ABSTRACT

This chapter examines what a biopolitical approach to asylum can tell us about neoliberal justice for refugees through an analysis of the United States' governmentality of asylum law and the use of a 'court-like system' in the case of a national group that has long been considered a threat to the American way life: Mexicans. It shows that rejection is more closely linked to the habitual US neoliberal governmentality of Mexican migration. The chapter discusses the biopolitical framework and focuses on how the semi-judicial asylum system and asylum law, which form the basis of the governmentality of migration into the US, are employed with the intention to immunize against the Mexican racial and cultural threat. It also offers a governmentality analysis of the asylum apparatus in the US as a form of immunization against a new wave of Mexican migration while examining the tactical use of asylum law and its court-like system in the US biopolitics of migration.