Extremities and Regularities

Nicholas De Genova

Regulatory Regimes and the Spectacle of Immigration Enforcement

BORDERED IDENTITIES

If there were no borders, there would be no migrants — only mobility (De Genova 2013c). To make the point somewhat differently, it is instructive to comprehend the category migrant (or immigrant) as perhaps the premier instance of what we might call a bordered identity. A 'migrant' identity is literally triggered, or activated, through the enactment of a border across which an act of 'migration' is said to take place. As in the well-known slogan of the Chicano liberation movement, it is not that the people in motion cross a border so much as it is the border that crosses them and thereby constitutes them as 'migrants' (Acuña 1996, 109; cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2012b, 197). It is not the act of mobility in and of itself that constitutes migration so much as the specific construal of that mobility as an act of border crossing, and such a construction of human mobility as 'migration' happens only by means of one or another technique of bordering. The border must be enacted somehow or other upon the more humble fact of human mobility and hence upon the body and identity of the newly anointed 'migrant'. The juridical status and social condition that we conventionally designate '(im-)migrant' in fact signifies what is always a rather variegated and heterogeneous spectrum of juridical distinctions and social inequalities and differences: there are many types of migrants, and it is precisely the work of immigration regimes and citizenship law to hierarchically sort and rank them. Nevertheless, it is the bordered definition of state territoriality that constitutes particular forms and expressions of human mobility as 'migration' and classifies specific kinds of people who move as 'migrants'. Borders make migrants.

If this is true, however, then it is imperative to recognize that citizenship, too, is fundamentally a category of bordered identity. In this regard, William Walters has characterized the deportation of noncitizens as precisely a 'technology of citizenship' (2010b, 107). Similarly, Bridget Anderson, Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti discuss the deportation of 'foreigners' as 'a membership-defining act' dedicated to asserting the value and significance of citizenship and reinforcing the distinction between citizens and noncitizens in terms of the citizenry's (unconditional) right to residence in the state' (2013, 2). Thus, what is ultimately the defining condition of migrants' noncitizenship — their deportability, their susceptibility to deportation (De Genova 2002, 2010a) — turns out likewise to be a decisive and defining predicate, in the negative, of citizenship itself. However, this working definition of citizenship still implies a liberal leap of faith that seems to disregard the fullest (illiberal) extent of acts of sovereignty within the toolkit of liberal statecraft that have variously served to constitute and regulate citizenship. We need only be reminded of various historical examples of statutes for the denaturalization (and exclusion) of 'undesirable' (or 'enemy') citizens, which range from the disqualification of women from their birthright citizenship for marrying 'alien' men (Bredbenner 1998) through