires an analytics of government that is, as Dean
claims, pluralistic; that acknowledges the existence of a plurality of
regimes of practices in a given territory, each composed from a
multiplicity of in principle unlimited and heterogeneous elements
bound together by a variety of relations and capable of

polymorphous connections with one another (p.27). Such an
analytics, will investigate the distribution of power between state
and civil society, public and private, juridical and social, coercive and noncoercive, disciplinary and normalizing. And according to Dean, the point of
departure for such an analytics of government is the identification
and examination of specific situations in which the activity of
governing comes to be called into question, the moments and the
situations in which government becomes a problem (p. 27).
Examinations must separate themselves from sovereignty

including the state makes understanding modern power
relations impossible
What Foucault does insist upon in Society Must Be Defended is that if we

want to analyze modern power relations, we need to extricate
ourselves from the theory of sovereignty. This is the meaning of his
claim that in political theory we have still not cut off the head of the
king. In the place of the theory of sovereignty as a basis for political
theory, Foucault enjoins us to investigate the microphysics of power: ...
let me say that rather than orienting our research into power toward
the juridical edifice of sovereignty, State apparatuses, and the
ideologies that accompany them, I think we should orient our
analyses of power toward material operations, forms of subjugation
[assujeissement], and the connections among and the uses made of
the local systems of subjugation on the one hand, and apparatuses
of knowledge on the other (p. 34).6 and the uses made of the local
systems of subjugation on the one hand, and apparatuses of
knowledge on the other (p. 34).6
A2: Cede the Political

The affirmative is a-political because they are only a rearrangement of the technical virtuoso of modern
calculative managerialism; critique makes a new
relationship to the political possible which spurs new
kinds of actions.
Grayson 2007 [Human Security as Power/Knowledge: The Biopolitics of a
Definitional Debate, at SGIR Turin Conference,
http://archive.sgir.eu/uploads/Grayson-graysonsgir.pdf]
While the argument thus far has been critical of the biopolitics of human
security, it does bear noting that the myriad forms of human misery and
suffering to which human security ostensibly wishes to respond do
demand forms of action and engagement. However, responses
should not be conceptualised from positions that deny the powerrelations that make them possible; to do so is the very epitome of
irresponsibility. Conversely, to completely disengage from practical action will
accomplish very little to reduce levels of suffering. Inaction, a political stasis
of paralysis in which we should refuse to act in order to disconnect from the
biopolitical matrix can also be unacceptable. The invocation of a binary
distinction to guide resistance does nothing to address the powerrelations constitutive of the current political situation; letting die is,
after all, a form of biopolitical management. Rather, the key ethical
problematique to which biopolitics cogently speaks is that the question is
not necessarily one of action or inaction, but rather how to remain
cognizant of how forms of action and/or inaction advocated by
human security definitions produce and maintain a system of global
governmentality aimed at maximizing economies of biopower? It is
this ethical problematique which finds a resonance in William Connollys
investigation of the politics of suffering and the responsibility to (re)act. He
argues that the most difficult cases require not an ethics of help for
the helpless but a political ethos of critical engagement between
interdependent, contending constituencies implicated in
asymmetrical structures of power. Indeed, some ways of acting upon
obligations to the deserving poor or victims of natural disaster
provide moral cover for the refusal to cultivate an ethics of
engagement with constituencies in more ambiguous, disturbing,
competitive positions. (Connolly 1999, 129) What this speaks to is the
disciplinary power of clear policy prescriptions engendered by the
human security debate to foreclose the possibility of assistance in
instances where to do so makes us feel uncomfortable or threatens
what is perceived as the correct way of living. Thus, Connollys
argument provides a new purchase on how it becomes possible
ignore suffering or even institutionalise it as a part of broader
biopolitical strategy. Moreover, it is also essential to keep cognizant of how
the inherently subjective forms of interpretation within the human
security debate are presented as being beyond their own subjectivity .
Rather, under the cloak of cosmological realism, they are presented as

objective methods of ascertaining truth, a truth that may be universal or
particulardepending on the definition being advancedyet always
unmediated. However, as David Campbell (2005) has argued, positions
which appeal to realisms are themselves onto-political. Thus, the
broad, narrow, and via media accounts of human security that vie for exalted
status of the best understanding of the concept contain fundamental
presumptions that establish the possibilities within which[an] assessment of
actuality is presented (Campbell 2005, 128). It is the certainty that can be
achieved in avoiding onto-political consideration that becomes so attractive
within the human security debate. Avoiding onto-politics makes it possible for
a definition to prove its worth through a careful analysis of facts backed by
the legitimizing function of its method. The goal is of course to produce
clear policy prescriptions which are taken on board by the policy
community. Within this formulation of (bio)politics, there is no need
to reconsider, no need to agonize over decisions, no need to be held
accountable for the power-knowledge that is produced, and no need
to question the regime of truth that legitimizes them; facts simply
cannot be denied. Tragically, the absolute absence of critical thinking
demanded by the abdication of onto-political reflection produces the
conditions within which gross irresponsibility and unaccountability
can flourish. Unless we reject the imperative of producing decidable
decisions, Campbell notes via Derrida that we become the co-authors of
an emaciated spectrum of policy possibility that is devoid of ethics,
the political, and responsibility; the replacement is a program, a
technology, and its irresponsible application (Campbell 2005, 132).
Therefore, the fiction that a decision can be sufficient, that a
decision can definitively resolve the potentially irresolvable while
remaining outside of onto-politics, is the most significant political
act that is both constitutive of, and produced by, the biopolitical
rationalities at the heart of the human security debate (Campbell
2005, 131). For human security to represent a marked transformation in how
security is conceptualised and a sign of progress in the field of security
studies, the discursive formation that sets its limits and the
incitement to discourse which shapes its debates must acknowledge
that no decision is sufficient, so we will have to make many and
see a constant oscillation and mobility between different positions
(Campbell 2005, 131). The imposition of modes of being and becoming
in the form of biopolitical rationalities that are pervasive within the
human security discourse including both human and security
must be subject to critique (Connolly 1999). Given the conceptual,
professional, and cultural obstacles faced by security analysts in extricating
themselves from these modes of thinking, the call is not a simple one.
Topicality
We Meet
Immigration is economic engagement.
Milner and Tingley, Professor of Politics and International
Affairs at Princeton University, Assistant Professor of
Government at Harvard University, 11
(Helen V and Dustin, October 3, 2011, Princeton University, The Economic
and Political Influences on Different Dimensions of United States Immigration
Policy, pages 4-5, http://www.princeton.edu/~hmilner/working
%20papers/The%20Economic%20and%20Political%20Influences%20on
%20Different%20Dimensions%20of%20United%20States%20Immigration
%20Policy.pdf Accessed 7-10-13, RH)
Our overall contributions to the literature are threefold. First, we highlight
how widely the substantive content of legislation that is called immigration
policy varies and thus point out the risk of obscuring important differences
across policies if the analysis does not disaggregate the legislation. We show
that different factors affect attitudes toward different policy dimensions.
Hence we help adjudicate the important debate over economic versus
ideological factors as influences on immigration policy. Second, we provide a
critical test of public finance theory in the legislative setting. Hence as in the
trade literature, which has examined both public opinion and legislative
voting, our extension of public finance arguments helps provide a more
complete picture of democratic representation by extending earlier public
opinion work to the legislature. Third, this paper contributes to a larger
research tradition that seeks to explain preferences of both citizens and
their elected representatives toward different types of international
economic engagement, such as immigration, trade and foreign aid
(Espenshade and Hempstead, 1996; Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2006; Hiscox,
2006; Huber and Espenshade, 1997; Milner and Tingley, 2011; Scheve and
Slaughter, 2001b).
Were Reasonable - Immigration is associated with

economic engagement
Craft, US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel, 8
(Joseph A, October 31, 2008, Naval War College, SHAPING THE FUTURE:
SECURITY COOPERATION TO SHAPE CHINESE
DIPLOMACY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC, page 27, http://www.dtic.mil/cgibin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA494286, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
Department of the Army, Stability Operations, 1-11. The National Security
Strategy seeks to promote freedom, justice, and human dignityto promote
effective democracies, and to extend prosperity through free trade and wise
developmental policies. Chinese diplomatic engagement that includes bribes
and political tampering, and Chinese economic engagement that creates
dependency on Chinese labor and resources for sustainment undermine state
institutional legitimacy. Also, though not PRC sponsored, other illegal
activities associated with Chinese economic engagement, such as
illegal immigration, illegal trade, and human trafficking, have contributed to

instability and human rights violations.
Immigration is included as economic engagement.

Pietsch and Aarons, Australian National University School
of Politics and International Relations Senior Lecturer, La
Trobe University School of Social Sciences Associate
Lecturer, 12
(Juliet and Haydn, Australia: Identity, Fear and Governance in the 21st
Century, Australian Engagement with Asia: Towards closer political,
economic and cultural ties,
http://epress.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Australia%3A+Identity
%2C+Fear+and+Governance+in+the+21st+Century/10171/ch03.html#toc_
marker-7, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
A second reason explaining the influence of Australias political engagement
with Asia on levels of cultural and economic engagement can be found in
Australias immigration patterns. As new groups of immigrants arrive in
Australia, they bring their cultural heritage with them. Some of this cultural
heritage is shared with the Australian-born population through business,
entertainment and sporting opportunities. Over time, a growing proportion of
the Australian-born population and migrant communities absorbs hybrid
AsianAustralian cultural practices as part of their own identity and lifestyle.
A third and final reason that demonstrates the influence of politics on cultural
and economic engagement is the growth of business relationships. As the
government encourages international trade through a number of policy
instruments, this opens the way for new business opportunities and industry
partnerships between Australia and Asia.
Economic Engagement includes immigration and

integration.
Doetsch et. al, Head of Mayer Brown Latin
America/Caribbean practice, 6
(Douglas, Clare Munana, President of management consulting firm Ancora
Associates and Alejandro Silva, Chairman, Evans Food Group, 2006, Chicago
Council on Foreign Affairs, A Shared Future: The Economic Engagement of
Greater Chicago and Its Mexican Community, page 16,
http://www.idpl.org/images/publicationsPDFs/DeLeon_ChicagoCouncilFull_200
6.pdf, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
The Mexican American Task Force has focused on the aspect of integration
of the regions largest immigrant group that is most crucial both to the
immigrants and to the regions long-term growth and prosperity, the
economic engagement of Mexican immigrants and their children.
EE includes opening up space for immigration

Li, researcher at the Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang
Normal University,
China, 2010 [Pengtao, The Myth and Reality of Chinese Investors: A Case
Study of Chinese Investment in Zambias Copper Industry China in Africa
Project Paper 62 http://www.eisourcebook.org/cms/June%202013/Myth%20&
%20Reality%20of%20Chinese%20Investors,%20Zambian%20Copper
%20Case%20Study.pdf, MM]
Language barriers and cultural differences, and the misunderstandings
arising from these factors, should not be underestimated. These factors will
affect Zambian perceptions of Chinese investors and workers, and the
relations between Chinese expatriates and Zambian communities. With
increasing economic engagement between the two countries, the
Chinese migrant population in Zambia has increased from more than 3
000 in 1990s to nearly 20 000 in 2010.14 Most are new migrants, yet some
have been in Zambia for more than ten years. These migrants can be divided
into three groups.
Examining immigration is key to economic engagement

Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2013
[Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 5/6/13, Immigration and Migration
http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/Files/Studies_Publications/TaskForcesandStu
dies/Immigration_and_Migration.aspx, Accessed 7/12/13- JM]
Over the past several years, The Chicago Council has convened multiple task
forces to examine migration and immigration issues affecting the
United States and many countries around the world. Resulting reports offer
recommendations for instituting effective immigration policies and for
working to ensure the civic, political, and economic engagement of
various immigrant communities.
Aff Education Good

Our conceptualization of the border has deviated our
ideology away from that of acceptance Open debates
and critical thinking are key
The fundamental problem with current U.S. immigration law is that it
is founded on the idea that it is permissible, desirable, and
necessary to restrict immigration into the United States. A border is viewed
as a barrier to entry, rather than as a port of entry. Unfortunately,
policymakers and the public accept without question the idea that the United
States can restrict immigration and assume that every nation-state must
restrict immigration. Consistent with this underlying assumption, most
recent immigration reform proposals move in the direction of closing
the borders rather than attempting to make the migration of people
into this country fairer, more efficient, and humane. To reform U.S.
immigration laws, the nation must reconceptualize the importance and
meaning of the international border. More open migration policies
deserve fuller analysis and public debate. Attempts to seal the border
through augmented border enforcement have failed time and time again. The
nation needs a dramatic new approach. With increasing frequency, observers
have voiced support for the liberal admission of immigrants or at least a
regime with narrower immigration restrictions. These arguments are well
worth considering.
Economic K of T
Migrants are the true form of economic engagement Denial of free immigration engenders violence in the
name of nation-building and makes their impacts
inevitable only recognition of migrants as the true form
of economic refugee combats imperialism
People trying to cross frontiers in search of work are branded illegal

immigrants, persecuted and vilified. Sometimes they are simply
called illegals, as if a human being could be categorised as an
illegal human being. The term of abuse most frequently used against
refugees themselves is that they are in reality economic refugees
rather than political ones and therefore bogus, abusing the system. There
is no such thing as the free movement of labour internationally. This lack of
freedom of movement may be one of the reasons why vast
international inequalities of wealth persist and are growing. The
wealth of Europe and other industrialised countries was built, from the
sixteenth century onwards, through the exploitation of the natural resources
and peoples of the rest of the world. Europeans used the labour of
conquered peoples to produce raw materials and primary products
for consumption in Europe, and they destroyed the industries of the
more advanced civilisations they encountered in their imperial
expansion. They then embarked on their own industrialisation and
they protected their new industries through quotas, tariffs and
prohibitions. Once they had established their dominance, they
advocated free trade. The methods they used, and use, to prise open
markets and secure raw materials throughout the world range from military
force to the more obfuscated pressures of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. Since the 1980s the major powers have
embarked on an orgy of liberalisation. They demand and have to a
great extent achieved the removal of controls not only on imports
and exports of goods, but also on capital flows (especially outflows)
and investment. According to the economic theories used to justify these
policies, economic liberalisation is supposed to lead to greater
welfare for all. In reality it has led to polarisation and crisis, as is the
normal observable reality of markets. Although some countries,
especially in East Asia, grew fast in the last 20 years, others have become
poorer. The gap between them and the richer countries is growing wider.
Integration into the world market, together with continuing high levels of
inequality and exploitation, have caused some enterprising people to attempt
to migrate in search of work, as market economics would predict. But the

logic of economic liberalisation has not been applied to the movement of
people. According to this logic, economic liberalisation should of course
include the free movement of labour as well as of goods and capital, and this
in turn, according to market theory, should lead to an equalisation of wage
levels internationally. This might or, more likely, might not turn out to be the
case in reality, just as within countries inequalities persist and often grow in
the so-called free market (as a result, free marketeers would say, of market
imperfections). But it is likely that polarisation is aggravated by the
denial of peoples right to move around the world in search of
employment and a better life. The aim of immigration controls is to
ensure that there is no such possibility . They are a market imperfection
of an extreme variety, and one more demonstration that the so-called free
market does not in reality exist. Samir Amin, the celebrated Marxist
economist, argued in a lecture at Wolfson College in Oxford on 23 February
1999 that it is no mere chance that globalisation has not resulted in the
peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America catching up:
Borders Negative Core
Topicality
Immigration is FX
The aff is FX at best Immigration results in EE
Newendorp, Lecturer at Harvard University, 2008 [Nicole
DeJong, Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post1997 Hong Kong Stanford University Press, MM]
The blurring of social, cultural, and political boundaries created
through these actual cases of movement back and forth over border
areas, and through the creation of "new" and "different" kinds of borders
both through the formation of supranational regional areas, such as the
European Union and NAFTA, and the "reunification" of Hong Kong with the
PRC, can certainly be unsettling for citizens and residents of these areas.
These changes also have the potential to be exciting for immigrants
(and sometimes for citizens), whose subjectivities may be altered
through new possibilities of social, political, and economic
engagement engendered by this movement . For many mainland wives
who immigrated to Hong Kong, the potential to experience a new lifestyle in
"modern," "cosmopolitan" Hong Kong, where children could be educated in
English, where wives would have the right to cross freely back and forth over
the I long Kong/ mainland border, and where they could imagine travel to
places beyond Hong Kong, created the desire to stay in I long Kong despite
the hardships they experienced there. May, one of the immigrant wives
whose experiences figure prominently throughout this book, told me: The
longer I live in Hong Kong, the more I understand it. But the place I like is
where I was born (fillgei thursai goelouh). But that's not to say that I long
Kong is bad. That is, to be a woman and marry a manwherever he is am' to
follow himwhether it's in Hong Kong or someplace else ... to follow your
husband to the place he was born. Is that good or bad? It depends on the
person. I'm not in a hurry to go back to the mainland.
More ev of FX
Ibrahim, Contributor to DIASPEACE, 2010 [Mohamed Hassan,
Somalilands Investment in Peace: Analysing the Diasporas Economic
Engagement in Peace Building, DIASPEACE Working Paper 4, August 2010,
MM]
From a local perspective, the economic engagements of the diaspora have
had a positive impact on the local inhabitants outlook to the future. They
have helped to restore a sense of confidence and self-esteem and granted
them hope. A legislative member of the House of Representatives said,
describing how such involvements provided aspiration to local communities:
It is a sign for the locals, when they see people [diasporas] coming from a
country that is peaceful, stable and has more opportunities investing here
[post-conflict place] it gives hope. As they say to themselves, these guys
know something we dont know, so it provides them aspiration.87 More
specifically, the diasporas economic engagement has been a driving
engine behind the economic recovery of the country, especially due to

the limited aid Somaliland receives from the international community. In the
words of one researcher, diaspora investment first and foremost has
been responsible for economic engagement and job placement. They
are behind all the existing small investments in the country that create
employment opportunities for many people.88
Economic Engagement is a direct effect of immigration

changes.
Suroor, Journalist for The Hindu Newspaper, 10
(Hasan, August 22, 2010, The Hindu, Threat to relocate jobs over Britain's
immigration cap, http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/threat-torelocate-jobs-over-britains-immigration-cap/article588076.ece, Accessed 712-13, RH)
They pointed to Union Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma's
recent remarks that the proposed immigration curbs could hurt
economic engagement between the two countries.
Immigration leads to increased Economic Engagement

Easson, Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company
Directors and of the Royal Institution of Chartered
Surveyors, 13
(Michael, February 9, 2013, The Australian, Skilled migration is the key to a
thriving and cohesive economy, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationalaffairs/opinion/skilled-migration-is-the-key-to-a-thriving-and-cohesiveeconomy/story-e6frgd0x-1226573810800, Accessed 7-12-13, RH)
Australia's skilled migration program is also a key part of Australia in the
Asian Century. In 2011-12, seven of the top 10 permanent migration source
countries were Asian; India became our largest source of permanent migrants
for the first time. This immigration trend is deepening our economic
engagement with the fastest growing region in the world.
Framework
A2: State Inclusion Bad

Detaching domestic policy from its assumptions foregoes
the plight of millions who experience nonstop suffering
Jarvis, Associate Professor of IR at the University of
British Columbia, 0
[Darryl S. L., International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism, p. 128-129, MM]
More is the pity that such irrational and obviously abstruse debate
should so occupy us at a time of great global turmoil. That it does
and continues to do so reflect our lack of judicious criteria for
evaluating theory and, more importantly, the lack of attachment
theorists have to the real world. Certainly it is right and proper that we
ponder the depths of our theoretical imaginations, engage in
epistemological and ontological debate, and analyze the sociology of our
knowledge. But to support that this is the only task of international
theory, let alone the most important one, smacks of intellectual
elitism and displays a certain contempt for those who search for
guidance in their daily struggle as actors in international politics.
What does Ashleys project, his deconstructive efforts, or valiant fight
against positivism say to the truly marginalized, oppressed, and
destitute? How does it help solve the plight of the poor, the
displaced refugees, the casualties of war, or the migrs of death
squads? Does it in any way speak to those whose actions and
thoughts comprise the policy and practice of international relations?
On all these questions one must answer no . This is not to say, of
course, that all theory should be judged by its technical rationality and
problem-solving capacity as Ashley forcefully argues. But to support that
problem-solving technical theory is not necessaryor in some way bad
is a contemptuous position that abrogates any hope of solving
some of the nightmarish realities that millions confront daily. As Holsti
argues, we need ask of these theorists and their theories the ultimate
question, So what? To what purpose do they deconstruct, problematize,
destabilize, undermine, ridicule, and belittle modernist and rationalist
approaches? Does this get us any further, make the world any better, or
enhance the human condition? In what sense can this debate toward
[a] bottomless pit of epistemology and metaphysics be judged
pertinent, relevant, helpful, or cogent to anyone other than those foolish
enough to be scholastically excited by abstract and recondite debate.
Contrary to Ashleys assertions, then, a poststructural approach fails to
empower the marginalized and , in fact, abandons them. Rather than
analyze the political economy of power, wealth, oppression, production,
or international relations and render and intelligible understanding of these
processes, Ashley succeeds in ostracizing those he portends to represent
by delivering an obscure and highly convoluted discourse. If Ashley
wishes to chastise structural realism for its abstractness and
detachment, he must be prepared also to face similar criticism,

especially when he so adamantly intends his work to address the real
life plight of those who struggle at marginal places.
Solvency
Open Borders Fail

Opening the border for inclusion only masks other forms
of exclusion- making immigrants even more hesitant to
cross the border
Motomura 07
(Hiroshi, Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, 2007, Americans in
Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States,
pg 13)
This entire inquiry reflects my hope that national citizenship in the United
States can be a viable context for a sense of belonging and for
participation in civic, political, social, and economic life that is
inclusive and respectful of all individuals. There are certainly other
models of belonging, including transnational models that reflect a
sense of belonging to more than one nation, and postnational
models that think beyond national citizenship entirely. But the
apparent inclusiveness of these other approaches to belonging can
mask other modes of exclusion. If national citizenship matters less, ties of
religion, race, class, and other groupings that are less cosmopolitan or
democratic than national citizenship will matter even more than they do
already. The result may be a world without national walls but also a world of a
thousand petty fortresses, as political philosopher Michael Walzer once put
it.10 Making national citizenship into an inclusive vehicle is not easy.
It requires a welcome of immigrantscrystallized in the idea of
Americans in waitingthat has faded from law and policy in the
United States. Although this idea has weakened and is in danger of
weakening further, it should be restored to prominent influence because it
captures this basic truth: a sensible we/they line must reflect the
understanding that many of them will become part of us. This
understanding was the conceptual engine for integrating
generations of immigrantsmostly those from Europe. With much of
this understanding gone, we should not be surprised if more recent
waves of immigrants, especially immigrants of color, seem more
reluctant to cross the we/they line into American society. Recovering
the lost story of immigrants as Americans in waiting is thus crucial not only to
giving immigrants their due, but also to recovering the vision of our national
future that is reflected in the phrase a nation of immigrants that America
is made up of immigrants, but still one nation.
Open Borders do not solve for either economic equality,

worker oppression or Democratic representation
Immigration Laws)
An open-borders solution is, of course, not the silver bullet that
would instantly cure all of the nations woes. Far from it. Inequalities
in the modern U.S. capitalist system will persist. The receding of the
immigration laws will allow greater labor mobility and free the labor market to
operate more efficiently in response to market forces than the current system
of immigration controls does. Efficient markets, however, rarely operate
without perpetuating or increasing economic inequality. Other tools
would be needed to address the endemic problems of economic
inequality in American social life. Several proposals in this book,
however, are designed to help ameliorate the problems of economic
inequality exacerbated by open borders. Wealth redistribution policies that
transfer benefits from those economic actors who gain from easy labor
mobility to the poorest citizens of the United States constitute one possibility.
Those, such as lower-skilled workers, who benefit littleor perhaps lose
groundbecause of the immigration of workers should receive transfer
payments or tax reductions funded by taxes paid by the beneficiaries of free
labor migration, primarily businesses and employers. In addition, the federal
government, which collects the lions share of A Call for Truly Comprehensive
Immigration Reform | 43 tax revenues paid by noncitizens, should provide
adequate resources to state and local governments that today provide
services, such as emergency services and a public education, to immigrants.
To a limited extent, states have aggressivelyat times successfullypressed
the federal government on an ad hoc basis for financial assistance to defray
the costs of immigration and immigrants. To help cover those costs, resources
could be redirected by the federal government to states with large immigrant
populations. This would reduce the fiscal pressures at the state and local
levels, which often fuel resentment and anti-immigration sentiment. Last but
not least, the federal government must do much more to ensure that
wage and labor protections are enforced for all workers in the
United States. Currently, the law completely fails to regulate the secondary
labor market, in which immigrants are exploited and lack wage and labor
protections. The existence of the unregulated secondary market
undercuts the efforts of labor in the primary market, in which
employers tend to comply with the law, to improve its treatment by
employers. On a related note, open borders as advocated in this book
would do nothing to solve the dilemmas of democracy American
style. That project, of course, deserves the nations attention. As the
presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 show, much work remains to be
done in the United States to ensure that all U.S. citizens enjoy a
truly democratic election process that does not disenfranchise a
large percentage of the greater community. With millions of noncitizen
residents barred from voting, the United States already has serious problems
with ensuring true democracy for all residents. A similar problem continues to
afflict many minority citizens. One possibility to improve the responsiveness
of government to immigrants, which is beyond the scope of this book and
would surely provoke controversy, might be to extend the franchise to
noncitizen residents of the United States.86 The United States finds itself at a
historical crossroads. Immigration is on the front pages of newspapers across
the country. Restrictionist messages fill talk show radio and the national
news. Immigration deserves the nations attention. But it warrants sober
analysis, not sound bites designed to rile base instincts and insult and
alienate members of the national community. A real effort must be made to
address the most fundamental problem with U.S. immigration law: that our
laws are dramatically out of synch with the social, economic, and political
reality of immigration in the modern world.
Borders GoodLiberty
Borders create competition between governments that is
key to maintaining individual liberty
Morriss 2004 [Andrew, Chairholder in Law and Professor
of Business at the University of Alabama, Borders and
Liberty, Foundation for Economic Education, The
Freedman, Vol 54 No 7,
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?
aid=4646]
Borders play a critical role in our lives. Some of the borders that matter
to us are ones we establish ourselves: this is my house and property; that is
your house and property. By choosing what is mine and using the legal
system to mark it off from what is yours, I create a border. While not quite as
invulnerable as suggested by the maxim A mans home is his castle, my
property gives me a firm border against you. Borders come from property
rights and are essential to a free society. At the macro level we have
political bordersunrelated to property rights, more permeable than
personal-level borders, but just as important to ensuring liberty.
When I drive from my home to my office, I cross the borders of multiple
political subdivisions of the state of Ohio, moving from Columbia Township to
Cleveland, from Lorain County to Cuyahoga County. Those borders are
invisible but important. Cleveland confiscates 2 percent of my salary because
my work lies within its borders (Ohio cities can levy local income taxes).
Columbia Township taxes my home. Columbia does not tax my income, and
so income I earn at home is worth 2 percent more to me than wages at work.
Cleveland cannot tax my home, freeing me from the concern that
people I cannot vote for could tax property as well as income. (Of
course I also worry about people I can vote for taxing my income and assets,
but at least there is a theoretical possibility of throwing the rascals out when I
vote.) These borders are all permeable: I do not need to show identification
to pass across any of them and do not need to justify my purpose in moving
among the various cities and towns along my drive to and from work. Other
macro-level borders are less permeable. When I walk across the U.S.-Mexican
border near my parents home in Yuma, Arizona, in one direction I must
satisfy Mexican authorities that my purpose is legitimate. In the other, I must
satisfy U.S. authorities that my return is legitimate. In both directions, people
with guns are standing by, ready to keep me out should I fail to satisfy them
about the legitimacy of my purpose. Only the Americans with guns seem
worried about who is entering the United States. They look at my
identification, ask what I was doing in Mexico, and, sometimes, have dogs
sniff my vehicle and belongings. In many respects, these macro-level
borders are wonderful things. Lorain and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio
must compete for my familys residence. Choosing to live where we do is
related to the taxes charged by the communities where we might have lived.
Investors make similar choices. The choices by families about where to
live and invest their money influence communities public policies.
Choosing bad policies produces an exodus; choosing good policies leads to
immigration of both capital and people. For example, Cleveland is trying to

reverse its post-World War II decline in population by offering to exempt new
construction from real-estate taxes for 15 years. Such competition isnt
perfect, of course, and only operates on the margin. Desirable locations such
as New York City will be able to impose higher taxes than less-desirable
locations such as Cleveland. Nonetheless, the competition offered on
local taxation policy and other regulatory issues is important in
restraining governments from infringing liberty. Macro borders with
competition enhance liberty. At the state and local level the only way
politicians can prevent such competition is by eliminating borders. In
Cleveland, regional leaders are pushing consolidation of local governments
into one big entity as the solution to the exodus of population and investment
to lower-tax jurisdictions. Fortunately, politicians self-interest also cuts
against consolidation since it would mean fewer positions for them.
The Mexican border is specifically key to individual liberty

Morriss 2004 [Andrew, Chairholder in Law and Professor
of Business at the University of Alabama, Borders and
Liberty, Foundation for Economic Education, The
Freedman, Vol 54 No 7,
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?
aid=4646]
National borders are also important sources of liberty. The Mexican
border, for example, offers a choice between a drug-regulatory
regime that requires a doctors prescription for most
pharmaceuticals and one that does not. The streams of visitors to towns
such as Algodones, Baja California, are not merely seeking lower prices.
Some are seeking medicines unapproved in the United States; others are
looking for medications for which they have no U.S. prescription, whether for
recreational (such as Viagra) or medical (antibiotics) use. Mexico does not
offer the pro-plaintiff tort doctrines of U.S. product-liability law, has lower
barriers to entry for pharmacists, and a wide-open market for
pharmaceuticals that includes openly advertised price competition. U.S.
residents near the Mexican border thus have a choice of regulatory regimes
for their medicine that those of us who live farther away do not. Border-region
residents can buy medicines either with the U.S. bundle of qualities,
restrictions, and rights, or the Mexican bundle. From the level of traffic of
elderly visitors Ive seen at the border crossing, it appears the Mexican
bundle is more attractive for many. Borders are thus friends of liberty in
two important ways. First, without borders we would not have the
competition among jurisdictions that restricts attempts to abridge
liberty. The impact of borders goes beyond those who live near them.
Pharmacists try to prevent the free sale of prescription drugs, but they would
be much more successful if Mexico did not offer an alternative for at least
some consumers. It is the margin that matters, and so free availability of
pharmaceuticals in Mexico benefits even those of us who live in Ohio.
Jurisdictions thus compete to attract people and capital. This
competition motivates governments to act to preserve liberty.

Famously, for example, states compete for corporations, with Delaware the
current market leader. Delaware corporate law offers companies the
combination of a mostly voluntary set of default rules and an expert decisionmaking body (the Court of Chancery). As a result, many corporations, large
and small, choose to incorporate in Delaware, making it their legal residence.
(Their actual headquarters need not be physically located there.)
Corporations get a body of liberty-enhancing rules; Delaware gets tax
revenue and employment in the corporate services and legal fields. That
states position is no accident. At the beginning of the twentieth century, New
Jersey was the market leader in corporate law. When New Jerseys legislature
made ill-advised changes to its corporations statute that reduced shareholder
value, Delaware seized the opportunity and offered essentially the older
version of New Jerseys law. Within a few years, the vast majority of New
Jersey corporations became Delaware corporations. The second way that
borders further liberty is that they allow diversity in law and other
community norms, letting each individual find the setting that most
resembles the type of society he or she desires. Everyone in Ohio need
not agree on how to organize town activities: I can live in a township with few
taxes and few services, and my more left-wing colleagues at the university
who prefer a more interventionist society can live in Cleveland Heights, a
suburb with an aggressive central-planning mentality and high taxes.
Borders GoodIdentity
Turn rejection of fences-as-borders is unethical
separation of communities is a necessary precondition for
human identity
Williams, professor of IR at the University of Durham, 3
[John, 7-1-3, Geopolitics, Territorial Borders, International Ethics and
Geography: Do Good Fences Still Make Good Neighbours?, p. 37-40,
Academic Search Complete, MM]
Defending the Ethics of Territorial Borders- The foregoing discussion leads us
to two issues to discuss in relation to developing a partial and limited defence
of the ethics of territorial borders. The ontological strength of territorial
borders leads to questions about the ethical component of the depth of
practice that supports this. Here, the article wishes to point to evidence that
borders of some sort, including territorial borders, are deeply rooted in
ethics. The second ethical issue that arises relates to the defence of a neoclassical constructivist mode of enquiry into international relations. This is an
ethically consequentialist account that looks at the desirable elements of
practice that flow from the more fundamental ethical role of borders. Turning
to the first of these tasks, it is implausible to assert that institutions as
enduring as territorial borders-as-fences inextricably linked to the
sovereign state have endured for so long and are so entrenched unless
borders are in some way representative of a need for division in
human ethical life. There is evidence in both the material already
surveyed and from elsewhere in normative and ethical accounts of division,
distinction and differentiation to support the idea that the ontological
strength of territorial borders in international relations can be
connected to a deep-rooted need for division in human ethical life. In
relation to the material at the heart of this paper, territorial borders are
synonymous with division. 'Boundaries, by definition, constitute lines of
separation or contact.... The point of contact or separation usually creates an
"us" and an "Other" identity.' 62 In their idealised essentialism they
divide tones of sovereign control: they divide inside from outside:
they divide foreign from domestic: they divide our identities as
citizens; they divide national communities: they divide those to whom
we owe primary allegiance from those who come second (if anywhere) in
moral calculation: they divide us from them. The endurance of borders
and boundaries in human society, whether they be territorial borders or
otherwise, implies that borders and the need to create an 'us' and an 'other'
are very powerfully entrenched in human relations and our ability to identify
and understand ourselves. The critique of reified sovereign
territoriality in political geography does not lead to the
abandonment of territorial borders. Instead they are reinterpreted as
features of hegemony, for Agnew and Corbridge, of power for Tuathail and
of identity for Newman, requiring the re-territorialisation, rather than
the de-territorialisation, of social life under conditions of
globalisation. The anthropological work of Dorman and Wilson points to

the need for boundary distinctions between social groups and the
vital role that these play in the maintenance and development of
identity ." Frances Harbour's survey of universal ethical propositions, also
drawing on anthropological work, suggests a necessary division in human
ethical life. By extension, the power-riddled, historically conditioned,
accident prone and even arbitrary, careless or plain misguided creation of
territorial borders does have deep roots. Borders, including territorial
borders, may be inescapable in international politics not just for
reasons of power, but for reasons of right, too. Recalling Hutching's
injunction not to separate these into essentially incommensurable categories
of thought we can argue that the weight of evidence about the ubiquity
of borders points to their being a necessary part of human life, and
a basic category of ethical thought about that life. Philosophical weight
can also be brought to bear in defence of a view of borders and boundaries as
being pan of the human condition through the work of Hannah Arendt. She
famously argued that 'we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that
nobody is ever the same as anyone else who lived, lives or will live..." The
unique, distinctive individual finds their self-understanding through
interaction with fellow human beings with whom they share
community and in spaces where they can meet as equals. This equality
importantly includes an equality of community membership granting them a
set of shared ideas, experiences and values, rather than some sort of decontextualised equality such as that experienced behind a Rawlsian veil of
ignorance." Arendt's account emphasises the requirement for
communities to retain their distinctiveness from one another ,
including through the use of borders and boundaries. [Human] dignity
needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political
principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend
the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in
and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.' In simple terms,
borders can be seen as either being prior to and creative of difference, or that
difference is prior to and creative of borders. This stark juxtaposition of
opposites is resolved in favour of the latter option by the arguments that
borders are social phenomena and that the human condition is
characterised by an essential diversity of human beings and the
necessary relationship between distinctive individuals and their
communities. The durability and depth of sedimentation of territorial
borders as fences suggest that division, and division on a territorial
basis, speaks to a deep-seated need of human identity and also in
human ethics. We need to have reasons for granting a privileged position to
some that is not available to others, perhaps in the form of recognising rights
and duties of special beneficence, and accepting that proximity, both
geographical and emotional, and location upon one side of the line on the
map or the other, does make a difference.' Territorial division in the form of
states is an important, but certainly not the only, aspect of this. The
endurance of the territorial border-as-fence as the primary
mechanism for division in international politics cannot , though, be

treated as prima facie ethically irrelevant or straightforwardly contingent.
However, its position as a social phenomenon also means that the creation
and re-creation of the border-as-fence has to be held up to constant ethical
questioning and critique. The arguments of tradition, culture and
precedent as to who is to count and who is not, who is to be a citizen
and who is not, what the role of territory ought to be and how it should be
delimited cannot be taken for granted." As the normative theorists insist,
a part of ethical analysis and enquiry is to constantly question
dominant ethical arguments. This may be crucial in exploring the
current location of territorial borders and the enunciation of the role
that they play, but such a critique may not be able to land an ethical knockout blow upon a feature of human ethical thought and life that seems to be
highly durable. Location and role may change, but that borders will have
locations and play roles, and that these should he critically explored, may
be a fixture. A cosmopolitan international ethic thus needs to engage
with the desirability of division as well as to promote inclusiveness.
There is a need for cosmopolitan ethics to go further than identifying the
consequences of territorial borders that are the frequent target of normative
critique. Repression, religious intolerance, discrimination, ethnic
cleansing and so on have become inextricably associated with the
territorial state. The consequences of the existence of territorial borders
can indeed be extreme and morally repugnant. However, whether such
effects are an inevitable and essential result of the existence of
territorial borders seems far less certain . We may argue that the role
of territorial borders to divide in international politics is potentially
ethically justifiable. Such justification needs to be rooted in elements of
existing practice and values that are generally regarded as legitimate and
serving important purposes in shaping the way the world ought to be. If we
accept the view of normative theory outlined earlier then we can see
that the social creation and recreation of ethics includes, via mechanisms
like territorial borders, a view of division and distinction that is ethically
valued. An appreciation of the constructed and dynamic nature of
territorial borders holds out the prospect of being able to detach
these aspects from the more violent practices that have also
accumulated around territorial borders. This, of course, is easier said than
done.
Diversity threatens the survival of the national American

identity
Beirich and Potok 9
(Heidi and Mark, Director of Research and Intelligence project, Southern
Poverty Law Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, USA: Hate Groups,
Radical-Right Violence, on the Rise Policing,
http://policing.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/pap020v1)
But the most important factor driving the rise of these groups is that,
although the United States has always been a multiracial country,
many whites view it as having been created by and for Christian
whites. Beginning in 1965, when racial immigration quotas were
abolished, large numbers of immigrantsparticularly Latinos
entered the country at the same time that birth rates for native-born
whites were falling precipitously. As darker skinned immigrants arrived in
places that had only rarely seen such newcomers, many whites reacted
with fear and anger. This has been greatly exacerbated by the U.S. Census
Bureau's prediction that whites will lose their absolute majority in the
United States in 2042; the news in 2000 that California had lost its white
majority had already fueled these fears. As other states follow suit in coming
years, more whites may well resort to extremism. For white supremacists,
this coming date spells impending doom, a fact that many white
supremacist ideologues have harped upon relentlessly. Jared Taylor, editor
of the racist American Renaissance magazine, offers what is probably the
most cogent critique of mainstream, politically correct viewsa
critique that seems to have found great sympathy. Some think that it's
virtuous of the United States, after having been founded and built by
Europeans, according to European institutions, to reinvent itself or
transform itself into a non-white country with a Third World
population, Taylor told an interviewer for The New White Nationalism in
America: Its Challenge to Immigration (Swain, 2002). I think that's a kind of
cultural and racial suicideWere all now more or less obliged to say,
Oh! Diversity is a wonderful thing for the country, whereas,
practically every example of tension, bloodletting, civil unrest
around the world is due precisely to the kind of thing were importing
diversity (Swain, 2002). These factors have created a situation ripe for
organizers of the radical right. Already, in the wake of Obama's elections,
groups ranging from the white nationalist Stormfront to the neo-Confederate
League of the South, were claiming to have experienced dramatically
increased interest (Scheer, 2008).
A2: Borders Unethical

No ethical barriers to immigration control stabilization
for the future is key
FAIR, national, nonprofit, public-interest membership
organization, 9
[9-9, Federation for American Immigration Reform, The United States Is Already Overpopulated,
http://www.fairus.org/issue/the-united-states-is-already-overpopulated, accessed 7-9-13, MM]
The predominant role of immigration in causing U.S. population

growth means that Congress can effectively stabilize the population
through a change in immigration policy. Unsustainable growth
stems from two policy decisions in Washington the increase in
immigration quotas to record levels since 1965 and the ineffective
enforcement of laws designed to deter illegal immigration. The U.S.
accepts far more legal immigrants as a percent of our population
than do the nations of Europe. As a result, the U.S. population is
booming at about one percent per year, while Western Europe has
reached stability. Recognizing that immigration was the dominant
contributor to U.S. population growth, President Clintons Council on
Sustainable Development acknowledged in 1996 that, reducing current
immigration levels is a necessary part of working toward
sustainability in the United States . Since then, immigration has
reached never before seen levels and the U.S. population has grown by a 42
million. A change in U.S. immigration policy would not mean turning
our back on cultural and ethnic diversity, but the number of
immigrants coming to the U.S. each year must be reduced in order to
achieve population stability. Each year nearly 300,000 people emigrate
from the U.S. and become permanent residents in other countries. By
bringing immigration and emigration into balance the nation can honor its
immigrant heritage while stabilizing its population.37 There is no ethical
or practical barrier to population stabilization .38 The only barrier is
a lack of political will.
Removing BordersEnergy Consumption

Immigration increases energy consumption 40 years of
data proves.
Martin, Federation for American Immigration Reform
Director of Special Projects, 9
(Jack, June 2009, Immigration, Energy and the Enviornment, page 2-5,
http://www.fairus.org/site/DocServer/energy_enviro.pdf?docID=2941,
Accessed 7-9-13, RH)
Between 1974 and 2007 total immigrant admissions were 27 million
persons. Thus direct legal immigration accounted for 31.5 percent of
the U.S. population increase during this period.The share of population
growth attributable to immigration is still higher when illegal immigration and
the children born to the immigrants after their arrival are included. The close
correlation between increased U.S. energy consumption and
increased population is further illustrated by the data in Table 3, which
presents a breakdown of energy consumption by consuming sector. The table
shows that per capita energy consumption in the residential sector
remained virtually unchanged over the 19732007 period. Thus the
entire 44.7 percent increase in residential energy use was entirely a
factor of population growth. By contrast, in the industrial sector energy
consumption was virtually unchanged between 1973 and 2007 while per
capital consumption actually declined about 30 percent. Several factors were
responsible for this decline. In response to the increase in energy prices that
commenced in 1974, U.S. industry installed more energy efficient production
equipment. Secondly, some historically energy-intensive industries such as
steel and basic materials have moved offshore. Finally, the decrease in per
capita consumption in this sector reflects a basic structural change that has
occurred in the U.S. economy. Today, a greater percentage of GDP is derived
from service industries such as banking, financial services, medical
services, travel services, etc. Most of the energy used in these service
industries appears in the commercial energy category in Table 3. Indeed,
when per capita energy consumption data in the commercial and industrial
sectors are added together, the total has still declined by about 16 percent
while total energy consumption in these two sectors increased from
42.2 quads to 50.9 quads (21%). Thus, once again, this 8.7 quad
increase may be attributable entirely to population growth. In the
transportation sector, there was a 9 quad increase in energy consumption
between 1974 and 2007. However, in this sector, there was also a 9.1
percent increase in per capita energy consumption, a fact which
likely relates to more cars per capita, increased purchase of less
economical vehicles such as sport utility vehicles [SUVs] and
Humvees, as well as the extended use of older, less fuel-efficient
cars by population segments with limited means. Per capita motor
gasoline consumption in the U.S. was little changed between 1974 and 2005,
i.e., a seven percent increase despite major improvements in the fuel
efficiency of new vehicles.3 However, total gasoline consumption
increased over the same period by 53 percent. The driving factor

behind gasoline consumption is vehicle-miles, which in turn is driven
by population growth. Total vehicle-miles for passenger cars, motorcycles,
light trucks and SUVs rose approximately 113 percent between 1974 and
2000. The fact that the growth in vehicles-miles was more than 3 times as
fast as the population increase should not be surprising. In the first place, as
the population of an urban region grows, the urbanized area increases in size,
and the residential areas are almost always on the periphery of the urban
region. Therefore commute distances are increased. Secondly, population
growth has caused property values near some urban centers to rise
dramatically. People with modest incomes who have been priced out of the
housing market in these urban centers have been buying homes in small
towns that, in some cases, are located considerable distances from their
places of employment. Finally, it should be noted that the fastest growing
component of transportation energy has been jet fuel. Between 1974 and
2000, jet fuel consumption increased from 1.60 quads to 3.587 quads and per
capita consumption rose from 56 gal. in 1974 to 94 gal. in 2000.6 This
increase in per capita consumption was responsible for about 1.5 quads of
the 2.0 quad increase in jet fuel consumption between 1974 and 2000.
Looking at the total usage, population growth is again indicated as a
primary factor in the overall 34.1 percent increase in energy
consumption over this same period because overall usage per capita
decreased by 6.3 percent.
Biopower Answers
A2: Biopower Bad

Biopower does not make massacres vitala specific form
of violent sovereignty is also required.
Ojakangas, 05 - PhD in Social Science and Academy research fellow @
the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies @ University of Helsinki 2005
(Mika, The Impossible Dialogue on Biopower: Foucault and Agamben, May
2005, Foucault Studies, No. 2, http://www.foucaultstudies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)
Admittedly, in the era of biopolitics, as Foucault writes, even

massacres have become vital. This is not the case, however,
because violence is hidden in the foundation of biopolitics, as
Agamben believes. Although the twentieth century thanatopolitics is the
reverse of biopolitics, it should not be understood, according to
Foucault, as the effect, the result, or the logical consequence of
biopolitical rationality. Rather, it should be understood, as he
suggests, as an outcome of the demonic combination of the
sovereign power and biopower, of the city-citizen game and the
shepherd-flock game or as I would like to put it, of patria potestas (fathers
unconditional power of life and death over his son) and cura maternal
(mothers unconditional duty to take care of her children). Although
massacres can be carried out in the name of care, they do not follow
from the logic of biopower for which death is the object of taboo.
They follow from the logic of sovereign power, which legitimates
killing by whatever arguments it chooses, be it God, Nature, or life.
Biopower does not cause racism or massacresit is only

when it is in the context of a violent or racist government
that it is dangerous.
Ojakangas, 05 - PhD in Social Science and Academy research fellow @
the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies @ University of Helsinki 2005
(Mika, The Impossible Dialogue on Biopower: Foucault and Agamben, May
2005, Foucault Studies, No. 2, http://wlt-studies.com/no2/ojakangas1.pdf)
It is the logic of racism, according to Foucault, that makes

killing acceptable in modern biopolitical societies. This is not to
say, however, that biopolitical societies are necessarily more
racist than other societies. It is to say that in the era of
biopolitics, only racism, because it is a determination immanent to
life, can justify the murderous function of the State .89
However, racism can only justify killing killing that does not
follow from the logic of biopower but from the logic of the
sovereign power. Racism is, in other words, the only way the
sovereign power, the right to kill, can be maintained in biopolitical
societies: Racism is bound up with workings of a State that is obliged
to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race,
to exercise its sovereign power.90 Racism is, in other words, a
discourse quite compatible91 with biopolitics through which

biopower can be most smoothly transformed into the form of sovereign
power. Such transformation, however, changes everything. A biopolitical
society that wishes to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, even
in the name of race, ceases to be a mere biopolitical society,
practicing merely biopolitics. It becomes a demonic combination of
sovereign power and biopower, exercising sovereign means for
biopolitical ends. In its most monstrous form, it becomes the Third
Reich. For this reason, I cannot subscribe to Agambens thesis,
according to which biopolitics is absolutized in the Third Reich.93 To be
sure, the Third Reich used biopolitical means it was a state in which
insurance and reassurance were universal94 and aimed for
biopolitical ends in order to improve the living conditions of the
German people -- but so did many other nations in the 1930s. What
distinguishes the Third Reich from those other nations is the fact
that, alongside its biopolitical apparatus, it erected a massive
machinery of death. It became a society that unleashed murderous
power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take life
throughout the entire social body, as Foucault puts it.95 It is not,
therefore, biopolitics that was absolutized in the Third Reich
as a matter of fact, biopolitical measures in the Nazi Germany
were, although harsh, relatively modest in scale compared to
some present day welfare states but rather the sovereign
power:
This power to kill, which ran through the entire social body
of Nazi society, was first manifested when the power to take life, the
power of life and death, was granted not only to the State but to a
whole series of individuals, to a considerable number of people (such
as the SA, the SS, and so on). Ultimately, everyone in the Nazi State
had the power of life and death over his or her neighbours, if only
because of the practice of informing, which effectively meant doing
away with the people next door, or having them done away with.96
The only thing that the Third Reich actually absolutizes is, in
other words, the sovereignty of power and therefore, the
nakedness of bare life at least if sovereignty is defined in the
Agambenian manner: The sovereign is the one with respect to whom
all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with
respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.97
Biopower is inevitable
Wright 08 (Nathan, Fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy,
Camp as Paradigm: Bio-Politics and State Racism in Foucault and Agamben,

2008 http://ccjournal.cgu.edu/past_issues/nathan_wright.html) TYBG
Perhaps the one failure of Foucaults that, unresolved, rings as most ominous
is his failure to further examine the problem of bio-political state racism that
he first raises in his lecture series, Society Must Be Defended. At the end of
the last lecture, Foucault suggests that bio-power is here to stay as
a fixture of modernity. Perhaps given its focus on the preservation of
the population of the nation it which it is practiced, bio-power itself
is something that Foucault accepts as here to stay. Yet his analysis of
bio-politics and bio-power leads inevitably to state-sanctioned

racism, be the government democratic, socialist, or fascist. As a
result, he ends the lecture series with the question, How can one
both make a bio-power function and exercise the rights of war, the
rights of murder and the function of death, without becoming racist?
That was the problem, and that, I think, is still the problem. It was
a problem to which he never returned. However, in the space opened by
Foucaults failure to solve the problem of state racism and to elaborate a
unitary theory of power (Agamben 1998, 5) steps Agamben in an attempt to
complete an analysis of Foucauldian bio-politics and to, while not solve the
problem of state racism, at least give direction for further inquiry and hope of
a politics that escapes the problem of this racism.
Biopower is strategically reversibleit can become a tool

of resistance and empowerment
Campbell, 98 (David, professor of international politics at the University
of Newcastle, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics
of Identity, pg. 204-205) TYBG
The political possibilities enabled by this permanent provocation of
power and freedom can be specified in more detail by thinking in
terms of the predominance of the bio-power discussed above. In this
sense, because the governmental practices of biopolitics in Western
nations have been increasingly directed toward modes of being and
forms of life such that sexual conduct has become an object of concern,
individual health has been figured as a domain of discipline, and the family
has been transformed into an instrument of government the ongoing
agonism between those practices and the freedom they seek to
contain means that individuals have articulated a series of
counterdemands drawn from those new fields of concern. For
example, as the state continues to prosecute people according to sexual
orientation, human rights activists have proclaimed the right of gays to enter
into formal marriages, adopt children, and receive the same health and
insurance benefits granted to their straight counterparts. These claims are
a consequence of the permanent provocation of power and freedom
in biopolitics, and stand as testament to the strategic reversibility
of power relations: if the terms of governmental practices can be
made into focal points for resistances, then the history of
government as the conduct of conduct is interwoven with the
history of dissenting counterconducts.39 Indeed, the emergence of
the state as the major articulation of the political has involved an
unceasing agonism between those in office and those they rule. State
intervention in everyday life has long incited popular collective action, the
result of which has been both resistance to the state and new claims upon
the state. In particular, the core of what we now call citizenship consists of
multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their
struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war. In
more recent times, constituencies associated with womens, youth,
ecological, and peace movements (among others) have also issued claims on
society. These resistances are evidence that the break with the
discursive/nondiscursive dichotomy central to the logic of

interpretation undergirding this analysis is (to put it in conventional
terms) not only theoretically licensed; it is empirically warranted.
Indeed, expanding the interpretive imagination so as to enlarge the
categories through which we understand the constitution of the political
has been a necessary precondition for making sense of Foreign Policys
concern for the ethical borders of identity in America. Accordingly, there are
manifest political implications that flow from theorizing identity. As Judith
Butler concluded: The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of
politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which
identity is articulated.
Democracy Checks
Democracy checks radicalization of biopolitics
empirically proven.
Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the
University of California-Davis, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some

Reflections on Our Discourse about "Modernity", in Central European History,
Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004) pgs. 18-19) TYBG
In an important programmatic statement of 1996 Geoff Eley celebrated the
fact that Foucault's ideas have "fundamentally directed attention
away from institutionally centered conceptions of government and
the state ... and toward a dispersed and decentered notion of power
and its 'microphysics.'"48 The "broader, deeper, and less visible
ideological consensus" on "technocratic reason and the ethical
unboundedness of science" was the focus of his interest.49 But the "powerproducing effects in Foucault's 'microphysical' sense" (Eley) of the
construction of social bureaucracies and social knowledge, of "an entire
institutional apparatus and system of practice" (Jean Quataert), simply do
not explain Nazi policy.50 The destructive dynamic of Nazism was a
product not so much of a particular modern set of ideas as of a
particular modern political structure, one that could realize the
disastrous potential of those ideas. What was critical was not the expansion
of the instruments and disciplines of biopolitics, which occurred everywhere
in Europe. Instead, it was the principles that guided how those instruments
and disciplines were organized and used, and the external constraints on
them. In National Socialism, biopolitics was shaped by a totalitarian
conception of social management focused on the power and ubiquity of the
volkisch state. In democratic societies, biopolitics has historically been
constrained by a rights-based strategy of social management. This is
a point to which I will return shortly. For now, the point is that what was
decisive was actually politics at the level of the state. A comparative
framework can help us to clarify this point. Other states passed
compulsory sterilization laws in the 1930s. Indeed, individual states in
the United States had already begun doing so in 1907. Yet they did not
proceed to the next steps adopted by National Socialism, mass
sterilization, mass "eugenic" abortion and murder of the "defective."
Individual figures in, for example, the U.S. did make such suggestions. But
neither the political structures of democratic states nor their legal and
political principles permitted such poli? cies actually being enacted. Nor did
the scale of forcible sterilization in other countries match that of the Nazi
program. I do not mean to suggest that such programs were not horrible; but
in a democratic political context they did not develop the dynamic of
constant radicalization and escalation that characterized Nazi policies.
Democracy checks biopolitical coercion and violence.

Dickinson 04 (Edward Ross, Associate Professor of History at the University
of California-Davis, Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on
Our Discourse about "Modernity", in Central European History, Vol. 37, No. 1
(2004), pg 32.)
Again, as Peukert pointed out, many advocates of a rights-based welfare
structure were open to the idea that "stubborn" cases might be legitimate targets for sterilization; the right to health could easily be redefined as primarily
a duty to be healthy, for example. But the difference between a strategy
of social management built on the rights of the citizen and a system
of racial policy built on the total power of the state is not merely a
semantic one; such differences had very profound political
implications, and established quite different constraints. The rights-based
strategy was actually not very compatible with exclusionary and
coercive policies; it relied too heavily on the cooperation of its
targets and of armies of volunteers, it was too embedded in a
democratic institutional structure and civil society, it lacked powerful
legal and institutional instruments of coercion, and its rhetorical structure
was too heavily slanted toward inclusion and tolerance.
Democracy checks biopolitical violence


Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004) pg. 35) TYBG
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century biopolitical
discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our own time are
unmistakable. Both are instances of the "disciplinary society" and of
biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering modernity, and they share that
genealogy with more authoritarian states, including the National Socialist
state, but also fascist Italy, for example. And it is certainly fruitful to view
them from this very broad perspective. But that analysis can easily
become superficial and misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly
different strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes.
Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also
substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all, again, it
has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic that
characterized National Socialism (or for that matter Stalinism), the
psychotic logic that leads from economistic population management
to mass murder. Again, there is always the potential for such a discursive
regime to generate coercive policies. In those cases in which the regime of
rights does not successfully produce "health," such a system can and
historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But again, there
are political and policy potentials and constraints in such a
structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those of
National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes require,
enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and participation that is
functionally incompatible with authoritarian or totalitarian
structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends through a regime of
democratic citizenship does appear, historically, to have imposed
increasingly narrow limits on coercive policies, and to have
generated a "logic" or imperative of increasing liberalization. Despite
limitations imposed by political context and the slow pace of discursive

change, I think this is the unmistakable message of the really very impressive
waves of legislative and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in
Germany.90
Liberal government solvesbiopower must be combined

with a concept of racial sovereignty to cause their impacts
Dean 04 (Mitchell, professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle,
2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf) TYBG
Second Thesis: It is not merely the succession or addition of the
modern powers over life to the ancient right of death but their very
combination within modern states that is of significance. How these
powers are combined accounts for whether they are malign or
benign. According to this view, it is not the moment that life became a
political object in the eighteenth century that defined the disturbing features
of modern states. Rather, the different ways in which bio-politics is combined
with sovereign power decide their character. Certain passages from
Foucaults lectures and from the History of Sexuality can be interpreted in
this way. In a passage from the latter, Foucault shows that the genocidal
character of National Socialism did not simply arise from its
extension of bio-power.16 Nazism was concerned with the total
administration of the life, of the family, of marriage, procreation,
education and with the intensification of disciplinary micro-powers. But it
articulated this with another set of features concerned with the
oneiric exaltation of a superior blood, of fatherland, and of the triumph
of the race. In other words, if we are to understand how the most
dramatic forces of life and death were unleashed in the twentieth
century, we have to understand how bio-power was articulated with
elements of sovereignty and its symbolics. Pace Bauman, it is not
simply the development of instrumental rationality in the form of modern
bio-power, or a bureaucratic power applied to life that makes the
Holocaust possible. It is the system of linkages, re-codings and reinscriptions of sovereign notions of fatherland, territory, and blood within
the new bio-political discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene that
makes the unthinkable thinkable. The fact that all modern states
must articulate elements of sovereignty with bio-politics Contretemps
5, December 2004 21 also allows for a virtuous combination. The
virtue of liberal and democratic forms of government is that they
deploy two instruments to check the unfettered imperatives of biopower, one drawn from political economy and the other from
sovereignty itself.17 Liberalism seeks to review the imperative to
govern too much by pointing to the quasinatural processes of the
market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are external to
government. To govern economically means to govern through economic and
other social processes external to government and also to govern in an
efficient, cost-effective way. Liberalism also invokes the freedom and
rights of a new subjectthe sovereign individual. By governing
through freedom and in relation to freedom, advanced liberal
democracies are able to differentiate their bio-politics from that of

modern totalitarian states and older police states.
Biopower Good
Biopower goodit doesnt create bare life; instead it
produces extra-life.
Ojakangas 5 (Mika, Doctorate in Social Science, Impossible Dialogue on
Biopower, Foucault Studies)
Moreover, life as the object and the subject of biopower given that
life is everywhere, it becomes everywhere is in no way bare, but is as the
synthetic notion of life implies, the multiplicity of the forms of life, from the
nutritive life to the intellectual life, from the biological levels of life to the
political existence of man.43 Instead of bare life, the life of biopower is
a plenitude of life, as Foucault puts it.44 Agamben is certainly right in
saying that the production of bare life is, and has been since Aristotle, a main
strategy of the sovereign power to establish itself to the same degree that
sovereignty has been the main fiction of juridicoinstitutional thinking from
Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt. The sovereign power is, indeed, based on
bare life because it is capable of confronting life merely when
stripped off and isolated from all forms of life, when the entire
existence of a man is reduced to a bare life and exposed to an unconditional
threat of death. Life is undoubtedly sacred for the sovereign power in
the sense that Agamben defines it. It can be taken away without a
homicide being committed. In the case of biopower, however, this
does not hold true. In order to function properly, bio power cannot
reduce life to the level of bare life, because bare life is life that can only
be taken away or allowed to persist which also makes understandable the
vast critique of sovereignty in the era of biopower. Biopower needs a
notion of life that corresponds to its aims. What then is the aim of bio
power? Its aim is not to produce bare life but, as Foucault emphasizes,
to multiply life,45 to produce extralife.46 Biopower needs, in
other words, a notion of life which enables it to accomplish this task.
The modern synthetic notion of life endows it with such a notion. It enables
biopower to invest life through and through, to optimize forces,
aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them
more difficult to govern. It could be argued, of course, that instead of
bare life (zoe) the form of life (bios) functions as the foundation of biopower.
However, there is no room either for a bios in the modern bio political
order because every bios has always been, as Agamben emphasizes, the
result of the exclusion of zoe from the political realm. The modern biopolitical
order does not exclude anything not even in the form of inclusive
exclusion. As a matter of fact, in the era of biopolitics, life is already a bios
that is only its own zoe. It has already moved into the site that Agamben
suggests as the remedy of the political pathologies of modernity, that is to
say, into the site where politics is freed from every ban and a form of
life is wholly exhausted in bare life.48 At the end of Homo Sacer,
Agamben gives this life the name formoflife, signifying always and above
all possibilities of life, always and above all power, understood as
potentiality (potenza).49 According to Agamben, there would be no power
that could have any hold over mens existence if life were understood as a
formoflife. However, it is precisely this life, life as untamed power

and potentiality, that biopower invests and optimizes. If biopower
multiplies and optimizes life, it does so, above all, by multiplying
and optimizing potentialities of life, by fostering and generating
formsoflife.50
Turn - Biopolitics are not totalitarian it strengthens

democracy and prevents the impacts they describe. And,
the type of power present in democracy is wholly distinct
from the type of power responsible for their impacts
Ross, Berkeley history professor, 2004
(Edward, Central European History, AD:7-8-9March, p. 35-36) PMK
In short, the continuities between early twentieth-century
biopolitical discourse and the practices of the welfare state in our
own time are unmistakable. Both are instances of the disciplinary
society and of biopolitical, regulatory, social-engineering
modernity, and they share that genealogy with more authoritarian
states, including the National Socialist state, but also fascist Italy, for
example. And it is certainly fruitful to view them from this very broad
perspective. But that analysis can easily become superficial and
misleading, because it obfuscates the profoundly different
strategic and local dynamics of power in the two kinds of regimes.
Clearly the democratic welfare state is not only formally but also
substantively quite different from totalitarianism. Above all,
again, it has nowhere developed the fateful, radicalizing dynamic
that characterized National Socialism (or for that matter
Stalinism), the psychotic logic that leads from economistic
population management to mass murder. Again, there is always
the potential for such a discursive regime to generate coercive
policies. In those cases in which the regime of rights does not
successfully produce health, such a system can and
historically does create compulsory programs to enforce it. But
again, there are political and policy potentials and constraints in
such a structuring of biopolitics that are very different from those
of National Socialist Germany. Democratic biopolitical regimes
require, enable, and incite a degree of self-direction and
participation that is functionally incompatible with authoritarian
or totalitarian structures. And this pursuit of biopolitical ends
through a regime of democratic citizenship does appear,
historically, to have imposed increasingly narrow limits on
coercive policies, and to have generated a logic or imperative of
increasing liberalization. Despite limitations imposed by political
context and the slow pace of discursive change, I think this is the
unmistakable message of the really very impressive waves of legislative
and welfare reforms in the 1920s or the 1970s in Germany. Of course it is
not yet clear whether this is an irreversible dynamic of such systems.
Nevertheless, such regimes are characterized by sufficient degrees of
autonomy (and of the potential for its expansion) for sufficient numbers of
people that I think it becomes useful to conceive of them as productive of
a strategic configuration of power relations that might fruitfully be

analyzed as a condition of liberty, just as much as they are productive of
constraint, oppression, or manipulation. At the very least, totalitarianism
cannot be the sole orientation point for our understanding of biopolitics,
the only end point of the logic of social engineering. This notion is
not at all at odds with the core of Foucauldian (and Peukertian)
theory. Democratic welfare states are regimes of
power/knowledge no less than early twentieth-century totalitarian
states; these systems are not opposites, in the sense that they
are two alternative ways of organizing the same thing. But they
are two very different ways of organizing it. The concept power
should not be read as a universal staring night of oppression,
manipulation, and entrapment, in which all political and social
orders are grey, are essentially or effectively the same. Power is
a set of social relations, in which individuals and groups have
varying degrees of autonomy and effective subjectivity. And
discourse is, as Foucault argued, tactically polyvalent.
Discursive elements (like the various elements of biopolitics) can
be combined in different ways to form parts of quite different
strategies (like totalitarianism or the democratic welfare state);
they cannot be assigned to one place in a structure, but rather
circulate.
Biopolitics creates a better life- benefits outweigh the

costs
Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004)) TYBG
It is striking, then, that the new model of German modernity is even more
relentlessly negative than the old Sonderweg model. In that older model, premodern elites were constantly triumphing over the democratic opposition.
But at least there was an opposition; and in the long run, time was on the
side of that opposition, which in fact embodied the historical movement of
modernization. In the new model, there is virtually a biopolitical consensus. 1
And that consensus is almost always fundamentally a nasty, oppressive thing,
one that partakes in crucial ways of the essential quality of National
Socialism. Everywhere biopolitics is intrusive, technocratic, top-down,
constraining, limiting. Biopolitics is almost never conceived of or at
least discussed in any detail as creating possibilities for people, as
expanding the range of their choices, as empowering them, or
indeed as doing anything positive for them at all. Of course, at the most
simple-minded level, it seems to me that an assessment of the potentials of
modernity that ignores the ways in which biopolitics has made life
tangibly better is somehow deeply flawed. To give just one example, infant
mortality in Germany in 1900 was just over 20 percent; or, in other
words, one in five children died before reaching the age of one year. By
1913, it was 15 percent; and by 1929 (when average real purchasing
1See for example Usborne,
The Politics and Grossmann, Reforming Sex.
power was not significantly higher than in 1913) it was only 9.7 percent.2
The expansion of infant health programs an enormously ambitious,
bureaucratic, medicalizing, and sometimes intrusive, social engineering
project had a great deal to do with that change. It would be bizarre to
write a history of biopolitical modernity that ruled out an
appreciation for how absolutely wonderful and astonish ing this
achievement and any number of others like it really was. There
was a reason for the Machbarkeitswahn of the early twentieth century:
many marvelous things were in fact becoming machbar. In that sense, it is
not really accurate to call it a Wahn (delusion, craziness) at all; nor is it
accurate to focus only on the inevitable frustration of delusions of power.
Even in the late 1920s, many social engineers could and did look with great
satisfaction on the changes they genuinely had the power to accomplish.
Biopolitics creates strong government through citizen

benefits- key to democracy and freedom
Vol. 37, No. 1 (2004)) TYBG
Nor should we stop at a reexamination of knowledge and technology. It might
make sense, too, to reexamine the process of institution-building, the
elaboration of the practices and institutions of biopolitics. No doubt the creation of public and private social welfare institutions created instruments for
the study, manipulation, or control of individuals and groups. But it also
generated opportunities for self-organization and participation by
social groups of all kinds. Grossmann s birth control movement was but
one instance of the explosive growth of the universe of associational life in
the field of biopolitics, which itself was only one small part of a much broader
development: the self-creation of a new, urban industrial social order,
the creation of a self-government of society through myriad
nongovernmental organizations. In these organizations, citizens were
acting to shape their own lives in ways that were often
fundamentally important as part of lived experience of the life
world. Of course there was nothing inherently democratic about these
organizations or their social functions many were authoritarian in
structure, many cultivated a tendentially elitist culture of expertise, and some
pursued exclusionary and discriminatory agendas. Nevertheless, they
institutionalized pluralism, solicited participation, enforced public
debate, and effectively sabotaged simple authoritarian government.
Again, National Socialist totalitarianism was in part a response
precisely to the failure of political, social, and cultural elites to
contain and control this proliferation of voices, interests, and
influence groups.3 Private organizations, further, were not the only ones
that helped to build habits and structures of participation. The German state
European Historical Statistics, 17501970
2MB. R. Mitchell,
percent (132).
3See Stanley Suval,
(New York, 1975), 130. By 1969 it had fallen to 2.3
Electoral Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (Chapel Hill, 1985) and Margaret Anderson, Practicing
Democracy: Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, 2000). There is a good discussion of
these issues in Geoff Eley, The Social Construction.
deliberately recruited citizens and nongovernmental organizations to help it

formulate and implement welfare policy. It had to, for no state could possibly
mobilize the resources necessary for such a gigantic task. And of course often
the policy initiative came from the other direction from private
organizations engaged in elaborating biopolitical discourses of
various kinds, and working to mobilize the authority and resources
of the state to achieve the ends they defined for themselves. That
was an intended consequence of the creation of a democratic
republic. As S. N. Eisenstadt wrote in 2000, an important part of the project
of modernity was a very strong emphasis on the autonomous
participation of members of society in the constitution of the social
and political order.4 Again, the massive, state- orchestrated mobilization
of the German population in the Nazi period or in the German Democratic
Republic (not least in welfare organizations) should remind us that such
mobilization is not necessarily democratic in nature; this is a point made
amply for the Weimar period too by, for example, Peter Fritzsche. 5 But
obviously, it could be, and in fact, before 1933 and after 1949 in the Federal
Republic of Germany, very often was. One answer might be to argue as
Michael Schwartz and Peter Fritzsche have suggested that regimes that
arise for reasons having little to do with this aspect of modernity choose
their biopolitics to suit their needs and principles. Victoria de Grazia, for
example, has suggested that differing class coalitions determine regime
forms, and that regime forms determine the shape of biopolitics. 6 This is
obviously not the approach that has predominated in the literature on
Germany, however, which has explored in great depth the positive
contribution that modern biopolitics made to the construction of National
Socialism. This approach may well exaggerate the importance of biopolitics;
but, in purely heuristic terms, it has been extremely fruitful. I want to suggest
that it might be equally fruitful to stand it on its head, so to speak. One could
easily conclude from this literature that modern biopolitics fits primarily
authoritarian, totalitarian, technocratic, or otherwise undemocratic regimes,
and that democracy has prevailed in Europe in the teeth of the development
of technocratic biopolitics. Again, however, the history of twentieth-century
Germany, including the five decades after World War II, suggests that this is a
fundamentally implausible idea. A more productive conclusion might be that
we need to begin to work out the extent and nature of the positive
contribution biopolitics has made to the construction also of
democratic regimes. Why was Europes twentieth century, in addition to
being the age of biopolitics and totalitarianism, also the age of biopolitics and
democracy? How should we theorize this relationship? I would like to offer
five propositions as food for thought. First, again, the concept of the
essential legitimacy and social value of individual needs, and hence
the imperative of individual rights as the political mechanism for
getting them met, has historically been a cornerstone of some
strategies of social management. To borrow a phrase from Detlev
Peukert, this does not mean that democracy was the absolutely inevitable
4Eisenstadt, Multiple, 5. For an even more positive assessment of Western modernity, see Charles Taylor, Modern Social
Imaginaries,
14 (2002): esp. 92, 99, 103.
5See Fritzsche, Did Weimar Fail?, 638; also his Germans and Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in
Weimar Germany (New York, 1990).
6See Victoria de Grazia,
(Berkeley, 1992), 3.
Public Culture
How Fascism Ruled Women
outcome of the development of biopolitics; but it does mean that it was

one among other possible outcomes of the crisis of modern
civilization.7 Second, I would argue that there is also a causal fit
between cultures of expertise, or scientism, and democracy. Of
course, scientism subverted the real, historical ideological underpinnings of
authoritarian polities in Europe in the nineteenth century. It also in a sense
replaced them. Democratic citizens have the freedom to ask why;
and in a democratic system there is therefore a bias toward
pragmatic, objective or naturalized answers since values are
often regarded as matters of opinion, with which any citizen has a
right to differ. Scientific fact is democracys substitute for
revealed truth, expertise its substitute for authority. The age of
democracy is the age of professionalization, of technocracy; there is
a deeper connection between the two, this is not merely a matter of
historical coincidence. Third, the vulnerability of explicitly moral
values in democratic societies creates a problem of legitimation. Of
course there are moral values that all democratic societies must in some
degree uphold (individual autonomy and freedom, human dignity, fairness,
the rule of law), and those values are part of their strength. But as peoples
states, democratic social and political orders are also implicitly and
often explicitly expected to do something positive and tangible to
enhance the well-being of their citizens. One of those things, of course,
is simply to provide a rising standard of living; and the visible and
astonishing success of that project has been crucial to all Western
democracies since 1945. Another is the provision of a rising standard of
health; and here again, the democratic welfare state has delivered
the goods in concrete, measurable, and extraordinary ways. In this
sense, it may not be so simpleminded, after all, to insist on
considering the fact that modern biopolitics has worked phenome nally well.
7Peukert, Genesis, 242,236.
Focus on Biopolitics Kills V2L

The kritik creates a distinction between biological and
political life that destroys value to life
Fassin, 10 - Social Science Prof at Princeton (Didier, Ethics of Survival: A
Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life Humanity: An International

Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Fall, Vol 1 No 1,
Project Muse)//dm
Conclusion Survival, in the sense Jacques Derrida attributed to the concept
in his last interview, not only shifts lines that are too often hardened
between biological and political lives: it opens an ethical space for
reflection and action. Critical thinking in the past decade has often
taken biopolitics and the politics of life as its objects. It has thus
unveiled the way in which individuals and groups, even entire nations, have
been treated by powers, the market, or the state, during the colonial
period as well as in the contemporary era. However, through indiscriminate
extension, this powerful instrument has lost some of its analytical
sharpness and heuristic potentiality. On the one hand, the binary
reduction of life to the opposition between nature and history, bare life
and qualified life, when systematically applied from philosophical
inquiry in sociological or anthropological study, erases much of the
complexity and richness of life in society as it is in fact observed. On
the other hand, the normative prejudices which underlie the
evaluation of the forms of life and of the politics of life, when
generalized to an undifferentiated collection of social facts, end up
by depriving social agents of legitimacy, voice, and action. The risk
is therefore both scholarly and political. It calls for ethical attention.
In fact, the genealogy of this intellectual lineage reminds us that the main
founders of these theories expressed tensions and hesitations in
their work, which was often more complex, if even sometimes more
obscure, than in its reduced and translated form in the humanities
and social sciences today. And also biographies, here limited to
fragments from South African lives that I have described and analyzed in
more detail elsewhere, suggest the necessity of complicating the
dualistic models that oppose biological and political lives. Certainly,
powers like the market and the state do act sometimes as if human
beings could be reduced to mere life, but democratic forces,
including from within the structure of power, tend to produce alternative
strategies that escape this reduction. And people themselves, even
under conditions of domination, [End Page 93] manage subtle tactics that
transform their physical life into a political instrument or a moral
resource or an affective expression. But let us go one step further:
ethnography invites us to reconsider what life is or rather what
human beings make of their lives, and reciprocally how their lives
permanently question what it is to be human. The blurring between
what is human and what is not human shades into the blurring over what is
life and what is not life, writes Veena Das. In the tracks of Wittgenstein and
Cavell, she underscores that the usual manner in which we think of forms of
life not only obscures the mutual absorption of the natural and the social but
also emphasizes form at the expense of life.22 It should be the incessant
effort of social scientists to return to this inquiry about life in its
multiple forms but also in its everyday expression of the human.
Migration DA
Immigration destroys the environment and causes urban
sprawl - population stabilization lessens future and
proximate causes of environmental destruction
Beck, immigration and urban sprawl expert, B.A. in
journalism, 6
[Roy, 6, the Social Contract Press, Mass Immigration: Resources and Sprawl,
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/booklets/common-sense-massimmigration/immigration-resources-sprawl.html, accessed 7-10-13, MM]
In every traffic-choked, infrastructure-stressed, park-congested,
school-overcrowded community of the land, Americans live with the
same fear: that their quality of life will forever deteriorate under an
inevitable, never-ending population explosion. Woods, brooks, and
fields at the edge of town that once helped soothe their souls have
been cleared, scraped, paved, and built on. Every ride or hike
through countryside near the new urban edges is like a walk
through a hospital ward for the terminally ill - the days of these
nearby open spaces are numbered. U.S. population grows by 3 million a
year. That, according to federal data, is roughly half the cause of the
destruction of 2.2 million acres of natural habitat and farmland each year. But
the relentless deterioration is not inevitable - government has the power to
correct this. With native-born Americans adopting a slightly-belowreplacement-level fertility since 1972, the only cause of long-term U.S.
population growth is immigration and the high fertility of
immigrants. For three decades the federal government has
increasingly sabotaged the American people's dreams for
environmental quality by snowballing total immigration over traditional
numbers by 400-700%. Lest anybody misunderstand, the immigrants
themselves are not to blame . Rather, the responsibility for
environmental damage rests with the officials who have set and
allowed the unprecedented immigration levels. Some supporters of
high population growth contend that immigrants can't cause sprawl
because they are so poor and huddle in crowded urban tenements.
Federal data, however, show that the majority of immigrants live in
the suburbs. Many construct housing in the rural strip around the suburbs.
Many more buy existing suburban houses from American natives who
would not otherwise have the money to construct their houses on the
rural edge. The children of immigrants flee the urban core cities at exactly
the same rate as the children of natives. For many reasons, massive
immigration drives massive destruction of natural habitat . America
at the first Earth Day in 1970 was filled with 203 million people and now has
grown by 100-plus 90 million. The Census Bureau projects that current
immigration policies will drive our population to 420 million by 2050, nearly
three times the 1950 number. We can stop that from happening and allow for
a decent quality of life for America's future human, animal, and plant
inhabitants.
Environment collapse causes extinction

Diner 94 (Major David N.; Instructor, Administrative and Civil Law Division,
The Judge Advocate General's School, United States Army) "The Army and the
Endangered Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom?" 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161l/n)
Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number
of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These
ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems.
"The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a
stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several
strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched
circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 79 By
causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified
many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk
of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the
dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild
examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically,
each new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and
intertwined affects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human
extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a
mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings,
80 mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
Immigration Causes Environment Collapse

Unmitigated population growth leads to resource
exhaustion and accesses every ecological impact
reductions are key
organization, 9
The United States is already overpopulated in the sense that we are

consuming our national ecological resources at an unsustainable
rate. Our growing dependence on foreign energy supplies is a prime
example. We now depend on foreign imports for 28.8 percent of our energy
consumption: two-thirds of our petroleum products and about one-sixth of our
natural gas consumption.1 Because of the abundance of our nation's
resources, we have long been careless about our level of
consumption, but it is the precipitous rise in the U.S. population over
the last four decades that has resulted in our outstripping of our
national resources. We are living beyond our means and are doing
so increasingly as our population expands. This is a serious problem
with major implications for future generations. This imbalance cannot be
remedied without curbing both population growth and consumption as well as
increasing productivity. We must become more sensitive to the issue of
consumption of finite, non-renewable resources and to the limits of
renewable resources. Reining in population growth requires
immigration reduction, and that objective should be at the top of the
agenda for policy makers because it is the most immediate and the
most amenable to change through public policy. In 1972, the
Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future
recommended population stabilization, concluding: The health of our country
does not depend on [population growth], nor does the vitality of business nor
the welfare of the average person. The Commissions recommendation was
based on the 1970 Census finding that the population had reached more than
203 million residents. Since 1970, the U.S. population has added more
than 100 million residents, about a 50 percent growth in fewer than
40 years. As the root cause of land and resource shortages,
ecological degradation and urban congestion, sustained and growing
overpopulation is jeopardizing the natural inheritance we leave for
future generations. The United States has a national environmental
policy but no national population policy. As a result, environmental
policy decisions are made in a vacuum. By determining the long-term
ecological carrying capacity of the United States, Congress would be able to
make informed decisions regarding the impact of U.S. population change on
achievement of long-term environmental objectives. This report does not
attempt to quantify the carrying capacity of the United States; it simply
explains how current population growth is damaging the U.S.

environment and lowering the average Americans quality of life. A
local example of what should be undertaken at the federal level has been
launched in Albemarle County, Va. (Charlottesville) where Advocates for
a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP) is promoting a population
limit for the county. Its focus is to, use smart growth tools to
manage development in the short term, but simultaneously insist
that local governments identify an optimal sustainable population
size to cap growth in the community, and use this right size as a
basis for municipal planning decisions.2 An obvious drawback to dealing
with overpopulation at the local level is that the possibility for dealing
with the issue of immigration which ASAP acknowledges accounts
for 85 percent of national population growth is very limited.
Turn their call for continual growth is a Ponzi scheme,

which necessarily collapses into decreased standards of
living for citizens
organization, 9
The argument that population growth is essential for economic

growth employs the logic of a Ponzi scheme. It works only if there is
endless population growth. Common sense tells us that there are limits
to sustainable population growth just as there is a limit to the land
area of our country. The U.S. population is now 307 million residents with
an annual average growth rate of 0.975 percent.21 Slightly less than one
percent per year seems like a small level of growth, but in fact it is a high
level of growth for a population as large as ours. As of July 4, 2009 the U.S.
was officially 233 years old, so lets project what another 233 years of
the current rate of population growth would produce. Todays
population (307 million) increased by the current annual growth rate
(1.00975) 233 times equals a population of 2,944,205,941 just shy of
three billion people and nearly ten times our current population and it
would not stop there. We must rethink the assumption that
continued population growth is necessary for economic growth . Our
economic competitors in Europe and Japan have proved that
assumption is false. True increases in per capita wellbeing depend
on productivity growth based on technological or organizational
innovation, not population growth. At the same time, a growing
population reduces the natural resources and land available per person and
decreases the nations biodiversity, while increasing pollution, traffic
congestion, and sprawl. A few economic elites do benefit from overpopulation
by skimming a percentage off the labor of an ever-increasing workforce. But,
the population growth Ponzi scheme will fall apart - like all Ponzi
schemes because it cannot be indefinitely sustained. The land
simply cannot support a continually increasing population and it is already
facing the threat of collapse because the country is already in ecological

deficit.
Unmitigated chain migration puts the US on a path to

destruction accesses resources and quality of life
Hull, president of CAPS and PhD in behavioral science, 6
[Diana, 6, Californians for Population Stabilization, Mass Immigration: Illegal
vs. Legal Entry and Chain Migration, p. 5, BeePDF, MM]
Mass immigration makes U.S, cities and their surrounding areas
unacceptably crowded, canceling the deliberate decision of U.S.
citizens to limit their numbers by having fewer children. A nation's
people have a right to choose the size of their national family, but
allowing three million or more immigrants to settle here every year
removes the majority of Americans from the decision-making loop.
From 2000 to 2005, 86% of U.S. population growth was the result of
immigration and births to immigrants and there will be about 500 million
people in the United States by mid-century. Without securing the border
and limiting legal immigration to about 200,000 a year, we are on a
path to a billion Americans by 2100. Illegal immigrants are selfselected. We don't know their true identity, whether they are able
bodied or sick, schooled in any language or skill, or have a history of crime or
violence. Yet once in the interior of the country, they are rarely
apprehended and often remain in the U.S. for a lifetime. Their
presence lures others from their family and community, so every
illegal alien establishes a base camp for others. Yet almost every
major city in the U. S. accommodates their presence and police
rarely ascertain their immigration status. Between 12 and 20 million
illegal aliens live among us. Legal immigrants add another one million people
every year. There are many routes to legal residency. Most applicants
gain entry under the family reunification provisions of the immigration
law. This is known as "chain migration." Chain migration allows relatives
to immigrate, not only a spouse, minor children, and parents, but also siblings
and adult children who can bring in their spouses who can sponsor their
siblings, parents, and relatives, ad infinitum. Together chain immigration
and illegal entry have essentially replaced the right of the majority
citizen-stakeholders to set national immigration levels . But even
more serious is the ratcheting up of our numbers. This propels the
exponential population growth curve with steep and dangerous momentum.
Inevitably, the nation will become even more seriously over-populated,
natural resources will dwindle, and the quality of life will erode. The
size, composition, and distribution of the United States population is a
national issue of the highest urgency. Our citizens must act, or our
country and environment will pay a terrible price.
Econ DA
1NCEcon
Immigration causes unstable population growth,
downward pressure on wage levels, and a loss of billions.
Stoll 1997 [David, anthropologist and writer, March 1997 In Focus: The
Immigration Debate Volume 2, Number 31,
http://www.theodora.com/debate.html, Accessed 7/10/13- JM]
Among the factors affecting these different assessments are a rising sense of
economic and social insecurity in many U.S. communities, dependence of
many economic sectors on immigrant labor (from childcare to agribusiness),
an increasingly interconnected global economy characterized by the
relatively free flow of capital and trade, and rising crime and drug trafficking
in border states. Current immigration policy is failing on numerous accounts.
Stricter border controls have proved unable to stem illegal immigration flows,
leading instead to rising human rights abuses and victimization of bordercrossers. Immigration clearly contributes to a downward pressure on
wage levels and to decreased job availability in certain economic
sectors. Many refugees fleeing repressive governments and violent
political situations find themselves rejected by Washington.
Economists tend to agree that immigration is a net benefit to the U.S.
economy. Immigrants fill jobs that U.S. citizens often reject, help the U.S.
economy maintain competitiveness in the global economy, and stimulate job
creation in depressed neighborhoods. But net benefits for the economy can
conceal serious losses for vulnerable sectors of the U.S. population.
It is no secret that many employers ranging from suburbanites to small
contractors to major corporations would rather hire foreigners who often work
harder for less pay than U.S. citizens. As such, immigration has long been
a contentious labor issue. The infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
was, among other things, a reaction to the importation of indentured
laborers, who were paid far less than other workers. The immigration debates
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries anticipated contemporary alliances
between self-interested capitalists and open-door idealists on the one side,
and nativists and protectionists on the other. One consequence of the Great
Wave from 1880 to 1924 (with immigration averaging more than a half
million annually) was that northern manufacturers relied on imported
southern and eastern Europeans rather than hiring southern blacks. Long
employed in the agricultural sector, immigrants since the 1970s have
become a major presence in other industries that have reorganized
to take advantage of cheap labor and undermine union wage scales.
A prominent example is the meatpacking industry, which has replaced U.S.
workers with Mexicans and Southeast Asians at far lower pay. The chronic
oversupply of labor from south of the border has kept farm wages
low and obstructed successful labor organizing. The low-wage
economy of border towns like El Paso is also partially explained by
heavy immigration flows. El Paso, which has grown rapidly in macro terms,
is for the most part a low-wage, labor-intensive treadmill with high
unemployment, earnings a third lower than the national average, and twice
the national poverty rate. Low-skill workers, particularly recent immigrants
and blacks, are among the most common casualties of this process. But they
are not the only ones. The 1990 expansion slots for high-skill immigrants
have contributed to rising levels of unemployment in the U.S. for engineers,
computer programmers, and Ph.Ds in technical fields. Immigration also has
implications for U.S. population growth, environmental protection,
and the demand for new infrastructure. In the 1970s the U.S. population
was approaching stability at less than 250 million around the year 2030.
Currently, immigration (including new arrivals and their children) accounts
for an increase of about 1.5 million more people a year, which represents
more than half of total U.S. population growth. At current levels of
immigration, the U.S. population will approach 400 million by the year 2050.
If immigration is reduced to half the current level, the U.S. population would
still approach 350 million by that year. Given the voracity with which U.S.
residents consume a disproportionate share of the world's
resources, the accelerated growth of this population is far more
troubling than that of third world residents, who consume so much less.
Immigration's fiscal costs and contributions are hotly debated. Rice University
economist Donald Huddle argues that, in 1994, legal and illegal
immigration drained $51 billion more in social welfare and job
displacement costs than immigrants paid in taxes. But according to the
Urban Institute, immigrants contribute $25-30 billion more in taxes than they
receive in services. Clearly immigrants are stressing the social
infrastructure in some states. But cutting them off from hospital care,
schooling, and assistance creates conditions of destitution that are even
more costly to address apart from the ethical issues such action poses.
Economic collapse causes nuclear war

Harris and Burrows, PhD European History at Cambridge
and NICs Long Range Analysis Unit, 9 (Mathew, PhD European
History at Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and
Jennifer, member of the NICs Long Range Analysis Unit Revisiting the
Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis
http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf, 6-31-13)
Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes
the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and
interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each
with ample Revisiting the Future opportunity for unintended consequences,
there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more
instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great
Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that
period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and
multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on
the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in
the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be
true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century . For that
reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow
would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic
environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying
those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and
nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the

international agenda. Terrorisms appeal will decline if economic
growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is
reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the
diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the
worlds most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in
2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established
groups_inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes,
and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks_and
newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become
self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that
would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most
dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S.
military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although
Irans acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a
nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new
security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional
weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not
clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the
great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle
East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism
taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended
escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states
involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential
nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and
mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent
difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending
nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel,
short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian
intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense,
potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict that the world
continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge,
particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neomercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive
countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In
the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government
leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be
essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their
regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical
implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval
buildups and modernization efforts, such as Chinas and Indias development
of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these
countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding
targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could
lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves,
but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting
critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the
Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is
likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a
more dog-eat-dog world.
Immigration Kills Econ

Allowing the border to open will cut economic progress
while exponentially increasing growth rate poverty is
widespread
Ayon 09 (David R., Senior Research Associate at Loyola Marymount
University, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University,
March 27, Developing the US-Mexico Border Region for a Prosperous and
Secure Relationship: The Impact of Mexican Migration and Border Proximity
on Local Communites, accessed 7-12-2013, AR)
This very preliminary and partial sketch of the migration-related
demographics of border communities already suggest a number of
policy concerns that bear on the regions migratory relationship and
socioeconomic integration with Mexico. The still-prominent role of agriculture in the
regions economy alone is suggestive of a low-wage, seasonal labor force that is comprised of cross-border
the great restructuring of migrant labor in

the service and sales sectors has not closed the border wage
penalty. The 2008 Federal Reserve study found that border migrants earn 16 percent less than
migrants in the interior of the United States. In the words of the authors, the border wage
penalty appears to be largely related to the nature of border labor
supplyapparently in a manner that cuts across economic sectors.
migrants and U.S. residents. However,
It is not only the border crossers who pay the border wage penalty. U.S. communities along the Mexican
border are among the poorest in the country. Indeed, if we exclude San Diego, the per capita income of the
other 23 counties in 2003 was below that of all 50 states. To quote the school districts study, Residents of
La Frontera tend to be young, immigrant, and poorly educated. As the 2001 Federal Reserve study of
Texas border cities put it, High
population growth is the source of the

seeming paradox between a booming job market and continued
stagnation of income Legal and illegal immigration and a high
birth rate make it difficult to raise incomes in these six cities,
despite whatat least from a labor market perspectivelooks like
solid economic progress.
Immigrants are not needed they take unemployed US

workers jobs
Camarota and Jensenius, Director of Research for the
Center for Immigration Studies, demographer at the
Center for Immigration Studies, 9
(Steven and Karen, Center for Immigration Studies, December 2009, A Huge
Pool of Potential Workers: Unemployment, Underemployment, and Non-Work
Among Native-Born Americans, page 3
http://www.cis.org/UnemploymentAmongNativeWorkers) RH
The fact that unemployment and the U-6 measure look so bad for lesseducated and young workers is not proof that immigration has caused this
situation. The severity of the current recession clearly is part of the
problem. But unemployment, underemployment, and declining rates
of labor force participation were a problem for less-educated natives
long before this recession began. What we can say from the data is
that those types of workers most in competition with immigrants

face the most dire labor market situation. This is consistent with the
possibility that immigration has harmed their job prospects. The
other conclusion that we can draw from this data is that there is no shortage
of less-educated workers in the country. If the United States were to
enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return
to their home countries, we would seem to have an adequate supply
of lesseducated natives to replace these workers. Additionally, the
United States could alter its immigration policy in response to the
recession. The number of natives unsatisfied with their employment
status (represented by U-6) raises the question of why new foreign
workers are needed. In 2008, an average of 112,000 new foreign workers
were authorized each month to work in the United States. This includes new
adult permanent residents (green card holders) and long-term temporary
visas for guest workers and others authorized to work. It does not include
several hundred thousand illegal immigrants who are already in the country
when they change their status and are therefore technically not new arrivals.
However, they too could be counted as new work authorizations.
Immigrants are detrimental to the economy they ruin

our welfare system and have little to contribute.
Malanga, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, 6
(Steven, Summer 2006, How Unskilled Immigrants Hurt Our Economy City
Journal,http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_immigrants_economy.html, RH)
But the tale of Librado Velasquez helps show why supporters are wrong about
todays immigration, as many Americans sense and so much research has
demonstrated. America does not have a vast labor shortage that
requires waves of low-wage immigrants to alleviate; in fact,
unemployment among unskilled workers is highabout 30 percent.
Moreover, many of the unskilled, uneducated workers now journeying
here labor, like Velasquez, in shrinking industries, where they force
out native workers, and many others work in industries where the
availability of cheap workers has led businesses to suspend
investment in new technologies that would make them less laborintensive. Yet while these workers add little to our economy, they
come at great cost, because they are not economic abstractions but
human beings, with their own culture and ideasoften at odds with
our own. Increasing numbers of them arrive with little education and
none of the skills necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Many
may wind up stuck on our lowest economic rungs, where they will rely on
something that immigrants of other generations didnt have: a vast U.S.
welfare and social-services apparatus that has enormously amplified
the cost of immigration. Just as welfare reform and other policies are
helping to shrink Americas underclass by weaning people off such
social programs, we are importing a new, foreign-born underclass. As
famed free-market economist Milton Friedman puts it: Its just obvious
that you cant have free immigration and a welfare state.
Immigration can only pay off again for America if we reshape our
policy, organizing it around whats good for the economy by
welcoming workers we truly need and excluding those who, because

they have so little to offer, are likely to cost us more than they
contribute, and who will struggle for years to find their place here.
Immigrants compete for jobs and push out US born

workers.
The flood of immigrants, both legal and illegal, from countries with
poor, ill-educated populations, has yielded a mismatch between todays
immigrants and the American economy and has left many workers poorly
positioned to succeed for the long term. Unlike the immigrants of 100
years ago, whose skills reflected or surpassed those of the native workforce
at the time, many of todays arrivals, particularly the more than half who now
come from Central and South America, are farmworkers in their home
countries who come here with little education or even basic training in bluecollar occupations like carpentry or machinery. (A century ago, farmworkers
made up 35 percent of the U.S. labor force, compared with the under 2
percent who produce a surplus of food today.) Nearly two-thirds of
Mexican immigrants, for instance, are high school dropouts, and most
wind up doing either unskilled factory work or small-scale construction
projects, or they work in service industries, where they compete for entrylevel jobs against one another, against the adult children of other
immigrants, and against native-born high school dropouts. Of the 15
industries employing the greatest percentage of foreign-born workers, half
are low-wage service industries, including gardening, domestic household
work, car washes, shoe repair, and janitorial work. To take one stark example:
whereas 100 years ago, immigrants were half as likely as native-born workers
to be employed in household service, today immigrants account for 27
percent of all domestic workers in the United States.
Although open-borders advocates say that these workers are simply
taking jobs Americans dont want, studies show that the immigrants
drive down wages of native-born workers and squeeze them out of
certain industries. Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz,
for instance, estimate that low-wage immigration cuts the wages for
the average native-born high school dropout by some 8 percent, or
more than $1,200 a year. Other economists find that the new
workers also push down wages significantly for immigrants already
here and native-born Hispanics.
Consequently, as the waves of immigration continue, the sheer number of
those competing for low-skilled service jobs makes economic
progress difficult. A study of the impact of immigration on New York Citys
restaurant business, for instance, found that 60 percent of immigrant workers
do not receive regular raises, while 70 percent had never been promoted.
One Mexican dishwasher aptly captured the downward pressure that
all these arriving workers put on wages by telling the studys
authors about his frustrating search for a 50-cent raise after working
for $6.50 an hour: I visited a few restaurants asking for $7 an hour, but
they only offered me $5.50 or $6, he said. I had to beg [for a job].
Similarly, immigration is also pushing some native-born workers out
of jobs, as Kenyon College economists showed in the California nail-salon
workforce. Over a 16-year period starting in the late 1980s, some 35,600
mostly Vietnamese immigrant women flooded into the industry, a mass
migration that equaled the total number of jobs in the industry before the
immigrants arrived. Though the new workers created a labor surplus
that led to lower prices, new services, and somewhat more demand,
the economists estimate that as a result, 10,000 native-born
workers either left the industry or never bothered entering it.
Increasing Immigration will simply cause the creation of a

new underclass wages will plummet and empirical
examples prove.
Given these realities, several of the major immigration reforms now
under consideration simply dont make economic senseespecially
the guest-worker program favored by President Bush and the U.S. Senate.
Careful economic research tells us that there is no significant
shortfall of workers in essential American industries, desperately
needing supplement from a massive guest-worker program. Those
few industries now relying on cheap labor must focus more quickly on
mechanization where possible. Meanwhile, the cost of paying legal
workers already here a bit more to entice them to do such low-wage
work as is needed will have a minimal impact on our economy.
The potential woes of a guest-worker program, moreover, far overshadow any
economic benefit, given what we know about the long, troubled history of
temporary-worker programs in developed countries. They have never
stemmed illegal immigration, and the guest workers inevitably become
permanent residents, competing with the native-born and forcing
down wages. Our last guest-worker program with Mexico, begun during
World War II to boost wartime manpower, grew larger in the postwar era,
because employers who liked the cheap labor lobbied hard to keep it. By the
mid-1950s, the number of guest workers reached seven times the annual
limit during the war itself, while illegal immigration doubled, as the
availability of cheap labor prompted employers to search for ever more of it
rather than invest in mechanization or other productivity gains.
The economic and cultural consequences of guest-worker programs
have been devastating in Europe, and we risk similar problems.
When postWorld War II Germany permitted its manufacturers to
import workers from Turkey to man the assembly lines, industrys
investment in productivity declined relative to such countries as Japan,
which lacked ready access to cheap labor. When Germany finally ended the
guest-worker program once it became economically unviable, most of the
guest workers stayed on, having attained permanent-resident status. Since
then, the descendants of these workers have been chronically
underemployed and now have a crime rate double that of German

youth.
France has suffered similar consequences. In the postWorld War II
boom, when French unemployment was under 2 percent, the country
imported an industrial labor force from its colonies; by the time Frances
industrial jobs began evaporating in the 1980s, these guest workers
and their children numbered in the millions, and most had made
little economic progress. They now inhabit the vast housing projects,
or cits, that ring Parisand that have recently been the scene of
chronic rioting. Like Germany, France thought it was importing a
labor force, but it wound up introducing a new underclass.
Importing labor is far more complicated than importing other
factors of production, such as commodities, write University of
California at Davis prof Philip Martin, an expert on guest-worker programs,
and Michael Teitelbaum, a former member of the U.S. Commission on
Immigration Reform. Migration involves human beings, with their own
beliefs, politics, cultures, languages, loves, hates, histories, and families.
A2: Immigrants Create Growth

Immigrant labor results in little to no savings
disadvantages outweigh costs
In many American industries, waves of low-wage workers have also
retarded investments that might lead to modernization and
efficiency. Farming, which employs a million immigrant laborers in California
alone, is the prime case in point. Faced with a labor shortage in the
early 1960s, when President Kennedy ended a 22-year-old guestworker program that allowed 45,000 Mexican farmhands to cross
over the border and harvest 2.2 million tons of California tomatoes
for processed foods, farmers complained but swiftly automated, adopting a
mechanical tomato-picking technology created more than a decade earlier.
Today, just 5,000 better-paid workersone-ninth the original
workforceharvest 12 million tons of tomatoes using the machines.
The savings prompted by low-wage migrants may even be minimal in
crops not easily mechanized. Agricultural economists Wallace Huffman
and Alan McCunn of Iowa State University have estimated that without
illegal workers, the retail cost of fresh produce would increase only
about 3 percent in the summer-fall season and less than 2 percent in
the winter-spring season, because labor represents only a tiny
percent of the retail price of produce and because without migrant
workers, America would probably import more foreign fruits and
vegetables. The question is whether we want to import more produce from
abroad, or more workers from abroad to pick our produce, Huffman remarks.
For American farmers, the answer has been to keep importing
workerswhich has now made the farmers more vulnerable to
foreign competition, since even minimum-wage immigrant workers
cant compete with produce picked on farms in China, Chile, or
Turkey and shipped here cheaply. A flood of low-priced Turkish raisins
several years ago produced a glut in the United States that sharply drove
down prices and knocked some farms out of business, shrinking total acreage
in California devoted to the crop by one-fifth, or some 50,000 acres. The
farms that survived are now moving to mechanize swiftly, realizing
that no amount of cheap immigrant labor will make them
competitive.
Backlash DA
1NCBacklash
Immigration legislation fuels armed, right-wing extremist
groups.
Miller 09 (Greg, reporter for the Washington Post and former reporter for
the LA Times and winner of the Overseas Press Award, Los Angeles Times,
Right-wing extremists seen as a threat, April 16, 2009,
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/16/nation/na-rightwing-extremists16)
The department routinely issues intelligence warnings to state and local authorities, a role it was assigned
in response to criticism that the federal government had failed to do so in the months preceding the Sept.
the report said

extremist organizations were "harnessing this historical election as
a recruitment tool." It cited two cases before the election where potential threats against
Obama were disrupted by law enforcement. The assessment also listed economic
factors -- including increases in real estate foreclosures and
unemployment -- as creating a "fertile recruiting environment" for
right-wing groups. And it describes evidence compiled by local law enforcement
agencies that extremist groups are stockpiling weapons out of concern that
11 terrorist attacks. Describing right-wing groups' animosity toward Obama,
Congress and the Obama administration might enact legislation requiring the registration of all firearms.
a push for new immigration legislation that would grant

residency or citizenship to people who entered the country illegally
could fuel anger among groups fearing competition for jobs.
The report also said
Preserving nationalism is key to prevent imminent race

wars
Beirich and Potok 9
Unlike the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazi organizations, the ideology of most
nativist extremist groups is not explicitly racist. But there are
exceptions. Nine of the groups identified by the SPLC as nativist
extremist are also listed as racist hate groups. That is because they
disparage all Latinos on a racial basis, regardless of immigration
status, or because they plainly endorse white nationalism, sometimes
predicting impending race war. While only a few nativist extremist groups
deal in such unvarnished white supremacist ideology, most of them are
playing a role similar to that of traditional hate groups in the raging
national immigration debate: they are interjecting racist conspiracy
theories, disseminating false and defamatory statistics about
criminal immigrants and the problems they create, blaming and
targeting Latino immigrants as individuals, and promoting direct
intimidation, mean-spirited harassment and even murder. Their
rhetoric is shot through with paranoid conspiracy theories of invasions, and
is frequently warlike. An army of illegal aliens, including criminals, drug
smugglers, and terrorists, is invading our country, the Indiana Federation for
Immigration Reform and Enforcement declared. America is being destroyed

by a modern version of Genghis Khan's army, according to the Emigration
Party of Nevada, whose leader, Donald Pauly, has called for the
Department of Homeland Security to station sniper teams on the
border and also suggested that all Mexican women should be forced to
undergo sterilization after having their first child (Buchanan and
Holthouse, 2007).
Causes Backlash
Radical anti-immigration groups have soared in number
and have been driven by non-white immigration.
Potok 10 (Mark, senior fellow of Southern Poverty Law Center and EIC of Intelligence Report,
Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Report, Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism,
Spring 2010 Issue Number: 137, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-allissues/2010/spring/rage-on-the-right)
broad-based populist anger at political,

demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion
of new extremist groups and activism across the nation. Hate groups stayed at
record levels almost 1,000 despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in
America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%,
adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called
The radical right caught fire last year, as
"Patriot" groups militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to
impose one-world government on liberty-loving Americans came roaring back after years out of the
limelight. The
anger seething across the American political landscape

over racial changes in the population, soaring public debt and the terrible economy,
the bailouts of bankers and other elites, and an array of initiatives by the relatively liberal Obama
Administration that are seen as "socialist" or even "fascist"
goes beyond the radical
right.
The "tea parties" and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be
considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories
and racism. We
are in the midst of one of the most significant rightwing populist rebellions in United States history, Chip Berlet, a veteran
analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of
overlapping social and political movements populated by people
[who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the
machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care,
reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage." Sixty-one percent of Americans
believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Just a quarter
think the government can be trusted. And the anti-tax tea party movement is viewed in much more
The signs of
growing radicalization are everywhere. Armed men have come to
Obama speeches bearing signs suggesting that the "tree of liberty" needs to be "watered" with
"the blood of tyrants." The Conservative Political Action Conference held this
February was co-sponsored by groups like the John Birch Society, which
believes President Eisenhower was a Communist agent, and Oath Keepers,
a Patriot outfit formed last year that suggests, in thinly veiled language, that the
government has secret plans to declare martial law and intern
patriotic Americans in concentration camps. Politicians pandering to the
positive terms than either the Democratic or Republican parties, the poll found.
antigovernment right in 37 states have introduced "Tenth Amendment Resolutions," based on the
constitutional provision keeping all powers not explicitly given to the federal government with the states.
And, at the "A Well Regulated Militia" website, a recent discussion of

how to build "clandestine safe houses" to stay clear of the federal
government included a conversation about how mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh and Olympics
bomber Eric Rudolph were supposedly betrayed at such houses.The number of hate groups
in America has been going up for years, rising 54% between 2000 and 2008 and
driven largely by an angry backlash against non-white immigration
and, starting in the last year of that period, the economic meltdown and the climb to power of an African
American president. According to the latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC),
these groups rose again slightly in 2009 from 926 in 2008 to 932 last year despite the demise of a
key neo-Nazi group. The American National Socialist Workers Party, which had 35 chapters in 28 states,
imploded shortly after the October 2008 arrest of founder Bill White for making threats against his
enemies. At the same time, the number of what the SPLC designates as "nativist extremist" groups
organizations that go beyond mere advocacy of restrictive immigration policy to actually confront or
harass suspected immigrants jumped from 173 groups in 2008 to 309 last year. Virtually all of these
vigilante groups have appeared since the spring of 2005.
Endorsing multiculturalism and assimilation of local

cultures will result in white backlash and racial violence
Beirich and Potok 9
None of the factors discussed here are likely to wane in the coming years.
Immigrantslegal or otherwisewill very probably continue to flow into
the United States, and whites will eventually lose their majority.
Another challenge relates, of course, to economic globalization,
particularly the transfer of many industrial jobs abroad and the
spread of neo-liberal approaches to economic problems.
Globalization has contributed to the loss of some national
sovereignty, with its attendant spread of multiculturalism and
multiracialism, and pressures on local cultures to assimilate into a
kind of Western world culture. A backlash from some whites is to be
expected, with its chances enhanced by the election of Barack Obama.
These factors are now compounded by the large numbers of
Americans who increasingly find they are facing hard economic
times. It is not clear precisely how such economic developments will affect
the growth of the radical right, although it seems certain that any correlation
is not a simple onepeople who lose their jobs do not rush out to join radical
groups without further ado. What seems more likely is that difficult
economic times, particularly when they affect people not accustomed to
seeing their prospects shrinking, give the radical right an opening. It is at
such moments that the sometimes convoluted explanations of the world
offered by radical ideologues get more of a hearing than they otherwise
would have. And to some, the only possible defense against this
homogenizing juggernaut is what is seen as the organic nationa
nation that is based on race, a community of blood.
Invasion of immigrant workers on domestic workers

creates controversy, there will be no harmony
Publication)
There is some evidence that low-wage immigrant workers in the United

States, who immigrate to this country in substantial numbers, have
palpable effects on the wage scale of the lowest-paid workers in the
United States. Because these immigrants are willing to work for
lower wages than are domestic workers, employers may offer to pay
less. Unskilled U.S. citizens in urban, high-immigration areas are the most
directly affected. One much-cited 2005 study by the Harvard economists
George Borjas and Lawrence Katz attributed wage reductions for low-skilled
workers to undocumented immigration from Mexico.42 Other empirical
studies, however, undermine this claim.43 In fact, growing wage disparities
may be attributable to factors other than undocumented immigration, such
as globalization and decreasing unionization of workers in the United
States.44 Even if the overall effects of immigration on unskilled
citizens are relatively small, the impacts on discrete parts of the
labor force are tangible and help generate tension between citizens
and immigrants.45 Unquestionably, immigration has transformedand
continues to transform certain labor markets. Over the past few
decades, jobs in the poultry and beef industries in the Midwest and the
Southeast and the janitorial industry in Los Angeles have increasingly been
filled by immigrants. In some circumstances, jobs that were held
predominantly by African Americans have come to be taken for the most part
by Latina/o immigrants.46 These shifts have sparked tension and
controversy.
Opening the border failscauses backlash

Publication)
Impediments to a regional arrangement do, of course, exist. The political

unpopularity of immigration in the United States is one. Demographic
differences are another. Racial, socioeconomic, and cultural differences
among the populations of the NAFTA partners arguably exceed those of the
original EU members. In addition, the staying power of anti-Mexican
sentiment in the United States should not be underestimated. It has
a lengthy history and is enduring. Fear of a mass migration of poor
culturally and racially different people will likely generate
considerable controversy for the foreseeable future and even greater
fears about the national identity than currently exist.
Economic issues and increasing immigration is likely to

lead to violence
Beirich and Potok 9
A perfect storm is brewing. An economic meltdown, high rates of nonwhite immigration, rapid demographic change and now the election of
America's first African American president are fueling widespread
rage on America's radical right (and, to a lesser extent, in parts of the
political mainstream). These developments are likely to lead to growth
in the number of hate groups, higher levels of hate-motivated
violence, and continuing domestic terrorism, presenting significant
challenges for law enforcement professionals in the near future. And if

antigovernment sentiment continues to grow in the wake of these political
trends, law enforcement officials may well find themselves personally
targeted, so a full understanding of these movements, from both the
perspective of protecting the public and officer safety, is imperative. Some
leaders of the organized radical right, reacting to the campaign and
ultimate election of Barack Obama, have openly suggested that more
violence is on the way. Thom Robb, an Arkansas Klan leader,
described in November 2008 the race war he sees developing
between our people, who I see as the rightful owners and leaders of
this great country, and their people, the blacks (Robb, 2008). This rage
has already resulted in two alleged violent plots, including one in which a pair
of neo-Nazi skinheads in Tennessee were arrested just 2 weeks before the
2008 elections. They were accused of planning to murder black school
children, shoot and behead other African Americans, and assassinate Obama,
then still only a candidate.
Multiculturalism threatens Americans both economically

and culturally insecurity results in the formation of hate
groups
Beirich and Potok 9
A remarkable thing occurred while America's Patriot movement rose and fell.
Even as this very public phenomenon captured the attention of law
enforcement, citizens and the press alike, hate groupsKlan, neo-Nazi and
other organizations whose primary ideology is based on racial or other
forms of explicit group hatredrose steadily. White nationalists, now
describing themselves as separatists rather than supremacists, offered a
racial analysis of the world that won increasing acceptance among
extremists. By 2007, the latest figure available, the SPLC was tracking 888
hate groups, the largest number since the organization began monitoring
extremism in the early 1980s.2 The number of hate groups has
ballooned since 2000, when 602 groups were counted, a rise of more
than 45%. It is now the hate movement, which stands to be boosted by
the added fuel of the economic malaise and the election of the first
black president, which presents the most direct challenge for law
enforcement. Worryingly, the movement's increasingly revolutionary nature
and extreme antigovernment positionsafter Obama's election, for example,
David Duke said in a radio interview, that government is not our
governmentmean that certain sectors of the radical right have now
adopted the most dangerous aspects of the Patriot movement.3 This was
emphasized by the two alleged plots by white supremacists to assassinate
Obama that were busted up during the months running up to the November
election, one in Denver, CO, and the other by skinheads from Tennessee and
Arkansas. Current trends favour further growth in the number of hate
groups. These trends [which] include the power of new communications
technologies, the use of white power music to recruit youth, the

falling proportion of whites in the U.S. population and rising Latino
immigration. Hate groups see the government as not merely failing to
address these problems, but as actually being secretly run by Jews and other
nefarious types who are bent on encouraging these developments. At the
same time, sharp economic pressures have borne down on young
white workers, the middle class, farmers and workers in heavy
industrypressures that are now increasing. Finally, globalization and
other rapid social and economic changesaccompanied by the rise of a
new, multicultural orthodoxyhave ignited an angry reaction among
many who feel that they are losing their identity.
Backlash Causes War

Both physical and psychological hate violence will only
escalate
Beirich and Potok 9
Even as anti-immigrant vitriol and propaganda has increased in

recent years, hate violence has risen against perceived illegal
aliens. Between 2003 and 2007, the latest year for which FBI national
hate crime statistics are available, anti-Latino hate crimes rose a total
40%. Those numbers likely understate the problem, because undocumented
immigrants, fearing deportation, are highly unlikely to report attacks to the
authorities (Potok, 2008a). The SPLC also documented several particularly
egregious examples of physical and psychological violence directed
at Latinos between 2004 and 2007 (Mock, 2007). The perpetrators
ranged from racist skinheads to rogue border patrol agents to otherwise
everyday citizens who took it upon themselves to repel an invader,
terrorize a criminal alien, or exterminate a cockroach. In one
particularly notorious case that occurred in January 2007, four heavily
armed men wearing military-style berets and camouflage fatigues
ambushed a pickup truck carrying 12 undocumented immigrants in a
farm field near Eloy, AZ. The assailants shot and killed the driver and
wounded one of the passengers. Survivors described the shooters as
three white men and one Latino who spoke little Spanish. The ambush stood
out because it lacked any characteristics of typical borderland violence
committed by bandits or rival smugglers. No one was robbed in the Eloy
ambush, no drugs were found in the truck and no one was kidnapped (rival
immigrant smugglers, or coyotes, frequently steal one another's human
cargo). Also, the fact that three of the men were white was exceedingly
unusual rare for coyotes or border bandits. The incident remains under
investigation. Symbolic of the increasingly violent rhetoric coming
from nativist extremists, some applauded the attack. For example, Jeff
Schwilk, the founder of the San Diego Minutemen, openly celebrated
the murders. In America, we call incidents like that cleansing the
gene pool, Schwilk declared in an email (Buchanan and Holthouse, 2007).
Public forums hosted by various nativist extremist groups were rife with
support for the killers. I really hope it IS pissed off Americans who are taking
justice into their own hands, doing what the Border Patrol and the National
Guard ARE NOT ALLOWED to do, a member of the California-based hate
group Save Our State wrote on the group's forum in early 2007. Go
vigilantes! Where can I send a check? (Buchanan and Holthouse, 2007).
Backlash Turns Solvency

Protective measures are taken by nativist movements to
ensure border security
Beirich and Potok 9
Many whites have come to see the federal government, along with the
nation's business elites, as specifically responsible for the failure to curb nonwhite immigration. On the radical right, the government often is seen as
plotting to destroy the white race. Now, the white supremacist movement
has been joined in its anger over America's immigration policy by a
new nativist movement that seemingly came out of nowhere in the last
few years. Starting with a meeting held in 2001 in Sierra Vista, AZ,
which brought together several anti-immigrant hate groups to laud a
border rancher known for detaining suspected immigrants at
gunpoint, the organized anti-immigrant movement has exploded
(Southern Poverty Law Center, 2001a). By 2007, the SPLC had identified 144
nativist extremist groups active across 39 states (Southern Poverty Law
Center, 2007). Most of these organizationsnearly 100 of themhad
appeared since April 2006. The groups identified as nativist extremist
target people, rather than policy. That is, they do not limit
themselves to advocating, even in forceful terms, for stricter border
security, tighter population control, or tougher enforcement of laws
against hiring illegal immigrants. Instead, they go after the
immigrants themselves, using tactics including armed vigilante border
patrols; conspicuous surveillance of apartments and houses occupied
by Mexicans and Central Americans; publicizing photos and home
addresses of suspected illegal aliens and harassment and
intimidation of Latino immigrants at day-labour sites and migrantworker camps. Because their tactics frequently cross the line into illegal
harassment and even violence, these groups sometimes represent another
challenge for law enforcement. Though most heavily concentrated in Arizona,
California and Texas, nativist extremist groups are active in all regions
of the United States. Many of the groups in non-border states are
local chapters of either the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps or the
Minuteman Project, which comprised 57 of the 144 nativist extremist
groups listed by the SPLC. These separate, competing nationwide
organizations both emerged from the original month-long Minuteman
civilian border patrol operation held in Cochise County, AZ, in April 2005.
Minuteman chapters raise money for their parent organizations and muster
volunteers for vigilante border actions. Many also hold protest
actions or conduct surveillance ops at day-labor sites in their home
cities. In states where it's allowed by law, their members openly carry
firearms. The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and Minuteman Project have
also spawned a slew of imitators and splinter groups that have no official
affiliation with either national Minuteman organization. These rogue outfits

include the Antelope Valley Minutemen, whose leader, Frank Jorge,
has written on his website: We have a right, and an obligation, to
defend our country, our homes, and our families not only from this
invasion, but also from the very Government that is precipitating this
treasonous act (Buchanan and Holthouse, 2007).
No Solvencytearing down the border would cause antiimmigration groups to just recreate borders
ADL 2006 (May 23, Anti-Defamation League Extremists
Declare 'Open Season' on Immigrants: Hispanics Target of
Incitement and Violence,
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/immigration_extremis
ts.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_1)
Anti-immigration border vigilante groups have also organized antiimmigrant events around the country this spring. The largest border
vigilante group, the Minuteman Project, held a reprise in April of their 2005
vigilante border patrols along the Arizona- Mexico border, and followed up
with a caravan that staged anti-immigration events across the country. One
Minuteman event in Birmingham, Alabama, was organized by Mike
Vanderboegh, a former militia leader. At the rally, an attendee distributed
copies of Olaf Childress's racist and anti-Semitic newspaper, First Freedom.
Other anti-immigration groups held rallies from Arizona to Minnesota. Antiimmigration groups have also turned to publicity stunts. The Minutemen,
for example, declared on May 9 that they would start building their
own "border security fence" on private property along the border
with Mexico, unless the federal government itself deployed the military or
erected such fencing. The Minutemen claimed that they had received nearly
$200,000 in donations to build such a fence. Other border vigilante groups
have already begun or announced similar projects.
Anti Immigration Groups Rising

Right-wing, anti-immigration groups are risinglaundry
list.
Miller 09
(Greg, reporter for the Washington Post and former reporter for the LA Times and winner of
the Overseas Press Award, Los Angeles Times, Right-wing extremists seen as a threat, April 16, 2009,
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/16/nation/na-rightwing-extremists16)
The economic downturn and the election of the nation's first black
president are contributing to a resurgence of right-wing extremist
groups, which had been on the wane since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, according to a U.S.
intelligence assessment distributed to state and local authorities last week. The report, produced by the
Department of Homeland Security, has triggered a backlash among conservatives because it also raised
the specter that disgruntled veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might "boost the
capabilities of extremists . . . to carry out violence." The assessment noted that domestic security officials
had seen no evidence that such groups were planning attacks in the U.S. But it is the first high-level U.S.
intelligence report to call attention to an array of recent domestic developments as potential harbingers of
Among other factors cited in the report were increased

prospects for gun control and immigration legislation under President
Obama, as well as resentment over the rising economic influence of
countries such as China, India and Russia. But the assessment focuses most of its
terrorist violence.
attention on animosity toward Obama and anxiety over the recession. "The economic downturn and the
election of the first African American president present unique drivers for right-wing radicalization and
the document
describes an economic and political climate that has "similarities to the
1990s, when right-wing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic
recruitment," the report warns in the first of a series of findings. Overall,
recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty
by other foreign powers." The unclassified report was not released publicly but was distributed among
law enforcement agencies across the country before it surfaced online this week.
Terrorism DA
1NCTerrorism
Allowing our borders to be opened will lead to loss of all
American freedoms and nuclear terrorism
Schlafly 1 (Phyllis, J.D., Oct, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, The Threat of
Terrorism Is From Illegal Aliens,
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2001/oct01/psroct01.shtml) TYBG
At the same time, Americans have some soul-searching to do about

our security. Why were our FBI and CIA caught so completely by surprise?
Why have they been spending their resources chasing after a few people who
were no harm to society, such as one loner on a mountaintop at Ruby Ridge
and a pathetic religious group in Waco, while the plotting foreign terrorists
crossed our borders and lived in our country illegally, took their flight training
in Florida, and repeatedly boarded our planes? The terrorists are
foreigners, most or all of whom should not have been allowed to live
in our country. As FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted, at least some of the
hijackers were "out of status," i.e., they had no proper immigration
documents. It should be repeated over and over again: The terrorism
threat is from illegal aliens who are allowed to live in our midst -and this is a failure of our immigration laws and our immigration
officials. The criminals who were convicted of the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing, of the murders in front of the CIA headquarters in
1993, and who were involved in a 1998 plot to bomb New York's
subway system were Middle East aliens who should not have been in
the United States. They were either granted a visa that should never have
been issued or had overstayed a visa and should have been expelled. The
1996 Khobar Towers bombings, the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen were all
carried out by radical Middle East groups. Since easy access into the
United States has been repeatedly exploited by aliens bent on
terrorism, it should have been no surprise that it was used by the
World Trade Center/Pentagon hijackers. The policy of opening our
borders to anyone who wants to sneak into our country illegally -or to remain illegally after entering legally -- must be exposed and
terminated. This is the most important security precaution our
government must take. The flood of illegal aliens coming across our
southern border from Mexico is well known. The opportunity for illegals
to come across our vast northern border is not as well known, but offers easy
opportunities for illegals bent on criminal acts. Canada has a no-questionsasked immigration policy, and many border crossings between the United
States and Canada are unmanned. The third wide-open door for illegals is the
issuing of visas by 3,700 U.S. consular officers around the world. Our State
Department has a laissez faire policy on issuing visas and approves 80% of
the 8 million visa applications every year. The State Department manual used
by consular officials states that "mere membership" in a recognized terrorist
group, or even "advocacy of terrorism," does not automatically disqualify a
person from entering the United States. Congress passed a law ordering the
immigration service to track foreign visitors and students and match their
entry into this country with the expiration date of their visas. Congress also
ordered the immigration service to create a database of foreign students that
would be accessible to law enforcement. These requirements are not due to
go into effect until 2003! Visa visitors -- whether tourist, student or worker -should be tracked on a federal database that flags the names when their exit
dates come around. It is inexcusable that visa applicants aren't screened
more carefully, and that aliens aren't expelled when their visa expires.
Immigration officials don't even know how many people are in the United
States on visas or how many are so-called "overstays," but it's clearly a
substantial factor in illegal immigration. Many new airport security measures
are now making airline travel longer and more difficult. The question should
be asked how any of these measures, if they had been in place, would have
prevented the 9/11 hijackings. We want security measures that will put
criminals at risk, not harass law-abiding citizens. The chance of U.S.
citizens hijacking a plane on a suicide mission is infinitely smaller
than the chance of foreign enemies doing the same. Why are all
passengers interrogated about their luggage rather than about their
citizenship? It's time to rethink the rule that an airplane be a gun-free zone.
If the foreign masterminds behind this attack had thought that the crew or
passengers were armed, they might not have invested so much in this type of
terrorism. The courageous actions of passengers against the hijackers on the
flight that crashed in Pennsylvania apparently prevented the plane from
reaching its target where many more people would have been killed. Self-help
is essential in an emergency when no law enforcement officials are available.
While we worry about hijacked planes today, we may soon worry
about hijacked foreign missile silos. Terrorists who would commit
the unspeakable crimes of 9/11 would not hesitate to use nuclear
weapons.
Terrorist retaliation causes nuclear war draws in Russia

and China
Ayson 2010(Robert, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the
Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of
Wellington, July, After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic
Effects, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, Available Online
to Subscribing Institutions via InformaWorld)
A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in
response by the country attacked in the first place, would not necessarily
represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are
reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as
belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn
here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear
exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these
weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twentyfirst century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside
considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold
War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear
weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear
weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful
nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by state possessors
themselves. But these two nuclear worldsa non-state actor nuclear attack
and a catastrophic interstate nuclear exchangeare not necessarily
separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially
an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events
leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or
more of the states that possess them. In this context, todays and
tomorrows terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early
Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were
seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers
started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and
early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1
problem. t may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an
especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to
such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a
terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just
how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least
because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state
sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too
responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that
could just as easily threaten them as well. Some possibilities, however
remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States
react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of
nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason
Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of
that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science
fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris
resulting from a nuclear explosion would be spread over a wide area in tiny
fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable,
and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency
of the explosion, the materials used and, most important some indication
of where the nuclear material came from.41 Alternatively, if the act of
nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials
refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible
at all) suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling
out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably
Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very
short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its program continues,
and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be
definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo? In particular,
if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension
in Washingtons relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when
threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials
and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the
chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States
was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or
China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war,
as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The

reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur
in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited
conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures
that might rise domestically to consider the United States as a possible
perpetrator or encourager of the attack? Washingtons early response to a
terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an
unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China.
For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate
aftermath of the terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be
expected to place the countrys armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal,
on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful
planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow
and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use
force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the
temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be
admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating
response.
Open Borders Causes Nuclear Terrorism

Opening the US Borders increases Terrorism
Murdock, Fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover
Institution on War, 2013 ( Deroy, 6/1/13 The Union Leader, U.S.
Mexican border welcomes terrorists,
http://www.unionleader.com/article/20130502/OPINION02/130509896 ,
7/12/13, TZ)
There are at least 7,518 reasons to get the U.S.-Mexican border

under control. That equals the number of aliens apprehended in
fiscal year 2011 from the four nations that federal officials label
"state sponsors of terrorism" plus 10 "countries of interest." Since
January 2010, those flying into the United States via these 14 nations face
enhanced screening. As the Transportation Security Administration
announced at the time: "Effective aviation security must begin beyond our
borders." U.S. national security merits at least that much vigilance on our
borders. The roaring immigration-reform debate largely addresses Hispanic
aliens who illegally cross the border. Far more worrisome, however, are the
thousands who break into the United States from countries "where
we have concerns, particularly about al-Qaida affiliates," a top State
Department official told CNN. These include Cubans, Iranians, Sudanese
and Syrians, whose governments are federally designated "state
sponsors of terrorism." As Customs and Border Protection's "2011
Yearbook of Immigration Statistics" reports, 198 Sudanese were nabbed
while penetrating the USA. Between fiscal years 2002 and 2011, such
arrests totaled 1,207. (These figures cover all U.S. borders, although 96.3
percent of detainees crossed from Mexico.) Like other immigrants, most
Sudanese seek better lives here. But some may be vectors for the
same militant Islam that tore Sudan in two - literally. In FY 2011, 108
Syrians were stopped; over the previous 10 years, 1,353 were. Syria
supports Hezbollah, and Bashar al-Assad's unstable regime
reportedly has attacked its domestic opponents with chemical
weapons. Among Iranians, 276 were caught in FY 2011, while 2,310 were
captured over the previous 10 years. Iran also backs Hezbollah, hates
"The Great Satan" - its name for the United States - and craves
atomic weapons. The other 10 "countries of interest" are Algeria,
Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen and: . Afghanistan, the Taliban's
stronghold and current theater of America's longest war. (Afghans
halted in FY 2011: 106; prior 10 years: 681.) . Nigeria. The land of
underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab suffers under Sharia
law in its northern provinces. (Respective data: 591 and 4,525.) .
Pakistan, hideaway of the Pakistani Taliban and the late Osama bin
Laden (525 and 10,682). . Saudi Arabia, generous benefactor of
radical imams and militant mosques worldwide; birthplace of 15 of
the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers (123 and 986). . Somalia. Home of Indian
Ocean pirates and al-Qaida's al-Shabaab franchise. In October 1993,
Islamic terrorists there shot down two Black Hawk helicopters, killed 18 U.S.
soldiers and dragged several of their bodies through Mogadishu's streets (323
and 1,524). The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight last

November published "A Line in the Sand: Countering Crime, Violence, and
Terror at the Southwest Border." This study offers chilling portraits of
some who consider the southern border America's welcome mat. . On
Jan. 11, 2011, U.S. agents discovered Said Jaziri in a car trunk trying
to enter near San Diego. Jaziri traveled from his native Tunisia to
Tijuana, he said, and paid smugglers $5,000 to sneak him across the
border. France previously convicted and deported him for assaulting
a Muslim whom he considered insufficiently devout. In 2006, Jaziri
advocated killing Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for creating
what Jaziri called sacrilegious drawings of the Prophet Mohammed. .
Somalia's Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane told authorities in 2011 that
he earned up to $75,000 per day smuggling East Africans into
America. His clients included three al-Shabaab terrorists. As the
House paper states: "Dhakane cautioned that each of these individuals
is ready to die for their cause. ..." . On June 4, 2010, Anthony Joseph
Tracy was convicted of conspiring to slip aliens into America. Tracy told
federal investigators that Cuban diplomats used his travel agency in Kenya to
transfer 272 Somalis to Havana. They proceeded to Belize, through Mexico,
and then trespassed into the USA. Tracy claims he refused to assist alShabaab. But officials discovered an email in which he casually wrote: "...i
helped a lot of Somalis and most are good but there are some who are bad
and i leave them to ALLAH..." Remember: These anecdotes and statistics
involve individuals whom authorities intercepted. No details exist about aliens
who successfully infiltrated America.
Allowing illegal aliens in our country makes the U.S. a

police state and risks a second 9/11
Schlafly 1 (Phyllis, J.D., Oct, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, The Threat of
Terrorism Is From Illegal Aliens,
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2001/oct01/psroct01.shtml) TYBG
It's important for Americans to understand that the 9/11 hijackings
are a problem of the U.S. government allowing illegal aliens to roam
freely in our country and of promiscuously issuing visas without
proper certifications. It's also a problem of our government failing to
enforce current immigration and visa laws, and failing to deport illegal aliens
including those who overstay their visas. At least 16 of the 19 hijackers fit in
one or more of these categories. For more than two weeks prior to 9/11, the
FBI had been trying to find one of the hijackers whom the CIA had spotted
meeting with a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole. But all the FBI had to
go on was his visa application, which listed his address as "Marriott, New York
City" (where there are ten Marriott hotels and he never went to any of them).
The U.S. law that requires an alien's border crossing document to include a
machine-readable biometric identifier (such as a fingerprint or handprint),
and requires that the identifier match the appropriate biometric characteristic
of the alien, has never gone into effect. We are not going to tolerate a
system that treats U.S. citizens and aliens the same. All aliens are
not terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are aliens. We do not want to
live in a police state, where every American is treated like a
terrorist, drug trafficker, money launderer, illegal alien, or common
criminal. Larry Ellison, the head of Oracle Corp., the leading database
software company, has offered to donate the tools for creating machinereadable ID cards that contain digitized thumbprints and photographs.
Ellison's proposal would open up vast new markets for Oracle to promote
privacy-invading database software, at the expense of law-abiding citizens.
We should have a computerized database of all aliens entering the United
States, whether they are tourists, students, or workers, and a tracking system
that flags the file when a visa time expires. Aliens should be required to carry
smart ID cards that contain biometric identifiers, the terms of their visas, and
a record of their border crossings and travels within our country, similar to
the rubber stamps used in all passports. Airports should be equipped with
the machines to swipe the smart card every time an alien boards a plane.
Dumb questions like "Has your luggage been under your control since you
packed it?" should be replaced with useful questions like "Are you a U.S.
citizen?". The National Commission on Terrorism reported last year: "The
United States is, de facto, a country of open borders." It will do a lot more
for the safety of Americans to close those open borders than
imposing oppressive regulations on the travel of law-abiding
citizens. We should expel all illegal aliens, especially from the Middle
East, and place a moratorium on legal immigration and the issuing of
visas, until the terrorism threat is resolved.
Immigration from mexico would cause terrorism, criminal

activity, human trafficking, and increased gang violence
Taylor 10 (Dr. Jameson, policy researcher at Mississippi Center for public
policy, Illegal Immigration: Drugs, Gangs and Crime
http://www.jwpcivitasinstitute.org/media/publicationarchive/perspective/illegal-immigration-drugs-gangs-and-crime) TYBG
Paramilitary groups trading fire with U.S. agents. Kidnappings and
murders of U.S. citizens. Members of al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other
terrorist organizations infiltrating the border on a routine basis. We
are not talking about Iraq but Texas. One of the clearest indicators the
United States has lost control of its southwest border is the ease with which
thousands of tons of drugs and millions of illegal aliens are crossing the U.S.
border on an annual basis. This open borders policy has opened the door
to more than just cheap labor. The presence of millions of
undocumented persons in our country has provided a perfect cover
for various forms of criminal activity, ranging from drug trafficking
to prostitution to identity theft. Federal investigators believe that
as much as 2.2 million kilograms of cocaine and 11.6 kilograms of
marijuana were smuggled into the United States via the Mexican
border in 2005.1 With the decline of the Medellin and Cali cartels of
Columbia, two Mexican drug cartels the Sinaloa cartel and the Gulf cartel
are battling over the billion-dollar drug trade between Mexico and the United
States. These cartels also have ties to U.S. gangs that serve as distribution
networks in the interior United States. A 2006 study by the House Committee
on Homeland Security warns that the Mexican cartels have essentially
wrested control of the border from both the U.S. and Mexican governments:
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports that the Mexican drug
syndicates operating today along our Nations Southwest border are
far more sophisticated and dangerous than any of the other

organized criminal groups in Americas law enforcement history.
Indeed, these powerful drug cartels, and the human smuggling
networks and gangs they leverage, have immense control over the
routes into the United States and continue to pose formidable
challenges to our efforts to secure the Southwest border. The
cartels operate along the border with military grade weapons, technology and
intelligence and their own respective paramilitary enforcers. This new
breed of cartel is not only more violent, powerful and well financed, it is also
deeply engaged in intelligence collection on both sides of the border.2 Here
in North Carolina, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports a
significant increase in drug-trafficking activity. Explains the DEA: The
majority of the increased drug-trafficking activity is due to an
unprecedented influx of foreign nationals into the state in
particular Spanish-speaking, specifically Mexican, nationals. A
2003 report by the National Drug Intelligence Center corroborates the DEAs
findings: Mexican criminal groups in southwestern states and Mexican drug
trafficking organizations (DTOs) in Mexico routinely use Mexican illegal
immigrants in North Carolina as couriers to transport cocaine, marijuana,
methamphetamine and, to a lesser extent, heroin into and through the state.
These criminal groups exploit a growing Mexican population in North Carolina
to facilitate their illicit activities. Law enforcement authorities in North
Carolina, principally in the western and southern areas of the state, indicate
that Mexican criminal groups are also increasing their involvement in retail
drug distribution.3 Needless to say, the majority of illegal immigrants are
not directly involved in the drug trade. Nevertheless, the DEA has determined
that their presence allows Mexican traffickers to effectively conceal
their activities within immigrant communities.4 Johnston County
Sheriff Steve Bizzell (R) estimates that 80 percent to 85 percent of the drug
trade in his county is conducted by Hispanics.5 In 2002, the Wake County
Sheriffs Office similarly reported that although Hispanics comprised only 5.4
percent of the population, they accounted for 46 percent of drug-trafficking
arrests.6 As indicated above, transnational gangs, such as Surenos-13 and
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), are responsible for much of the low-level drug
trade in North Carolina. Over the past several years, North Carolina has
experienced a disturbing surge in gang activity. Between 1999 and 2004,
Wake County saw a 5,743.3 percent increase in gang membership. During the
same period, the city of Durham saw a 333.3 percent increase.7 A 2005
report by the Governors Crime Commission estimated that 22.2 percent of all
gang members in North Carolina are Hispanic (with ethnicity unknown for
another 19.4 percent).8 By contrast, Hispanics accounted for only 7 percent
of total state population in 2004. Nationally, Hispanics are thought to
comprise 49 percent of total gang membership. A majority of these
gang members are illegal immigrants. Notes Duplin County Sheriff Blake
Wallace (D), There is an increasing gang activity problem, particularly with
MS-13 and studies have shown that the majority of those gang members are
illegal aliens.9 Among these studies is a report published by the Governors
Crime Commission which posits that 66 percent of Hispanic/Latino gang
members are illegal aliens.10 In the case of MS-13, one of the most violent
and powerful gangs in North Carolina, federal authorities estimate that
approximately 90 percent of U.S. MS-13 members are foreign-born illegal

aliens and depend upon the Texas-Mexico border smuggling corridor to
support their criminal operations.11 As Forsyth County District Attorney Tom
Keith (R) puts it, You cannot say drugs without saying gangs without
saying illegal aliens.12 In addition to the drug trade, the Mexican cartels
are becoming increasingly involved in human trafficking (i.e.,
prostitution) and human smuggling. According to Dr. Deborah SchurmanKauflin of the Violent Crimes Institute, Mexico is the number one source
for young female sex slaves in North America. Each year thousands of
women and children with 12-year-olds in top demand are smuggled across
the border and sent to brothels across the United States. Such brothels, notes
Schurman-Kauflin, can take the form of homes, apartments, spas, massage
parlors, and hotels even middle class neighborhoods can be at risk.13
War DA
1NCConflict
Borders are necessary to prevent conflictpower sharing
leads to more war
Downes, 06 (Alexander. Professor of political science and international
affairs at the George Washington University. "More Borders, Less Conflict?
Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil Wars." The SAIS Review of International Affairs
26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013. JMR)
The conventional wisdom among scholars and policymakers opposes

solving ethnic conflicts by drawing new borders and creating new states. This view,
however, is flawed because the process of fighting civil wars imbues the
belligerents with a deep sense of mistrust that makes sharing power after
the conflict difficult. This is especially true in ethnic civil wars, in which
negotiated power-sharing agreements run a high risk of failing and
leading to renewed warfare. In light of these problems, this article

argues that partition should be considered as an option for ending
severe ethnic conflicts. The article shows how failure to adopt partition in
Kosovo has left that province in a semi-permanent state of limbo that only increases
the majority Albanian population's desire for independence. The only route to
long-term stability in the region-and an exit for international forcesis through partition. Moreover, the article suggests that the United States should
recognize and prepare for the coming partition of Iraq rather than pursuing the futile
endeavor of implementing power-sharing among Iraq's Shi'ites, Kurds, and Sunnis.
The conventional wisdom regarding borders in political science and

the policy community is that we already have plenty and do not need
any more. Scholars and policymakers alike tend to oppose the creation of new
states, especially as a means to end civil conflict. They argue that secession and
partition generate more problems than they solve and lead to new conflicts. The
preferred solutions to these conflicts take the existing borders as

given and concentrate on fostering negotiated settlements that
arrange power internally through such mechanisms as powersharing, regional autonomy, or federalism. As Ted Robert Gurr has written,
"threats to divide a country should be managed by the devolution of state power
and . . . communal fighting about access to the state's power and resources should
be restrained by recognizing group rights and sharing power."1 Other researchers
agree, maintaining that the key factor in sustaining negotiated settlements to ethnic
conflicts is the degree to which the agreement institutionalizes power-sharing or
regional autonomy.2
Recently, however, scholars have begun to challenge this single-state-
solution orthodoxy, arguing instead that dividing states and creating

new borders may be a way to promote peace after ethnic civil wars. One
view, represented by Chaim Kaufmann, stresses that ethnic civil wars cannot end
until contending groups are separated into homogeneous ethnic enclaves. When
groups are intermingled, each side has an incentive to attack and

cleanse the other. Once separation is achieved, these incentives
disappear. With the necessary condition for peace in place, political
arrangements become secondary. Unless ethnic separation occurs,
Kaufmann argues, all other solutions are fruitless because ethnic

intermingling is what fuels conflict.
Borders Prevent War

Separation of ethnic groups reduces conflict
Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil Wars." The SAIS Review of International Affairs
26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013. JMR)
In this article, I argue that partition-defined as separation of contending

ethnic groups and the creation of independent states-should be
considered as an alternative to power-sharing and regional
autonomy as a means to end civil wars. Partition does not require
groups to disarm and make themselves vulnerable to devastating
betrayal. Nor do formerly warring groups have to cooperate and
share power in joint institutions. Partition also satisfies nationalist
desires for statehood and fills the need for security. In cases of severe
ethnic conflict, when perceptions of the adversary's malign intentions are so
entrenched as to impede any agreement based on a single-state solution,
partition is the preferred solution.
In the remainder of this paper, I will elaborate further on this argument and
apply it to the case of Kosovo, demonstrating why autonomy for Kosovo
within Serbia is impossible. Following an evaluation of the various options
being considered for Kosovo's independence, I will argue for a partition of
Kosovo along the Ibar River accompanied by the return of the Serbian
population to Serbia. Finally, I argue that like it or not, partition is probably in
Iraq's future.
Third party intervention and negotiated settlements wont

solveborders are necessary
Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Civil Wars." The SAIS Review of International
Affairs 26.1 (2006): 49-61. ProQuest. Web. 8 July 2013. JMR)
Scholars have offered two solutions to the dilemmas and dangers of

negotiated settlements. First, some argue that the more
institutionalized the agreement is, the more it will allay the former
belligerents' security fears and increase their ability to safeguard
their interests. These optimists maintain that negotiated
settlements, by creating institutions to share power in the central
government or devolve power to sub-state regions, increase the
likelihood of success by allowing groups to govern themselves and
prevent others from implementing measures harmful to their
interests. Examples of power-sharing institutions in the central government
include reserving executive posts and government ministries for members of
different groups, joint decision-making, proportional representation, and a
minority veto. Institutions that devolve power include regional autonomy
agreements or federalism. By working together in common institutions,
groups may moderate their views of their former adversary's intentions and
even come to trust each other.10 Second, intervention by a third party
is thought to be an effective way to reduce security fears and
facilitate agreement implementation. If the key problems are that both
sides fear betrayal and there is no mechanism to enforce the agreement,
interposing a third party into the situation can resolve these issues by
increasing the likelihood that the parties will keep their promises and
mitigating the costs to the other if one of them does not. Providing troops on
the ground during the early phases of implementation is critical for stability,
security, and protection when groups are disarming and institutions are
taking shape.11 Unfortunately, neither power-sharing institutions nor
third-party intervention provide more than a temporary band-aid for
the critical underlying problems, which are uncertainty about the
adversary's intentions and inability to commit to the agreement. For
several reasons, negotiated settlements are likely to fail even when
they include provisions for institutions and third-party enforcement.
Because an intervener's presence is likely to be temporary, former
belligerents are reluctant to disarm and integrate their military forces with
those of their past enemy. Once the third party leaves, the parties again have
to rely on each other's promises to abide by the agreement. Fear of future
betrayal-fed by experiences of past malign intentions-prompts
groups to keep their guns, which increases the likelihood of a return
to war. In high-conflict or post-conflict environments, elections tend to
resemble ethnic censuses. Out-group conflict increases in-group solidarity,
and those who advocate compromise with former enemies are easily branded
as traitors betraying the group's interests. In the aftermath of civil wars,
people tend to support nationalist parties and politicians who promise to
protect the group's interests. Post-war elections are likely to bring hard-line
leaders to power who are reluctant to trust the other side and make the
compromises necessary to implement the agreement. As a result, political
institutions that require trust and accommodation are likely to be
gridlocked. When these institutions break down, third parties may step in to
govern in their stead, but this is only a stop-gap solution because it renders
these institutions even less likely to work when the outside party leaves.
Furthermore, if the war was characterized by ethnic cleansing, agreements
that call for expelled minorities to return to their former homes may lead to
further violence. The now-dominant majority group may destroy or inhabit
the homes of those who were expelled. Minorities often face hostility,
discrimination, and difficulty finding employment. When the third party
leaves and no longer can provide protection, they may be forced out again.
Finally, recent research on cease-fires in interstate wars has found a striking
correlation between third-party intervention and increased risk of another war
in the future. The logic is that "agreements that specify terms that do not
correspond well with the expected military outcome of renewed fighting" are
more likely to fail than those in which the terms reflect the outcome on the
battlefield or the consequences that renewed fighting would bring. Thirdparty intervention often short-circuits a war before a clear battlefield outcome
has emerged, and thus "considerable uncertainty remains regarding the
consequences of continuing the war."12 This uncertainty undermines
agreements because one or both sides may believe that it could achieve a
better outcome by fighting. Third-party intervention also increases the

likelihood of a mismatch between the agreement's terms and the probable
outcome of the war. This is because outside parties tend to intervene to
prevent one side from decisively defeating another and to restore the status
quo ante. Agreements like these are particularly unlikely to last when the
third party withdraws because the side that was winning in the previous
round of fighting believes that it can achieve a better outcome by returning
to war. Once the agreement's enforcer departs, the stronger side has an
incentive to attack to revise the terms of settlement. Similarly, single-statesolutions imposed by third-party intervention when one or more of the parties
prefers independence run an increased risk of failure because they go against
the preferences of the groups involved.
Borders can only lead to peacethey take away incentive

for war
The poor record of negotiated settlements in ethnic civil wars that leave
borders intact, whether or not they are facilitated by third-party
intervention, suggests that a new approach might be necessary: one
based on partition rather than power-sharing. In this model, third
parties would intervene not to turn back the clock to the pre-war situation,
but to inflict a decisive defeat on one side or the other. This would
reduce the likelihood that the defeated party would think it could
gain anything by resorting to war in the future. In those cases where a
third party intervenes on behalf of ethnic rebels, military victory will result
in partition. Partition can only lead to peace, however, if it is
accompanied by ethnic separation. Interveners should work to make
sure that the states are as ethnically homogeneous as possible so as
to reduce the likelihood of future cleansing, rebellions by the
remnant minority for union with its brethren in the other state, or
war to rescue "trapped" minorities. Finally, both sides should be
militarily capable of defending themselves, and the borders between
them should be made as defensible as possible to discourage
aggression, either by following natural terrain features or by
building demilitarized zones or other barriers.
Opening the border also brings in spillover violence that

originates in Mexico
Washington Post 11 (Clint McDonald, March 31, Dangers on the US-Mexico Border,
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-03-31/opinions/35207272_1_border-patrol-agents-border-security-spilloverviolence, accessed 7-12-13, AR)
There is a storm brewing along our border with Mexico, and our nation is relegating responsibility for
quelling that storm to some of our poorest communities. In a visit to El Paso last week, Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed that there has been no spillover violence from Mexico into the United
It is not spillover violence but

spillover effects of hostilities in Mexico that pose the real threat to
States. Regardless of the veracity, her point is irrelevant.
the United States. Spillover effects are the direct results of Mexican
violence that influence U.S. citizens living in communities along the
border. For example, Mexican gangs fighting to control territory around the
frontier village of El Porvenir, in Chihuahua, have threatened for almost a year to kill
its residents. To escape the violence, nearly the entire village
eventually relocated to Texas border communities without, of course, being
screened or processed. The results include schoolchildren fearing for
their safety as their Mexican schoolmates talk of violence and
murder, school buses tailed by armed private security guards and
criminals relocating to the United States with their families and
conducting their operations from this country. The single greatest
spillover effect: U.S. citizens living in fear. While border security is undeniably a
federal responsibility, spillover effects are principally dealt with by local jurisdictions and along the U.S.Mexico border, this is mostly sheriffs offices operating in large, sparsely populated county areas supported
by small tax bases. Border counties are among the poorest in the United States and can barely afford to
hire and equip sufficient, qualified law enforcement personnel to meet citizens needs.
Integration will result in increased tensions and inevitable

conflictKosovo proves
The case of Kosovo is even more interesting. The United States and its
NATO allies intervened in 1999 to stop Slobodan Milosevic's expulsion of
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, but never supported the Albanians' claim to
sovereignty over Kosovo. UN Resolution 1244 called for Kosovo to remain
an autonomous province within Serbia and Montenegro. The United
Nations has maintained this fiction while governing Kosovo since the
war, engaging in so-called "kick-the-can diplomacy," putting off the
difficult decisions to the future.13 Rather than calming the situation, this
delaying tactic has raised the ire of the Kosovar Albanians, who see
their treasured goal of independence slipping away. "We are here,
suffocated with UNMIK [the UN Mission in Kosovo] over our heads,
and Serbia over our necks," protested one Albanian. "UNMIK is now six
years here without a deadline. We want a deadline. To become
independent from a stronger place you need action, not process."14
Veton Surroi, the Albanian publisher who now serves in Kosovo's parliament
agrees: "The focus has been on buying time, and that's the only focus there
has been."15 Even UNMIK officials concur with this assessment: "One of the
profound problems bedeviling the international community," one bureaucrat
noted, "is that it has not yet defined the goal of what we're working toward
here."16 In short, the UN strategy of keeping Kosovo in a "deep winter," its
refusal to endorse the objective of independence for Kosovo, and the delay in
opening negotiations on the future of the province have caused the Albanians
to become increasingly frustrated and led to outbursts of anti-Serb violence,
such as the riots of March 2004 that killed 19 people.17 Kosovo is plagued
by the problems that typically undermine single state solutions after
ethnic wars. Given the province's uncertain political future, both
Albanians and Serbs have incentives to remain armed. In June 2003,

the United Nations Development Program estimated that there were
approximately 333,000 to 460,000 privately held small arms in Kosovo, of
which only 20,000 were legally owned.18 UN-sponsored gun collection drives
bring in few weapons; one three-month campaign that ended on Oct. 1, 2003,
netted just 155 guns.19 Trepidation over Kosovo's future status makes both
ethnic communities reluctant to part with their weapons. According to a
report by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, "Faced with an
uncertain future and constant wondering about whether conflict will
ensue once again, people may want to keep weapons to provide
protection and security if the situation once again becomes
precarious."20 Comments by both Serbs and Albanians confirm this
motivation. According to an Albanian tour guide in Drenica, for example,
"Nobody knows if another war is going to happen or not. If they
don't give us independence, that might mean that the Serbian forces
will be allowed to come back-and most people here don't want to be
caught empty-handed when that happens." Serbs, for their part, believe
that self-help is the only way to safeguard themselves from vengeful
Albanians. As one Serb from Gracanica commented, "We believe that none
of the security forces operating in Kosovo at the moment are able to
fully protect the Serbs, so we have to look out for ourselves."21
Lack of borders results in the marginalization of minority

groupsIraq proves
Despite international attempts to encourage power-sharing and
federalism as a means to preserve a united Iraq, a partition of the country
into three states-a Kurdish state in the northeast, a Shi'ite state in
the south, and a Sunni state in the northwest-is probably unavoidable
for the same reasons it is unavoidable in Kosovo. The history of violence
and repression has made it hard for Iraq's ethnic groups to trust
each other. The Kurds suffered such brutality that they insist on
maintaining their own armed forces and prefer an independent
Kurdish state to remaining part of a united Iraq. The Sunni Arabs-the
dominant and privileged group under Saddam Hussein's regime-have
suffered a major status reversal and are now marginalized. The Sunni-based
insurgency that has raged since Saddam's downfall in 2003 signals not only
many Sunnis' attachment to and reverence for Saddam, but also their
mistrust and suspicion of Iraq's Shi'ites and Kurds. The 2005 constitution
was negotiated mostly without Sunni input and over their vehement
objections. Unsurprisingly, Sunnis voted overwhelmingly against the
document. Last-minute promises by Shi'a and Kurdish leaders that
would allow the constitution to be renegotiated following new
parliamentary elections are small consolation to Sunnis, who will
always compose a small minority of the country's elected
representatives and thus will wield little power. The constitution's
federal provisions represent Shi'ite leaders' recognition that the Kurds insist
on near total autonomy-and thus that the Shi'ites should form their own
federal bloc as well. Given the powerful centrifugal forces at play, this
process will lead to the eventual partition of Iraq. Rather than
continue to promote power-sharing institutions that are ineffective
or insist on the maintenance of a single Iraqi state in the face of
mounting evidence that three states are going to emerge, the
United States and other international actors should begin preparing
the ground for partition. Three issues will be of primary importance. First,
the United States needs to work with Iraq's neighbors to ensure they will not
interfere or seek to exert undue influence over the successor states. The
United States should work to reconcile Turkey to a Kurdish state, extract
promises from Iraqi Kurds not to foment or encourage Kurdish nationalism in
other countries, and warn Iran that it must allow Iraq's Shi'ites to determine
their own future. The next task will be determining the new borders of
the three states. It is beyond the scope of this essay to propose what those
borders should be. However, the Shi'ite state probably would comprise the
nine southern provinces plus the southern part of Diyala province. The Sunnis
likely would receive Anbar, Salahuddin, Ninevah province west of the Tigris,
and the western parts of Ta'mim and Diyala. Kurdistan would probably consist
of Dohuk, Erbil, Suleimaniyah, Ninevah east of the Tigris (including Mosul),
and the eastern third of Ta'mim (including Kirkuk). Finally, there is the
question of Baghdad, home to large numbers of all three groups. Options for
Baghdad include making it an international zone or an area of joint control
among the groups, or giving each state sovereignty over the areas where its
people live. These tasks will not be easy, but they acknowledge the reality
that, as Peter Galbraith has put it, "The fundamental problem of Iraq is an
absence of Iraqis."31 The Kurds unanimously prefer independence, the Sunni
Arabs fear oppression in a state dominated by their former victims, and the
Shi'ites-although preferring a single Iraq that they would control-will accept a
truncated state rich in natural resources and free of a Sunni insurgency. Civil
wars generate intense mistrust, fear, and hatred that make the
future maintenance of multiethnic societies via negotiated
settlements and power-sharing institutions difficult. Iraq, like Bosnia
and Kosovo, is no exception. After six years in Kosovo, the United
States and the United Nations finally have realized that partition
cannot be avoided. One hopes it will not take that long for a similar
realization to dawn on them in Iraq.
DA Links
Politics
Despite some sympathy, border enforcement remains
extremely popular to all parties
Publication)
Conservatives generally find themselves deeply split on the issue of

immigration. Some staunch members of the Republican Party, including
President George W. Bush, generally favor liberal admission policies, or at
least more liberal policies than the ones currently in place. Economic
conservatives see gains from immigration and inexpensive labor. In stark
contrast, another wing of the Republican Party is deeply concerned with
the alleged cultural impacts of immigration. This faction aggressively
plays on populist fear about cultural changes blamed on immigrants and
demands restrictionist policies and tougher border enforcement. Today, this
arm of the Republican Party, represented most prominently by Congressman
Tom Tancredo and the conservative icon Pat Buchanan, often exercises
great influence over the direction of immigration law and policy by
tapping into broad-based fears of economically and otherwise insecure U.S.
citizens. Poor, working, and middle-income people worry about the
changes wrought by immigration and are not likely to sympathize with
the desire of big business for cheap labor. On the other hand,
Democrats also find themselves divided on immigration. Economically, they
are concerned with immigrations downward pressure on the wage
scale and its impact on a long-time base of Democratic support, labor
unions. Although change has come in recent years, organized labor, often
supportive of the basic Democratic agenda, has historically supported
restrictionist immigration laws and policies. Many liberals, however,
desire the humane treatment of immigrants and often push for proimmigration and pro-immigrant laws and policies. There, however, is some
common ground. Many Democrats and Republicans often agree that
increased border enforcement is necessary. Like tough-on-crime
stances, this has proved time and time again to be a politically
popular position. This is even true for those sympathetic to 138 | The
Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor Across Borders the plight of
immigrants. In addition, influenced by public fears of being overrun
by floods of immigrants, politicians of both parties often support
limits on legal immigration and heavy border enforcement.
State Spending
Opening the borders would drown states in fiscal debt
Publication)
Immigration has had especially significant fiscal impacts on states in
which large numbers of immigrants live. The state and local
governments in high-immigration states must bear substantial
costs. Consumption of emergency health services alone can have
substantial impacts on state and local governments. 73 The state of
Arizona, for example, pays more than $90 million each year to
provide emergency services to undocumented immigrants. The state
is required to provides such services by federal law but receives only
about $650,000 from the federal government to help cover the
services , a fraction of its their costs.74 A public education, which is
generally paid for by state and local governments, is also costly, even if it
turns out to be a good economic investment for the nation. The costs of
providing law enforcement protections to immigrants also can be
formidable.
Job Loss
Increase of migrants leads to less jobs.
Sanchez 09 (Rob, Timeout! The case for a moratorium on legal
immigration, The Social Contract Press, Volume:20, MCJC)
One of the most obvious ways to stop job erosion in the U.S. is to
stop illegal immigration and to put severe limits on employment
based visas. Beware of politicians that ask us to accept the Faustian bargain
of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Their claim is fallacious that CIR
will solve the illegal immigration problem, but only if we expand
guest worker visa programs. The following statement by Sen. McCain is
not unique as many variations of it have been repeated throughout the years
by political elitists who care more about increasing the supply of cheap labor
than preserving the viability of the American middle class:
I believe we can pursue the security programs and at the same time set up a
system where people can come here and work on a temporary basis. I think
we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of
people who are eligible and at the same time make sure that we have some
control over people who come in and out of this country.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), news conference, 2003
We must be careful not to be fooled by the Mortons Fork (false
choice) offered by McCain and other promoters of CIR, who ask us to
accept more immigration by increasing the number of employment
based worker visas and by giving amnesty to illegal aliens in trade
for a promise of more border enforcement. Its not a fair deal because
American workers lose jobs any time there are increases in
immigration it really doesnt matter if the increase is due to legal
or illegal immigration. The only thing that matters is how much our total
population is allowed to grow by flooding the labor market with more
immigrants. Increased immigration means the supply of workers goes
up, demand goes down, labor arbitration forces wages to go down,
and job opportunities for Americans dwindle. Its a lose-lose deal for
American wage earners.
There are two very obvious means to improve the employment situation in
the United States: first we must stop illegal immigration, and second most of
our employment based visa programs should either be severely
restricted or abolished. Until both of these happen all proposals for
Comprehensive Immigration Reform should be rejected especially if
they allow any type of amnesty or the expansion of guest worker visa
programs. If unemployment ever reaches zero, and we are sure our
borders are secure, then it might make sense to have a public
dialogue about the merits of liberalizing the immigration system.
K Args
CapRoot Cause
Capitalism is the root problem of economic inequality, not
immigration
Publication)
An inextricably related economic fear is that easy migration

increases 144 | The Economic Benefits of Liberal Migration of Labor Across
Borders wealth inequality. This line of reasoning, which finds some support
empirically, sees cheap labor allowing business to reap greater profits,
accumulate more wealth, and gain at the expense of labor. As the old
adage goes, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. This, however,
may well be an enduring characteristic of capitalism and a market
economy, rather than the result of immigration and liberal
admissions policies. Even if such fears were real, it may not be possible
through border enforcement measures to halt highly motivated immigrants
from entering the United States. Other policies are necessary to address
wealth distribution concerns.

Borders Affirmative and Negative - Gonzaga 2013

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Borders Affirmative and Negative - Gonzaga 2013

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Borders 1ac

We begin with the story of Prudenica Martin Gomez, who

Death and suffering on the border is increasing with each

Furthermore, the politics of border crossing and border

This border biopolitics results in several impacts: the first

Surveillance and Biopolitics, Electronic Journal of Sociology. RH]

We internalize border-thinkingthe disciplinary capacities

The fulcrum of biopolitics at the border is racism.

Crises and Problemizations, The Review of Politics, Volume 67, p. 340]

stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population,

Racism outweighs all other impacts

Furthermore, biopolitics culminates in genocide.

Thus the plan: the United States federal government

In a world of biopolitics, our aff is a radical ethical act.

about answering for a dwelling place , for ones identity, ones

absolute and unlimited hospitality can be seen as crazy, self-harming

first thinkers to identify embodiment as a philosophical blindspot - Butler

We control all the internal links to their policy and

Borders Affirmative Core

Border Conditions Inherency

Migrant Conditions Bad

Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime, Sociological

converged with other forms of containment to become an important

In order to counteract the deportation efforts of the

Ellerman 9 (Antje, Dept of Politics @ U of British Columbia,

apportioned rights but depends on the charity or goodwill of aid

Government border operations have empirically been

As of March 2006, the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation

Poor law enforcement along the border feeds the human

Today, because of the money to be made in this black market, criminal

The immigrants plight in making it to the Land of the

and Mabie-Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies at

Trafficking results in abuse and forced labor

Besides its deadly consequences, heightened immigration enforcement has

Exclusion of economic equality infringes on international

The most frequently invoked substantive ground for excluding noncitizens is

Immigrant Detainees Suffering

persons charged with a crime according to American laws. Neither

Social services have been withheld from aliens solely

inquire into a persons status to ensure access to social

The paradigm of suspicion criminalizes the mobility of

Without Borders? Notes on Globalization as a Mobility Regime, Sociological

Border Policies Bad

Government Policies render immigrants exploitable,

Labor exploitation is a special problem with respect to immigrants from

exploitable labor force beneficial to American employers and

Closed borders promotes isolation and the profound

Borders are Discriminating

Another way of evaluating immigration restrictions proves instructive in

Immigration laws label immigrants as disposable and

Closed borders purposely target people of color, the

Migrant Conditions is a D-Rule

We must consider global mobility and human rights first

The field of migration studies has been hamstrung by two dominant

subjectivities in kinds of obedience and auto-confession. We must ask: How

The protection of individual rights of migrants outweighs

York University, Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open

about immigration policy. In particular, there is reason to significantly

(Coalicion de Derechos Humanos, 2007). When they debated, formulated,

Surveillance and Biopolitics, Electronic Journal of Sociology. RH]

The Panopticon is a metaphor for surveillance along the

Surveillance and Biopolitics, Electronic Journal of Sociology. RH]

means of segmenting and immobilising space as well as placing

hence, the way in which the metaphor of the Panopticon encapsulates