ABSTRACT
The presence of undocumented immigrants in United States of America (U.S.A.), territory is commonly seen as a challenge to the border, and the ability of the state to control, direct, and act upon populations within its sovereign territory. That the Undocumented1 might, just by being present as “illegal,” reinforce state power and the legal territorial basis of it, is not immediately apparent. Furthermore, that undocumented lives are both at once “naked”—that is, subjugated-and necessary; both the cornerstone to, and the weak link in, state power is certainly a paradox. It is precisely this paradox, that is, the (in) dispensability of the Undocumented to state power and the border which I interrogate in this chapter. State power is dependent upon a static, stable and clear border (Rajaram
and Grundy-Warr 2007: xi); it cannot comprehend messy, overlapping edges. However, borders are inherently unstable and fluid. I, therefore, employ the idea of the border as a “borderscape” (ibid.), a term that implies an inherent contestability of the border as always in process, never static or fixed. Didier Bigo (2001) has also used the motif of a Möbius Ribbon to describe the coinciding of inside/outside, belonging/non-belonging, inclusion/exclusion, and the continuum of internal and external securities. However, Rajaram and Grundy-Warr note that, “the instrumentalisation of the border, which clarifies a distinct space of politics and a space outside politics (a zone of exception),
rests on an occlusion of the role that society plays in ameliorating and influencing territorial place making” (2007: xxviii). In other words, the existence or legitimacy of the border rests on being perceived as static and fixed over and above the reality that it cannot “sit still” (2007: xxix). In this process of continual (re)production, state and society are both implicated. Let us recall this within the context of the Undocumented. The U.S. state
has taken a number of careful steps in the past 15 years to define, prescribe, and manage the solution for the “undocumented problem,” which has become commonly perceived as a perpetually lurking threat, not only to national security and the state, but also to society and everyday citizens as a potential pollutant of pure culture and values (see Haddad 2007). The management of the undocumented problem at the border as well as the administration of the solution has focused on managing or policing notions of (il) legality through the figure of the Undocumented. In 1993/94, the U.S. Border Patrol initiated a strategy called “Prevention through Deterrence” which aimed to “restore the rule of law to the border” (U.S. Border Patrol Public Relations 1996). The beginnings of this strategy entailed militarizing the border in two key areas (those which recorded the largest numbers of apprehensions) in order to deter potential crossers. The justification for the strategy emerged from the production of the Undocumented as an emblem of illegality, which needed to be policed, controlled, governed, and excluded. On the whole, the strategy was hailed as a huge success due to an initial drop in apprehension numbers, on the basis of which it was extended to other parts of the border. The U.S. Government Accountability office (GAO), Report to U.S. Congressional Committee (2001: 2, 14) later concluded that the only certain effect of the strategy was that undocumented flows had shifted location, rather than actually having been deterred altogether. Publicly, Deterrence reinforced a certain performative aspect of the real and material power of the U.S. state to redirect, constrain, prevent, and prohibit entry to its territory. It also maintained a veneer of success, even though overall apprehension numbers soon rose back up to pre-1994 levels, indicating that the strategy did not actually deter undocumented crossings at all (ibid.). So, was the strategy of Deterrence a success or a failure? I argue that it
should be seen as a successful failure (Foucault 1975), and one that reflects the paradox that I outline above in my discussion of the (in)dispensability of the Undocumented to state power-that is, the need of state power to make distinctions within the inherent indistinction that equally sustains it. Deterrence illustrates the ability of power to act productively rather than repressively in order to “get things done.” While the strategy failed in deterring actual crossings, it succeeded in producing a homogeneous and governable undocumented population.2 Indeed, it is precisely this population, designated as exceptional or abnormal-“extraterritorial aliens”—that reaffirms the necessary legal fiction of the nation-state. However, just by being, the Undocumented also expose the fragility or
instability of the law, (il)legality and the border as being in process. The figure
of the Undocumented exposes the symbiotic relationship of the norm and the exception (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007: x). The Undocumented, therefore, are at once, the cornerstone and weak link of sovereign state power, threatening yet essential for its reconstitution (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004: 36). The successful failure of Deterrence is, thus, precisely this-the state projection of management and control of the Undocumented over and above their potential to expose notions of inside/outside, belonging/nonbelonging, norm/exception, and ultimately, the border as being utterly unstable and constructed. This chapter uses the marginal figure of the Undocumented to interrogate
the simultaneous fortification and fragility of the border and state power visà-vis the performance of (il)legality. The first section introduces Foucault and Agamben in order to explain the productive function of power in the relationship between the state and marginal life (i.e., the Undocumented). The second section returns to the strategy of Deterrence using a Foucauldian lens to suggest that it is a strategy of biopower in action, illustrating the (in)dispensability of the Undocumented to state power. The third section enhances the previous one by bringing back Agamben to interrogate more closely the mutually constitutive relationship between the Undocumented and the citizen. The final section uses the lens of “the camp” (Doty 2007c) to examine what happens when the law ceases to operate meaningfully and the distinction between legality/illegality and citizen/undocumented is collapsed. In this indistinction, I smuggle Foucault back in to argue that the resistance necessarily embedded within these webs of power is revealed to be the permanent underlying threat of the Undocumented which exposes the fragility of fixed notions of (il)legality upon which the state (and border) rests. In this sense, resistance is always, already present alongside the Undocumented, who threaten to deconstruct the border from within. This resistance challenges fixed notions of the state and citizen, and thus, also the dividing lines which mark undocumented lives as marginal.
